Happy Boxing Day!

Jack Johnson! The winner! And NEW Heavyweight Champion of the World!
I say this or something like this every year. One hundred two years ago, a referee (0r somebody) said it in Australia when Jack Arthur Johnson pummeled champion Tommy Burns into a stupor. Burns' share of the purse was 30 or 35 thousand dollars or something like that... I don't recall the exact amount. He would later say it wasn't worth it, a heavyweight statement, since $30000 was a fortune on Dec. 26, 1908.

Jack Johnson's take? A handshake from his corner men... and the biggest prize in boxing, the Heavyweight Championship of the world. Jack was paid nothing, and reputedly chased Burns around the world, trying to goad the champ into a fight for the title. Until the day after Christmas 1908, Burns was wise enough not to pick up the challenge.

Boxing Day is a minor holiday in the British Commonwealth. It has nothing to do with fisticuffs. It is a day that citizens remember, thank and gift the public servants who deliver packages ('boxes') to the rest of us. Not a bad idea, given that in many parts of the globe it is the busiest and hardest time to be a mailman, due to the holidays and the horrible holiday weather.

But ironically it was on Boxing Day that Johnson caught up with Tommy Burns, in 1908. As a Canadian, Burns knew of Boxing Day. I don't know if he caught the significance of the irony or if he just decided that the running from Johnson had to finally stop. Anyway, Burns granted Johnson an audience, and of course paid dearly for it. Johnson, a skilled boxing technician with power, speed and strength, toyed with the smaller Burns for 14 rounds, telling Burns, "Hit me here, Tahmy!" repeatedly, pointing to various spots on his own body. Finally in the 14th Johnson tired of the shenanigans and pummeled the helpless champ relentlessly. In a display of how things went in those long ago days, police stepped into the ring, shut off the cameras, and then stopped the bout. IN other words, they were more distressed that the world might SEE a Negro pummeling a white man than the actual pummeling itself.

To Burns' credit, he did not quit. I don't think he even went down, though we would have to ask the witnesses in those long ago, pre-ESPN days.

Regardless, Johnson was crowned the winner and new champion. He subsequently made and squandered a fortune or two. Of course he was also the first Negro Heavyweight Champion (that is the vernacular of 1908). Much has been made of this, as it should be. But it is interesting... boxing actually was the first major sport to grudgingly allow this kind of pioneering change, far ahead of say, baseball, football and basketball, sports which refused integration of black and white peoples for decades to come. And it also must be noted, that Jack Johnson himself refused, for his own seven year reign, to allow another Negro to challenge him for the title.

Anyway, congrats, Lil Arthur! Whatever happens today you are champeen. And like Abe Attell, the crooked ex-champ and bag man for gambler Arnold Rothstein (in Eight Men Out) says, "Ain't nothin' ever gonna take that away"...