The American Prize Ring

The importance of this book “cannot be understated,” writes John Warren in his foreword. He must mean “overstated” since he goes on to praise the book as “the best reference work on bare-knuckle boxing in America.” Nonetheless, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles.With the prize ring in the doldrums in 1880, William Harding, who became famous as the sports editor of the National Police Gazette, began a year-long series of weekly columns on the history of bare-knuckle fighting, recounting bouts both famous and obscure. In 2022, Jerry Kuntz strung Harding's columns together into an independently published book under Harding's original title, The American Prize Ring: Its Battles, Its Wrangles, and Its Heroes, 1813–1881. Kuntz's reprint of Harding's columns is quite useful to anyone interested in American boxing's early history.It is very hard to tell exactly how William Harding put his narrative together during 1880–81. Perhaps the Gazette kept a morgue of old issues going back to its founding in 1845. A longtime journalist and athlete himself, Harding would have known where to find old copies of the Spirit of the Times and the New York Herald. No doubt he also knew which New York City saloons held the densest concentrations of garrulous if aging boxers, sportsmen, and hangers-on.“The fight was a desperate one. Seventeen desperate rounds were fought. . . . Seventeen rounds were desperately fought,” Harding wrote of the 1855 battle between Johnny Sweetman and Young Dutch Sam. As Kuntz notes in his introduction, the prose, at times, is repetitive and unimaginative. At least Harding makes his prejudices clear; he was more interested in native-born fighters than Irish and English immigrants; he mentions very few African Americans.The quality of coverage, too, is uneven. In a big fight like the Sayers-Heenan battle of April 1860, Harding manages to give us a lot of background on the fighters, the buildup to the match, the bout itself, and the aftermath. But at other times, the reader is sorely disappointed. For example, American Fistiana (1849 edition) described the 1842 battle between Yankee Sullivan and William Bell: Round 3d.—When “time” was called, Sullivan slowly rose and walked heavily to the mark; but when there and confronted with his enemy, as quick as light, he “cast his knighted color off” and stood the very incarnation of the spirit of mischief. He led off amid cries of “Oay luk at the divil!” from some admiring Patlanders, and caught Bell a sharp blow on the eye; a rally—rapid exchanges and some brisk in-fighting followed, which ended in Bell being pressed to the ropes, where Sullivan, with his arm round his neck, fibbed him severely.Harding, on the other hand, had only this to say: “In the next round the cunning Yankee was up at the call of time and fighting harder than ever” (16).When Harding does get around to fuller descriptions, his prose confirms the deep homoeroticism of the ring. Describing the preliminaries to the June 1869 battle between Tom Allen of Birmingham, England, and Mike McCoole of St. Louis, he wrote, “Allen stripped magnificently, his flesh being firm and hard, and knotted o'er with muscles which looked as though formed of steel, while his eyes sparkled with the lustre of health.”Harding was nostalgic for an old blood sport that seemed to be in its death throes. Ironically, with Gazette editor Richard Kyle Fox acting as promoter and Harding writing hundreds of column inches, prize fighting revived in the 1880s to become one of the three big American sports for the rest of the century, alongside baseball and horse racing. Soon a new, charismatic champion of Boston, John L. Sullivan, would eclipse all of the previous bare-knucklers.For anyone studying the bare-knuckle era, Kuntz's book is a source to rely on, along with nineteenth-century newspaper reports, compilations such as American Fistiana, and several “Life and Battles” compendia. Especially useful in our digital age, Harding gives us hundreds of names, places, and dates, which we can check against ever-growing databases. We'll never know as much as we'd like about the early prize ring, but Jerry Kuntz's edition of William Harding's columns enriches the story

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