THE BOSTON STRONG BOY
Famous boxer turned to acting after retirement
In 1892, John L. Sullivan was the most famous boxer in the world. But after 10 years of slugging it out as heavyweight champ, he was nearing the end of his career.
So the Boston Strong Boy decided to try a new career, hitting the road in a play, Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. Sullivan apparently got 50 per cent of the box office.
“I know I ain’t no actor, but I gets de money just de same,” he told the audience in a speech after the play in San Francisco.
On Jan. 8, 1892, Honest Hearts and Willing Hands came to the Vancouver Opera House. The “comedy-drama” was written especially for Sullivan by Duncan B. Harrison, who co-starred in the production. It included a threeround boxing match, which the Vancouver Daily News-Advertiser noted was strategically placed near the end, “so that there is no danger of people departing.”
There seemed to be no danger of anyone mistaking Sullivan for an actor, either. “As an actor John L. Sullivan can hardly be called a success, though there is an originality that makes some of his doings very amusing indeed,” wrote the News Advertiser’s anonymous critic.
“The art of elocution or gesticulation he cares nothing for, ( but) he speaks the few words assigned him to say as if he meant them. When it becomes his duty to remain silent upon the stage, he assumes a look of high disdain for the attention of the crowd and for the dramatic art in general. (Still) in the prizefight scene at the end of the fifth act he is completely at home, and the setto with Jack Ashton, who takes the role of a hired thug, is a good exhibition of boxing.”
The reviewer was kinder than 19th-century humorist Bill Nye.
“Personally I regard (Sullivan) as about the purest, whitest specimen of manhood that I have ever seen on the stage,” Nye wrote in the Oct. 22, 1890, Chicago Tribune. “But he has an unfortunate play. He ought to play little Eva or the death-bed scene in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ He wants something more touchful. As a blacksmith in knee-panties he does not seem to appeal to the nobler sensibilities as he might.”
Sullivan drew a standing-roomonly crowd at the 1,300-seat Opera House, which had opened at 731 Granville St. in 1891. He also managed to leave town without creating a ruckus from his drinking, which was prodigious.
On Feb. 27, 1891, newspapers reported that he had got plastered when Honest Hearts and Willing Hands was playing Macon, Ga., drawn a revolver and taken three shots at a “negro scene-shifter” who “failed to move as lively as Sullivan thought he should.”
One of his obituaries said Sullivan claimed to have earned $2 million boxing “and spent one million of it buying drinks for himself and his host of admirers.”
John Laurence Sullivan was born in Roxbury, Mass., now part of Boston, on Oct. 15, 1858. He wasn’t that big by modern standards (five-foot-10½, 190 to 210 pounds), but was tough as hell, with a lethal right hand.
He started boxing at 17 in the “bare-knuckles” era when fighters fought without gloves. On Feb. 7, 1882, he beat Paddy Ryan in Mississippi City, Miss., to take the American Heavyweight Championship. He then toured the U.S., daring would-be tough guys to step into the ring. If you could last four rounds with him, the promoters would fork over $100.
Boxing was a controversial sport at the time, and Sullivan was said to have helped to make it (somewhat) respectable. But it was still a brutal era — on July 8, 1889, it took 75 rounds for Sullivan to knock out Jake Kilrain. After he beat Kilrain, he mostly fought three-round exhibitions, but on Sept. 7, 1892, the prospect of a big payday lured Sullivan to New Orleans to fight Jim Corbett. Sullivan was almost 34 years old and no longer in top shape because of his drinking, and was knocked out in the 21st round.
The Boston Strong Boy retired from the ring, although he continued to do exhibitions for another decade. He died of a heart attack on Feb. 2, 1918, at age 59.