Should we abolish professional boxing?

I happen to like boxing, even though the fighters are largely children and the managers generally greedy bums.

Every so often some North American organ of opinion decides to tee off on what we call bullfighting and the Spanish-speaking world calls the running of the bulls. Cruelty, etc. When this happens, you can bet your bottom peso there will be, in return, a vast collective snarl from the Spanish-language press. Abolish the cruelty of boxing, etc.

A great deal of violent and intemperate lingo will be spilled, and nothing much will be proved except that one man’s cruelty is another man’s corrida.

A new demand to abolish professional prize-fighting comes from an unexpected source within the United States, the April issue of that organ of Christian endeavor, the Reader’s Digest. James Steward-Gordon, in an article, says professional boxing is not a sport at all but “a sordid business designed to yield maximum profit to the men who control the fighters, the arenas and the TV outlets.”

After pointing out that some fighters are killed by head blows, and that some fighters are owned by former gangsters, the writer exhorts: “Isn’t it high time the United States banned this public butchery?”

None of the author’s information is new. His rhetoric is overheated. His conclusion is ridiculous.

Boxing was illegal in this country until 1896, when it was legalized in New York and Nevada. This did not prevent the great pre-1886 bare-knuckle fights, or the careers of John L. Sullivan, Dandy Jim Corbett and hundreds of others.

If pro boxing is made illegal, it will be the biggest shot in the arm the game has had since the Jimmy Walker Law, which really made boxing legal in New York in 1920.

Boxing is not an altogether admirable thing, but it decidedly has its points. I happen to like it, even though the fighters are largely children and the managers generally greedy bums. Will Connolly of The Chronicle once summed it up: “Boxers are the only professional athletes who send out Christmas cards. The managers you can have.” Drinking alcohol is not an admirable thing, but it decidedly has its points. Need I labor the analogy? The Andrew Volstead of boxing, if he ever turns up (and his name will probably be Kefauver), will do for the sport what prohibition did for alcohol — make it popular even beyond its undoubted merits. We might even have “fighteasies,” perish the usage.

No, there is no good to come from the United States outlawing professional boxing. What we might outlaw is the kind of gaseous tommyrot the Digest is peddling this month, in the interest, I would guess, of increasing its sales among little old ladies.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on March 23, 1960.