Upcoming "Strong Boy" Book Talks

What better way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day than learning more about one of the country's first Irish-American heroes? I'll be telling the colorful tale of the hard-hitting, hard-drinking Gilded Age boxer John L. Sullivan at a number of Boston-area institutions this March. Among the scheduled dates are the following:

March 6, 6 PM: Boston Public Library
March 8, 9:30 AM: The Irish Ancestral Research Association (Boston)
March 12, 7 PM: Medford Public Library
March 16, 2:30 PM: Stevens Memorial Library (North Andover)
March 18, 7 PM: Falmouth Historical Society and Museums on the Green
March 19, 7 PM: Thomas Crane Public Library (Quincy)
March 27, 6:30 PM: South End Historical Society

Come on out, and you'll

• Learn how Sullivan’s incredible career and oversized personality launched America’s modern sporting obsession
• Travel back in time to the extravagant Gilded Age to witness the birth of America’s celebrity culture
• Discover how Sullivan’s power and self-confidence transformed him into an idol for a generation of Irish-Americans emasculated in the wake of the horrific potato famine that gripped their homeland
• Grab a ringside seat to Sullivan’s epic brawls, such as his 75-round bout with Jake Kilrain, and his battles outside the ring with the law, a troubled marriage, and raging alcoholism
• Explore how Sullivan revolutionized boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today

A full list of events can be found on the Strong Boy web site. I'll be bringing flat John L. in tow. He's bundled up for the winter weather and ready to go.

Hope to see you there!

Muhammad Ali and John L. Sullivan

It was 50 years ago today that 7-1 underdog Cassius Clay shocked the sports world by defeating reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida. The next morning Clay announced to reporters that he had joined the Nation of Islam, and within weeks he would change his name to Muhammad Ali.

Ali was arguably the greatest fighter of the 20th century, and he had much in common with the premier brawler of the 19th century, John L. Sullivan. The loquacious Ali was a master showman and boxing's poet laureate, composing verses in which he taunted opponents and praised himself. (His iambic pentameter was so popular that Columbia Records released a 1963 spoken word album called “I Am the Greatest” in which the 21-year-old rising star performed his poetry, backed my musical accompaniment, before an audience.)

Ali's self-aggrandizing braggadocio made him controversial, but it didn't make him unique. Nearly a century before, John L. Sullivan approached his opponents with the same swagger, such as the time he blitzed John Flood on a barge towed up the Hudson River in 1881 and pointed at Paddy Ryan, the reigning heavyweight champion, in the audience and growled: "I'll get you next!" "I can lick any S.O.B alive" is the famous mantra attributed to Sullivan, and with the exception of "Gentleman Jim" Corbett it was also true.

Ali is more than just a boxer. He is a major cultural figure who transcends sport, much in the same way Sullivan was in the 19th century. Ali starred in films and during his forced exile from the ring even headlined a Broadway musical called "Buck White," which unfortunately took a seven count--seven performances before the curtain fell on the flop. (The Playbill for "Buck White" spends as much time listing the colleges where Ali lectured as his accomplishments in the ring.)

A century before, Sullivan was also a pugilistic thespian. He starred on stages around the country, headlining five-act melodramas written specifically with him in mind for the lead. He appeared in Uncle Tom's Cabin and also toured the country delivering monologues in which he told stories of his fighting days and bad Irish jokes.

Oh, and one other surprising connection. Both men had Irish roots. Sullivan's lineage to the Emerald Isle would not be a shock. Both his parents emigrated from Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. So did County Clare native Abe Grady. He settled in Kentucky in the 1860s and married a freed slave. One of their grandchildren was Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady Clay. Now you know where each fighter got his gift for gab.

For more on Sullivan, visit the "Strong Boy" web site and click here to purchase the book.

When John L. Sullivan Gained the Heavyweight Crown

February 7, 1882, was a beautiful day for barbarity. The brilliant mid-winter sun transformed the Gulf of Mexico’s placid blue canvas into a sparkling sea of diamonds. The ivory sands of the Mississippi coastline glistened like a blanket of fresh powdered snow as lazily drifting clouds offered periodic relief on an unseasonably warm day.

The soft, repetitive murmur of the wavelets kissing the white dunes was muffled, however, by the yells of a bloodthirsty mob gathered just yards away. Nearly 2,000 boxing fans had invaded the grounds of the Barnes Hotel, jolting the resort town of Mississippi City from its wintertime slumber. The sanguinary crowd hoped that the hotel’s emerald lawn would soon turn crimson from the soaking blood of two warriors—reigning American heavyweight champion Paddy Ryan and John L. Sullivan, the undefeated 23-year-old phenom from Boston who had awed America with his power.

From boisterous barroom squabbles to surreptitious whispers in church pews, the bare-knuckle 

championship had become the talk of the nation. Preacher Henry Ward Beecher warned his Brooklyn congregation against betting on the fight, but to little avail. The New York Times reported that as much as $200,000 had been wagered on the bout in New York City alone. Major metropolitan newspapers provided unprecedented coverage, and as the days remaining to the fight dwindled, trainloads of fans poured into New Orleans from as far away as San Francisco.

The savagery, corruption and gambling endemic to prizefighting roamed so far beyond the bounds of Victorian-era sensibilities that the governor of Louisiana had banned the Ryan-Sullivan affair from his jurisdiction and the governor of Mississippi ordered sheriffs to use any means necessary to prevent the championship fight from soiling his state’s turf. Fearful of “magisterial interference,” fight promoters kept the bout’s location shrouded in a cloak of secrecy as thick as the darkness that enveloped the trainloads of fans that departed New Orleans at 5 a.m. on the morning of the fight for a destination unknown.

Hours later, the train finally stopped and exhaled at Mississippi City, and fans sprinted to the battleground. Well-to-do dandies in stovepipe hats and a handful of corseted women in flowing dresses gladly surrendered five dollars for the highly coveted vantage on the hotel’s verandah, while fans of lesser means perched themselves in bare magnolia trees.

As Ryan and Sullivan came to the center of the ring and doubled-up their clenched, bare fists, the crowd pressed hard against the makeshift ring. The roar of 2,000 voices echoed off the towering Mississippi pines as Sullivan pounced like a caged tiger. He surprised his adversary with a jackhammer left that landed on Ryan’s cheek with a sickening fleshy thud. The massive opening salvo tore open a gash on the champion and gave Sullivan first blood. The challenger followed it up with a right fist that rocked Ryan’s left jaw, sent him to the turf, and induced winces throughout the crowd.

It had taken all of thirty seconds. Thirty seconds for Sullivan to demonstrate he was the unstoppable force. Thirty seconds to prove his power wasn’t diminished by his naked fists. Thirty seconds to prove that a lack of prizefighting experience meant nothing when you had two thunderbolts attached to your arms. Ryan had never been on the receiving end of such hard hits. “When Sullivan struck me, I thought that a telegraph pole had been shoved against me endways,” he said after the fight.

As blood spurted down his face, Ryan walked back to his corner to get sponged, but his confidence was shaken. With boyish amusement, Sullivan skipped back to his corner, understanding what most of the fans—and probably Ryan himself—had just discovered: He was the superior man.

For nine rounds, the challenger continued his onslaught with terrific rushes as Ryan’s left eye began to swell shut. As a groggy and exhausted champion mounted a counter to get to the middle of the ring in the ninth round, Sullivan geared up and threw his favorite punch: a wicked right hook to the left side of the neck, connecting just under Ryan’s left ear. The blow made such an awful sound that even those without a direct view knew immediately that Sullivan had unleashed a terrible knockout blow.

Ryan crumbled to the ground in a heap, bloodied and broken. His trainer sent a sponge aloft in a symbol of surrender. John L. Sullivan was the new heavyweight champion.

Rather than reveling in his victory, Sullivan’s first act as champion was a gracious one, crossing to his opponent’s corner to shake hands. Still full of energy, he then hurdled the ropes and sprinted the one hundred yards to his quarters and streaked into superstardom. After being carried to his quarters to be examined by a doctor, a bloodied and battered Ryan discovered a further indignity—$300 had been stolen from his vest pocket while Sullivan was stealing his crown.

The intense media attention and fan interest surrounding the 1882

championship bout provided a mere glimpse at the future. Newly laid railroad lines had permitted fans and reporters from across the country to witness the event in person, and brand-new telegraph lines instantly transmitted blow-by-blow accounts. With a transportation and communications network stitching the country together and media coverage growing, the modern sports age had begun, and it had found its first athletic god. He had arrived in Mississippi City as John L. Sullivan and departed as an American Hercules.

This post was an excerpt from the new biography "Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan," which the Boston Globe called "one of the best boxing books ever penned." For more, visit the "Strong Boy" web site and click here to purchase the book.

Photograph of Mississippi City fight scene courtesy of Tracy Callis

The Final Hours of John L. Sullivan

The temperature had nearly sunk to zero when the sun rose on Saturday, February 2, 1918. In spite of the freeze, John L. Sullivan decided to keep his plans to meet friends in Boston. He had news to share. He was returning to the ring—albeit a circus one. The night before, Sullivan’s business manager, D’Arcy O’Connor, visited the ex-fighter’s farm in Abington, Massachusetts, to get his signature on a contract to tour that upcoming summer with Ringling Brothers Circus. Under the deal, Sullivan was to receive $1,000 a week to ride in an Irish jaunting car with an Irish bagpiper and deliver a ten-minute address in the center ring.

As Sullivan prepared to depart, his old sparring partner George Bush, who had lived with the champ since the death of his wife, heard groaning emanating from the bedroom. He rushed in and found that John L. had fainted on the bed. Bush contacted an Abington doctor, R. B. Rand, who revived the former champion and gave him a heart stimulant. “I’m all right now,” Sullivan reassured Bush as he sat on his bed. “Telephone the people in Boston that I’ll be along and that I’m sorry I’m late.” Shortly after Dr. Rand left, Bush again heard Sullivan groaning and complaining about the sharp pain in his chest. Sullivan began to slip away after this second attack. At 11:45 a.m., John L. Sullivan passed away.

Although he had been having heart trouble for the previous three weeks, the death of the old gladiator “came as a bolt from a clear sky.” That death had visited Sullivan so quickly, and at the age of fifty-nine, may have been stunning, but the cause of his demise—“fatty degeneration of heart” was listed on the death certificate—would not have surprised John L. in the least. Although death had brushed him several times, from barroom bullets to a drunken stumble off a rushing passenger train, Sullivan always knew his heart would do him in. He had predicted it a quarter-century earlier. “I have always had it in my head that it is heart disease that is to be my ending,” he told a reporter in 1893. “My mother died of heart disease, and I take after her physically. It has to come some time, and I am not looking for it in a hurry, but when it does come I had rather be snuffed out quickly by something like heart disease than to suffer with a lingering illness.”

The news quickly spread across Abington before it radiated out to the front pages of evening newspapers around America. Hundreds of Sullivan’s neighbors made the pilgrimage that afternoon to the forlorn farm. Inside, fourteen-year-old Willie Kelly, an orphan taken in by Sullivan years earlier, sobbed for his best friend and the man he knew as a father for half his life. John L.’s favorite pet collie, Queenie, wandered from room to room whining for the “Big Fellow.” Within the next week, perhaps in a quest to follow their master, a cow, a bulldog, two collies, and Sullivan’s favorite horse, “Colonel Corn,” all dropped dead on the farm.

The “Strong Boy” returned to Boston in the company of his lifelong friend, undertaker Timothy J. Mahoney. The mortician could find no coffin in metropolitan Boston to hold this mountain of a man, so a specially ordered mahogany casket was shipped from New York. The day after his death, Sullivan’s body was brought to his sister’s Roxbury house, the closest thing John L. had to home for so many years before he remarried. The house on Brook Avenue may have been just over a mile from where he was born on East Concord Street in Boston’s South End, but the road he had traversed between those two bookends of his life had been a truly long one, one of the most storied and colorful in sports history. 

Read the story of John L. Sullivan in the new biography "Strong Boy," which the Boston Globe called "one of the best boxing books ever penned." For more, visit the "Strong Boy" web site. 

The House That John L. Sullivan Built

Go back, back to when Madison Square Garden was actually adjacent to New York City's Madison Square Park. Back when the "world's most famous arena" was barely known in Gotham. Back when William H. Vanderbilt, son of the late Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, had one of those pesky millionaire's problems.

When Vanderbilt assumed control of the first incarnation of Madison Square Garden in 1879, the building hosted a lineup of masquerade balls, horticultural shows, temperance lectures, revival meetings, and band concerts. P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth and the new Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show brought in the paying customers, but only for a few weeks a year. To boost revenue, Vanderbilt decided to host more sporting events at his building across from the northeast corner of Madison Square Park. Wrestling matches and billiard tournaments, however, drew only lukewarm crowds. Six-day pedestrian races, which started a minute after midnight on Monday morning and ended at midnight the following Saturday, brought in fans, but spread over the course of an entire week they were not big money-makers.

Like any New York theater owner, Vanderbilt needed a smash hit with a box-office superstar in the leading role.

He needed John L. Sullivan.

He booked the newly christened American heavyweight boxing champion for a grand sparring match against the man who claimed the championship of England—Joe Collins, alias “Tug Wilson.” Not even Vanderbilt, however, could have envisioned the throng that descended upon Madison Square Garden on the sultry summer evening of July 17, 1882. Thousands poured out of the Third Avenue elevated trains and jumped off the Fourth Avenue streetcars as fight time approached. The sweltering swarm with one-dollar tickets in hand pushed, swore, and shoved their ways inside the Fourth Avenue entrance while Manhattan’s oligarchs flashed their two-dollar tickets at the entrance on fashionable Madison Avenue. The marketplace laws of supply and demand pleased the army of ticket speculators, who received as much as five dollars a ticket.

Never had so many passed through the gates of the arena. Twelve thousand people boiled inside the oppressive cauldron of Madison Square Garden as at least two thousand disappointed fans pleaded to be allowed inside. A stagnant haze of tobacco smoke hovered over the crowd and obscured the views from the building’s outer reaches. What struck reporters was not only the size of the crowd, but also its composition. More than the rabble had been roused by the spectacle. “Hundreds of respectable citizens” turned out as well. “From the highest type of respectability to the lowest grade of depravity, every art, profession, vocation, trade, and crime had its representative,” reported one local newspaper.

Sullivan had refused a prizefight against Wilson, instead offering him $1,000 and half of the gate if he could stand up for four rounds. And for four rounds, Wilson infuriated the champion and earned the hisses of the crowd by dancing around the ring and hitting the ground to avoid any of Sullivan's punches. He flopped, hopped, and dropped. He skipped, dodged, and dove. When Sullivan approached, he clenched, hugged, and danced. Wilson wasn't interested in fighting. Diving was the only sport he exhibited in the Garden. Although prostrate for most of the twelve minutes, Wilson remained standing in the ring as time was called at the end of the fourth round. The Englishman had

failed to land one big blow and by some accounts fell twenty-eight times during the bout, yet he emerged the winner under Sullivan’s ground rules.

To Vanderbilt’s joy, however, the gate money for the Sullivan-Wilson fight topped $16,000. John L. left Madison Square Garden disgusted, but—with his share of the receipts—far richer. He raked in thousands for just twelve minutes of work with the gloves, and Vanderbilt found his drawing card. Over the next several years, John L. became a regular draw at MSG, both in four-round gloved exhibitions and testimonial benefits. Sullivan put Madison Square Garden on the American sporting map. The arena would be torn down in 1887 to give way to a second, more glorious incarnation of Madison Square Garden. 

If old Yankee Stadium was the "House That Ruth Built," then the original Madison Square Garden, that other New York sporting cathedral, certainly was the "House That Sullivan Built." 

Read more about John L. Sullivan in Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America's First Sports Hero. Strong Boy is available on Amazon.com and BN.com. 

John L. and the Red Sox

He may have only sported a brilliant handlebar mustache and not a full lumberjack beard, but no doubt that John L. Sullivan would feel a special affinity for the bewhiskered 2013 Boston Red Sox.

The “Boston Strong Boy” was a huge baseball “crank,” as fans were known in the late 1800s. As a boy, Sullivan rooted for the National League’s Boston Red Stockings and attended games at the nearby South End Grounds. During his boxing days, Sullivan would stand at home plate before games as Boston left fielder Joe Hornung threw balls as hard as he could at the champion standing on home plate. John L. hardly flinched as he let the baseballs bounce off his prodigious chest.

Sullivan, a decent ballplayer himself, played on numerous semipro teams. He boasted that he turned down a $1,300 contract offer from the Cincinnati Red Stockings to play with them during the 1879 and 1880 seasons, although a sporting newspaper reported years later that the team president could not recall such an offer. During Sullivan’s reign as heavyweight champion, big-league baseball teams such as the Philadelphia Athletics hired the champ for a day to pitch for their teams in exhibition games in return for half the gate. In 1883, 4,000 fans came out to the Polo Grounds to watch as Sullivan, clad in a white flannel uniform and pillbox hat, took the field with the New York Metropolitans.

After his fighting days were done, Sullivan periodically showed up at Boston’s ballyards to watch the Braves and the new American League franchise, which would become known as the Red Sox. Sullivan was in attendance at the first World Series in 1903 as Boston defeated Pittsburgh. He sat in the dugout before games with Boston manager Jimmy Collins.

The “Boston Strong Boy” even took to the emerald lawn of Boston’s new ballyard, Fenway Park, in 1917 as an honorary first-base coach at an all-star benefit game for the family of recently deceased Boston Globe baseball scribe Tim Murnane. Will Rogers entertained the 17,000 fans by galloping around Fenway demonstrating rope tricks before the Red Sox took the field against a team of all-stars that included “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Tris Speaker. As Sullivan took to the coaching box for the all-stars, he stood on the same field as another noted athlete, Sox phenom Babe Ruth, who toed the rubber as the starting pitcher after easily winning the pre-game hitting competition by launching a ball 402 feet. Sullivan had little work to do as Ruth scattered just three hits in five scoreless innings against a pantheon of baseball legends. On Fenway’s emerald turf, the lives of the greatest American sports superstars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries briefly intertwined.

As a Boston boy partial to facial hair and a “crank” of the highest order, no doubt John L. would have a message for everyone today: “GO SOX!”

Read more on John L. Sullivan in Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America's First Sports Hero.

Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library

Happy Birthday, John L. Sullivan?

On October 15, 1858, John L. Sullivan was born in Boston's South End. 

Or was he?

John L. always gave his birthday as October 15. His mother and father did the same. Instead of a Bible, the Sullivan family recorded the birth dates of John L. and his siblings in the front of Life of the Blessed Virgin and Life of Christ. The date recorded inside is also October 15. 

Yet, the city of Boston birth certificate for John L. Sullivan lists his birth date as October 12, 1858, as you can see here. 

City records from the 1800s were susceptible to errors. Sullivan's death certificate, for instance, listed his incorrect age when he passed away. I would chalk the discrepancy up to a city error except for John L. Sullivan's baptismal record. According to the record I received from the Archdiocese of Boston, Sullivan was baptized on October 13, 1858, at St. Joseph's Church in Roxbury. Below is an older record of Sullivan's baptism:

So who's right? God, country, or the "Boston Strong Boy"? I think in this case, church and state have got it right. October 12 is Sullivan's birthday.