Introducing his famed collection of New Yorker writings about boxing, The Sweet Science, the journalist and famed chronicler of the pugilistic arts AJ Liebling acknowledged his debt to a 19th-century predecessor. According to Liebling, the “greatest writer about the ring who ever lived” was an Irish writer and journalist by the name of Pierce Egan.
Egan was born into an Anglican family about 1774, most likely in Dublin, not long before his father decided to move to London.
The young Egan started his career as a printer before drifting into journalism. Despite the fact he had no formal education, Egan showed an early talent for writing and began working part-time as a parliamentary reporter.
His big break came when he was commissioned to write a serialised history of boxing. The publication in 1813 of the first volume of Boxiana introduced Egan’s writing to a wide readership and marks an important moment in the history of modern sports journalism. The book not only outlined the rudiments of boxing’s history, but also, more importantly, introduced the boxers of the day to a new audience.
Although not a well-known name today, for a period in the first half of the 19th century, Egan was a literary star. In Liebling’s words, Egan was ‘a hack journalist’ and possibly a “shakedown man”, yet no one had ever “presented a more enthusiastic picture of aspects of [London] life except the genteel”.
Liebling could readily appreciate Egan’s talents. Born into a well-off Jewish family in New York, his passions were pugilism and fine dining; he was equally at home mixing it with the fight crowd ringside at the Garden as he was tucking into a plate of foie gras with the great and the good at a swish Parisian eaterie.
Perhaps the quality that appealed to Liebling more than any other in Egan’s writing was the fact that he brought to life a part of English society lesser depicted in literature – “a panorama of low, dirty, happy, brutal, sentimental Regency England that you’ll never get from Jane Austen”. As such, Egan’s writing is regarded as an influence on the young Dickens.
While Egan’s prose revelled in the technical aspects of the sport – it was he who referred to boxing as a “science”, thus giving Liebling the title of his book – his blow-by-blow reportage of the then marathon, bare-knuckled bouts testify to its primeval violence. Egan introduced countless slang terms into his reports, thus gifting the sport with its own terminology and earning him one of his many monikers: “The Lexicographer of the Ring”.
Liebling once described Egan as the “Blind Raftery of the London prize ring”. In fact, the Irishman was a kind of Regency-era Jimmy Breslin – his very presence ringside lending a certain literary kudos to prize fights and other popular entertainments of the age, such as cock-fighting and bull-baiting, cudgelling and wrestling.
Prefiguring a later generation of British sportswriters, Egan understood the power of patriotic flag-waving. In his introduction to the first volume of Boxiana, he contended that boxing represented the “manly” characteristics of the British race. As Egan saw it, Johnny Foreigner always picked up a weapon to resolve a dispute. The Dutch were too quick to turn to the long knife; scarcely any person in Italy was without a stiletto; and the French and the Germans often used sticks and stones to seek revenge. In England, “the Fist only is used”.
This admiration was not confined to the English. Egan evinced a marked partiality for the Irish fighters who regularly entered British rings to earn a few bob. An example was the Irish boxer Michael Ryan whose “knowledge of the art was considerable, and in uniting a good theoretic inquiry with a tolerably extensive practice, he became not only one of the most scientific but truly formidable boxers”.
Egan published books and articles on different aspects of popular culture. He also flirted with the theatre, returning to Ireland to stage a play adapted from his own book about the adventurers of two characters (neither feline nor murine) called Tom and Jerry.
He died in London in 1849. His literary legacy is considerable, not least the manner in which he influenced one of the greats of the golden age of American sportswriting.
In an article titled “Ahab and Nemesis” about Rocky Marciano’s final bout in Yankee Stadium in 1955, Liebling used Egan’s description of a Regency-era fighter to describe the great Italian-American heavyweight’s hitting power. His opponent, Archie Moore, on the other hand, was a more cerebral type of boxer, whose style would not have pleased Egan.
“I thought of [Moore] as a lonely Ahab,” wrote Liebling, “rehearsing to buck Herman Melville, Pierce Egan and the betting odds.”
But Ahab never wins, the bookies seldom lose, and Rocky Marciano entered history undefeated.