The boxing world, 1890–1914

The popularity and social significance of boxing fluctuated substantially in the period from 1890 to 1914. This ‘state of flux’ was the result of both changes in the form of the sport – the overlapping decline of bareknuckle prize-fighting and the emergence of gloved contests – and what some scholars have regarded as a shift from British to American pre-eminence in influence and control.Footnote ¹⁴ A number of historians have identified the famous bout between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in New Orleans in September 1892 as the symbolic ‘end of the bare-knuckle era’.Footnote ¹⁵ It certainly crystallized a number of important changes in the character and organization of the sport. To begin with, it was the first heavyweight championship bout to be contested by gloves, and hence an important moment in the universal acceptance of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. What is more, an athletic club – the New Orleans Olympic Club – organized the fight, indicating a shift from pugilism's challenge system to a more bureaucratic system of match-making and promoting. Local politicians had recently legalized fights in the city under certain conditions and introduced standard weight categories, a limited number of rounds, and increased powers for referees.Footnote ¹⁶ While Sullivan had fought clandestine bareknuckle fights ten years previously, he was now performing in front of an audience that included ‘middle-class businessmen and their wives’.Footnote ¹⁷ A reformed version of boxing thus emerged in the 1890s, though any progression to a position of respectability was to be slow, partial, and uneven. In the United States, Britain, and Australia, the sport ‘continued to move in and out of legality’ over the next thirty years.Footnote ¹⁸

Boxing's insecure legal status and the variable political and social reactions to it across the anglophone world have only been hinted at in the existing scholarship. Opposition to professional boxing was often underpinned by broader concerns over the uncivilized and immoral nature of the spectacle and the potentially damaging effects this could have on its largely working-class labour force and audience. In all three sites, the distinction between ‘prize-fighting’ and ‘boxing’ was the central issue with which lawyers, legislators, and police officials grappled. The 1878 R v Orton case in Britain had established that ‘a mere exhibition of skill in sparring’ was not illegal but that a display at which the parties ‘intended to fight till one gave in from exhaustion or injuries received’ was a prize fight and a breach of the law, whether gloves were used or not.Footnote ¹⁹ However, the distinction was difficult to uphold in practice. A gloved contest at London's Pelican Club between the heavyweight champions of England and Australia in November 1889 was considered by the Attorney and Solicitor General to be ‘of an illegal character’ but an absence of corroborating police evidence led to the case being dropped.Footnote ²⁰ A series of fatalities led to a number of high-profile inquests and court cases between 1898 and 1901.Footnote ²¹ In each instance, the defendants were acquitted of manslaughter but boxing was not legalized; as one letter-writer to The Times noted, ‘so long as the “knock-out” is tolerated every glove contest tumbles on the verge of legality’.Footnote ²² Indeed in a high-profile case in September 1911, the Home Office intervened to prohibit a planned world heavyweight championship contest at Earl's Court between the black American Jack Johnson and Britain's ‘Bombardier’ Billy Wells. A few months later, the Chief Constable of Birmingham prevented a championship fight taking place in the city on the grounds that it was ‘a prize fight, and therefore illegal, as overstepping the limits of a mere trial of skill’.Footnote ²³

In Australia and the United States, boxing floated in a similarly murky space somewhere between legitimacy and prohibition. A patchwork of constantly shifting colonial, state, and city laws and jurisdictions complicated the picture further. The Sydney authorities banned boxing in the city following the deaths of two contestants in fights at the California Athletic Club in December 1892 and March 1893.Footnote ²⁴ In Adelaide a municipal byelaw prohibited boxing exhibitions during the early 1890s, while in Perth pressure from religious groups to suppress contests that had a ‘demoralising effect’ on the young and encouraged ‘larrikinism in its worst form’ led to a similar measure in the mid 1890s.Footnote ²⁵ As in Britain, the increased popularity and profile of the sport towards the end of the 1900s led to renewed pressure to curb its more commercial and supposedly ‘brutal’ excesses. Anti-boxing propaganda was fuelled by reactions to international events such as the aborted Johnson–Wells fight as well as by local developments such as the death of the young Melbourne boxer James Fogarty in November 1910.Footnote ²⁶ The government introduced a raft of regulations – limiting the number of rounds, padding the rings, prohibiting the supposedly American innovation of in-fighting, and giving the police power to stop an unevenly matched contest – to ensure that ‘boxing contests were not allowed to develop into prizefights’.Footnote ²⁷ Yet there was no serious consideration, as the prime minister, Andrew Fisher, stated in July 1910, of banning the sport outright.Footnote ²⁸

The geography of the boxing world was constantly redefined by the sport's shifting legal status. As the first two American cities to permit boxing under certain conditions, New Orleans and New York have been posited as the main centres of the reformed sport in the 1890s.Footnote ²⁹ In New York, the Horton Act of 1896 allowed for sparring matches to be organized in the premises of private athletics clubs. It was repealed in 1900 by a coalition of Republicans led by Assemblyman Lewis, who objected to the iniquitous and brutalizing tendencies of ‘professional prizefighting’, as well as to its alleged links to gambling and criminality.Footnote ³⁰ Even under the Lewis law, however, boxing maintained a subterranean existence in saloon bars, back rooms, and private ‘membership’ clubs. According to a New York Evening World article in December 1903, ‘private’ fights were ‘becoming as regular as theatre matinees’. Five years later there were at least twenty boxing clubs in the city operating covertly but apparently with official approval.Footnote ³¹ Even under these conditions, as shown in Figure 1, New York accounted for by far the largest concentration of boxing contests in any city in the world.

Figure 1

Number of promotions staged in the world's main boxing centres, 1893–1913. Source: annual figures established with data from BoxRec website, http://boxrec.com/ (consulted between June and September 2012), using searches by ‘location’ and ‘year’.

In 1911, local Democratic politicians pushed through the Frawley Act, which established a three-man athletic commission to regulate boxing in New York state. Bouts were limited to ten rounds, clubs and referees had to be licensed, and medical arrangements became standardized. The return of legalized boxing convinced some commentators in New York that the city was likely to become ‘the centre of the boxing world’ once again, and indeed by November 1912 there were forty-nine licensed clubs operating in the city, with nearly US$1 million paid in gate receipts over the previous year across New York state.Footnote ³²

Mainstream boxing histories have normally seen the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period of rising American pre-eminence and control in the professional sport. Yet the reality was far more complicated than this suggests. There was no fulcrum around which the boxing world rotated. It is more accurate to think of a constant shifting of the balance of influence and power, as well as in the paths of movement and communication, between key connected points on the boxing map. With boxing in New York restricted under the Lewis law, San Francisco especially, and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles and the smaller towns of Daly City, Colma, and Vernon, began to stage an increasing number of championship fights in the early years of the twentieth century. In other US cities where the sport had formerly been popular, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, boxing was either banned outright or severely restricted.Footnote ³³

As the decade wore on, significant international challengers to the supremacy of American cities in championship promotion began to emerge. The staging of a series of world heavyweight title fights by Hugh McIntosh in Sydney in 1908 was a significant turning point. Thereafter, a cluster of prominent international promoters fought separately and in combination to stage the main world titles. In late 1909, it was mainly Californian and Australian entrepreneurs who placed purse bids for the Jack Johnson–John Jeffries world heavyweight title bout to be staged the following summer.Footnote ³⁴ A Nevada businessman, Tex Rickard, and the San Francisco promoter Jack Gleason bid the most, and eventually put the fight on in Reno, Nevada. Yet it was McIntosh's failed bid, which included proposals for the bout to take place in London, Paris, or Sydney, that signalled a shift in major titles bouts going to Europe and Australia rather than the USA over the next four years.Footnote ³⁵Table 1 indicates that, across the divisions, London was actually the most popular location for world championship fights, with San Francisco, New York, and Paris some way behind, although many of London's contests were in the less prestigious, lighter weight categories.

Table 1

Locations of world championship title fights, 1890–1914

Source: Boxing news annual and record book, 1972, London: City Magazines, 1972.

Below the high-profile championship bouts, informal local, national, and transnational boxing circuits based on small clubs, halls, theatres, and other venues grew along particular lines but were frequently reshaped and redirected. Though far from static and entrenched, London's boxing infrastructure was probably the most stable across the period. There were at least fourteen venues used annually for boxing contests in London in selected years between 1893 and 1913.Footnote ³⁶ Some, such as the National Sporting Club (NSC) and Wonderland on Whitechapel Road, staged regular contests over much of the period. The number of shows staged at London's venues was high, at 87 in 1893, and staying above this figure in each year, reaching a peak of 145 during the sport's worldwide boom in 1913. In New York, the number of events was affected by the wider regulation, with an annual figure of 115 in 1898 dropping to just 16 in 1903 and then leaping to 655 by 1913. The post-1910 boom was significant, though not as dramatic, in Sydney, where 61 shows were staged in 1908 and 153 by 1913 (see Figure 1).

At a time when national and international governing bodies were being established in a range of sports, the regulation of boxing was limited. In Britain, the creation of the NSC in 1891 had seemed to lay the basis for a new era of legitimate and respectable professional boxing.Footnote ³⁷ A private club based in Covent Garden with an exclusively middle-class clientele, the NSC set itself up as the ‘Home of Boxing’, ‘an institution that set standards, defined and refined codes’.Footnote ³⁸ It soon established itself as Britain's foremost boxing venue and its effective headquarters, a situation that was reinforced by the inauguration of the system of Lonsdale Belts for its designated champions in 1909 and its monopoly over Britain's major championship fights. The predominance of the NSC underscored London's pre-eminent status as the main, but by no means the only, locus of British boxing and a vital point of connection – through its clubs, promoters, and press – with overseas boxing cultures. Yet there were few comparable regulatory institutions outside Britain, at least until the foundation of the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC). What is more, national and local differences in the rules of the sport, the weight divisions of boxers, and the allocation of championships ensured that international cooperation and regulation were to be problematic.

Boxers on the move

Boxing was a sport and a profession built on traditions of geographical mobility. From the regency period, prize-fighting, though centred on London, had drawn in competitors from a host of provincial circuits. British pugilists had travelled across the Atlantic in significant numbers since the 1830s, while the flow of migrants increased markedly in the wake of the widely publicized transatlantic contest between Tom Sayers of Britain and John Heenan of the USA in 1860. By this time, Australia too had become absorbed into an early international network of pugilistic exchange.Footnote ³⁹ Prize-fighting's culture of mobility was further enhanced during the 1880s when American managers such as Billy Madden, Al Smith, and Pat Sheedy organized a series of large exhibition tours involving troupes of fighters. Inspired by the promotional techniques of vaudeville and the circus, and utilizing the structure of existing theatre circuits, some of these, such as John L. Sullivan's tour of England in 1887–88, were major transnational ventures.Footnote ⁴⁰

We know that geographical mobility was an increasing feature of gloved boxing as it developed during the 1890s. But the degree and scope of this mobility has never been calculated. This section aims to provide new and robust data on the scale of mobility, and the routes of travel, among boxers across the main sites of the boxing world. Tracing the movement of boxers across and between continents is a tricky task. The general absence of established national and international governing bodies and the chaotic nature of the granting of titles, and challenges and defences, means that it is impossible to be precise about individual boxing records and championship histories. Nonetheless, the BoxRec website, hosted and updated by boxing historians throughout the world is a crucial and reliable source of data. In particular, I have used data from Barry Hugman's History of world championship boxing – in conjunction with other published records authored by Hugman and others – to trace the competitive record of 301 of the most prominent professional boxers who fought in Australia, Britain, and the United States in the period from 1890 to 1914.Footnote ⁴¹ I have included the records of all boxers who have been recorded as having fought for British and Australian titles (the latter up to 1909), as well as for the most widely recognized version of World titles (dominated for most of the period by American boxers) in the six established weight classes in the pre-1914 period: bantamweight, featherweight, lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, and heavyweight.

Using these criteria, the boxing careers of 97 British-based, 68 US-based, and 136 Australian-based boxers have been identified. The careers tracked span a slightly wider chronological range than the parameters of this article, with one or two beginning in the prize-fighting era of the late 1870s and 1880s and some continuing into the First World War and the early to mid 1920s, but it was felt important to include boxing lives in their totality and most are, in any case, firmly based in the two and a half decades before 1914. Such an approach also necessarily focuses on the elite of the boxing profession and hence those most likely to be mobile and to cross national and oceanic boundaries in search of championship bouts, larger purses, and pugilistic experience. This is borne out by the data, which show that a large proportion of the boxers from all three centres travelled internationally at least once during their careers. Interestingly, among the US-based boxers – admittedly a smaller and perhaps more select group than the other two – 82.3% had travelled beyond the United States to fight. The proportion was slightly smaller among the British-based boxers (at 74.2%) and was lower still for the Australian-based fighters (at 47.1%). The precise destinations of these journeys, however, and the more detailed trajectories of the fighters’ careers, provide us with plenty of evidence about patterns of sporting mobility across the period.

The US boxers tended to travel to two main destinations: Britain and Canada (see Table 2). Close proximity to northern US towns and cities – and a connection with the boxing cultures of these places – made Canada the most common cross-border destination (48.5%). In fact, a number of Canadian cities and venues – such as Toronto and Fort Erie – were enmeshed in wider North American boxing circuits. Boxing experience in Britain – or more particularly London – was favoured by 45.6% of the US boxers across the period. This often extended no further than a specific journey for a one-off bout; indeed, for much of the period ambitious US boxers tended to travel almost exclusively to the NSC. Boxing's fluctuating legal status in New York and elsewhere was a crucial determinant of the outflow of talent. In 1897, London's Illustrated Police News had reported on a sizeable contingent of American boxers located in training camps in Hertfordshire and the West Midlands.Footnote ⁴² By 1900, the introduction of the Lewis law led American observers, such as the manager William Brady, to predict an exodus of boxers from the east coast of the United States to England, and the British press noted periodic ‘invasions’ of American competitors in its boxing halls.Footnote ⁴³ Multiple fights or larger British or European tours were more common towards the end of the 1900s, particularly as Paris promoters started to compete seriously with their British and American counterparts. A smaller proportion of US fighters – just 19.1% – travelled to Australia; as in the case of France, this happened mainly in the years immediately before the war, largely as a result of the endeavours of a coterie of prominent Australian sports entrepreneurs including McIntosh, Reginald ‘Snowy’ Baker, and John Wren.Footnote ⁴⁴

Table 2

Main foreign fight destinations of a sample of US-based boxers, c.1890–1914

Source: created using data from the BoxRec website.

A significant proportion of the boxers who travelled outside the United States were African Americans. Men such as Frank Craig and Bob Scanlon, and later the so-called heavyweight ‘Coloured Quartette’ – Joe Jeannette, Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, and Sam McVea – were part of a larger diaspora of black boxers and performers who spent much of their professional careers overseas. In many respects, the foreign mobility of black Americans was a reaction to their ‘disenfranchised status politically, economically, and socially within the United States’. Theresa Runstedtler has argued that the departure of numerous black boxers from the United States could be seen as ‘a clear rejection of white American racism’, with Europe and Australia offering the potential of greater earnings, freedom, and professional recognition.Footnote ⁴⁵ As with black jazz musicians, such overseas journeys could be productive of experiences of cosmopolitanism and fellowship, although ultimately a variety of restrictions based on colour and race shaped their opportunities throughout the anglophone world.Footnote ⁴⁶

Overseas travel for British boxers generally meant either visits of varying duration to the United States or shorter trips to France (see Table 3). Over 40% of the top British boxers fought in the US at some stage in their careers and 33% boxed in French rings. Of the seventy-two who competed abroad, only six (8.3%) had no experience in either France or the United States. Integration into imperial boxing circuits in the southern hemisphere was less marked. Only 16.5% fought in Australia, a smaller percentage than among their American compatriots, and only 6.2% went to South Africa. Distance of travel and the more limited opportunities to fight probably ensured that aspiring British boxers tended to choose to gain experience, money, and prestige by touring the United States or, towards the end of the period, closer to home in continental Europe.

Table 3

Main foreign fight destinations of a sample of UK-based boxers, c.1890–1914

Source: created using data from the BoxRec website.

Between 1890 and 1909, 136 Australian-based boxers fought for either Australian national or world titles. Sixty-four of these (47.1%, as we have seen) fought outside Australia. Just over 62% of these itinerant boxers sailed to the United States. Britain was the second most popular destination, at 42.2%, with South Africa next at just over one-third and New Zealand at 32.8% (see Table 4). As these figures indicate, most of those who travelled did so more than once in their careers, regularly circulating around a number of chosen destinations or moving between key boxing centres in the anglophone world. The first half of the 1890s, in particular, witnessed a period of extraordinary mobility of Australian boxers to the United States. Of the leading boxers considered in this data, twenty – many of whom were former or future national champions – could be found competing in American rings at some point between 1890 and 1895. In an interview in the Los Angeles Herald in 1892 concerning Australian fighters ‘who are coming here’, the Australian journalist A. G. Hales mentioned Tom Williams, Joe Goddard, Sandy Ross, Sid Barnes, Bill Jennings, Chiddy Ryan, Dummy Mace, Jim Burge, George McKenzie, Charley Dunn, Billy Murphy, Abe Willis, ‘and lots more’. ‘The big purses offered here’, Hales said, ‘is [sic] the reason why our men want to come.’Footnote ⁴⁷ As has been noted, various state restrictions on public boxing limited opportunities over the next decade or so but a contract to fight in the United States remained a central aspiration for those plying their trade in the boxing halls of Sydney and Melbourne. Trips to Britain tended to follow on from American experience: relatively few Australian boxers travelled directly to Britain but a significant number stopped off as part of an extended global trip eastwards.

Table 4

Main foreign fight destinations of a sample of Australian-based boxers, c.1890–1914

Source: created using data from the BoxRec website.

The changing geopolitics of the Angloworld help to explain why some of boxing's most dynamic transnational connections were centred on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. The extension of American strategic interests into the Pacific from the mid 1870s onwards coincided with a period of interaction and intellectual exchange between Australian and American politicians. The friendship between the two countries was ‘symbolically consolidated’ when the US fleet visited Australia in 1908 as part of an extended tour of the Pacific, an event around which McIntosh arranged the nation's first major world championship contest.Footnote ⁴⁸ Considerable population interchange and effective communication links ensured that people in California and Australia both knew a great deal about, and were interested in, one another, reinforcing ‘a sense’ among citizens of San Francisco, Sydney, and Melbourne ‘that their places had much in common’. The existence of a perceived ‘anglophone Pacific world’ encompassing boxing alongside other areas of trade and culture was demonstrated by the role of the steamships themselves in facilitating Californian–Australasian connections.Footnote ⁴⁹ John D. Spreckels, for example, owner of the Oceanic (Steamship Navigation) Company, was also a prominent member of the California Athletic Club in San Francisco; and both the captain and the purser of the RMS Alameda acted as agents and intermediaries between boxers, promoters, and club officials in Sydney and San Francisco during the 1890s.Footnote ⁵⁰

The trips and journeys outlined here could be conceptualized in a number of ways. In most, though not all cases, they were a form of short-term labour migration that stopped short of permanent relocation. The majority of boxers returned ‘home’ at some stage but there is a difference between the occasional return trip and a more circulatory pattern of mobility involving regular touring and a peripatetic lifestyle. The data suggest that the wandering boxer was in a minority but that this minority was fairly sizeable, particularly at either end of the period. Numerous illustrative examples could be flagged up, such as the Poplar bantamweight Jack Ladbury, who travelled between the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and New Zealand on nine occasions between 1901 and 1915, or New York's middleweight Willie Lewis, who moved twenty-four times along a transatlantic axis linking the US, Canada, and Cuba to the UK, France, and Belgium over the same period.Footnote ⁵¹ In total, the 301 boxers moved across national borders an average of 3.5 times over their careers. The British and the US-based were more mobile, with an average of around 4.7 moves, while the Australian boxers moved just twice on average. Among those who did venture across national borders, the figures were an average of 6.4 moves for the British, 5.7 moves for the Americans and, 4.3 moves for the Australians (see Table 5). At the very least, these statistics suggest that mobility across the anglophone boxing world was a recognized feature of the professional lives of a significant number of American, Australian, and British fighters in this period. One could go further and suggest that boxing was emerging as an industry that, like the circus and popular theatre, was not only characterized by, but sustained itself on, the transnational circulation of its labour force.Footnote ⁵²

Table 5

Cross-national career mobility of selected US, UK, and Australian boxers, c.1890–1914

Source: created using data from the BoxRec website.

A slightly different picture emerges, however, if we shift our focus from the movement of individual boxers to the sites of boxing performance. Further data have been collected on the nationality of boxers appearing at venues in three of the main centres of the boxing world – London, New York, and Sydney – in selected months at five-yearly intervals starting in 1893 and finishing in 1913.Footnote ⁵³ These show plainly that the overwhelming majority of boxers who competed in events in these cities had not crossed national borders to do so. In London, the percentage of foreign boxers ranged from 2.2% in 1893 to 13.7% in 1913; the figures for New York were similarly low, at 11.3% in 1893 and less than 8% in both 1898 and 1908. The Sydney figures were slightly higher, particularly at the end of the period, with overseas boxers accounting for 25% by 1913. But even here, the average percentage across the whole period was much lower. In fact, this evidence indicates that most boxers lived in the city in which they fought. A fair proportion seem to have been casual fighters, boxing only when they required the money to do so. Those who fought more regularly tended to be connected to specific venues or else to have moved within smaller, localized circuits that could function independently, but which often, and increasingly, intersected with larger national and international circuits. These data caution us against overemphasizing the mobility of the boxing profession as a whole, indicating the existence of a large subsidiary tier of boxers performing in mainly local and national circuits alongside, yet interconnected with, the peripatetic elite.

Transnational networks and boxing lives

The mobility of boxers between and across different parts of the anglophone world was dependent on the existence of a variety of supporting networks. Some historians have been fairly casual in their application of the term ‘network’, utilizing it as a general metaphor and often failing to differentiate between different types, or characteristics, of networks.Footnote ⁵⁴ At its most general, as a set of links between people and places, the concept has limited explanatory value. Yet recent studies have insisted upon much more detailed analyses of not just how networks developed and were sustained but also, crucially, how they actually functioned. For Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, whose work focuses on the British world, networks represented the informal ‘software of empire’ that ‘connected private, unofficial and provincial interests in Britain with their overseas contacts and communities’. Through networks, they have argued, ‘ideas and information were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded and people travelled’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Personal connections between individuals and groups – which may or may not have been bolstered by institutional linkages – were fundamental to this conception of ‘networks’. In a similar vein, Enda Delaney and Donald MacRaild have observed that the preference for a ‘network’ approach to migration history has accompanied a shift away from structures and institutional forces towards more personal narratives of the migrants themselves.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this view, informal, family, and community ties contributed to a multiplicity of social networks that provided reliable information connecting people across borders and sustaining migration flows. The boxing networks that developed in the 1890s and beyond were, as will be argued below, characterized more by personal relationships and partnerships, and loosely structured flows of information, than by formalized institutional links.

Information about boxing was carried across the anglophone world via a range of communication networks. Technological developments were, of course, vital to this. An Atlantic telegraph route in 1866 was followed by the connection of Australia and Britain in 1872 and an ‘all-red’ empire cable route linking Australia and New Zealand to North America from 1902. Improvements in shipping greatly facilitated networks, with more regular and reliable ship-mail and passenger services both between Britain and Australasia and across the Pacific.Footnote ⁵⁷ The press was the main vehicle for the circulation of news and information on all aspects of boxing. Historians of the transatlantic press have recognized that sports coverage was central to the emergence of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century, centred on more personal, sensational reporting, marketing gimmicks, and a lightening of tone. Joel H. Wiener placed sport together with crime and gossip as part of a ‘trinity of interests that attracted large numbers of readers’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the United States, newspapers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and the Chicago Tribune began to construct sports departments and employ ‘sporting editors’ during the 1880s. In Britain, evening sports editions of local newspapers became common in the 1880s and specialist sporting newspapers such as the Sporting Life and The Sportsman flourished, the latter becoming the world's first sporting daily in 1876.Footnote ⁵⁹

Matt McIntire has argued that it was baseball and cricket that best exemplified how sporting news was ‘embraced’ on either side of the Atlantic in the era of New Journalism.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet boxing arguably played an equally significant role and, moreover, demonstrated most clearly the interactions that existed between the American, British, and Australian sporting press and their employees. The popular daily press was not always the most important element of this. A small number of specialist sporting and boxing publications functioned as both promoters and commentators on the sport through the 1890s and 1900s. Richard Kyle Fox's National Police Gazette had long played a key role in organizing contests, backing contestants, and stimulating interest in prize-fighting in the United States.Footnote ⁶¹ London's Sporting Life and The Sportsman both featured boxing prominently and regularly included news and reports of bouts from across the Atlantic. So did the Mirror of Life, founded in 1894, whose owners created a cheaper, boxing-based publication in 1909, Boxing World and Athletic Chronicle. Another London-based weekly, Boxing, had been established earlier in 1909, marketing itself as ‘the only paper in the world solely devoted to boxing’.Footnote ⁶² In Australia, boxing was covered heavily by the Sydney-based Referee, launched in 1886 as a weekly competitor to the Melbourne Sportsman, and in other sporting weeklies such as The Arrow (founded in 1896) and the Sydney Sportsman (1900).Footnote ⁶³

Potter has suggested that telegraph technology, and the subsequent influence of news agencies and newspaper cartels, actually had the effect of restricting and homogenizing the flow of news around the British empire: the ‘structure of connections between press enterprises’ in the early twentieth century equated to an ‘imperial press system’ rather than a network.Footnote ⁶⁴ News was often filtered through London, and painted with a British gloss, with the result that the coverage in Australia and New Zealand of major events such as the South African War of 1899 to 1902 tended to be increasingly uniform.Footnote ⁶⁵

As a popular form of entertainment, boxing, with its continual stream of incident built around the movement of boxers, contract negotiations, and fight previews as well as results and reports, was a small but regular element of the ‘cable news’ of British, American, and Australian newspapers. Yet it also offers an example of the continuation of loosely defined press networks operating at the margins of these more systematic connections. This is especially true of the specialist sporting publications, which generally preferred to base their international boxing news on the reports of overseas correspondents, their own travelling journalists, or personal letters written to the paper. The Sydney Referee, for example, had sent its boxing correspondent, A. G. Hales, to the fight between Australians Peter Jackson and Frank ‘Paddy’ Slavin in London in 1892.Footnote ⁶⁶ It also employed W. W. Naughton, a New Zealander and a leading boxing writer for the San Francisco Examiner, for many years as its American correspondent.Footnote ⁶⁷ For the John Jeffries–Jack Johnson heavyweight championship bout in Reno in July 1910, it published ‘two special and independent accounts’, one cabled by Naughton and the other by its chief boxing writer, W. F. Corbett, who had travelled to the event from Sydney.Footnote ⁶⁸ British newspapers similarly made regular use of overseas contributors. The Mirror of Life and Sport included a double-page column on ‘American boxing gossip’, which became Boxing World's ‘Our American letter’, penned by George O. Almy.Footnote ⁶⁹ When the two were amalgamated as the Mirror of Sport and Boxing World in 1912, its ‘continental’, ‘colonial’, and American correspondents were retained alongside its London staff.Footnote ⁷⁰Boxing was devoting at least two pages to its ‘American news and notes’ by 1910 and also had whole-page or half-page columns for its ‘special’ Paris and Australian correspondents.Footnote ⁷¹ As in other sectors of the entertainment industry, the boxing trade press was itself ‘instrumental in building the very networks of commerce and discourse’ through which performers became conspicuous in different parts of the world.Footnote ⁷²

The world heavyweight championship bout in 1897 between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City, Nevada, offers an interesting case study of the way in which boxing news was carried across the anglophone world. British and Australian newspapers followed the convoluted negotiations for the contest and, when a contract was finally made, previewed the fight itself and the excitement it was generating in the United States. The English boxing referee Eugene Corri recalled in his 1927 memoir that popular enthusiasm spread across the Atlantic: ‘Evening papers sold in Fleet Street as when great victories were announced during the war’.Footnote ⁷³ Interest reached far beyond London and the pages of the major sporting publications and national dailies: newspapers across Britain drew on fairly standard cabled information but often offered a localized commentary that constituted rather more than a ‘cosmetic’ editing procedure. The Dundee Courier and Argus acknowledged that its ‘sporting readers’ were awaiting the result ‘with great enthusiasm’ and printed an account written by Sam C. Austin, the sporting editor of the Police Gazette, on the day after the fight.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Western Mail also covered the event extensively. It published Austin's cablegram, along with biographical sketches of the combatants, accounts of their training preparations, and reports of the public reaction across America. It came out firmly for the new champion, noting that it would be ‘a popular victory in Cardiff and South Wales, where Fitzsimmons made many friends when he visited Cardiff’ while giving boxing exhibitions in the UK; Corbett, by contrast, was considered ‘a braggart of pronounced type’.Footnote ⁷⁵ A West Country newspaper reminded its readers that Fitzsimmons was ‘a Cornishman’ as a well as a ‘naturalized American’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Coverage of the fight was similarly widespread in Australian newspapers, but decidedly more uniform, drawing for the most part on identical information cabled directly from London.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Corbett–Fitzsimmons bout also enjoyed a significant afterlife through the Veriscope film of the fight, which was exhibited internationally. Dan Streible has demonstrated the significance of the Veriscope tours, where the Corbett–Fitzsimmons fight drew large crowds eager to witness a novel ‘representation’ of the famous sportsmen in action. Both Dan Stuart, the Dallas entrepreneur and promoter of the original fight, and Corbett's manager, William Brady, went to considerable lengths to publicize the film as both a money-making venture in its own right and an advertisement for a potential re-match.Footnote ⁷⁸ Stuart offered possible descriptions of both the exhibition and the fight itself that newspapers could use, even providing written copy for journalists. In the United States, the film reached ‘a wide and diverse audience’, being exhibited in music academies, opera houses, theatres, and fairgrounds, with over two hundreds showings in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.Footnote ⁷⁹ The film was also sent around the world, with one machine exhibiting in Australia, China, Japan, India, South Africa, and Egypt.Footnote ⁸⁰ It reached Australia in September 1897, where it played to ‘crowded houses’ in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. As in the US, the film was also taken to smaller towns: in Western Australia it went to Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, Southern Cross, Northam, and Kanowna, as well as a longer run at the Theatre Royal in Perth.Footnote ⁸¹ The cinematic representation of the Corbett–Fitzsimmons fight brought boxing to a larger, more socially diverse, and more global audience than ever before. It encouraged spectators to connect with the participants and the spectacle: in Melbourne the boxers were ‘called to or encouraged with as much earnestness as if they were in the arena in Carson City’.Footnote ⁸² The fight had ‘secured perpetuation, so to speak’, the Edinburgh Evening News noted, ‘not by the pen only but by the instrumentality of the veriscope’.Footnote ⁸³ It also helped keep the exploits of American-based boxers in the public eye in Australia and Britain for months and even years.

Alongside journalists and boxing writers, promoters, managers, and agents played an important role in linking local sites and buttressing the networks of the boxing world. Hugh McIntosh's career as a sporting and theatrical entrepreneur offers an excellent example of the way in which connections could be established that ‘criss-crossed the internal boundaries’ of the empire and the wider Angloworld. Born in Sydney in 1876 as the son of Scottish and Irish immigrant parents, McIntosh was one of those ‘restless entrepreneurs’ of the Victorian and Edwardian age who ‘moved about in search of commercial advantage’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1899 he took ownership of a north Sydney catering company selling pies at racetracks and prize fights, before investing in hotels and moving into sports promotion, initially in the world of professional cycling and then boxing. In 1908 he contracted the Canadian world heavyweight champion Tommy Burns for three fights in newly constructed stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne. The last of these saw Burns lose his title to the black American Jack Johnson in front of 20,000 spectators. For the next few years, McIntosh travelled between Australia, Europe, and North America, initially promoting the film of the Burns–Johnson fight, then putting on his own shows in London and scouting international talent for his Sydney Stadium enterprise. In August 1912 he purchased Harry Rickard's Australia-wide Tivoli theatrical circuit and sold his interest in the Sydney Stadium. Yet he remained involved in the interlocking worlds of boxing promotion, theatrical production, and newspaper ownership, continuing to travel regularly between, and at times to live in both, Britain and Australia.Footnote ⁸⁵

Between 1908 and 1914, in particular, McIntosh travelled extensively around the anglophone world, building a network of personal and business contacts. In September 1910 it was claimed that he had travelled 180,000 miles (equivalent to eight times round the world) over the previous eighteen months. After securing the Burns–Johnson bout in 1908 he made ‘hurried trips between Australia and England and again between England and the United States and again between Australia and the States’. He then travelled to Reno for the Johnson–Jeffries contest, after which he journeyed ‘to New York, back to Chicago, back to New York, over to England and back and then from New York to Vancouver’.Footnote ⁸⁶ By this time, McIntosh had extended his boxing interests to Britain and France as well as Australia, leading the New York Times to describe him as ‘the London–Paris–Australia fight promoter’.Footnote ⁸⁷ He was apparently planning to ‘“corner” all the stars and arrange title fights for England and Australia’, as well as to acquire large venues in London and Birmingham to add to his three Australian stadiums.Footnote ⁸⁸ While these ambitions were not fully realized, he put on a series of fights at Olympia and other London venues, centred around the ‘search for a white champion’ to match against Jack Johnson.Footnote ⁸⁹ McIntosh had already demonstrated the potential of boxing's global reach in 1909 when his world tour of the Burns–Johnson fight film took in Australia, the US, Britain, and France, but also Fiji and Ceylon en route; his Australian heavyweight Bill Lang similarly stopped off for exhibition bouts in Hawaii and Fiji during a ‘world tour’ in 1910.Footnote ⁹⁰ In 1911, McIntosh tried to contract Johnson to fight a series of opponents in Australia and then conduct an exhibition tour through India, China, Japan, the Straits Settlements, and Fiji.Footnote ⁹¹ He even considered staging a bout between Johnson and the contender Sam Langford on a luxury ocean liner off the coast of Australia.Footnote ⁹²

While McIntosh contributed to the linking of different sites in the boxing world through his own personal contacts, he also made extensive use of new communication technologies and the press. He regularly sent personal letters and telegrams to journalistic contacts in all three countries and made sure that the details of personal communications to boxers and/or their representatives concerning purse offers and contract negotiations were widely publicized.Footnote ⁹³ A network of transnational representatives and contacts aided his international influence. Frank Morley and the American boxer Jimmy Britt looked after his interests in London.Footnote ⁹⁴ W. C. J. Kelly, an Australian business associate in the sports goods industry, acted for a time as his American representative, while Duke Mallins scouted talent in the United States and trained many of the contracted boxers in Australia.Footnote ⁹⁵ The influential Milwaukee journalist, boxing promoter, and booking agent, Tom Andrews, also became a close associate, after McIntosh paid him $10,000 to organize and chaperone a troupe of American boxers, including Billy Papke and Jimmy Clabby, on an Australian tour in November 1910. Andrews was also involved in attempting to negotiate terms with Jack Johnson for a return visit to Australia in 1912.Footnote ⁹⁶ Other journalists such as W. W. Naughton, New York's Bat Masterson, London's William Will, and W. F. Corbett of the Sydney Referee, were also connected to McIntosh in what became a transnational web of partners and acquaintances.Footnote ⁹⁷Boxing reported in 1912 that McIntosh's letter headings ‘show that he has established agencies and banking connections in every town of importance in the world, with the exception of Hong Kong and Yokohama’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Relationships of this type were often fostered in specific contact zones, such as at major international contests like the Johnson–Jeffries encounter in 1910 (where McIntosh first met Andrews), and even on board steamships themselves, where business partnerships could be forged, friendships could be strengthened, and ideas about global space (and one's place within it) could be developed and reworked in the process of travel.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sociability and camaraderie oiled the wheels of these transnational networks. McIntosh's party of the former world champions Tommy Burns and Bob Fitzsimmons were entertained at special functions on their arrival in Melbourne and Sydney in December 1909.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Naughton was similarly wined and dined by various sporting bodies during his trip to Australia and New Zealand in 1911, while his own California Press Club was ‘renowned for its lavish entertainment of visitors’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Boxers, too, could develop close relationships as they travelled together for long periods and regularly crossed paths in the world's main boxing cities.Footnote ¹⁰²

Fluid networks and the ‘limits’ of international regulation

Networks such as those that developed around McIntosh and his associates were always contingent and subject to reconfiguration. When McIntosh officially ‘retired’ from boxing promotion to concentrate on his theatrical initiatives, his position as Australia's leading promoter was soon assumed by the former Olympic boxer, referee, and journalist ‘Snowy’ Baker. Yet, while Baker was able to retain some of his predecessor's business links, he also spent considerable time cultivating new connections and diversifying his sources for acquiring boxing labour. He continued McIntosh's policy of importing the best overseas talent – with eighteen foreign boxers contracted by August 1913 – but felt it necessary to enhance his personal reputation in the United States and Europe through a lengthy recruiting and networking tour during the first half of 1914.Footnote ¹⁰³ Like McIntosh, Baker was able to establish a complex set of international contacts and informal partnerships that resembled Veronica Kelly's notion of a ‘mobile freemasonry’ in the theatrical world, in which ‘commercial competition and professional camaraderie were held in a mainly productive balance’ and through which a worldwide labour market could be accessed.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Attempts to standardize these networks through international regulation met with little success, however. In late 1909, London's Sporting Life began a campaign for the formation of an international boxing board of control that would frame universal rules for the conduct of world championships, decide who the champions were, and standardize the weights at which such fights were to be contested.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the crux of the problem, the paper argued, was the contrasting weight scales for boxers in different countries, meaning that ‘all titles with the exception of the heavy-weight must remain more or less in dispute’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Other anomalies, such as in the number of rounds, refereeing methods, and the timing of the weigh-in, could also, it was felt, be ironed out through the creation of an international regulatory body.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Reactions to the proposals highlighted the significance of local autonomy and diversity within the networked world of international boxing. Objections were raised for nationalistic reasons. Few were as forthright as Charles J. Meegan of the New York Morning Telegraph, who wondered why the British should consider themselves worthy of equal representation with the United States on the proposed board: ‘We have the universally recognized pugilistic champions of the world here, and why should we be willing to accept the minority position on a board to “control” them … it is the land of champions where these rules should be formulated’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Washington Herald was also sceptical, acknowledging that, while the idea was good, Britain's claim ‘to be the grandparents, father, mother, and a few other things of the game’ meant that it would ‘certainly give no other country a say in making rules’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

While most commentators applauded the principle of universal standards, a number considered an international body unworkable. Boxing World backed the proposal but felt that the United States would be ‘the weakest link in the chain of the co-operative scheme … every promoter is a law unto himself, and about as independent as a Seminole Indian wandering through the Everglades of Florida’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Other British observers feared that the jealousies between promoters and the power of the champion boxers themselves meant that an international board would have limited authority in America.Footnote ¹¹¹ In a wide-ranging critique of the scheme, the Sydney Morning Herald proclaimed an international control board ‘theoretically admirable but practicably impossible’. The different regulations within the United States – where, for example, the number of rounds ranged from six to forty-five, and some states prohibited referees or judges from deciding who had won the bout – represented the first stumbling block. But more problematic for the Herald was the limited power a body of this type could hope to wield. Because boxing championships could ‘only be obtained from the ring, and not from the official declaration of any board’, boxers invariably had a monopoly over their titles and were thus ‘virtually independent’ of any wider authority. In a sport that was still largely based on pre-modern pugilistic traditions of challenge and response and where contests ‘depend[ed] upon local laws and mutual agreement between contestants’, it was small wonder that moves to standardize were likely to be treated with disdain.Footnote ¹¹² The sporting editor of the Daily Phoenix wondered how an international board could possibly carry the authority ‘to curb the chase of promoters, managers and fighters for the golden flow of dollars which follows vaudeville engagements and boxing bouts, staged not with a view to universal rules, but to the box office and moving picture rights’.Footnote ¹¹³

The original proposal ran out of steam during the summer of 1910 when the NSC refused to back it and when its English promoters, led by the Sporting Life editor, William Will, failed to attend a planned meeting prior to the Johnson–Jeffries fight in Reno. The NSC's decision was prompted by its concern that no established national representative bodies existed overseas with which it could negotiate.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Two years later, when the NYSAC resurrected the idea of international cooperation after the Illinois middleweight Billy Papke had broken a contract by leaving New York to fight in Paris, similar objections were raised. Californian commentators, in particular, were critical of what they saw as the New York body's attempts to engage in international negotiations as a national representative. W. W. Naughton claimed that it was ‘folly to talk of universal control in boxing’ until common rules and regulations had been established in the United States. The suggested ‘American–French–Australian alliance’ was, in his view, simply ‘an understanding among certain cities in these countries’ and hence limited in its wider application.Footnote ¹¹⁵ An International Boxing Union was formed in Paris in 1911, with representatives from the French, Belgian, and later Swiss boxing federations, and became aligned for a short period with the NYSAC, but the NSC refused to become involved and its authority was limited. In practice, informal understandings and alliances – such as those between the NYSAC and the Société de la Propagation de la Boxe Anglaise, or London's NSC and the Sydney-based Stadiums Ltd – often emerged in the absence of worldwide regulation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Free from bureaucratic structures and universal regulations, international boxing may have been considered chaotic and uncontrollable by its critics but the very fluidity and complexity of its networks marked it out as a more genuinely transnational sport than most of its competitors.