Fights were reported in what John Kouwenhoven called the “syntax of momentum,” a peculiarly American and dynamic style of writing he found in an early transcontinental railroad guide. The headings will not slow you down; they are part of the rush. As the Sullivan-Corbett bout reels to its conclusion, here is how the New Orleans Times-Democrat titles its rounds:
SULLIVAN WAS SO THOROUGHLY SURPRISED CORBETT NOW BEGAN TO FORCE THE PACE CORBETT WAS THE AGGRESSOR HE FOUGHT WILDLY SULLIVAN STAGGERED BACK SULLIVAN STAGGERED BACK STORM OF BLOWS.
This is boxing as relentless progress, as the myth of late-nineteenth-century American life.
But no matter how progressive, or how much it seemed to reflect a vibrant spirit of competition, of Darwinian triumph and bootstrap optimism, boxing still suffered from an image problem. Though middle- and upper-class Victorian men took up the sport with enthusiasm in the era of rugged “manliness,” as both spectators and recreational participants, many still considered fistiana a “bloody and brutal” world. New Orleans, long a sporting city of “moral laxity” and leisure that worshipped the “gospel of play” (even on Sundays), was an ideal setting for boxing to thrive illegally in the years after the Civil War. The city would ultimately become the first in the country to attempt to truly legitimize pugilism by sanctioning it in 1890. Boxing’s proponents wanted more than mere legal acceptance, however; they sought respect, and hoped to sell the sport to civic leaders and to its myriad of local opponents (including the clergy and the Louisiana attorney general), and to rise above the sordid, illicit image that it evoked. Here in New Orleans is the knotty shift in boxing’s history from bareknuckled fighting (the London Prize Rules) to gloved fists (the Marquis of Queensberry Rules); from illegal rings furtively pitched by pine trees to reserved seating under electric lights in elegant athletic clubs.
It was these athletic clubs—a recent, nationwide phenomenon—that gave boxing its new veneer of credibility, and the Fistic Carnival’s Olympic Club epitomized the trend. “The Olympic Club is creating a respect for manly sports, a respect for honest, unafraid muscle,” the carnival program declared. Its officers moved in the city’s commercial elite: lumber, coal, cotton, real estate, insurance, “levee interests,” “capitalists.” President Charles Noel, for example, was a partner in a sawmill and sat on the city council, serving as committee chairman for streets and landings. The Olympic’s “renaissance style” clubhouse (costing $30,000) included a library and reading rooms, decorated with objects of art. Finances seemed unlimited—more improvements were planned, and purses were high. The club put $25,000 (the equivalent of nearly $500,000 today) toward the total $45,000 purse in Sullivan vs. Corbett.