There’s Large and Then There’s Giant

By Dave “Large” Larzelere
Greetings Sporting Bloggers – this is Large from No Mas, a.k.a Dave Larzelere, reporting for duty. Whatever the skip here has in store for me, I want to say this right now – I’m just here to help the squad. I think I quote either Aristotle or Iverson when I write, “There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there’s two in ‘championship.’â€
Those of you who are familiar with my work over at No Mas know that I have a strong classic-sports bent and an unhealthy preoccupation with the sweet science. And so I’m very proud to jump aboard the Sporting Bloggernaut on the 99th anniversary of what is arguably the most significant fight in the history of boxing. In fact, despite the fact that the bout took place in Sydney, Australia, you could make a pretty convincing argument that what transpired in the ring 99 years ago today was the most momentous sporting event in American history.
On that day, December 26th, 1908, Jack Johnson stopped Tommy Burns in the 14th round and became the first African-American heavyweight champion in history.
For years, Johnson, the Galveston Giant, had been the best fighter in the world, but the dominant white champion of his era, Jim Jeffries had sworn, as had all champions before him, never to face a black man in the ring. Jeffries was a national hero and the heavyweight championship a national treasure, the most esteemed prize in all of sport. The idea that a black man ever could contest for, let alone hold, that treasure was a detestable thought to nearly all white Americans.
Tommy Burns, a short but scrappy brawler from Detroit, won the heavyweight belt in 1906 shortly after the retirement of Jeffries, and Jack Johnson proceeded to follow him around the world and badger him into a title shot. Eventually he succeeded in Australia, and defeated Burns in a fight that proved as easy as Johnson himself knew it would be. He so brutally battered Burns that the police finally swarmed the ring to stop the bout rather than witness the ignominy of a white man being counted out at a black man’s feet.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine the impact of Johnson’s victory today. At a time when lynching was still routine and often unpunished, when freed slaves still lived alongside former soldiers of the Confederate Army, when the long nightmare of the Civil War was as much a specter in the national consciousness as Vietnam is to us today… at such a time, suddenly a defiant and charismatic black man was the heavyweight champion of the world. That world would never be the same again.
Below, another defiant and charismatic champion acknowledges his debt to the Galveston Giant.

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Large writes multiple times per week for The Sporting Blog, and also is the co-editor of his personal site No Mas. ↵