"It was clear the spirit of pugilism had left New Orleans."

Storm of Blows
Melissa Haley

IV. Duffy's Last Fights

John Duffy tried to revive the spirit of pugilism in early 1897, when he matched Joe Green (the black bricklayer who had been involved in the fatal fight at his saloon in '93) against the "Terrible Swede" in a clandestine match on the banks of the Mississippi, somewhere upriver and out of Orleans Parish. About a hundred men paid $5 and boarded a steamboat (the Mabel Comeaux); when the bread and sardines ran out, many "tried to drown their hunger at the boat's bar, and several succeeded in loading their stomachs with alcoholics." At the first stop in Jefferson Parish, the sheriff would not allow the match to take place. Late in the day, the boat finally pulled onto the banks of Morgan's Place, St. Charles Parish. Having no time to construct a ring, Duffy ordered the men to shake hands and fight. In the third round, a stranger appeared, "his face red with anger," and demanded that the fight be stopped, reportedly blustering "the idea of niggers fighting white men. Why, if that darned scoundrel would beat that white boy the niggers would never stop gloating over it, and as it is, we have enough trouble with them." The stranger, Henry Long, galvanized a group of supporters and the fight was halted, and the sports headed back to the city "sorry that they ventured on the trip."

That October, a twenty-round charity exhibition match to benefit yellow-fever victims was arranged, with Duffy as referee, at the Tulane Athletic Club; no prize money was involved. Two amateurs, John Cummings, a motorman, and Walter Griffin, a clerk at the Illinois Central Depot, were matched to fight under a police watch. A speaker told the crowd that they "could not expect brutality and heavy slugging" and called for "perfect order" from the sports. Cummings received a rough beating, though he was still taking punches and staying on his feet or on his knees. Someone in the crowd cried out to stop the fight, but it continued until Cummings was knocked out; he died within hours from "many blows to the head, which probably ruptured a blood vessel."

This was the third death on Duffy's watch, and again he came under fire for not ending the bout sooner, but the referee later said that he "never thought for a moment such an end would come to the battle." "I could not have afforded to have the mill continue, if I had dreamed of such a termination," he explained. "Referee Duffy Would Rather Have Set Fire to the Building Than Forced the Fight to Death" the Picayune proclaimed. Griffin was charged with manslaughter but released since the fight had been under police regulations; he then promised his mother that he would never fight again, and said that he "would never get over the disaster which befell Cummings."

It was clear the spirit of pugilism had left New Orleans. Indeed, professional boxing had already taken hold elsewhere: in Chicago and Buffalo and other cities, and, especially, in the athletic clubs of Manhattan, and the arenas of Coney Island. Title fights sprang up in random western outposts, like Carson City, Nevada, and across the Rio Grande from Texas. Rules and regulations were refined; weight divisions solidified. By the close of the century, the sport had been "absorbed into the hegemonic culture," according to Elliott Gorn, as middle- and upper-class men, feeling an increased sense of powerlessness in the "tightly controlled" workplace and perceiving "the artificiality and stuffiness of modern life," lived vicariously through the heroics of working-class, celebrity pugilists. By the 1920s, boxing would not only become an acceptable, even wildly popular, spectator sport for the bourgeoisie, it was big business as well, and fight promotion was a profession in its own right. All of these changes in the modern Queensberry realm of pugilism first publicly emerged, and took tenuous steps, in New Orleans.

Fig. 5. Site of Olympic Club, New Orleans. Photo taken by author. New Orleans, 1999.

John Duffy would not live to see his sport evolve; he took to bed in July 1898, and lay there for six weeks before he died, of cirrhosis, at the age of thirty-four. Captain Lee of Fire Company No. 5 tended to him in his sickness at his house on Julia Street (Duffy's wife Kate had died in April of tuberculosis). His four children were sent to St. Michael's Convent. Duffy had been supporting himself and his family with a job as lieutenant of night inspectors at the customs house; at the time of his death, the Professor's friends (ninety-six of them) had been planning a benefit for him, which was then carried on for his children. "Even in his last days he was fully conscious of his approaching end, and thought of the famous ringside battles at which he had officiated." Former mayor John Fitzpatrick, who had called for an end to boxing in New Orleans when Bowen died, was a pallbearer. At John Duffy's funeral "there were men from all walks in life who had been his friends and admirers when he was at the zenith of his glory."

Further Reading:

For overviews of the New Orleans fight scene see Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana, 1990); Dale A. Somers, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans, 1850-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1972); William H. Adams, "New Orleans as the National Center of Boxing," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 39 (1956). Nineteenth-century boxing in the U.S. is explored in Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986) and Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana, 1988). Gail Bederman's Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995) uses the boxer Jack Johnson to explore issues of masculinity and race. For boxing history reference, see James B. Roberts and Alexander G. Skutt, The Boxing Register: International Boxing Hall of Fame Official Record Book (Ithaca, 1999) and Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, A Pictorial History of Boxing (New York, 1959).