The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip

Preface

ix When I moved to Reno in 1980 to assume a senior administrative position at the University of Nevada, one of the first items to come across my desk was a contractual matter concerning boxing coach Jimmy Olivas. A couple of questions quickly popped into my mind: A boxing coach? Why do we have a boxing coach? Much to my surprise, the answer was that the university had established an intercollegiate boxing team as early as 1927 and that the Wolf Pack team had long been popular with local sports fans and students. I had previously served on three public university faculties over a span of twenty years and none had a boxing team, and to the best of my knowledge the manly art was not even part of the physical education programs. Although I had always kept up with intercollegiate athletics, boxing on campus was not a subject with which I was familiar. But as I soon learned, boxing was deeply ingrained in the culture of the state of Nevada, and it was only natural that the university sponsor a team. The pages that follow attempt to define the special niche that boxing has long enjoyed in my adopted state. Although there are many books describing famous fights and individual boxers, there has never been an attempt to connect the sport to the broader themes of the history and culture of the state. From crude bare-knuckle bouts in mining camps of the nineteenth century to the championship bouts that have been an important part of the lure of contemporary Las Vegas, prizefighting has played a significant role in the construction of Nevada’s popular culture, and in particular its economic development strategy. This book is an attempt to fill that void. Nevada’s boxing subculture did not exist in a vacuum, but early on was reflective of the men who worked in the mines where life was hazardous. Thus, those few men Preface x  Preface who willingly entered a ring to face an opponent determined to inflict serious punishment were naturally admired. At a time when Nevada was losing population and needed to encourage affluent visitors, it was only natural that boxing was used to promote tourism. The tradition of the Big Fight, born in rough-hewn frontier outposts like Goldfield, Ely, Tonopah, and Carson City at the dawn of the twentieth century, would be reprised decades later in Las Vegas, where more than two hundred championship fights have been staged to attract sports fans, especially “high-roller” gamblers, to the lavish casinos that line the world-famous Strip. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Nevada was widely considered a moral outlier, its libertarian outlook regarding the ambiguities of human behavior producing a wave of sermons, political speeches, and newspaper editorials from across the land denouncing the “Sin State,” “America’s Disgrace,” or worse. Although much of the moralistic condemnation stemmed in response to the state’s easy divorce laws, legal brothels, and wide-open casino gambling, it was the passage in 1897 of legislation that made Nevada the first state in the Union to legalize the widely condemned blood sport of boxing that first attracted widespread national criticism. A bill permitting “glove contests” was passed by state legislators and signed by the governor at the behest of businessmen anxious to lure affluent members of the sporting community to Nevada to stimulate a weak economy, but specifically to permit the long-anticipated, and repeatedly postponed, heavyweight championship fight between Gentleman Jim Corbett and challenger Bob Fitzsimmons to take place in the tiny state capital of Carson City (population three thousand). Ironically, one hundred years later, Nevada hosted another controversial championship bout in which Mike Tyson infamously bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear before a live crowd of sixteen thousand and a worldwide television audience of millions. This project has enabled me to blend my continuing research interest in American sports history to the history of the state in which I have lived for more than three decades. I am indebted to Joanne O’Hare, director of the University of Nevada Press, and acquisitions editor Matt Becker for inviting me to undertake this project. It has proved to be a delightful and rewarding endeavor that I otherwise would never have contemplated. Preface  xi I am indebted to many friends and colleagues who have generously assisted me in locating sources and by critiquing draft chapters...