Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

to all good Britons one and the same as champion of the world.
    But look how the Jew maneuvers! He won’t stand firm and hold his ground and give as good as he takes like any self-respecting British pug. No, he moves his feet, he dances away from punishment, in and out, side to side—“Stand still, you coward!” brave Humphries cries. “Shame, shame, kill the Jew, Dickie my lad!” call the Fancies. The old print in my den comes to life as I write—the great throng, imagine twenty thousand from all over England, aghast as they wonder what the upstart Jew is up to, against the handsome blond darling of the Bloods.
    What Daniel Mendoza was up to was nothing less than a Queensberry revolution, for although it was splendidly British to slug it out toe to toe, the rules said nothing about footwork, about retreating or sidestepping to make your opponent pump his fists foolishly into the air while the man of speed circles and torments him. Teaching the old British bulldog new tricks. In three fierce “Fights of the Century,” Mendoza carried the colors. The snobs of London might mimic his East End accent, but eventually they came to his rooms to do their amateur best to imitate his style. Perhaps no heavyweight ever floated like a butterfly in the Olympian manner of Muhammad Ali, but two centuries before Ali’s defensive balletics there was a little man of movement who bloodied the nose of an empire on the threshhold of world domination. The doors of the clubs and the schools and the companies did not open magically to the benighted people of Whitechapel, but to become a Mendoza wasto say, “Yes, I can!” to a closed society. Even if “The Jew Champion,” as he was fondly known, was only five feet seven inches in his fighting boots, all the little people of the Jewish Quarter stood a peg taller with his triumphs.
    Violence and race, national pride and the undercurrents of history erupted again in 1810 when a new Fight of the Century nearly set jolly England on its ruby red ear. A master of juxtaposition, the God of Boxing knows how to pit overdog against underdog, boxer against slugger, the brute against the bright, the black against the white, the poet against the plodder, the lover against the hater, the warrior against the evader, the philosopher against the rock. Not every championship fight is so neatly cast, but The Fight inevitably levitates itself to the level of allegory. Consider Cribb and Molineaux. Tom Cribb, champion of England, toast of the sporting taverns, houseguest of earls and the stuff of ballads. And in the opposite corner—Tom Molineaux. From where? America! The hated enemy! And if that weren’t bad enough, a man of color, a black, a slave from the colony of Virginia. Audacious Caliban risen from the mud of rebel wilderness. Our Tom will give him what-for! Our Tom will make that black ape wish he had never left the jungle.
    As perfectly cast as John Wayne playing fighting colonels winning patriotic wars singlehanded was Tom Cribb, brawny and beefy, hale, hearty, white as the Cliffs of Dover and considered even more durable. And the dark-skinned personification of evil, challenge to Anglo-Saxon pride, was equally well cast for his role—thick-lipped, wirehaired, illiterate, built for heavy work, the British dream or nightmare of the dread savage come to shadow the super race. The mug full of pencils on my desk is decorated with the figures of pink Cribb and dusky Molineaux in knee-breechered fighting stance. Turning the mug we read:
              Since boxing is a manly game,
                   and Britons recreation.
              By boxing we will raise our fame,
                   ’Bove any other nation
              Throw pistols, pomards, swords, aside.
                   And all such deadly tools;
              Let boxing be the Britons pride,
                   The science of their schools.
    English hopes were