Boxing wrote its rules late and broke them often. These stories run from a London fencing master who opened a fighting school in 1719 to a women's bout that finally topped the bill at Madison Square Garden, by way of a mining town that bought itself a championship, a count that took thirteen seconds, and a dentist accused of cheating.
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Champions
nine stories
1The fencing master who taught England to fight
On the tile: James Figg1719
Boxing's first champion was known for far more than his fists. James Figg ran a fighting school in London, where he taught swordplay, the quarterstaff and the cudgel alongside bare-knuckle boxing, and gentlemen and noblemen came to him for lessons. From 1719 to 1730 he could claim the title Champion of England for every kind of contest, not boxing alone. Historians now call him the sport's first champion, and the British Boxing Board of Control still dates the first recognized heavyweight championship to Figg in 1719.
Daniel Mendoza stood five feet seven and weighed about 160 pounds, not a big man for a prizefighter, and he beat larger opponents with speed rather than strength. He relied on footwork, quick punches and defense at a time when most fighters simply mauled, and in 1789 he set his methods down in a book, The Art of Boxing. Born in Whitechapel, in London's East End, he was the first Jewish fighter to gain prominence, and he later kept a public house there and opened a boxing school.
3From Staten Island slavery to the king's coronation
On the tile: Bill Richmond1763-1829
Bill Richmond was born on Staten Island in 1763 and enslaved in the household of a local minister. A British officer, Hugh Percy, reportedly saw him fight soldiers in a tavern brawl, arranged his freedom and took him to northern England for schooling and a cabinetmaker's apprenticeship. Richmond boxed into his fifties, bought a pub near Leicester Square, trained Tom Molineaux, and later gave boxing lessons to pupils who included the essayist William Hazlitt. In 1821 he served as an usher at the coronation of George IV.
Joe Gans won the world lightweight title in 1902 by knocking out Frank Erne in the first round, and became the first American-born Black boxer to hold a world championship. Erne had beaten him two years earlier, and Gans spent the time working out how to counter his left. Known as the Old Master, he won by precision rather than force: he moved only inches to slip a punch and put his own exactly where he meant to. He lost the title to Battling Nelson in 1908, and many still rank him the greatest lightweight ever.
The heavyweight championship was kept from Black fighters by a color line, and the champion Tommy Burns kept putting off Jack Johnson's challenges. An Australian promoter, Hugh McIntosh, finally made the match worth Burns's while with thirty thousand dollars and most of the money from the fight films. On the day after Christmas in 1908, in Sydney, police stopped the fight in the fourteenth round and Johnson was declared the winner, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world.
Joe Louis held the heavyweight title for eleven years and eight months, from 1937 until he retired in 1949, a reign Guinness World Records lists as the longest in any division. He defended it twenty-five times, often enough that his challengers were mocked as the Bum of the Month Club. Years later, Muhammad Ali asked Louis whether he really thought he could have beaten him. Louis said that as champion he had gone on a bum-of-the-month tour. Ali asked if that made him a bum. Louis replied, "You woulda been on the tour."
Henry Armstrong won the world featherweight title in 1937, took the welterweight title from Barney Ross in May 1938, and beat Lou Ambers for the lightweight title that August. For a time he held all three at once, across three different weights, until he gave up the featherweight title later in 1938 without ever defending it. He remains the only boxer to hold world championships in three divisions at the same time.
Bob Fitzsimmons was born in Cornwall, grew up in New Zealand, and never looked much like a heavyweight. He won the middleweight title in 1891. In 1897, at Carson City, he took the heavyweight championship from Jim Corbett, who outweighed him by about sixteen pounds, with a blow to the solar plexus, just below the breastbone. In 1903, at the age of forty, he added the light heavyweight title and became the first boxer to win world championships in three divisions.
9Forty-nine fights, forty-nine wins, then he stopped
On the tile: Marciano1952-1956
Rocky Marciano stood about five feet ten and weighed around 185 pounds, smaller and slower than most heavyweights. He won the title in September 1952 in Philadelphia, getting up from a first-round knockdown and trailing on points before he knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth. He defended it six times, then in April 1956 retired at the age of thirty-two. His record stopped at forty-nine fights and forty-nine wins, forty-three of them by knockout.
Tom Molineaux, an American trained in London by Bill Richmond, fought the champion Tom Cribb on December 18, 1810, in pouring rain. Bettors laid odds he would be beaten in fifteen minutes. Instead he had the better of the middle rounds, and after the 28th, by one early account, Cribb could barely rise from his second's knee at the call of time, while his second, Joe Ward, distracted Molineaux's corner until he recovered. Cribb won after more than thirty rounds. Molineaux then asked publicly for a rematch, hoping his color would not count against him.
On July 8, 1889, at Richburg, Mississippi, John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain fought seventy-five rounds with bare knuckles. Sullivan had trained down from about 240 pounds to 205 under the wrestler William Muldoon. Under the London Prize Ring rules a round ended whenever a man went down, so the count kept climbing. Kilrain, beaten, could not come to scratch for the seventy-sixth. It was the last heavyweight title fight under those rules, and in 1892 Sullivan lost the championship to James J. Corbett in gloves, under the Queensberry rules.
Jim Jeffries had retired undefeated in 1905, and five years later he was talked into coming back to face Jack Johnson on the Fourth of July, 1910, in Reno. Johnson won in the fifteenth round. The longer fight was over the film. Within three days of the bout, states and cities across the country had announced they would not allow the footage to be shown, and the film syndicate that had invested in the pictures saw its money put at risk.
Dempsey against Firpo at the Polo Grounds in September 1923 lasted less than four minutes. In the first round Dempsey put the Argentine challenger down seven times. Then Firpo sent the champion tumbling through the ropes and out of the ring, and reporters at ringside helped him back in, which was against the rules. Dempsey knocked Firpo out in the second round. George Bellows, covering the fight for a newspaper, painted the moment of the fall and put himself in the picture as the balding man at the far left.
5The seconds that never stopped being argued about
On the tile: Long Count1927
In Chicago that night, a knockdown count would not begin until the fighter who scored it went to a neutral corner. In the seventh round at Soldier Field in 1927, Jack Dempsey put Gene Tunney down and then stood over him. Referee Dave Barry had to send him to the corner before he could start counting. The official timekeeper put Tunney on the floor for thirteen seconds. He rose at nine on the referee's count, won the ten rounds on points, and boxing has argued about it ever since.
6A four in the morning fight, timed for other people
On the tile: Kinshasa1974
The fight started around four in the morning. Nearly 60,000 people filled Kinshasa's 20th of May Stadium at an hour chosen to suit closed-circuit theaters in the United States, where it was still evening. George Foreman was the unbeaten champion, and Muhammad Ali a four-to-one underdog. Ali spent round after round on the ropes, letting Foreman punch himself tired, the tactic he called the rope-a-dope, and knocked him out in the eighth. Soon after, dawn broke and a heavy rainstorm swept the stadium.
7The words that named the fight may never have been said
On the tile: No mas1980Legend
With sixteen seconds left in the eighth round in New Orleans in November 1980, Roberto Duran turned his back on Sugar Ray Leonard and quit. Reporters wrote that he told the referee no mas, Spanish for no more, and the phrase became the name of the fight. Duran tells it differently. He has said he never spoke those words, that he was muttering no sigo, I'm not going any further, and that the broadcaster Howard Cosell came up with no mas. He blamed stomach cramps from cutting weight.
Buster Douglas was a forty-two to one underdog against Mike Tyson in Tokyo in February 1990, and his mother had died twenty-three days before the fight. Tyson put him down in the eighth round; Douglas rose at nine and the bell ended the round. In the tenth, Douglas knocked Tyson down and the count ran out. Tyson's promoter protested that the count in the eighth had been slow. The protest failed.
In some 140 years of Madison Square Garden history, two women had never topped the bill. On April 30, 2022, Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano did, fighting ten rounds as the main event before a sellout crowd of 19,187. Taylor kept her undisputed lightweight titles on a split decision. The Ring named it the event of the year, and noted that it drew a far bigger live crowd than a men's world title fight held in Las Vegas the same night.
In August 1743 the prizefighter Jack Broughton drew up a code for the fights at his amphitheater in London, the first standard set of rules the sport had. It ran to seven rules. A square of a yard was chalked in the middle of the stage, and a fallen man whose second could not bring him up to it within half a minute was beaten. Nobody was to hit a man who was down or seize him below the waist, and a man on his knees counted as down. Broughton's rules governed prizefighting until 1838.
In February 1747 the prizefighter Jack Broughton advertised an academy at his house in the Haymarket, where gentlemen could learn to box. So that persons of quality would not be put off, he promised mufflers, early gloves that would spare pupils black eyes and bloody noses. They were teaching aids, not fighting gear. Prizefights went on being settled with bare fists for well over another century, and gloves did not become widespread in professional bouts until the late nineteenth century. The glove arrived as a courtesy to learners long before it was a rule for professionals.
3Why bare-knuckle fights could run past a hundred rounds
On the tile: The scratch1838
Under the London Prize Ring rules of 1838, a round did not last three minutes; it lasted until somebody went down. The fallen man then had thirty seconds to recover and eight more to reach, unaided, a mark called the scratch in the center of the ring. If he made it, the fight went on. Some fighters went down at the lightest blow, so rounds could be very short. In 1840 Ben Caunt beat Brassey of Bradford in 101 rounds that took an hour and a half, with the fighting in each round averaging not much more than twenty seconds.
4The rules are named for the man who did not write them
On the tile: Queensberry1867
The most famous rules in boxing carry the name of a nobleman who lent his title to them and not much else. They were written by John Graham Chambers, a Welsh sportsman and oarsman, and published in 1867 under the patronage of the Marquess of Queensberry. They called for boxing gloves, three-minute rounds with a minute between, ten seconds for a downed fighter to rise unaided, and an end to wrestling. Modern boxing is essentially that document.
A boxing ring is square, which bothers anyone who stops to think about it. The word is older than the shape. It comes from the circle of bystanders inside which fights and wrestling bouts were once held, and by 1770 the ring had come to mean boxing itself. Yet fights were already being staged on platforms twenty-four feet square by 1789, and the London Prize Ring rules later made a roped square of that size the standard. The name stayed anyway, which is why writers call it the squared circle.
The National Sporting Club's first Lonsdale Belt was won in November 1909 by the lightweight Freddie Welsh, who beat Johnny Summers for it. Holding it came with conditions. A champion had to defend within six months of a challenge, hand the belt back to the club before every defense, and insure it for two hundred pounds. Win three championship contests, though, and it was his for good, along with a pension of a pound a week from the age of fifty. The British Boxing Board of Control, which took over in 1929, now requires four wins.
In the nineteenth century boxing began adding weight divisions below the heavyweights, so that smaller men would not have to give away too much weight. In 1909 the National Sporting Club in London set out eight divisions, each with its own championship belt, and eight was long the traditional number. That tidy list has since been pulled apart. The major sanctioning bodies now recognize seventeen divisions, two of them add an eighteenth between cruiserweight and heavyweight, and most of the newcomers are wedged into the gaps between the original eight.
Olympic boxers had worn protective headgear at every Games since 1984, and it looked like an obvious safety measure. Then amateur boxing's governing body studied more than two thousand bouts, concluded that men suffered fewer concussions without it, and in 2013 took it away from senior men. The International Olympic Committee agreed, and men boxed without headgear at the 2016 Games in Rio. Women kept theirs, because there was too little data on head injuries in their comparatively young sport to justify the change.
You can read what a sport used to be like from the things its rules forbid. The London Prize Ring rules, as revised in 1853, banned butting, gouging, biting, kicking, clawing with the nails and falling on a downed man with the knees. A fighter could not use the ropes to help squeeze his opponent or hold a stone, a stick or resin in his hand, and he had to open his hands for the referee on request. Resin was no idle worry: in 1850 Tom Paddock was found with it smeared on his hands against Bendigo.
There have been four buildings called Madison Square Garden, and only the first two stood anywhere near Madison Square. The third was built by a boxing promoter. Tex Rickard put it up on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets for about five million dollars, and it opened in 1925. A book issued for the opening boasted an unobstructed view for 19,000 spectators. It became known as the House That Tex Built, and it served until 1968, when the present Garden took its place.
2A mining town staged a title fight to put itself on the map
On the tile: Goldfield1906
In 1906 business leaders in Goldfield, Nevada, a growing gold-mining town, wanted a boxing match to publicize the place. The job went to Tex Rickard, who ran a hotel there and had recently seen a fight in New York. He signed Joe Gans and Battling Nelson for thirty thousand dollars, and on Labor Day, September 3, Gans defended his lightweight title. It ran forty-two rounds and ended when Nelson was disqualified. The gate of nearly seventy thousand dollars was the largest ever for a boxing match, and Rickard went on to promote Jack Dempsey's million-dollar fights.
The sweet science, boxing's nickname, has a bookish pedigree. The sportswriter Pierce Egan's Boxiana, a sprawling chronicle of English bare-knuckle boxing written in the thick slang of the Fancy, began appearing in installments in 1812, and new volumes kept coming into the late 1820s. More than a century later A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker, who called Boxiana one of his favorite books, opened his 1956 collection of boxing pieces with a line credited to Boxiana, 1824. It hailed the sweet science of bruising, and Liebling titled the book The Sweet Science.
Nat Fleischer, a New York newspaperman, founded The Ring in 1922, and in 1929 he left newspaper work to give the magazine his full attention. He ran it for half a century, until his death in 1972, and it quickly became the authoritative voice on boxing. From 1941 he also published an annual Ring Record Book, which outlived him and kept appearing until 1987. The Ring still calls itself the bible of boxing, and plenty of other people call it that too.
In 1910 a seventeen-year-old tailor's son named Jacob Golomb started a company making swimsuits, and guaranteed they would last at least a year. He called them Everlast. Seven years later a young fighter named Jack Dempsey came looking for headgear that would survive more than fifteen rounds of work, and the swimwear business quietly became a boxing supplier. The name that now appears on gloves everywhere began as a promise about a bathing suit.
Gleason's Gym opened in the Bronx in 1937, founded by a former bantamweight born Peter Robert Gagliardi who fought under the name Bobby Gleason. It has moved twice since, to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn, and has outlasted almost every gym of its generation. Muhammad Ali, Jake LaMotta and Roberto Duran all trained there. So did Robert De Niro for Raging Bull and Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby.
7The recreation center basement that made champions
On the tile: Kronk1980s
The Kronk gym was named for a Detroit city councilman, John Kronk, and sat in the basement of a municipal recreation center. Emanuel Steward, then an electrician, began coaching there in 1971 and by the mid-1970s had built it into a national power. Hilmer Kenty won the WBA lightweight title in March 1980 to become Steward's first world champion, and Thomas Hearns followed five months later. Milton McCrory and Jimmy Paul came after them. The gym's gold and red colors became recognized throughout boxing.
8The Hall of Fame is in a village of two champions
On the tile: Canastota1989
Boxing's International Hall of Fame is not in New York City or Las Vegas but in Canastota, a village in upstate New York that produced two world champions: Carmen Basilio and his nephew Billy Backus. In 1982 townspeople raised money for a display honoring the pair, and Ed Brophy led the effort that grew into a museum. It opened in 1989 with two dozen former champions at the ribbon cutting, and Muhammad Ali was in the first class inducted a year later. Each June a four-day celebration is held in the village beside the Thruway.
Modern Olympic boxing began at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, where every entrant was American and the tournament doubled as that year's national amateur championships. London held a tournament in 1908. Then the 1912 Games went to Stockholm, and boxing was left off the program, because Swedish law at the time restricted the sport and required special permits. Since Antwerp in 1920 it has been part of every Olympic Games, though women did not box at the Olympics until London in 2012.