Personalities
Among British amateur boxers, only those who won Olympic gold medals tended
to achieve recognition beyond the limits of boxing enthusiasts. They included
Harry Mallin (Middleweight), 1920 and 1924),
Terry Spinks (Flyweight,
1956),
Dick McTaggart (Lightweight, 1956) and
Christ Finnegan (Middleweight,
1968). In
1908, at the
Olympic Games in London, five weight divisions were contested, Bantam weight,
Feather weight, Lightweight, Middleweight and Heavyweight. British boxers won
them all, and four of the finals were all-British!
It is the professional side of boxing, however, that has produced the
celebrities whose activities the public have generally followed. In the period
between bare-knuckle pugilism and post-Queensberry boxing,
Jem Mace was important. He carried many of the traditions of the old
London Prize-Ring, but promoted the use of gloves and helped to popularize the
sport in the United States and Australia. In the post-Queensberry era, the
first British fighter to achieve superstar status was
Bob Fitzsimmons. He weighed less than 12 stone but won world titles at
Middleweight (1892), Light-heavyweight (1903)
and Heavyweight (1897)
and fought his last bout at the age of fifty-two.
Successful fighters have provoked fierce local pride. The best example was
Jimmy
Wilde, a
Welsh
Flyweight who won the world Flyweight Championship in
1916 and held it
until
1923. He
once had a sequence of eighty-eight fights without defeat. Between
1911 and 1923, he
won seventy-five of his fights by a knockout. He was idolized in Wales, where
they commonly believed him to be the best boxer, pound-for-pound, that ever
lived. He was described as the "Mighty Atom" and "the ghost with a hammer in
his hand".
Freddy Welsh (Freddy Hall Thoomas), from
Pontypridd, won the Lightweight title in 1912.
The Scots had a similar pride in
Benny
Lynch, a Flyweight from
Glasgow,
who held the world Flyweight title in
1935 and again in
1937. Over the
years, Scots have had great success at this weight;
Jackie Paterson won the title in
1943 and
Walter McGowan in
1966.
Ken
Buchanan won the Lightweight title in
1971 and
Jim Watt
in
1980. In
Northern Ireland,
Rinty Monahan held the Flyweight title from
1947 to
1950 and
Barry McGuigan won the
W.B.A.
Featherweight title in
1985.
England, too, had its successes at the lighter weights. Among the
Flyweights,
Jackie Brown won the title in
1932,
Peter Kane in
1938 and
Terry Allen in 1950 and
Naseem Hamed in the
1990s.
The Welsh had their own featherweight legend
Jim Driscoll. His nickname was "Peerless Jim", he was born in the onetime
Irish "slum" of Newtown. Jim was the first outright winner of the Lord
Lonsdale Belt. Jim had prolific wins of the British, Empire and European
titles. Jim is considered by many to be the best pound for pound fighter of
all time.
Britain has had other popular world champions. In the
1930s,
Jackie Berg won the Light-Welterweight title; in the
1940s,
Freddie Mills won the Light-Heavyweight title; in the 1950s and 1960s,
Randy
Turpin and
Terry Downes won Middle-Weight titles; and in the
1970s,
John
Conteh and
John
Stracey won the Light-Heavyweight and Welterweight titles respectively.
With so many title-awarding bodies in the
1980s and
1990s, the public became unsure about who actually was the champion.
Nevertheless, the successes of
Nigel
Benn,
Chris
Eubank and
Joe
Calzaghe continued to bring extensive media coverage to boxing and
sustained a considerable public following.
The most popular boxers, howevers, have not always been the world
title-holders. Just fighting for the world title in the Heavyweight division
can bestow celebrity status, as was shown by
Henry
Cooper, who twice unsuccessfully fought
Muhammad Ali in the 1960s.
Britain had to wait 100 years to have its first Heavyweight champion since
Bob Fitzsimmons lost his title in 1899.
Lennox Lewis became undisputed champion in 1999, having first gained the
W.B.C. title in
1993.
Frank
Bruno held the W.B.C. world Heavyweight title shortly between
1995 and
1996, after
beating the man who beat Lewis,
Oliver McCall. He lost it to
Mike
Tyson in a rematch of their
1989 title bout.
Sue Atkins (alias
Sue Catkins) helped to pioneer
women's boxing in Britain in the 1980s, but without any official
recognition. The first British woman to be issued with a license was Jane
Couch from
Fleetwood, who won the
Women's International Boxing Federation (W.I.B.F.) Welterweight title in
1996. Most
experts would agree, however, that it was the
Christy Martin-Deirdre
Gogarty world championship bout, also in 1996, that helped women's boxing
popularity grow internationally. Weeks after defeating Gogarty by a six round
decision, Martin was featured on the cover of
Sports Illustrated.
Outside the United Kingdom, of course, boxing has also produced many
celebrities on a world-wide basis.
Muhammad Ali of
Louisville, Kentucky,
United States, often recognized and self appointed as The Greatest,
is probably the best example.
Puerto
Rico has three boxers to be generally considered national heroes out of a
cast of over 50 world champions from that country, these being
Felix Trinidad,
Wilfred Benitez and
Wilfredo Gomez.
Nicaragua
has
Alexis Arguello,
Mexico, out
of over 100 world champions,
Ruben Olivares,
Salvador Sanchez and
Julio Cesar Chavez,
Cuba has
Jose
Napoles and amateur legend
Teofilo Stevenson,
Argentina
Carlos Monzon,
Panama
Roberto Duran and
Eusebio Pedroza,
Australia
Jeff
Fenech,
Japan
Jiro Watanabe,
Ghana
Azumah Nelson,
South
Korea
Jung Koo Chang and so on. These are boxers whose fame transcended the
boxing borders and became household names among regular folks.
Medical authorities around the world have consistently argue for a ban on
boxing (or at least the changing of the rules to prevent blows to the head)
because of the
brain damage found in large fractions of professional boxers, but such
calls have not been successful, both on civil liberties grounds and the
argument that banning boxing would lead to underground, illegal bouts with far
fewer safety regulations than currently.
In
Mississippi City, on
February
7,
1882 the
last heavyweight boxing championship bareknuckle fight took place
