JOHN L SULLIVAN’S is a name that still resonates within the world of not just boxing but sports overall, despite him having been dead since 1918. When you take the time to look back at his remarkable life, you begin to understand why.

Born into poverty in 1858 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Sullivan began fighting professionally in 1878 at age 20. This was the era of bareknuckle bouts and Sullivan’s prowess in the ring quickly earned him the nickname The Boston Strong Boy.

A period in US history in which rugged masculinity and hard drinking were viewed as the hallmarks of a man and the country’s frontier spirit, Sullivan swiftly came to symbolise both as he cut a swathe through his opponents to emerge as the “first significant mass cultural hero in American life.”

His exploits were popularised in the pages of the then widely read periodical, The Police Gazette. The editor responsible for featuring Sullivan in its pages on a regular basis was a man by the name of Kyle Fox. Fox turned the magazine’s focus from high society onto the rough and tumble of boxing and sport in general, along with a liberal sprinkling of celebrity gossip.

Fox’s interest in covering sport so heavily in the Gazette was motivated not by the pursuit of Victorian-style ideals of nobility in competition, but instead by the opportunity it provided to profit from gambling. He established championship titles via the magazine and none more so than in boxing, and would invite the readers to bet on bouts organised under The Police Gazette’s auspices.

Legend has it that in a Boston saloon in 1881, Sullivan humiliated Fox when he turned down an invite to visit the latter’s table. “If he [Fox] wants to see John L Sullivan,” the fighter is said to have responded to the invite, “he can do the walking.”

From that point on, The Police Gazette moved from giving Sullivan nothing but favourable coverage to slandering him mercilessly. Kyle Fox also set about finding an opponent who could defeat him in the ring. Fox considered English, Irish and American, even New Zealand contenders to face the man promoted as the best bareknuckle fighter in the world, even though Sullivan only fought one non-American opponent throughout his entire career. This he did against an English fighter named Charley Mitchell. They met in the ring in 1888 and fought out a draw over 39 punishing rounds.

The following year, 1889, Fox arranged for Sullivan to face Jake Kilrain from Greenpoint, New York. Each side posted a $10,000 bet on the outcome on a winner-takes-all basis. Fox’s hopes of seeing his nemesis bested in a bareknuckle fight met with the crushing disappointment of watching Sullivan defeat Kilrain over an unbelievable 75 rounds at a specially built outdoor venue in Mississippi. It’s worth pointing out here, however, that in those days under the bareknuckle London Rules code, a round lasted until somebody got knocked down rather than the three minutes of the Queensberry rules that had come into force in the 1860s but were not then hegemonic.

An interesting fact about Sullivan’s early career was that in 1882, having earned himself a reputation, he persuaded then Irish-born US heavyweight champion, Paddy Ryan, to face him in defence of his title. The original plan was to stage the fight in New Orleans, but bareknuckle fighting was illegal there and the local authorities would not allow it.

Instead a specially chartered train left New Orleans for Mississippi to stage the bout there. Its passengers had bought tickets for the bout and among them were Oscar Wilde, who was in the US on a speaking tour, and the infamous James brothers, Frank and Jesse.

Paddy Ryan, Sullivan’s opponent, was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) and entered the ring in Mississippi with the movement’s emblem on a flag being carried behind him by a member of his entourage. Sullivan, meanwhile, had the Irish Harp and the Stars and Stripes in his corner prior to the start of the fight. The bout itself lasted just eight rounds, with Sullivan declared the victor after Ryan failed to come out for the ninth. 

After Sullivan emerged victorious from his 1889 fight against Jake Kilrain, his celebrity was at its zenith. Indeed, as Kasia Boddy writes of him: “He [Sullivan] became a screen onto which a wide variety of feelings and attitudes could be projected. In the late 19th century, many of those feelings concerned doctrines of materialism, whether economic, aesthetic, physical, or national.”

Interestingly, not everyone was enamoured at the sight of two men duking it out in front of raucous drunken crowds. Cuban revolutionary Josi Marti, Boddy reveals, viewed the Ryan v Sullivan fight as “proof of the uncivilised and outmoded nature of North American life.” 

Ironically, at the very point at which Sullivan’s celebrity had itself become a material force across the US, father time had begun to catch up with him and his physical powers were on the wane. Finally succumbing to the reality that the Marquis of Queensberry Rules had superseded the bareknuckle London Rules under which Sullivan had fought every one of his bouts hitherto, the now ageing prizefighter agreed to face Gentleman Jim Corbett under the strictures of the former. They met in 1892 in New Orleans and Corbett won the fight by knockout. It was a KO that fittingly marked the death of one era and the birth of another.

The United States was around this time well on the way to losing its supposed innocence as representative of a new world sans empire and colonial possessions — though the country’s former slaves and indigenous Indians would doubtless have had something to say about that — and rising to become the global economic behemoth it would become.

John L Sullivan was the poster for that supposed American innocence, in an age of the barroom and the ballroom as the 19th century gave way to the 20th and “progress” was the word on everybody’s lips. By the time he died in 1918 at age 59, the US and the world was plunged deep into a global conflagration the likes of which had never been seen. 

Still today, over a century on, young men are fighting and dying in trenches in Europe. Progress, what progress?