Introduction
John L. Sullivan was a boxing legend. He is credited as being the first heavyweight-boxing champion of the world and is still ranked highly in that division. Sullivan was the link between old style bare knuckle fighting and modern glove fighting under the Queensberry rules. He was the first great American sports celebrity and in his long and controversial career he met and sparred for Princes, Presidents and paupers. In late 1887, Sullivan, still the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, toured Ireland, the country of his parents’ birth. On 15 December 1887 he visited Limerick.
Family Background
John Lawrence Sullivan was born in mid-October 1858 in the Roxbury district of Boston, Massachusetts. Sullivan inherited his combativeness (and his fondness for alcohol) from his father, Mike Sullivan, a builder’s labourer from Laccabeg, Abbeydorney in Co. Kerry, who arrived in America in 1850. Sullivan’s physique came from his formidable mother, Athlone born Catherine Kelly, another Irish emigrant of the immediate post-Famine era. By all accounts, Sullivan’s childhood was as stable as it could be in the heaving mass of uncertainty and poverty that was the Boston Irish community at that point in the nineteenth century.
Mike Sullivan fulfilled the stereotypical Boston Irishman of the day: he worked with his hands, for he had little other skill; he was quick in temper and slow in temperance. His son, John L., at first attempted to learn a trade and for increasingly volatile periods was an apprentice plumber, tinsmith and stonemason. However, as some journeymen colleagues of Sullivan painfully found out, John L.’s personal attributes and ego were in fact perfect for prize fighting.
The Boston Strong Boy
For such a celebrated career - one that to this day marks the beginning of the modern heavyweight division - Sullivan’s first punch up was little more than a barroom brawl. In 1878 Sullivan and a few friends attended a benefit night at Dudley Street Opera House in Boston. At some stage during the night a local tough by the name of Jack Scannell challenged Sullivan - who by now had a reputation as the “Boston Strong Boy”. Massachusetts state law prohibited prize fighting but permitted “exhibitions” of physical skill. Duly the organisers of the benefit night accommodated the combatants. Sullivan took off his coat; laced up a pair of woolly mitts; received a knock on the head from Scannell; lost his temper and proceeded to belt Scannell into the on-stage piano. A star was born.
By 1881, and still without any formal coaching - appropriately he apprenticed on the job - Sullivan had graduated to performing on the then biggest boxing stage of all: Harry Hill’s Dance Hall and Boxing Emporium on New York’s East Side. In March 1881, Sullivan announced himself at Harry Hill’s by offering fifty dollars to any man who could last four rounds with him under the Queensberry rules. A veteran fighter named Steve Taylor attempted to do so but was pummelled in two rounds. During this stay in New York, Sullivan met Richard Kyle Fox, the Belfast born proprietor of the Police Gazette, and then the biggest boxing promoter in the United States. Fox and Sullivan were never to become friendly but both were cunning enough to ensure that their enmity remained well publicised to their commercial advantage.
