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In the Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons
This is the third book in Adam Pollack's series on the heavyweight champions of the gloved era. Bob Fitzsimmons was boxing's first pound for pound great, winning the world middleweight title before becoming the world heavyweight champion (and later lightheavyweight champ). Combining both crafty skill and crushing power, Fitzsimmons was able to knock out heavyweights when he only weighed 158 pounds!
This meticulous and tremendously researched book uses multiple local primary sources from New Zealand, Australia, and America to chronicle Fitzsimmons' boxing career. It contains detailed fight descriptions never before revealed, round by round reports, pre- and post-fight analysis, daily training regimens, critical analysis of opponents' careers, discussion of skills, techniques, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and explains how legal, political, social, and economic issues affected and impeded fights.
The book also includes stories of fixed fights, conspiracies, legal battles, trials, threats of violence and imprisonment made by governors, judges, and militiamen, and verbal jousting, taunting, boasting, and even physical confrontations between Bob Fitzsimmons and James J. Corbett.
This meticulous and tremendously researched book uses multiple local primary sources from New Zealand, Australia, and America to chronicle Fitzsimmons' boxing career. It contains detailed fight descriptions never before revealed, round by round reports, pre- and post-fight analysis, daily training regimens, critical analysis of opponents' careers, discussion of skills, techniques, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and explains how legal, political, social, and economic issues affected and impeded fights.
The book also includes stories of fixed fights, conspiracies, legal battles, trials, threats of violence and imprisonment made by governors, judges, and militiamen, and verbal jousting, taunting, boasting, and even physical confrontations between Bob Fitzsimmons and James J. Corbett.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2007
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August 15, 2008
The task of the historian, most would agree, is to transmit the information collected about the past to the present; in the process utilising the maximum range of tools and resources in gathering the sources that will form the basis of his finished work. Most would also tend to agree that the selection of material be done in an objective and unbiased fashion. However, what is less easy to agree upon are the sources on which the historian relies. For instance, what level of weight and probative value is one to give to those sources which are in conflict and in contradiction to each other? To what extent must the historian rely on the recollections of the primary participants in the ultimate quest for that elusive and indefinable quality referred to as ‘truth’? What is fact and what is merely the interpretation of fact or opinion? There is an arguable tendency for historians, even those who are tackling a subject matter afresh, to base their research on well-trodden paths of source material leaving out other avenues through which fresh undiscovered evidence can be unearthed.
Boxing historiography, in this sense, is no different from other realms of history. Indeed, a frequent criticism levelled at boxing historians, perhaps encumbered by staid and unimaginative methods of finding information, is the tendency to rehash old stories and to uncritically utilise old sources to the detriment of the task of unravelling the truth and ascertaining creditable reappraisals of past fighters.
It is with these issues in mind that Adam Pollack embarked on an ambitious series of projects on the quartet of early heavyweight champions: John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Jeffries. The book ‘In the Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons, the third instalment carries on his objective, as he puts it, of wanting history “based not on speculation , hearsay and legend, but on what local reports said at the time.”
The outlines of the story of Robert Fitzsimmons, the second fighter to win the world heavyweight championship under Marquis of Queensberry Rules, is well known to boxing fans with any modicum of knowledge of the history of what is known as the beginning of the ‘modern era’ of the sport, specifically, that which saw the transformation of the game from its bare-knuckle origins to that which permitted the using of gloves, as well as the beginnings of an ‘accommodation’ by society at large with an activity which was yet to be fully legalised in the United States.
The tale of ‘Freckled Bob’; the spindly limbed, bolt shouldered antipodean of Cornish origin, has been a staple subject in countless digests in boxing magazines, annuals and coffee table format offerings. Much in common with many fighters of that age and beyond, are the threads of a tumultuous and fascinating life full of dramatic incidents extraneous to the theatre inherent to the squared ring. Fitzsimmons story was an atypically rags to riches yarn that culminated in the descent from an opulent lifestyle to near pauper status at the end of his life. Like a restless breeze, incidents in his life and the development of his career, took him from the British Isles to the antipodes and on to the Americas. He was the ex-blacksmith boxer who rose from a humble provincial tradesman to a world championship boxer whose legend and immortality is neatly and assuredly encapsulated in the veritable boxing folklore of the ‘Solar Plexus punch’.
Pollack’s is not a biography in the conventional sense; the title of his book ‘In the Ring’ being itself a statement of intent. There are no substantive plots or sub-plots related to say, the effect of his upbringing on his character or his relationships with his parents or siblings or spouses. Instead he focuses on ascertaining, in exhaustive measure, the primary sources of the coverage of Fitzsimmons’s career for the devoted consumption of the reader, and in the process unfailingly eschews what he perhaps believes is the typical boxing historian’s disposition to develop a ‘handsome prose.’ An articulate writer, Pollack’s remit is aimed at finding out those aspects of uncorroborated and unchallenged ‘facts’ which have wormed their way into the accepted narrated truth of Fitzsimmons’s life. His work is one in which the formulating of eloquent prose is secondary to the slavish devotion to unearthing previously unknown facts and also by setting side-by-side for the readers consideration, those primary testimonies which conflict .
For neophyte and aficionado though, there is context. The reader discovers (or is reminded) of the reasons why the Australian boxing environment of the 1880s and the 1890s was the nurturer of a multitude of boxing talents not least of which Fitzsimmons stands as an exemplar. The role played by Larry Foley’s Gymnasium, a Sydney-located school where Foley himself and ‘professors’ such as the St. Croix-born Peter Jackson gave instruction. Foley’s gym offered both knowledge and equipment for honing the skills of many pugilists-in-the-making, and under the auspices of its owner, provided the venue of a ‘theatre of blood’ which hosted dramatic fights to the finish as well as the more sedate offerings of boxing exhibitions. It was here and in nearby regions that the ex-pug Englishman Jem Mace, the well-travelled boxing godfather of the age, played a formative part in the development of the sport and in the career of Fitzsimmons. It was in Australia also that several feuds were developed which would be carried over to America, where many were pulled by the lure of the mighty dollar.
Read the whole review at:
http://www.eastsideboxing.com/news.ph...
Boxing historiography, in this sense, is no different from other realms of history. Indeed, a frequent criticism levelled at boxing historians, perhaps encumbered by staid and unimaginative methods of finding information, is the tendency to rehash old stories and to uncritically utilise old sources to the detriment of the task of unravelling the truth and ascertaining creditable reappraisals of past fighters.
It is with these issues in mind that Adam Pollack embarked on an ambitious series of projects on the quartet of early heavyweight champions: John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Jeffries. The book ‘In the Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons, the third instalment carries on his objective, as he puts it, of wanting history “based not on speculation , hearsay and legend, but on what local reports said at the time.”
The outlines of the story of Robert Fitzsimmons, the second fighter to win the world heavyweight championship under Marquis of Queensberry Rules, is well known to boxing fans with any modicum of knowledge of the history of what is known as the beginning of the ‘modern era’ of the sport, specifically, that which saw the transformation of the game from its bare-knuckle origins to that which permitted the using of gloves, as well as the beginnings of an ‘accommodation’ by society at large with an activity which was yet to be fully legalised in the United States.
The tale of ‘Freckled Bob’; the spindly limbed, bolt shouldered antipodean of Cornish origin, has been a staple subject in countless digests in boxing magazines, annuals and coffee table format offerings. Much in common with many fighters of that age and beyond, are the threads of a tumultuous and fascinating life full of dramatic incidents extraneous to the theatre inherent to the squared ring. Fitzsimmons story was an atypically rags to riches yarn that culminated in the descent from an opulent lifestyle to near pauper status at the end of his life. Like a restless breeze, incidents in his life and the development of his career, took him from the British Isles to the antipodes and on to the Americas. He was the ex-blacksmith boxer who rose from a humble provincial tradesman to a world championship boxer whose legend and immortality is neatly and assuredly encapsulated in the veritable boxing folklore of the ‘Solar Plexus punch’.
Pollack’s is not a biography in the conventional sense; the title of his book ‘In the Ring’ being itself a statement of intent. There are no substantive plots or sub-plots related to say, the effect of his upbringing on his character or his relationships with his parents or siblings or spouses. Instead he focuses on ascertaining, in exhaustive measure, the primary sources of the coverage of Fitzsimmons’s career for the devoted consumption of the reader, and in the process unfailingly eschews what he perhaps believes is the typical boxing historian’s disposition to develop a ‘handsome prose.’ An articulate writer, Pollack’s remit is aimed at finding out those aspects of uncorroborated and unchallenged ‘facts’ which have wormed their way into the accepted narrated truth of Fitzsimmons’s life. His work is one in which the formulating of eloquent prose is secondary to the slavish devotion to unearthing previously unknown facts and also by setting side-by-side for the readers consideration, those primary testimonies which conflict .
For neophyte and aficionado though, there is context. The reader discovers (or is reminded) of the reasons why the Australian boxing environment of the 1880s and the 1890s was the nurturer of a multitude of boxing talents not least of which Fitzsimmons stands as an exemplar. The role played by Larry Foley’s Gymnasium, a Sydney-located school where Foley himself and ‘professors’ such as the St. Croix-born Peter Jackson gave instruction. Foley’s gym offered both knowledge and equipment for honing the skills of many pugilists-in-the-making, and under the auspices of its owner, provided the venue of a ‘theatre of blood’ which hosted dramatic fights to the finish as well as the more sedate offerings of boxing exhibitions. It was here and in nearby regions that the ex-pug Englishman Jem Mace, the well-travelled boxing godfather of the age, played a formative part in the development of the sport and in the career of Fitzsimmons. It was in Australia also that several feuds were developed which would be carried over to America, where many were pulled by the lure of the mighty dollar.
Read the whole review at:
http://www.eastsideboxing.com/news.ph...
Displaying 1 of 1 review