While the poet Walt Whitman had sung pugilism’s praises anonymously in his recently recovered “Manly Health and Training”, Jack London was the first major American writer to give the sweet science sustained literary attention.4 Preceding Ernest Hemingway by more than a decade, he followed European novelists’ treatment of the sport, including George Bernard Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone (1896). London wrote four works of boxing fiction — two short stories and two short novels. But where he really scored a knockout was in reporting on fights for the newspapers.
Although London covered a number of prizefights, it is his reportage on the Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries fight of 1910 that is most often remembered. Johnson-Jeffries was a huge event. It was the first fight to be declared the “Fight of the Century” and resulted in riots, murder, and changes to federal law. London’s coverage of the fight was substantial, and his use of racialized and racist tropes was conspicuous. While such language rightly draws the attention and ire of modern readers, its shock value can lead some to frame (or even dismiss) London’s boxing coverage as solely racist propaganda (as was the case in the Ken Burns’ 2005 documentary Unforgivable Blackness). A deeper look at London’s boxing coverage, however, reveals a more nuanced, sometimes contradictory, approach to race. The foundations of some of the racialized themes London used in describing Johnson vs. Jeffries can first be seen (and better understood) in his earlier boxing writing.
In 1901, London covered the heavyweight contest between James “Jim” Jeffries and Gus Ruhlin for the San Francisco Examiner. His article “Gladiators of Machine Age” demonstrates London’s love of the sport, and shows him to be a man who has spent considerable time not only writing about boxing but thinking about it — and enjoying it as well.5 He opens the article by describing Jeffries and Ruhlin — both white — this way: “A big, dark male, hairy of chest and body, in one corner; in the other corner a big, light male, smooth of skin and serious of face.” Jeffries (the “dark male”) beat Ruhlin (the “light male”), and London mourns the defeat with the claim that Ruhlin was not “animal” nor “elemental” enough. “When all is said and done”, London writes, “the prize fighter, big-muscled and brutish and barbarous is a finer thing than a decadent.”