The Strong Boy and the Seventy-five Red Rounds
Few names in any sport have endured like that of John L. Sullivan. Even to those with little interest in boxing, “The Great John L.” still evokes a glimmer of recognition.
John’s father, Michael, a diminutive Kerry man, had fled the poverty of Ireland in 1850 to spend his life digging sewers in Boston. His mother, Catherine Kelly, was a large woman from Athlone, on the River Shannon. The couple wanted their son to become a priest. He studied briefly to that end at Boston College, dropped out to play professional baseball, and soon switched to prize fighting.
In 1881, he traveled to New York and knocked out John Flood, known as The Bull’s Head Terror, on a barge in the Hudson River. The following year, at age twenty-three, he demolished Paddy Ryan, the heavyweight champion. “When Sullivan struck me,” Ryan said afterward, “I thought that a telegraph pole had been shoved against me endways.” Now the Strong Boy of Boston was champion of the world.
Pugilism, as it was called, was illegal in every state then. Exhibitions of the art of self-defense were allowed, but real fights had to be held in clandestine locations. Lovers of sobriety and punctuality saw the brutal spectacle as something repugnant, an affront to progress and “civilization.”
But working-class men viewed it as a chance to reclaim the honor and heroism denied to poor, landless immigrants and their offspring, an antidote to the regimentation of the factory, a corner of life where they made their own rules. Fighting was a rite, the squared circle a place of magic.
A certain class of folks with soft hands were fearful that modern life was making men weak. “It's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age,” Henry James had one of his characters declare. Rich men like Teddy Roosevelt hired pugilists to train them in the fistic arts.
Irish Americans dominated the sport as participants and promoters. Sullivan’s photograph was soon displayed in almost every barroom in the country. He fought exhibitions. He showed off his physique on stage and occasionally hammed it up in melodramas. He toured the country, offering a thousand dollars to any man who could last four rounds with him. Dozens tried, none succeeded.
In the fall of 1888, the champion was taken ill, prostrated, he later said, with “typhoid fever, gastric fever, inflammation of the bowels, heart trouble and liver complaint, all combined.” His principal ailment was acute alcoholism.
A priest was called, but Sullivan survived. In January 1889, a weakened Strong Boy left his bed and signed to fight Jake Kilrain that summer. Kilrain had a body hardened from work in the rolling mills near Boston. He was an abstemious family man, the respectable opposite of Sullivan.
According to the prevailing London Prize Ring rules, bare-knuckle fights had to take place outdoors on turf. Each bout was a fight to the finish. A fall ended a round, but the rounds continued until one man could no longer stand.
Given the rigors of these contests, Sullivan’s backers worried when he began his training by trotting as far as the local tavern. They hired professional strongman Bill Muldoon to train the champion at his farm in upstate New York. Muldoon put Sullivan on the water wagon and enforced a regime of cold baths, miles of road work, and clean living.
On July 8, 1889, the much-ballyhooed fight took place in a Mississippi pine woods outside New Orleans. Defying the edicts of six governors, three thousand spectators rode a mystery train to the secret location. Sullivan, to the surprise of many, had trained himself back into shape. He was “quick as a cat and very strong.” He would need all his stamina in the thick, hundred-degree heat. The merciless sun made resin weep from trees.
Kilrain looked good in the early rounds. Thousands of betting dollars changed hands when he scored “first blood,” slicing Sullivan’s ear in the 7th round. But as round followed round, Sullivan began to dominate. He wavered after the 44th round, when a drink of tea and whiskey made him vomit. But he came back and pounded his opponent so hard that Kilrain “turned a back somersault.”
Kilrain’s handlers urged him to quit. He said he would rather die. The two warriors fought on through the heat, the sun blistering their backs. In the 75th round, after two hours and fifteen minutes of fighting, Kilrain’s seconds, worried that he would be killed, threw in the sponge.
Spectators fought each other for bits of rope, splinters of posts, even clods of turf, which became valuable relics of the epic brawl. That night in New Orleans, a triumphant Sullivan appeared on the balcony of his hotel, swigging champagne from a bottle and throwing money to a mob of boys.
It was the last championship fight of the bare-knuckles era. Three years later, Sullivan fought again, this time indoors, under electric lights, and with padded gloves. Gentleman Jim Corbett, another Irishman, knocked him unconscious to become the new champ. “I came into the ring once too often,” Sullivan admitted.
It was his first loss—and his last fight. The big man had reached the end of his career at age thirty-four, but he was not disheartened. As he himself put it, “I'm still John L. Sullivan.”
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As always, another great read Jack. I remember a bit about John L. Sullivan but really enjoy reading more about how it was in the early days of boxing, even though I've never been a fan. Thank you.
Great article Jack, it hit close to home. My uncle, Jimmy Flood, was an amateur pugilist in the Rochester, NY area in the late 1920's early 30's. He claims to have been one of the best in town but me thinks he had the same fate as that John Flood you mentioned in your article. He, like John L., shared a love of the bottle.