Eddie Hearn’s Garden Parties: What’s Old is New Again

It’s still a fluid situation, but British promoter Eddie Hearn has made known his intention to promote boxing cards on four consecutive Saturdays in July. The events will be staged in a ring pitched under a canopy in the garden behind the Matchroom Sport headquarters in Brentwood, Essex, a suburb of London. At the front of the property, set upon 15 acres, is a colossal mansion that once served as the Hearn family home.

Eddie Hearn is the head of the boxing division of Matchroom, the company founded by his father. The elder Hearn, Barry by name, made his mark as a boxing promoter — he was ushered into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2014 – but now busies himself with other sports, primarily snooker and darts, which have a large TV presence in many parts of the world.

Eddie Hearn’s plans for his series of shows include taking over a nearby hotel where everyone involved in the promotion would be tested for COVID-19 and then quarantined in their room until the test results came back. The public would be prohibited from attending the shows and the number of media would be severely restricted.

The arrangement harks to the bare-knuckle days when boxing was a bootleg sport and matches by necessity played out before intimate gatherings as a large turnout would invite police interference. Some of the bigger fights were staged on the estates of wealthy patrons where the constabulary would not venture.

The two most famous fights of this description involved John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy, who at the height of his fame was America’s most well-known sporting personality.

On March 10, 1888, Sullivan opposed blustery British middleweight Charley Mitchell before perhaps two dozen witnesses in a ring pitched under a canopy of chestnut trees behind a horse stable on the country estate of Baron Alphonse Rothschild in the parish of Chantilly on the outskirts of Paris. The Rothschild name was synonymous with great wealth.

The weather in Chantilly that day was miserable. An icy rain turned the turf into a quagmire. Sullivan was the aggressor throughout but was never able to unsheathe his vaunted knockout punch. The ground was slightly sloped and the shifty Mitchell was able to maneuver John L. into fighting an uphill battle. After three hours and 10 minutes of tedium, the stakes were drawn and the fight was declared a draw.

Sullivan’s small traveling party included Arthur Brisbane, a young reporter for the New York Sun who would go on to become a legendary newspaperman. Brisbane immortalized the match in his lengthy report for his paper. (Who, if anyone among the U.S. contingent of boxing writers, will be welcome at the Hearn compound in July?)

The July 9, 1889, fight between Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, recognized as the last bare-knuckle fight on American soil, was unlike the fight in Chantilly as several thousand people were there, but it was also a clandestine affair. The sportsmen that descended on New Orleans, the gathering place for the last leg of their journey, were not informed where the fight would be held, only that it would be staged somewhere within a few hours by train from New Orleans.

It materialized in Richburg, a hamlet on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the home of Charles W. Rich, for whom the place was named. Rich was a wealthy lumberman and the fight was pulled off on his estate.

This fight, contested on a swelteringly hot day, lasted over two hours before Kilrain’s chief second Mike Donovan threw in the sponge.

An interesting sideline to the fight was that Sullivan and Kilrain entered the ring with a bounty over their heads, the Governor of Mississippi posting a reward of $1,500 for their capture for violating the state’s anti-prizefighting law. The illegality of the event did not hinder the political ambitions of Charles Rich who went on to become the Mayor of Hattiesburg or the fight’s referee, John Fitzpatrick, who was elected Mayor of New Orleans in 1892 and served two terms.

—

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit London hard, but there appears to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. On Monday of this week, no new cases of coronavirus were lab-detected during the full 24-hour period, a first since the first case in London was diagnosed in February.

While Bob Arum is plotting to promote a series of ESPN shows in Las Vegas next month beginning on June 9, it appears that England may ultimately lead the charge in returning the sport to normalcy. And Eddie Hearn, a “three-peat” winner of the TSS Promoter of the Year award, deserves credit for trying his best (and hopefully succeeding) in building a bridge to the future.

Check out more boxing news on video at The Boxing Channel 

To comment on this story in The Fight Forum CLICK HERE