Gentleman Jim: The Truth Behind a Boxing Legend by Patrick Myler Robson Books 243pp, £17.95 in UK
James J. Corbett's place in boxing history is almost canonical; he wrote an end to the old brutal, bare-knuckle era and established that boxing (with gloves on, of course) could be a game of skill and style. He was not the first scientific prize-fighter - but Corbett with his smart clothes and easy manners, good looks and relative social respectability, wrote a new chapter in the sport and gave it a certain, much-needed aura of "class".
In the film Gentleman Jim, Corbett (played by Errol Flynn) speaks in a quasi-British accent in contrast to the comic-opera brogue of the champion he dethroned, John L. Sullivan. Yet both were impeccably Irish by immediate ancestry - in Corbett's case, his father had come from Ballinrobe in Mayo to open a livery business in San Francisco. Corbett Senior wanted lace-curtain respectability for his son, but hopes of making him a priest were wrecked when he was expelled from two schools in succession. In the end he entered a bank, but young Corbett was athletically talented in a number of directions, and he had already discovered his flair for using his fists - and feet. In spite of family opposition, he became a professional boxer or "prize-fighter", in the old term. Though Corbett was no heavy hitter, he was extremely fast for a man of over six feet tall, and he possessed lightning reflexes, together with a dazzling left hand. He also perfected the art of feinting, something almost forgotten in the ring today. Corbett was hard to hit, and if he rarely hit the other fellow very hard, at least he hit him often, usually with an elegant left.
Soon he was beating experienced fighters and won a notable victory in twenty-seven rounds over his local rival, Joe Choynski - a fight which was interrupted by the police and had to be fought to the finish at another venue. He went an epic sixty-one rounds with the great negro, Peter Jackson, before the fight was absurdly declared "no contest". This justified a crack at the heavyweight title but John L. Sullivan, who despised Corbett as a "dude", showed his attitude towards him as a challenger by publicly sparring four rounds of an exhibition match in which both men - at Sullivan's insistence - wore full evening dress. This nose-thumbing exercise did not save Sullivan or his title for long. Little more than a year later, on September 7th 1892, he and Corbett met for the championship in New Orleans in a match whose result was flashed around the world and closely followed by millions. And in fact, an epoch was indeed ending, in several senses. Sullivan was into his mid-thirties, overweight and ponderous, and his old strength and bounce had been softened up by years of whiskey-drinking and brawling in saloon bars. Corbett danced rings around him, evaded his meat-chopping blows with ease, and finally knocked him down and out in the twenty-first round. He had dethroned an idol, particularly for Irish-Americans, and many fight-followers never forgave him for it.
Corbett may have presented an elegant lifestyle in public, but in spite of the nickname he was something less than a perfect gentleman in private life. He was good to his family, paying off his father's mortgage and helping his various brothers, but his womanising was inveterate and landed him in several scandals. His first marriage ended in a rather malodorous divorce and within a few weeks he married Vera Stanwood, real name Jessie Taylor, who seems to have been a "woman with a past". He was cited in more than one divorce suit and in later years he was reputedly the lover of Mae West, who had a penchant for boxers in her bedroom or dressing-room (Joe Louis is said to have been one of her clients). Yet somehow he and Vera stayed together for thirty-eight years, although the marriage - like Corbett's previous one - was childless.
As reigning heavyweight champion, Corbett showed more interest in vaudeville and straight theatre than in defending his title in the ring. This was, however, quite typical of the era, when boxing "gates" were still small and more money could be made on the stage and on personal tours. He thrashed the loud-mouthed Englishman, Charley Mitchell, easily inside three rounds but the long-awaited defence against Bob Fitzsimmons, Cornish-born though nurtured in New Zealand, was his last. Plainly the two men hated one another, and various insults were exchanged long before they entered the ring; but Corbett, over-anxious to be at peak fitness against an opponent he secretly respected and possibly feared, trained too hard and in the words of the referee, George Siler, "left his fight on the road". Fitzsimmons took his chance in the fourteenth round with the famous "solar plexus punch" - in effect, a simple short left hook to the stomach which caught the champion on the wrong foot. Fitz, who had never forgiven the champion for keeping him waiting for several years, refused to give him a rematch. In turn, Corbett was equally unforgiving and refused to go to the Cornishman's funeral many years later.
Still, Corbett had enjoyed his reign, which included a theatrical tour of many countries and a triumphal visit to Ireland - including his ancestral Mayo - in 1894. Vain, histrionic, a dandy, well-spoken and a natural showbiz personality, he revelled in publicity and public occasions, which he usually carried off with panache. Though rather a poor businessman, and an unsuccessful saloon-owner, he earned good money on the stage and from lecturing, so that he and Vera ultimately could live in reasonable style at their suburban home in Bayside, New York. In 1900, aged nearly thirty-four and out of the ring for more than a year, he essayed a comeback fight, and for the title - no "warming-up" contest first. The reigning champion was a fellow Californian who had once been Corbett's sparring partner, Jim Jeffries, but who had gone on to dethrone Fitzsimmons through sheer strength and toughness. Corbett was given little chance against an opponent who was much younger than he, much heavier and with the strength of a grizzly bear. But he trained hard, studied his rival's style closely, and for twenty-two rounds made him look a crude beginner. Jeffries, however, was one of those men of iron who never know they are beaten, and in the twenty-third round, though a mile behind on points, he nailed the tiring Corbett and knocked him out.
That should have been the end, but they met again for the title three years later. This time, there could be only one result. Corbett's boxing brain was as sharp as ever, but his reflexes had slowed as they always do with an ageing boxer, and the old skills had lost their magic. Jeffries beat the strength and dazzle out of him with steam-hammer body blows, floored him several times and finished him in the tenth round. Gentleman Jim never fought again, apart from a single short exhibition bout.
In retirement, Corbett remained a national personality, courtly and elegantly turned out, always urbane, sociable and carefully curbing the "Irish temper" which had landed him in trouble several times in the past. New champions were honoured to shake him by the hand, and Gene Tunney - who had made him his boyhood idol - declared that a single sparring session with 59-year-old Corbett taught him a lot of moves he hadn't known. John Ford the film director, Wodehouse the creator of Jeeves, Mark Twain the novelist, Lionel Barrymore the actor, were among his admirers. He made films, appeared on Broadway, wrote a newspaper column on boxing or lent his name to one, broadcast often, and became a part owner of several racehorses. He even trained young boxers, though he was a notoriously bad tipster when it came to naming fight winners. And he showed his social conscience by sitting on committees set up to fight the growing mass unemployment.
Though Corbett probably suffered financial losses in the Slump, he maintained his lifestyle and physical activity until his mid-sixties, when cancer of the liver set in. When he died at his Bayside home early in 1933, aged 66, traffic controllers had to be set up to handle the crowds who filed past his body. Corbett had died with the full rites of the Catholic Church and his funeral, from St Malachy's Church in Manhattan, was a national event with many sportsmen, actors, politicians, journalists, and businessmen in attendance.
Thomas Myler has written a very readable account of a remarkable personality and one of the great innovators in sporting history. He has not shirked the labour of research and brings alive both the panache and the almost frontier rawness and crudity of a very vigorous epoch in American history. The illustrations add considerably to the book, including the action shots of Gentleman Jim in his fights against Fitzsimmons and Kid McCoy. Incidentally, the championship match against Fitz in Carson City, Nevada, in 1897 (and on St Patrick's Day, too) was the first to be recorded professionally on film; so here, too, Corbett was a pioneer.