London viewed Johnson’s ascendancy to the heavyweight throne as an unmitigated catastrophe, and his views were widely held by white men everywhere-not least in the White House, where passionate boxing fan Teddy Roosevelt regularly beat the boxing bag in the White House Rose Garden. The gravity of this event for white supremacists was poignantly expressed in the hysteria of novelist Jack London’s call for a “Great White Hope” to take back the belt from the cocky, ebony black Jack Johnson. Football, from which black men were formally barred, became even more important as a demonstration of superior white male prowess after Jack Johnson won the world heavyweight boxing championship. It was the ideal sport for the age of “Muscular Christianity,” Social Darwinism, Anglo-Saxon ethnic/gender euphoria, the pseudo-science of eugenics, and white male supremacy. Yet it was the game of football that most faithfully reflected the zeitgeist of a nation embarking on the road to empire. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”” “In a 1903 speech Roosevelt said, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. Hence boxing also became popular among the young men who played football in the Ivy League men who would later become leaders among those who pass the laws, control commerce, define cultural standards and determine the proper manners and morals for the nation.
#FLYING WEDGE FOOTBALL INFLUENCE PROFESSIONAL#
The prestigious New York Athletic Club, playground of the rich and famous, hired a former professional bare-knuckle fighter and trainer Mike Donovan to teach men of the privileged class the fine points of pugilism. Liebling calls a “sweet science.”ĭriven by anxieties over the fear that upper-class white men were becoming “feminized” from “over-civilization,” advocates of “the strenuous life” such as Teddy Roosevelt began to embrace the sport of pugilism as a proper manly pursuit.
It was the same year the Marquis de Queensbury introduced the formal rules of boxing, transforming artless bare-knuckle brawls between pugnacious bullies into the martial art of pugilism, which at its best becomes what A. And like cricket, football began as a patrician sport played by upper class white males in the Ivy League, commencing with the Princeton-Rutgers game in 1867. Hence, like cricket in Victorian England, football embodies some fundamental American values that harken back to the formation of the nation. They enslaved African Americans for 250 years, employing some of the most savage, depraved practices in history.
The vast and fertile land Anglo-Saxon settler/colonists fought their British cousins for was stolen from the indigenous people by force of arms, after which the settlers enacted genocidal policies to reduce the “Indian” population. The United States was born in a bloody war. Our history and present circumstances suggest otherwise. One could equally claim “what do they know of football who only football know.” Guided by a master narrative of American civilization that is fashioned in the popular mind by hype artists and mythmakers more than the peer reviewed scholarship of professional historians, Americans like to think we are a peace-loving country. James writes, “The British Tradition soaked deep into me that when you entered the sporting arena to left behind the sordid compromises of everyday existence.” Foremost was the concept of playing by the rules, upholding fair play. He went on: “Before James’ broadly learned text, nobody recognized the importance of sport as the embodiment of deeply held societal values.” The brilliance of James’ analysis is that he demonstrated how cricket embodied the values of the British upper class during the Victorian era, when Britannia ruled the world. Sandiford, told this writer “changed the way we look at Victorian society.” James, in the opening passage of his erudite 1963 book Beyond a Boundary, a treatise on the sport of cricket that one historian of Victorian England, Dr. “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?,” asks the brilliant Trinidadian polymath C.L.R.
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