When Strong Boy came to town

If you were a red-blooded male, American or otherwise, in 1904, John L. Sullivan was one of your icons. You knew how the Boston Strong Boy had knocked out Paddy Ryan in 1882 to win the heavyweight championship, and how seven years later he had bludgeoned Jake Kilrain into submission after 76 rounds in the last major bare-knuckles bout in boxing history.

You knew how after years of drinking and gourmandizing, the ham-fisted Irishman had finally met his match in 1892 when a younger, faster ring gladiator called Gentleman Jim Corbett knocked him out in the 23rd.

You probably also knew about the incidents that happened after the great fall from glory on whistle-stop celebrity tours in little places such as Bangor, Maine.

How a year after Corbett flattened him, The Big Man from Boston, as the play in which he was starring was titled, spent the night in the Bangor jail before being shipped to York County court to face charges he had beaten up a one-armed lawyer (that’s right) on a train at Biddeford.

Or how in 1897, the police had been summoned to the posh Bangor House when the big fellow started quarreling loudly and profanely with the desk clerk over the size of his bill.

The odds are that on the night of Feb. 4, 1904, six years later, you were thinking about such events with a chuckle and a wink as you crowded into the Bangor Opera House to see “the overstuffed walrus,” as one of his many detractors had called him unkindly, deliver his witty monologue at the end of an evening of vaudeville acts. They included La Jess and La Jess, novelty gymnasts “whose act was distinctly novel in that it was both clean and entertaining,” according to the Bangor Daily News.

At 45, John L.’s mustache was striped with white and he had swelled up to 315 pounds from the 190 that had graced his 5-foot-10-inch frame at the height of his pugilistic career. But the crowd still loved him as much as he loved them, and so did the reporters, whom he treated like princes. So let the rivals from the Commercial and the NEWS tell the story.

First the Commercial’s man joined the big man for dinner – a big dinner at which Sullivan drank, we’re not told what, from a water pitcher. He was eating alone in his room at the Hotel Alpha, a new place around the corner from the Opera House, because he had a bad cold and did not want to spread it.

“Yes, I’m a fatalist,” he told the reporter in his deep voice that rumbled up like “a thousand bricks taking a little tumble.” He continued, “I’m one of the men who believe that what’s going to happen will and nothin’ can’t stop it.”

To illustrate his fatalistic philosophy, he told the story of how one night he had fallen from a moving train and been badly injured. No one missed him “for two or three miles.”

The Commercial’s man didn’t tell the whole story, however, leaving out the part about how the drunken ex-boxer had stepped out between the cars to urinate and been pitched off the platform.

He could have been so many things, he liked to speculate, including a great actor.

“Yes, I’d have been a big actor, one of the best, if I’d started in early enough,” he said. “Of course, I could have made a success as an actor. I had the physique and the voice.”

Sullivan had always been an actor and still was. He had given poetry recitations and posed in tights on stage as “The Dying Gladiator” and “Hercules at Rest.” During the glory decade as heavyweight champion, he had taken off three years to play the role of a noble blacksmith in a melodrama written especially for him. He even performed briefly as a heroic Simon Legree in a reconceived version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This was at least the third time he had come to Bangor to act. At 10 p.m. he took the stage. The gallery where the 25-cent seats were located was “packed to suffocation,” while the orchestra where one paid double that was “honeycombed with vacant chairs” reported the NEWS.

He talked for just 15 minutes, and the crowd loved him.

His opening line was always the same: “I’m not here because I have anything to say … but simply because my rent comes due next Monday, and I need the money.”

There was more truth to this than the audience probably knew. Sullivan had made and lost more than a million dollars during his career, according to one estimate, and had once declared bankruptcy. He had failed at saloonkeeping, refereeing, and selling whiskey, and had to pawn his diamond-studded fight belt.

He told the Bangor crowd that February night he would never fight again. But he didn’t indulge them in one of their favorite pastimes – speculating on who was the best of the current fighters such as Corbett, Big Jim Jeffries and Bob Fitzsimmons.

Then he recited a toast – The Health of Women – “to low and quirky music from the orchestra,” and before the curtain came down told some witty anecdotes that have lost much of their punch today.

Back at the Hotel Alpha, a crowd of friends and admirers gathered in Sullivan’s room. After they left, he “had a lunch and smoked a handful of cigars,” while granting an audience to the reporter for the NEWS.

The interview must have stretched into the wee hours. He talked about “the politician’s art, the stage, good cooking, the liquor laws, New York ‘with the lid off,’ the success of Tammany, presidential prospects, fishing down south and out on the Columbia River, the Virginia style of cooking a ham, the growing scarcity of terrapin and a hundred other things.”

The next day the newspapers respectfully concluded that Sullivan knew how to tell a good story, that he was a better entertainer than many who had found their way to Bangor, and that “no more flattering tribute of personal popularity has been bestowed upon any star, vaudeville artist or follower of the legitimate within the walls of the Opera House for many a long day.”

There was none of the snootiness evident in the review of his acting back in 1893 on the night he was so ignominiously thrown in the Bangor jail.

Even today, Sullivan stands out among the pop heroes of the past. Geoffrey C. Ward summed up this afterglow in American Heritage: Sullivan “was both the last of the bareknuckle heavyweight champions and the first prizefighter ever to make his living in the ring. It was he, more than any other man, who transformed the American fight game from an illicit pastime into a more or less legitimate big business, and he who blazed the trail out of big-city slums, followed first by other Irishmen with the requisite speed and skill and hunger, and then by Jews, Italians, blacks and Hispanics equipped with the same fierce talents.”

I will add that Sullivan was a genuine hero to our fathers and grandfathers, and it’s important that on one cold winter night in 1904 in Bangor, Maine, they were able to indulge their fantasies for a few minutes.

Richard R. Shaw contributed material to this column. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.