The Ghost Sport: Boxing, today relegated to the margins, was once central to American life
…Politicians, pledging to “fight” for a principle, sometimes hold up boxing gloves as a sign of commitment to cheering supporters. The gloves bring to mind a familiar image: a narrow, roped square; eager spectators surrounding the ring; and, in the fighters’ corners, old, wrinkled seconds with Q-tips behind their ears, holding buckets. The scene frames an odd, brutal human activity that disappears from the public mind for long periods, then surfaces again when a fight or fighter reaches out to us, demanding a response…
With the advent of Joe Louis, who first gained national prominence in 1935 and became heavyweight champion two years later, the heavyweight division returned to center stage. Louis was the first black man since Johnson to get a shot at the title, after a steep climb out of poverty and the social deprivation that American blacks once endured as a matter of course. A grandson of slaves, he was born in Alabama but moved north with his family, settling in Detroit’s Black Bottom ghetto—so named not for its population but for its dark soil—where he began boxing when still a boy. Unlettered and wary in the public eye, Louis fought in a deliberate, methodical style, always in position to punch and to defend, unhurried but moving toward what came to seem inevitable: another knockout win.
Louis faced adversity of the kind that today’s black athletes can only imagine. Remembering how Johnson had alienated whites, Louis’s management team installed a set of rules for his conduct. These included a ban on being photographed with white women and a public posture of stoicism and clean living. A generation later, more militant blacks, like Muhammad Ali, would suggest that Louis had been too accommodating of white sensibilities, but their criticism betrayed a lack of understanding of the social context. Blacks were still getting lynched in the South; Louis seemed to understand his opportunity, and he didn’t waste it…