Centennial of Prize Fight Brings Back Memories

Earl Gustkey’s story about the last bare-knuckle fight in history, between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, brought back memories.

When we were kids playing on the sidewalk outside our house in Medford, Mass., a white-haired man with a cane used to walk slowly along and regularly stop and talk to us.

Ten years later, when he died and there were big stories about him in the sports pages of the Boston papers, I was told the old man was Jake Kilrain.

Incidentally, there was nothing surprising about Sullivan and Kilrain both hailing from the nearby suburbs of Dorchester and Somerville because Boston was the longtime center of American boxing before the main action shifted to New York in the early ‘30s.

My father was a big fight fan who saw most of the top fighters of that era. Many of the very best were black (Sam Langford, George Godfrey, Joe Jeanette, Sam McVey were names he talked about).

However, racial prejudice was a vicious fact of life then, and they were forced to fight for peanuts and were never even considered for a title shot. My father had a supervisory job for the Boston Elevated Railway and often hired them to work on his road crews.

CHUCK QUEENAN

Santa Ana