The world premiere play "The Royale" takes its name from Battles Royale. You might remember a 1999 Japanese novel called "Battle Royale." The story about how the Japanese government forces junior high school students in a battle to the death competition became a movie in 2000. You can stream it on Netflix.
Historically, battle royale or a battle royal, pits more than one competitor against each other and the winner is the last one standing. Apparently, illegal fights had well to do white men betting on black men fighting for spare change. According to MuhammadAliBoxing.org.UK, the battles royals is "The purest form of depersonalization." The play, "The Royale," is a fictionalized account of Jack Johnson's winning the heavyweight championship by beating a white man.
What struck me as odd was that he wasn't the first black man in the ring to beat a white man. That had already been done (Joe Gans in 1902). He was the first black heavyweight to beat a white heavyweight boxer. I then watched "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a PBS documentary on the real Jack Johnson and the riots he caused.
This being Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I began thinking: What would have happened if an Asian had done the deed? Jack Johnson was born in 1878. He died in 1946, after World War II had ended. Johnson knocked out Canadian Tommy Burns in 1908, and then in 1910 beat James J. Jeffries in Reno, Nevada.
Searching on the Internet, I found that the first and only Asian to hold a major heavweight title was Ruslan Chagaev. Born in 1978 in what was at the time the Soviet Union, he won the the WBA title in 2007. The city where he was born, Andijan or Andizhan is the fourth-largest city in what is now Uzbekistan. The Republic of Uzbekistan is a Central Asian country, bordered by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Internet chatter muddies up the matter. Some claim that Chagaev is either full or part Tatar. The Tatars were the western part of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde.
If a black man becoming a heavyweight champion started riots, what would have happened if some Asian or Pacific Islander guy had done it? Yellow perilism had brought the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. How about instead of weightlifting and basketball, what if some Chinese sized large men had done boxing? What would have happened if a few Samoan guys had taken to boxing instead?
Boxing as a sport isn't good for your brains or your good looks. It's like asking for a concussion and whiplash daily. It's like wondering if your nose isn't flat enough. I know from watching a recent documentary that some Chinese are turning toward boxing as a means of escaping poverty. I also know from Frederick Wiseman's "Boxing Gym" that white collar workers are taking to boxing as a form of recreation.
My father used to watch boxing and he even got us two pairs of boxing gloves, mostly for my brother. We didn't take to pummeling each other though. We all scrapped our way through college because we were poor and my father had passed away before we even graduated from high school. Our battles were more intellectual.
I guess what shocked me about Jack Johnson's story was that it wasn't a black man beating a white man that started riots or that rioting in the streets after a sports event started so early, but that was only the heavyweight title that carried so much cultural meaning, that was linked to concepts of manhood and race.
Weird what it takes to be considered a man in America.
- Frederick Wiseman's "Boxing Gym" on Wordpress Pasadena Art Beat blog
- "Chinese Heavyweight" review on Wordpress Pasadena Art Beat blog
- Review of "The Royale" on Wordpress Pasadena Art Beat blog
- Review of "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" on Wordpress Pasadena Art Beat blog
*Help fund my education.
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