Resurrecting Sam Langford
How America has changed: Up through the ’40s and ’50s, boxing was second only to baseball as a spectator sport. Yet, while a lot of people today know Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, they don’t know Joe Louis or Jack Dempsey – much less Jack Johnson, who became the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world when he whupped Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Down Under, on Dec. 26, 1908. (Johnson successfully defended his title against former champ Jim Jeffries in “The Fight of the Century” in Reno on July 4, 1910, the centennial of which will be celebrated this summer. See “Unforgivably Jack” at AmeriCollector.com for more on the festivities.)
Jack Johnson at least got a good film drama made about him (“The Great White Hope,” 1970, starring a pre–Darth Vader James Earl Jones) and a terrific Ken Burns documentary, “Unforgivable Blackness,” which first aired on PBS in 2005. Johnson successfully challenged a white boxing establishment that resisted letting a black man contend for a world title; in that sense, he was not only a seemingly unbeatable fighter and a sports “original” but something of a marketing master. However, there was at least one other black fighter who might have defeated Johnson and all other titleholders but never got the chance.
That fighter was Sam Langford (1886–1956), originally from small-town Nova Scotia, but he relocated to Boston to embark on a pugilistic career. He is the subject of the biography, “Sam Langford: Boxing’s Greatest Uncrowned Champion
A boxing scholar and dealer in vintage books on boxing, Moyle is the right guy to rescue Langford from the oblivion that the fighter sank into during his own lifetime. Between 1902 and 1926, Langford fought some 304 bouts, winning 202 (130 by knockouts), losing 47 (nine by KOs) and drawing in 45. Both Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey were loath to get in the ring with him, but Langford’s inability to get a title shot condemned him to the obscurity of those who “coulda been a contender”: In 1944, he was discovered living, blind and penniless, in a fleabag hotel in Harlem. Asked how he could remain upbeat, Langford said he had his guitar … and his memories.
I really love it when someone with expertise and passion makes it his mission to right a historical injustice, and in my opinion that’s exactly what Clay Moyle has done. In writing “Sam Langford,” Moyle has recovered a lost body of knowledge and rescued a piece of our history. His book is a model for all serious collectors, whatever their fields. Order it from Amazon.com or signed by the author from www.prizefightingbooks.com.
Below, center and right: Sam Langford versus Iron Hague in England in 1909. Images courtesy of Clay Moyle.
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