The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, by Elliott J. Gorn

...The Victorian reformers, a coalition of capitalists and evangelicals, were largely successful in their domestication of manliness...

...So thought Teddy Roosevelt and many with him...

...The manly art" may still be with us, but manliness seems to have disappeared...

...Although illegal since 1750, boxing flourished in England from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries because of aristocratic and even royal patronage...

...From the late 1820s on, bare-knuckle boxing gradually lost its upper-class supporters...

...Since fisticuffs were an English import, Gorn first takes the reader to the Lx)ndon prize ring (September 28, 1811 for the second CribMolineaux fight), there to meet the "fancy," the whole sporting fraternity which drew its members from the highest and the lowest ranks of English society...

...While he does not state it so boldly, the conclusion is there to be drawn: The nineteenth century offered competing, and perhaps equally choice-worthy, understandings of "manliness" (self-reliance and self-control versus honor and valor...

...In the epilogue, Gorn shows himself plainly saddened and discomfited by the absorption of boxing into the mainstream...

...Gentleman and player, Corinthian and commoner alike subscribed to what Gorn calls "a male aesthetic...

...Once safely past the preface (wherein authors so frequently simplify Diana Schaub is assistant managing editor of the National Interest...

...During the era of its ascendancy in England, boxing barely existed in America...

...But Gorn has a degree of sympathy with pugilism's opponents—progressives of all types, from the respectable bourgeois who thought boxing kept the lower orders from work and selfimprovement to the labor radical who thought it kept the dispossessed from protest and social reform...

...His "simultaneous attraction and repulsion" serves in lieu of true scholarly disinterestedness, and may be what raises Gorn's "men's history" above most "women's history...

...These early matches, less structured than their mother-country antecedents, often dissolved into ethnic brawls...

...While decorum may have prevailed within the ropes, outside the "magic circle" license was the rule...

...As a result, boxing became safe for the spectators and lucrative for the promoters...

...As a sign both of boxing's spread and of its failure to gain respectability, newspapers made it a practice to publish an editorial disclaimer condemning prize fighting in conjunction with a round-by-round account of the latest set-to...

...Although he says he tends "to take the part of the lions over the Christians," he remains ambivalent about prize fighting and the particular male ethos underlying it...

...He mixes in a fair bit of fight footage, clipped from the penny dailies, the sporting magazines, and American Fistiana...

...In fact, he regards the women's studies movement as in his corner, so to speak, for it is the movement's insights into gender consciousness and the malleabihty of gender roles that inform his understanding of "the manly art...

...his lips were swollen to an incredible size, and the blood streamed profusely down his chest...

...Such incidents of disorder and riot contributed to fears of boxing's socially disruptive influence...

...With what appears to be academic pugnacity, Elliott J. Gorn asserts in the preface to The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America that "This is 'men's history.' " Gorn, however, is not taking a swipe at the practitioners of "women's history" or, in feminist jargon, "herstory...

...Rough sports, particularly boxing with its uniquely elemental quality, were the natural antidote to the threat of "neurasthenia" (the loss of vital "nerve force...

...Whereas in the preface he had voiced certain classically "liberal" reservations about the morality of the ring, his reflections on the end of the bare-knuckle era express an entirely different sort of reservation, one that seems profoundly conservative, not to say reactionary...

...In sum, the old sports and leisure traditions produced men who were at once too high-hearted and too sel&indulgent...

...By means of institutions like the YMCA, athletics, including amateur sparring, was enlisted in the service of a new understanding of religious mission...

...When a book about boxing, especially one that seeks to "inte'rpret" the ring, acknowledges such ideological training, there is cause for concern...

...Gorn is a fine storyteller...

...He believes that the "Sweet Science of Bruising" (Pierce Egan's fond epithet) is both noble and barbarous, the one quality inextricable from the other...

...His sketches of the antebellum champions— James "Yankee" Sullivan, Tom "the Chief" Hyer, John "Old Smoke" Morrissey, and John C. "the Benicia Boy" Heenan—capture not just their individual personalities, entertaining though these are, but the entire street and saloon subculture in which they moved, and which overlapped in predictable, and not so predictable, ways with the world of big city politics...

...It is gorier stuff than nowadays: Round 70th.—McCoy was now indeed a most unseemly object: both eyes were black—the left one nearly closed, and indeed that whole cheek presented a shocking appearance...

...When he came up he appeared very weak, and almost gasping for breath, and endeavored, while squaring away, to eject the clotting fluid from his throat...

...With the way thus prepared for the ring's rejuvenation, all it took was a sanitizing rule change (disallowing wrestling holds and throws, requiring gloves, establishing the threeminute round, one minute rest, and ten-second count, and permitting the ring to be pitched indoors) to transform boxing into first-rate commercial entertainment...

...it survived, but only furtively, among working men...

...among them, especially after the suppression of the English prize ring, were many "milling coves" seeking, one might say, freedom of combat...

...the critic's task by making overly reveahng confessions about their biases, their method, and their intellectual and moral debts), this book becomes an intelligent contribution to boxiana...

...The professors offered "scientific" instruction in the art of self-defense to gentlemen interested in a humane and honorable alternative to duelling...

...Pickpockets, professional gamblers, and prostitutes were sure to be part of any boxing crowd, and as "the English claret" streamed and spouted from the fighters, the "blue ruin" (gin) flowed liberally into the spectators...

...His very forehead was black and blue...

...Nonetheless, there were occasional bouts here, which increased in frequency as Irish and English immigrants arrived...

...What pretended to be the re-masculinization of America turned out to be a new dispensation in which Americans became consumers of an image of manliness...

...So despite opposition, by the 1850s, boxing in both its plebeian and refined varieties seemed firmly established in America...

...The new liberal order required men to be less courageous and more moderate...

...Boxers-turnedsoldiers introduced their fellows to the sport and many officers encouraged it as a suitably martial camp recreation...

...He laments the marketing of "the male aesthetic," and the accompanying transformation of "the fancy" into fans...

...But soon after the war, the rottenness of the Gilded Age infected boxing...

...Among the burgeoning middle class, all leisure activities were suspect...

...They also gave exhibitions of their science— exhibitions that bore deliberately little resemblance to prize fights...

...Dedication to property and family (the bourgeois shibboleths) meant steady habits: caution, calculation, productivity, sobriety, fidelity, and moral earnestness...

...The Civil War, whatever its meaning for the country, Gorn shows to have been a great boon to boxing, nationalizing its appeal...

...Fixed matches, toughs who guaranteed their man's victory with a pistol to the referee's head if necessary, and renewed police interference discredited the ring once again...

...Perhaps surprisingly, this ambivalence improves, maybe even redeems, the work for it enables Gorn to reconstruct, colorfully and faithfully, both the culture of the ring and the culture of its critics...

...This first fatality—so clearly avoidable had the referee, the seconds, the other fighter, or even the crowd behaved responsibly—invigorated the anti-prize fight crusade...

...in the twentieth century, both understandings have been undermined...

...Meanwhile, the nation moved inexorably toward its own paroxysm of violence...

...such gladiatorial events as boxing, bear-baiting, cockfighting, and cudgel-play were especially condemned as atavistic and degrading...

...Nonetheless, the ritualized violence of the ring continued, albeit with greater circumspection...

...The appearance of sparring masters, biUing themselves as "professors of pugiUsm," did much to make boxing acceptable in fashionable circles...

...Thus, he too has a history of oppression to relate: the history of the outlawed pastime of the urban proletariat...

...Through the movement known as "Muscular Christianity," evangelical piety reached a compromise with the sporting world...

...My heart sickened at the sorry sight...

...Similarly, the well-to-do developed a new sympathy for vigorous exercise, in response to widespread fear of the effeminizing effect of modern life...

...Although he is now venerated as the last of the great bare-knucklers, "the Boston Strong Boy" or simply "the Boy" was in fact responsible for popularizing the Queensberry rules (according to Gorn, he fought only two true bare-knuckle matches, one to gain the title and one to defend it...

...Because it was never legal, and hence had no regulatory body to standardize and enforce rules, prize fighting was more susceptible to underworld infiltration than other sports...

...The combatants donned gloves and demonstrated their skills for a mere three rounds with no purse at stake (by contrast, bare-knuckle contests sometimes lasted upwards of 100 rounds...

...Republican sentiment was firmly against it, seeing it as a symbol of Old World corruption...

...Gorn gives an insightful analysis of the effect of the new rules: As befits such a kinetic age, they quickened the tempo (in the process, depriving fighters of control over the pace of the action), put a premium on clean, dramatic blows and knockouts (decreasing the importance of "bottom" or endurance), made boxing look less rough and tumble but in no sense made it less dangerous, and perhaps most significantly, by moving boxing indoors, made effective crowd control possible...

...Gorn states that "the same biases that rendered women voiceless in the writing of history simultaneously excluded the majority of men, in particular workers, ethnic minorities, and the poor...

...Unbelievably, this fight would last thirty-nine more rounds before McCoy finally collapsed and died, drowned in his own blood...

...Perhaps the most fascinating chapters are those that trace prize fighting's final redemption—a redemption made possible in part by the Marquis of Queensberry Rules (providing a ceremonious end to the bare-knuckle era) and in part by the craze for "the strenuous life" that dominated the century's concluding decades...

...Moreover, in the garish and grand John L. Sullivan, the rehabilitated prize ring found its first celebrity...

...Bloodletting artfully performed, violence within explicit rules, brutality committed with style— the ring articulated an ideal of manhood that bound displays of sanguine passions within an aesthetic of restraint and decorum...