According to BoxingScene reporter Corey Erdman, ‘It didn’t pay much, but it allowed him to scavenge scraps out of the garbage to eat.’ He added that Srisaket, whose real name is Wisaksil Wangek, got a bonus of five cents on national holidays, which he would use to buy a packet of instant noodles to share with his best gal. Good training food, evidently: when he touched down in Bangkok in 2017 after defeating Nicaragua’s Roman ‘Chocalatito’ Gonzalez for the second time, he was greeted by the Thai prime minister and hailed as a national hero. Unfortunately, Srisaket’s happiness was short-lived: in 2018 his fiancée dumped him after fourteen years and he postponed a homecoming fight, citing a broken heart.
But while the developing world has thrown up many great fighters, the big cities of North America, Britain, Europe and Australia have been boxing’s home for most of its modern history. Big cities have always attracted immigrants hungry to improve their social and financial standing. Arriving with little or nothing, forced by circumstances into rough neighbourhoods and discriminated against, such immigrants often face a daily battle for survival. With much to prove and little to lose, it’s no wonder they have always made up the ranks of boxers. It seems like the only thing that changes is the group on the bottom of the social pile, and therefore at the top of boxing.
From the time gloved boxing took hold in the late nineteenth century, it was dominated by first- and second-generation Irish migrants, including the first heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan and his successor Jim Corbett, as well as great (but now mostly forgotten) fighters like Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, ‘Terrible’ Terry McGovern and Mickey Walker. But as the decades wore on, the fighting Irish were gradually supplanted by other newcomers, mostly from southern and Eastern Europe.
People are often surprised to learn that it was Jewish boxers who dominated the sport in the 1920s and ’30s. The poverty of New York’s Lower East Side tenements hardened the children of recently arrived Eastern European Jews, and many settled on boxing as the trade most likely to help them escape. Across the Atlantic, something similar happened in London’s Whitechapel ghetto, where Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg would enter the ring wearing a black and white prayer shawl and tefillin, the black leather box and arm straps worn during Jewish prayers.
Barney Ross (Dov-Ber Rasofsky), Newsboy Brown (David Montrose), Jackie Fields (Jacob Finkelstein) and Battling Levinsky (Barney Lebrowitz) were just some of the Jewish world champions of the era.
Undoubtedly the greatest of them all was Benny ‘The Ghetto Wizard’ Leonard, who some boxing historians still rate as the greatest lightweight of all time. Born Benjamin Leiner, Leonard claimed to have changed his name so his disapproving mother wouldn’t recognise it if she read about his fights in the newspaper. After he was stopped in his professional debut, he came to be known as a remarkable ring tactician with unrivalled technique, fast feet and power in both hands. He took a lot of pride in the fact that his dark hair remained immaculately Brylcreemed throughout his fights, and knocked Leo Johnson out in the first round after he dared to muss it up. At the peak of his fame in the 1920s, Leonard was one of the most recognisable athletes in America. He made more than a million dollars during his career, including a $452,000 gate in the first fight at Yankee Stadium, against Lew Tendler, who was Jewish himself.
Writer Budd Schulberg, whose father knew Leonard personally, had a poster of the fighter on his wall as a kid. Writing sixty years later, he compared Leonard’s impact on the self-image of the American Jewish community with Muhammad Ali’s significance to African-Americans. ‘To see him climb in the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighborhood gauntlet,’ Schulberg wrote.
Italian migrants made their way into the boxing scene during the same period, among them all-time greats like the two Rockies, Marciano and Graziano, Jake La Motta, Carmen Basilio, Willie Pep (Guglielmo Papaleo), Tony Canzoneri, Tony DeMarco and Joey Maxim (Giuseppe Antonio Berardinelli).
In Australia, the golden age of Italian boxers arrived a few decades later thanks to post-war immigration. ‘Latin’ boxers began to make an impact in the 1950s, and by the 1960s local promoters were even importing pugili from the mother country to fight in front of partisan crowds in Sydney and Melbourne.
One such import, Luigi Coluzzi, became Australian middleweight champion and the proprietor of bohemian Kings Cross cafe Bar Coluzzi. Among many other famous clients, he served coffee to former heavyweight champs Marciano and Primo Carnera, and was celebrated in the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘the boxing barista’ who helped ‘Australia become a more multicultural and cultured society’. Other noted Italian-Australian boxers include Rocky Mattioli, who won a junior middleweight title in the 1970s, and the fighting Gattellari brothers, Rocky and Lucky (the latter of whom you may remember from such criminal high jinks as the contract killing of Sydney businessman Michael McGurk).
Promoters have always counted on ethnic rivalries to sell tickets—whether that means a Puerto Rican against a Mexican or an Irishman against a Jew, and some boxers have even been willing to adopt other nationalities if it made financial sense.
Vincent Morris Sheer, for example, adopted the Irish moniker of Mushy Callahan and campaigned at welterweight during the 1920s (Mushy was apparently an update on Moishe). The same process of Hibernification happened to pre-World War I middleweight Ugo Micheli, who became Hugo Kelly. Johnny Dundee was born Giuseppe Corrara in Sicily, though this was well known; in those pre-PC days the featherweight was referred to as ‘The Scotch Wop’.
But the most famous ethnic switch of all was performed by Max Baer, who reigned as heavyweight champion for 364 days in 1934 and 1935. Baer, who got a bum rap as a villain in the 2005 Russell Crowe vehicle Cinderella Man, wore the Star of David on his trunks and played up his Jewishness, especially before his victory over Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling in 1933, which was hailed in the press as a refutation of Hitler’s antisemitism. The only problem: Baer was a gentile. The great trainer Ray Arcel offered irrefutable proof: ‘I saw Max in the shower and he was not a Jew.’
It’s worth noting that most of the great African-American fighters of the twentieth century were as much products of migration as their Italian, Jewish and Irish counterparts. Millions of African-Americans fled the everyday terror of the Jim Crow South for the big cities of the North between World War I and the end of the 1960s. Among them were Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston; so were many parents and grandparents of later generations of boxers.
The greatest of all the Great Migration fighters was born Joseph Louis Barrow in Chambers County, Alabama in 1914, the grandchild of slaves and the child of sharecroppers. Today the man who would become known to the world as Joe Louis is honoured by a bronze statue outside the courthouse in the county seat of Lafayette. To say the prevailing attitude in the 1920s was less affectionate would be an understatement. In 1926 the family were forced to flee, fearing for their lives after being threatened by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and Louis arrived in the crowded Detroit neighbourhood of Black Bottom aged twelve. It must have been quite a shock for a shy, stuttering boy from the Alabama backwoods. His mother wanted him to learn the violin, but he found his way to a boxing gym (though he carried his gloves around in a violin case for a while to avoid getting in trouble). He won the Detroit Golden Gloves at light heavyweight as an amateur, then turned pro.
Louis, with his impassive face, chiselled body and crushing knockout power, would go on to inspire generations of African-American boxers, but from the outset he benefited from the boxing culture that was developing among urban African-Americans. He was managed by two black businessmen, John Roxborough and Julian Black, and trained by a great lightweight of the previous generation, Jack Blackburn.
Despite being black himself, Blackburn was initially reluctant to take on Louis, saying: ‘You know boy, the heavyweight division for a Negro is hardly
likely. The white man ain’t too keen on it. You have to really be something to get anywhere. If you really ain’t gonna be another Jack Johnson, you got some hope. White man hasn’t forgotten that fool nigger with his white women, acting like he owned the world.’
Seeing how dedicated a pupil Louis was, Blackburn relented, but his assessment of the racial climate was accurate. He and Louis’ managers were keen to make sure their fighter attracted none of the racist hostility associated with Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, who outraged many white Americans with his interracial relationships and habit of humiliating their ‘Great White Hopes’.
Johnson had in fact won the championship in Australia, crushing Canada’s Tommy Burns at Rushcutters Bay on Boxing Day, 1908. Though he was welcomed when he arrived as a contender, Sydney’s reaction to his relationship with Lola Toy, a twenty-one-year-old pianist, demonstrates that white Australians’ prejudices weren’t so different from those of their American counterparts. For consorting with a black man, Toy was verbally abused in the street and dragged through the mud by the press, to the point where she sued the Sydney Referee in a sensational libel trial that included an offer to submit to a chastity test.
If that didn’t turn the white establishment against Johnson, his support of Australians of colour surely did. He was the guest of honour at a dinner thrown by the Coloured Progressive Association in 1907, an event covered by the Sydney Truth in an article so extraordinarily racist it would be indecent to quote it here. But for the Truth’s reporter, perhaps the most disturbing element of the evening was the president of the association denouncing the White Australia Policy, which had come into force six years earlier.
You also can’t help but smile at Johnson’s loud admiration for Indigenous art and culture, a posture almost perfectly calculated to irritate the scientific racists of the day. ‘I simply envy you…your central Australian natives must have been men of great genius,’ he told a group of journalists after a visit to the Australian Museum.
By the time the championship fight with Burns rolled around, white public opinion was set against Johnson, with one newspaper describing the bout as ‘the first great battle of an inevitable race war’.
Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that many Aboriginal Australians were cheered by Johnson’s victory and saw him as a hero. The Australian historian John Maynard points to Johnson as an inspiration for later boxers, including Jerry Jerome, the first Indigenous Australian titleholder. He also tells the story of three Aboriginal men arrested for robbing a vegetable garden in Broome in 1923. One of the group, Christopher Taylor, told the court he would leave town and go to Perth to become a boxing champion. Everyone, at least aside from the other defendants, laughed at him and someone even suggested he would be killed in the ring. ‘They couldn’t kill Jack Johnson,’ said Taylor. That shut them up.
Back in America a decade later, Roxborough and Black were more concerned with getting Louis a title shot and earning truckloads of money than they were with altering worldwide race relations, so they drew up a list of ‘Seven Commandments’ governing his behaviour, which was signed and distributed to the press.
These included maintaining a neutral facial expression in interviews, never gloating over a fallen opponent and, most importantly, never, ever being seen with a white woman. Antagonising the white audience was bad for business, and Louis’ handlers were having trouble securing opportunities as it was.
So difficult was the situation that they were forced to cut in the most powerful man in boxing, the white New York promoter ‘Uncle’ Mike Jacobs, who promised Louis a shot at the title. True to his word, he delivered in 1937, and Louis knocked out James J. Braddock, ‘The Cinderella Man’, in the eighth round. He held the championship until 1949, defending it a record twenty-five consecutive times.
After his victories over Nazi Germany’s Schmeling (who had knocked him out in 1933) and Fascist Italy’s Primo Carnera, Louis became a symbol of American democracy and a folk hero to African-Americans. White liberals, especially, wanted to see Louis as a symbol of what was good about America—even if they were blind to the double standards that limited the way he could act in public—hence sportswriter Jimmy Cannon’s famous tribute: ‘He was a credit to his race: the human race.’
It’s difficult now to convey just how big a star ‘The Brown Bomber’ was, but during the 1930s and 1940s he was probably the most famous sportsperson in America, and the only black man who appeared regularly in mainstream white newspapers. Millions heard his fights live on the radio, and he became a symbol of black pride. Louis’ impact was perhaps best captured by Martin Luther King in his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait:
More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: ‘Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis…’
The story turns out to be apocryphal, but it manages to capture Louis’ standing, which has perhaps been eroded by the passage of time and overshadowed by Muhammad Ali’s importance to subsequent generations.
Louis’ success doubtless contributed to the popularity of boxing among African-Americans, but the social factors that influenced his own life were even more important. Until the 1950s entertainment and sport were still the only careers in which African-Americans could gain fame and recognition, and sport largely meant boxing.
It’s true that Jack Dempsey and his white predecessors as heavyweight champion refused to fight black opponents, but by the 1930s and ’40s the sport was comparatively integrated (even if many African-American fighters found themselves frozen out of big fights on the specious grounds that they didn’t draw crowds, or were given short shrift by the judges when they did secure them).
One result of the fight game’s relative openness, and the lack of other opportunities for young African-Americans, was the development of the strong black boxing culture that Louis benefited from. Despite the availability of more secure, less arduous career paths for young African-Americans, that culture is still strong today.
Mexico and Puerto Rico and their diasporas are similarly invested in prize fighting. In the United States, Latinos face some of the same socioeconomic obstacles as African-Americans and unsurprisingly produce a similar number of fighters.
Outside North America, other downtrodden groups have used the ring as a ladder and developed fighting cultures. Britain’s Romany and Irish Traveller communities, often lumped together as gypsies, have proud boxing traditions. Bare-knuckle fights continue to this day among Travellers, and are sometimes used as a way to settle feuds. Staffordshire man Bartley Gorman V, who claimed to be the undefeated bare-knuckle champion of England and Ireland, fought all challengers between 1972 and 1997 in pubs and racecourses, in a quarry and even once down a coal mine. In Bare Fists, his hugely entertaining history of bare-knuckle boxing, journalist Bob Mee relates a tale of a caravan of several hundred Irish Travellers attempting to ‘invade’ Scotland and subjugate the Scottish traveller community in the early 1990s. A Scottish clan called the McPhees put forward a champion, who met his Irish counterpart in a bare-knuckle fight on the border, the outcome of which would determine whether the raid would go ahead. The combat was long and bloody, reports Mee, and ended when the Scot bit off the Irishman’s nose.
That sort of thing makes professional boxing seem positively genteel, so it’s hardly surprising that many Travellers now opt to fight with gloves, and the last decade has been a golden period for Travellers finding success as top-level pros. Middleweight contenders Billy Joe Saunders and Andy Lee are both Travellers, as is the flamboyant Tyson Fury, who defeated Wladimir Klitschko for the heavyweight cha
mpionship in 2015. Fury’s nickname is ‘The Gypsy King’, and he has often spoken about not feeling accepted in Britain. ‘Nobody wants to see a gypsy do well,’ he told the BBC in 2016. (He has also said a lot of awful things about women and homosexuals; to what extent this can be attributed to his upbringing and battles with mental illness is up for debate.)
In Australia, Indigenous people suffer chronic socioeconomic disadvantage, but have found success in the boxing ring. Many of our best boxers have been Aboriginal, including Jerry Jerome, George Bracken, the Sands brothers, Tony Mundine and his son Anthony.
The story of Olivares’ old foe Lionel Rose is typical. Arguably Australia’s best-ever boxer and the first Indigenous Australian to become a world champion, he was born in a bark humpy at Jackson’s Flat, an Aboriginal settlement outside Drouin in West Gippsland. Rose’s parents had been ejected from the town proper because they were black. Disgracefully, in what was even then one of the world’s richest countries, Rose grew up in conditions worse than those experienced by Olivares in Mexico City. No running water, no electricity, pit latrines, lice, constant running noses, and nothing but corrugated iron, bark and burlap to keep the cold Victorian winter out. ‘All we had to eat was black tea and damper,’ he said, years later, in his quiet, old-fashioned accent.
Rose learned the rudiments of the sport by hitting a sack of sand hung from a gum tree by his father Roy, a former boxer in travelling tent shows. After being discovered by the Melbourne trainer Jack Rennie, Rose went on to liberate the bantamweight championship from Fighting Harada in 1968. He was just Australia’s second world champion (or maybe the third depending on how you count it—these things are never definitive in boxing), and the new prime minister, John Gorton, personally telegraphed him in Tokyo on behalf of a proud nation.
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