When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport/A Flame of Pure Fire
Bodner, Allen & Kahn, Roger
are not creating catastrophes, either hidden or impending, by doing so. The environment needn't be a source of constant political crisis, and property and markets and technology are more a...
...not to mention the lure of green for hard-pressed immigrant families in a world in which a young fighter could earn $3oo for a single ten-round match, an amount "that often represented ten or fifteen weeks' salary for his father...
...Skew acknowledges undereounting occurs-how could it not in a nation of such mobile people?-but points out that the national undercount has steadily improved to the point that less than 2 percent of the population was missed in 198o and 199 o. Minority undercounts, too, have improved, just not as quickly as the white undercount...
...Still, Skerry deftly shows that adjustment is not a panacea, as it creates both winners and losers...
...and its population numbers are used to decide how 435 congressional seats are apportioned to the states...
...And why do the media pile on the bandwagon, such as when the New York Times called a court ruling against sampling a The American Spectator " J w l y / A u g u s t 2 o o o 91...
...Should statistical methods be used to compensate for the disproportionate numbers of minorities who fail to be counted, or should we stick to the "actual enumeration" mentioned in the Constitution...
...Census was designed by the Founders to determine congressional apportionment and tax-burden distribution-two decidedly political spheres-making the Census Bureau's recent attempts to portray itself as nonpolitical wrongheaded...
...Madcap Maxie" he was called...
...Of Leonard VICTOn GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Beat them badly, in Willard's case flooring him seven times and shattering his cheekbone...
...By modern heavyweight standards Dempsey, at 6' 1", 185 pounds, was not a big 90 July/A~g~s t o~ o o o . The American Spectator man, though he took on and defeated fighters like Jess Willard (6' 6", z5o pounds) and Luis Angel Firpo (6' 3", 23o pounds...
...For most newly arrived Jewish-American immigrants, steeped in the Diaspora traditions of the Old Country, the idea of fighting as a way to make a living was, to say the least, disparaged...
...Max was a full-chested beach boy from the palm-lined boulevards of the Golden State, while they were wiry street fighters who went into the ring to escape the ghetto life of the urban East...
...Overwrought perhaps, but such is the Dempsey remembered in history, the Manassa Mauler whose "will to do hurt" produced the first million-dollar gates as hot-eyed crowds came to see him destroy, in turn, Georges Carpentier, Firpo, Billy Miske, and Tommy Gibbons...
...Should respondents be able to cheek off more than one ethnic category at a time...
...which is to say, quoting Bodner, "he apparently wasn't Jewish...
...the spirit of the Western frontier come East to win his fortune...
...I was a miner and a cowboy," Dempsey told Kahn in a 196o interview...
...Try this one...
...But wait: there remains one part of the Dempsey rdsum6 that this thinking fan, for one, was unacquainted with--his decidedly mixed ethnic origins...
...Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics Peter Skerry Brookings Institution / 248 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY TracyRobinson C ensus Day--during which all American households were supposed to fill out and return their forms- came and went on the first of April...
...In recent decades, racial issues have been in the forefront of politics, so naturally the controversy has carried over to the census...
...I fought wherever I could, in school halls, outside saloons, any place they were putting up a purse...
...By creating a more accurate count of the entire population, adjustment could actually lower the ratio of minorities to whites, but there's no way to tell if or to what extent that will happen until the count is completed and analyzed...
...It is thanks to these large stakes that Congress and the media have questioned a great many technical and procedural decisions made regarding the last three decennial tallies: How will minorities be categorized...
...The demographic information that results helps us understand what our population looks like and how it has changed over time...
...And, before that, in the 19zo's , the lightweight champion our fathers reverentially called "the incomparable Benny Leonard...
...vidual, patriotic duty, appealed to the unending appetites of communities for federal dollars-was attacked this time around...
...I was lucky...
...In A Flame of Pure Fire, Roger Kahn recalls the rags-to-riches saga of William Harrison (Jack) Dempsey, the ninth-born of a dirt-poor Mormon family that came from West Virginia to settle in the bankrupt mining town of Manassa, Colorado...
...Max knew clever, but preferred brawl...
...The sport was considered a lowly pursuit and there was the ever-present fear of personal injury...
...There were also Barney Ross (real name: Barnet Rosofsky), the welterweight champion, and, for laughs, "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom, the light-heavyweight champion...
...real name: Benjamin Leiter) it was said that he was so clever a boxer that "His hair is as neat after a fight as before it...
...On the other hand, there was the harsh reality of life in the ghetto, where merely walking to school through rival ethnic neighborhoods was a daily training camp for future pugilists...
...Outside the ring, however, there was the Dempsey known by all who met him as a genial, fun-loving man-about-town, a gent who went out of his way to avoid hurting people (as when the macho Ernest Hemingway challenged him to a sparring match and Dempsey laughed it off--a humanitarian snub for which the writer never forgave him...
...What is remarkable about that r4sum6, given the self-adulation of today's generation of fighters, is its modest candor...
...Peter Ske W, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says such controversy is to be expected...
...Good fighters all, but, unlike Baer, they were celebrated for their cleverness in the ring, not their ferocity...
...its figures help to determine the disposition of federal funding...
...Those of us around in the mid-3o's remember the Star of David on his boxing trunks...
...But mostly I was a hobo...
...One punch, that's all he looked for: Knock the SOB out and get back to Hollywood, where the cameras rolled and the golden shikses hung out...
...vN Willing to Be Hurt When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport Allen Bodner Praeger / :zo7 pages / $24.95 A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s Roger Kahn Harcourt Brace/474 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold S ometimes revisionism goes too far, as when Allen Bodner asks us to believe that Max Baer, the only Jewish fighter ever to hold the heavyweight boxing title, was uncircumcised...
...Bodner's passion for boxing was passed down by his father Leo, an amateur fighter in the Roaring Twenties and professional manager in the thirties and forties...
...To many, politics and the census do not logically seem connected...
...I got to know some presidents and beautiful women who would have rung the burg]ar alarm if I'd walked in on them once upon a time...
...In Counting on the Census...
...By contrast, Max Baer's jet-black locks flew loose with the first punch of every fight, whether delivered or absorbed...
...The environment needn't be a source of constant political crisis, and property and markets and technology are more a boon to environmental health than a bane...
...after all, how is counting the nation's population every ten years a political exercise...
...he notes that the U.S...
...The census is "inescapably a political undertaking," Skerry says, which means it will undoubtedly get tangled up in the public battles of the day...
...And what about the undercount...
...By the 196o's , there were few if any Jewish fighters and a shrinking number of Irish- and Italian-Americans in a sport that had become a way out of the ghettoes and barrios for hungry young African-Americans and Latinos...
...N ot that all hungry young men who entered Leo Bodner's sport in the early years came out of urban ghettoes...
...No small star either, but one that ran from his thigh to his kneecap, as if to say, "You think all little Jewish boys grow up to be 98-pound accountants...
...We have never had so direct and unpretentious a champion," writes Kahn, "nor perhaps any who inside the ring fought with such snarling intensity...
...So...Max Baer wasn't the first uncircumcised Jewish heavyweight champion after all...
...N ZZZIIZZIIIZZIIZZZZZIZIIZ2ZZIZIIZ21ZZZIIIIII211ZIZZZIZZZIIIIIIIIZIIIZI One Nation, Under Count Counting on the Census...
...The fact is, the modern census is more than a head count...
...Adjustment would produce all sorts of unpredictable results," he warns...
...also the Livermore Larruper, after the California town he came from--yet another difference between Baer and other Jewish fighters of that era...
...Months later, the politics of the decennial enumeration remain with us...
...Again, Joyce Carol Oates, the thinb ing fan's fight buff, would look back at those years and write: Has there ever been a fighter quite like the young Dempsey?--the very embodiment of hunger, rage, the will to do hurt...
...Activists and politicians concerned about race have focused on statistical adjustment, urging the bureau to use sampling and other statistical techniques to compensate for minorities who are missed by the count...
...Along with Leonard and Ross, ethnic heroes like Jimmy McLarnin and Tony Canzoneri drew avid fans to arenas across the country until, with the postwar advent of flush times and television, a new generation of urban ethnics replaced them...
...Debates about federal ownership of wilderness are indeed less important than all that, and whether or not you agree with him on that point, for most of this book Huber brings the good news with intelligence and wit...
...How intrusive should long-form census questions on income, marital status, or family structure be...
...Max Baer not Jewish...
...If an adjusted census may not give black, Asian, or Hispanic political leaders the results they desire-i.e., higher population figures for their groups -why, then, do they challenge a non-adjusted census as racist...
...But wouldn't it have been neat if the Manassa Mauler had worn at least one-sixth of a Star of David on those spotless white boxing trunks...
...Even its television advertising strategy--which, rather than portraying census cooperation as an indiTRACY ROBINSON is deputy editor of The American Spectator...
...It was an exercise in ferocity that not only made Dempsey heavyweight champion but so stunned the sports world that, as John Lardner later observed: The public suddenly saw him in a new light, the two-handed fighter who stormed forward, a flame of pure fire in the ring, strong, native, affable, easy of speech, close to the people in word and deed and feeling...
...Those were the golden years of boxing not only for hungry young Jews but their Irish and Italian counterparts...
...As the author notes, you won't find much written about Jewish athletes in studies like Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers...
...In the midst of such controversies, the Census Bureau, which likes to see itself as nonpartisan, can't win...
...I got beat a lot...
...Our family," he told Roger Kahn, "was pretty strongly Irish, with Cherokee Indian blood on both sides and a Jewish strain from my father's grandmother, Rachel Solomon...
...Jewish parents were usually, though not always, opposed to their sons becoming boxers," writes Bodner...
...Baer was not, however, the only Jewish prizefighter that little jewish boys could identify with in the mid-193o's...
...I improved, but I remember the beatings...
...Bodner's book, in large part an oral history, casts light on this overlooked segment of Jewish-American experience in the early years of the twentieth century...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
