Telling Truth From Tales

Thomas R. Hietala. The Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. 375 pp. Illustrations, photographs, and index. $41.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Andrew M. Kaye. The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2004. 208 pp. Photographs and index. $26.95.

Geoffrey C. Ward. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xi + 492 pp. Photographs and index. $26.95.

Anyone who has ever tried to carry out research on the history of sports in the United States will no doubt have confronted significant problems of evidence. Rarely do sportsmen and women leave archives documenting their achievements, either on or off the field of play. Memoirs, oral testimonies, and—more often than not—the popular press are really all that scholars have to work from when they set about writing their accounts of particular figures, sports, or competitions. Occasionally, as Andrew Kaye notes in his new study of Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, such scarcity of material leaves us with almost no knowledge of certain contests—like southern smokers, those warm-up bouts intended to entertain through demeaning blacks. Even when scholars do have more to work from than just journalistic tidbits, the fact such coverage is so often generously laced with distorting even pernicious biases, poses its own problems of interpretation. Writing at the end of his new book, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey Ward describes the press reports on which he based his account as simply "a condescending blend of truths, half-truths, and stereotypical distortion[s]" (p. 431). Years after Jack Johnson's fight with fellow black heavyweight Sam Langford, legendary boxing commentator Nat Fleischer would still remain unsure about the nature of the bout because of the rumors spread by Langford's manager.¹ All of which seems vaguely reminiscent of Daniel Boorstin's assessment that "popular biographies can offer very little in the way of solid information. For the subjects are themselves mere figments of the media."² Recounting the lives of sporting figures—people whose lives are made in the public's gaze—forces us to think how it is possible to know the celebrity. It says something about boxing history's vitality, and the scholars it attracts, that these three works take up this problem and do so from rather different angles.

Sports history, as the three works reviewed here show, has an appeal unlike any other form of historical scholarship, placing academics and aficionados alongside each other in its ranks of producers and consumers. Unsurprisingly, it is a genre of history written for many different reasons. Ward, frequent collaborator with documentary producer Ken Burns and author of similar historical studies, chides those who seek "high-minded reasons" for writing about boxing (p. 449). Instead, he argues for the simple pleasure of chronicling the pursuit's past. Similarly, Thomas Hietala, author of a comparative study of the careers of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, describes his wish to make history "more enticing and accessible to a wider audience" (p. 377). On the other hand, Kaye, a British academic, and boxing enthusiast, approaches his subject as a work of cultural history, insisting that the history of sports can illuminate social mores, and using his study as a platform for discussing the mechanics of cultural authority. Whatever their particular approach may be, all three works answer the call made by Steven Reiss some fifteen years ago, writing in this journal, to provide more biographical studies of sporting luminaries, and as such they compliment an ever growing body of similar studies.³

Devoting 200 pages more than any previous work has to the life and career of Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness must surely stand as the definitive study. But what does it tell us about Papa Jack that is not already known? For the most...