ABSTRACT
Like most sports, and arguably even more so, boxing offers the classic spectacle. Man is pitched against man in a fi ght for survival that traces itself back to the gladiator contests of ancient Rome. The British Empire reinvented the circus games under the seal of fairness and promoted boxing all over the world, whereby the sport also reached American culture. While the fi rst American champions were still of British descent, the spectacle in the ring soon entered the national spotlight. By the 1950s, television joined in and elevated the sport to a broadcast spectacle, with its own parameters and its own ritualized place in the weekly program. As with any spectacular event, and as with sports in particular, boxing began to develop its own history, supported by a wealth of statistical data and many sets of visual symbols, emblems, and icons, which conveyed their specifi c meanings to the initiated, fueled every new fi ght with accumulated signifi cance, and established the status of every fi ght before it even took place. Boxing names and icons, such as those of Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, or Sugar Ray Robinson, made the history of the spectacle and obtained a central place in the American public sphere. By the 1960s, the popularity and ritualistic status of American professional boxing even outshone Olympic boxing, which was not considered relevant to the “real” arena. When Muhammad Ali won the light heavyweight title in Rome as the young Cassius Clay, the gold medal was hardly worth the entrance ticket to a professional career, let alone able to guarantee competition with the real gladiators, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson.1 Since the gold medal was not enough for him to join the national spectacle, Ali started from early on to craft his image, using among other things poetry to attract the nation’s attention: “To make America the greatest is my goal-So I beat the Russian and the Pole-And for USA won the medal of Gold-Italians said ‘You’re greater than the Cassius of old.’”
