Among British amateur boxers, only those who won Olympic gold medals tended to achieve recognition beyond the limits of boxing enthusiasts. They included Harry Mallin (Middleweight), 1920 and 1924), Terry Spinks (Flyweight, 1956), Dick McTaggart (Lightweight, 1956) and Chris Finnegan (Middleweight, 1968). In 1908, at the Olympic Games in London, five weight divisions were contested, Bantamweight, Featherweight, Lightweight, Middleweight and Heavyweight. British boxers won them all, and four of the finals were all-British!
It is the professional side of boxing, however, that has produced the celebrities whose activities the public have generally followed. In the period between bare-knuckle pugilism and post-Queensberry boxing, Jem Mace was important. He carried many of the traditions of the old London Prize-Ring, but promoted the use of gloves and helped to popularise the sport in the United States and Australia. In the post-Queensberry era, the first British fighter to achieve superstar status was Bob Fitzsimmons. He weighed less than 12 stone but won world titles at Middleweight (1892), Light-heavyweight (1903) and Heavyweight (1897) and fought his last bout at the age of fifty-two.
Successful fighters have provoked fierce local pride. The best example was Jimmy Wilde, a Welsh Flyweight who won the world Flyweight Championship in 1916 and held it until 1923. He once had a sequence of eighty-eight fights without defeat. Between 1911 and 1923, he won seventy-five of his fights by a knockout. He was idolised in Wales, where they commonly believed him to be the best boxer, pound-for-pound, that ever lived. He was described as the “Mighty Atom” and “the ghost with a hammer in his hand”. Freddy Welsh (Freddy Hall Thomas), from Pontypridd, won the Lightweight title in 1912.
The Scots had a similar pride in Benny Lynch, a Flyweight from Glasgow, who held the world Flyweight title in 1935 and again in 1937. Over the years, Scots have had great success at this weight; Jackie Paterson won the title in 1943 and Walter McGowan in 1966. Ken Buchanan won the Lightweight title in 1971 and Jim Watt in 1980. In Northern Ireland, Rinty Monahan held the Flyweight title from 1947 to 1950 and Barry McGuigan won the W.B.A. Featherweight title in 1985.
England, too, had its successes at the lighter weights. Among the Flyweights, Jackie Brown won the title in 1932, Peter Kane in 1938 and Terry Allen in 1950 and Naseem Hamed in the 1990s.
The Welsh had their own featherweight legend Jim Driscoll. His nickname was “Peerless Jim”, he was born in the onetime Irish “slum” of Newtown. Jim was the first outright winner of the Lord Lonsdale Belt. Jim had prolific wins of the British, Empire and European titles. Jim is considered by many to be the best pound for pound fighter of all time.
Britain has had other popular world champions. In the 1930s, Jackie Berg won the Light-Welterweight title; in the 1940s, Freddie Mills won the Light-Heavyweight title; in the 1950s and 1960s, Randolph Turpin and Terry Downes won Middleweight titles; and in the 1970s, John Conteh and John Stracey won the Light-Heavyweight and Welterweight titles respectively. With so many title-awarding bodies in the 1980s and 1990s, the public became unsure about who actually was the champion.
Nevertheless, the successes of Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank and Joe Calzaghe continued to bring extensive media coverage to boxing and sustained a considerable public following.
The most popular boxers, howevers, have not always been the world title-holders. Just fighting for the world title in the Heavyweight division can bestow celebrity status, as was shown by Henry Cooper, who twice unsuccessfully fought Muhammad Ali in the 1960s.
Britain had to wait 100 years to have its first Heavyweight champion since Bob Fitzsimmons lost his title in 1899. Lennox Lewis became undisputed champion in 1999, having first gained the W.B.C. title in 1993. Frank Bruno held the W.B.C. world Heavyweight title shortly between 1995 and 1996, after beating the man who beat Lewis, Oliver McCall. He lost it to Mike Tyson in a rematch of their 1989 title bout.
Sue Atkins (alias Sue Catkins) helped to pioneer women’s boxing in Britain in the 1980s, but without any official recognition. The first British woman to be issued with a license was Jane Couch from Fleetwood, who won the Women’s International Boxing Federation (W.I.B.F.) Welterweight title in 1996. Most experts would agree, however, that it was the Christy Martin-Deirdre Gogarty world championship bout, also in 1996, that helped women’s boxing popularity grow internationally. Weeks after defeating Gogarty by a six round decision, Martin was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Outside the United Kingdom, of course, boxing has also produced many celebrities on a world-wide basis. Muhammad Ali of Louisville, Kentucky, United States, often recognised and self appointed as The Greatest, is probably the best example. Puerto Rico has three boxers to be generally considered national heroes out of a cast of over 50 world champions from that country, these being Felix Trinidad, Wilfred Benitez and Wilfredo Gomez. Nicaragua has Alexis Arguello, Mexico, out of over 100 world champions, Ruben Olivares, Salvador Sanchez and Julio Cesar Chavez, Cuba has Jose Napoles and amateur legend Teofilo Stevenson, Argentina Carlos Monzon, Panama Roberto Duran and Eusebio Pedroza, Australia Jeff Fenech, Japan Jiro Watanabe, Ghana Azumah Nelson, South Korea Jung Koo Chang and so on. These are boxers whose fame transcended the boxing borders and became household names among regular folks.
In Mississippi City, on February 7, 1882 the last heavyweight boxing championship bareknuckle fight took place.
In 2004, female boxer Ann Wolfe surpassed Henry Armstrong (until then the only man to hold world titles in three divisions simultaneously), by becoming the only boxer ever to hold world titles in four different categories at the same time. A rule preventing men from holding titles in more than one weight class at the same time is in place since soon after Armstrong held his three titles.
