This is official: sport hereby begins its second century this week.
The seminal event was the heavyweight championship bout when The Boston Strong Boy, John L. Sullivan, was upset by The California Dude, Pompadour Jim Corbett. All we see at any modern sporting event was evident in some manner at that fight a whole century ago: the hype, the hero worship, the greed, the gambling, the money, the misplaced attention. The presidential campaign-Cleveland vs. Harrison– was driven onto the back pages as Western Union cabled hundreds of thousands of words from New Orleans. Even the antecedents of satellite TV seem obvious: colored spotlights in city skies indicated who was ahead, and special telegraph sets were installed just for the occasion in saloons and pool halls. Instead of calling in to radio talk shows, the fans of that time–The Fancy, they were called– wrote doggerel. (Some things were better left the way they were in the 19th century.) Likewise, our modern endorsement sports stars had nothing on the two commercial gladiators. As they trained, both also rehearsed plays they planned to take on the road afterward. We may have refined big-time sports since 1892, but, really, hardly anything original developed after this sophisticated opening day.
It is simply amazing how that one fight engaged the nation, joining all 44 states emotionally, as sure as railroad tracks had bound it in a more practical way. Sullivan was the key. It is difficult today to conceive of the celebrity status that he attained. He was Michael Jordan-he was Michael Jackson … he was Princess Di!–carried to another power, alone in his orbit. Sullivan was widely accepted as a metaphor for all America-this other young, powerful giant. “I can lick any sonofabitch in the house!” he would cry, just as the United States was starting to flex for all the world.
Indeed, so tied up was The Great John L. with what America had come to mean that after Corbett whipped him so publicly, revisionists scurried about to explain that it was not America lost, only a new, craftier, more scientific America emerging-as represented by the guileful, newly ordained Gentleman Jim. Sullivan’s graceful speech after his defeat emphasized only one thing: “I’m glad it was an American who beat me.”
The fight also remains so meaningful because Sullivan was the first substantial minority hero, forefather of Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio, Roberto Clemente and all the other champions of the 20th century who would represent, with their athletic success, American dreams otherwise trapped in the stew at the bottom of the melting pot.
Corbett was every bit as blood Irish as Sullivan. However, he was from distant San Francisco, a lithe, handsome dandy, and it didn’t matter how Irish Pompadour Jim was himself, only that he had defeated the idol who had first made Irish men proud before all American. (The same irony would be displayed 80 years later when Joe Frazier was perceived by blacks as a threat to Ali’s black title.)
In fact, at his moment of triumph, as The Great John L. lay on the turf, bloody and broken of body, bankrupt of purse, Corbett somehow was able to look past his own glory, to see how this new grandiose sport could be as mean as it was glorious. “I was disgusted with the crowd,” he wrote later. “All those thousands who had given Sullivan such a wonderful ovation when he entered the ring turning it to me now that he was down and out.” Every man jack in America would have caroused with the new champ that night, every woman embraced him. Instead, Pompadour Jim went back to the house where he was staying, drank a glass of milk and retired.
And that is how the first day of sport in the modern world ended a hundred years ago this Monday.
