AMERICA AT LARGE:KNOCKING OUT two fellows on the same night is hardly a trifling accomplishment, but back in the days before the customers started carrying knives and packing heat it used to be a fairly regular occurrence at certain Limerick pubs.

When Ismaikel (Mike) Perez registered the seventh and eighth knockouts of his 10-fight pro career barely an hour apart at the UL Arena last Saturday it was dutifully, if somewhat erroneously, reported that the Cork-based Cuban heavyweight had “created world boxing history”.

In their defence, ringside scribes who described Perez’s feat as unprecedented may have been following the lead of promoter Brian Peters, who in a release announcing the Cuban’s intent to serially face Latvian Edgars Kalnars and Czech Tomas Mrazek on the Andy Lee-Mamadou Thiam undercard had noted that “heavyweight legends such as Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and George Foreman fought more than once on the same night, but they were always only exhibitions and were never counted as official contests”.

Earlier in the last century, however, at least two heavyweight champions fought twice on the same night – and in both instances, the results are incorporated on their official records.

In March of 1906, barely a month after he had won the title on a points decision over Marvin Hart, Canadian Tommy Burns scored first-round knockouts over Jim O’Brien and James J (Soldier) Walker on the same bill in San Diego. And on Thanksgiving Day of 1920, the man who had succeeded Burns as champion also registered a double. Five years after he had lost the title to Jess Willard in Havana, Jack Johnson knocked out both Frank Owens and his near-namesake, Topeka Jack Johnson, before what was literally a captive audience: 300 of his fellow inmates at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

Burns remains among the more obscure champions in heavyweight history, and is better known today for losing to Johnson than for anything he accomplished in the ring. Even in his time he felt underappreciated, and deliberately arranged the two fights in one night as a publicity gimmick. The BoxRec footnote on the proceedings says that while many historians considered them exhibition bouts, “they both received the only official sanctioning of their day, billing by the promoters and newspapers as being for the title”.

O’Brien, one of Burns’s opponents on that day, had extended him the distance in a middleweight fight in Michigan three years earlier. Walker never won a fight, but three of his six career losses came at the hands of Burns, Tommy Ryan, and the underappreciated Peter Jackson – a trio which between them accumulated 175 professional wins.

Although the rest of the card consisted of bouts between inmates, Johnson’s two Leavenworth opponents were both professionals imported for the day. (In much the same fashion, James Scott, a light-heavyweight contender of the 1970s serving a life sentence, had several fights at the Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, all of which were official and some of which were even televised.) The former champion knocked Owens down 12 times on the way to a sixth-round knockout, but was kinder to Topeka Jack, a former sparring partner, whom he carried to a four-round decision.

Now, Jim O’Brien, Soldier Walker, Frank Owens and Topeka Jack Johnson might not have exactly qualified as world-beaters, but from what we know of Perez’s opponents last weekend, we’d make any of the aforementioned quartet no worse than even money against Kalnars or Marzek, even in their current condition, which is to say, dead.

There is some irony to the fact that the only two heavyweights to have previously accomplished this rare double would themselves meet in the ring. Six weeks from now, Reno will be the site of a massive three-day observance celebrating the centennial of the July 4th, 1910 “Fight of the Century” between Johnson and the undefeated former champion Jim Jeffries in that Nevada city.

So far as we know there was no official commemoration in Rushcutter’s Bay on St Stephen’s Day of 1908, although had Burns not agreed to become the first heavyweight champion to defend his title against a challenger of colour on that occasion, there never would have been a Johnson-Jeffries fight.

Having disposed of O’Brien and Walker, Burns had two fights against his old nemesis, light-heavyweight champion Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, before taking his show on the road. He made five consecutive defences in Europe (including one, against Jem Roche, in Dublin) and two more in Australia, few of which were even covered by most American newspapers. But for a twist of fate, his fight against Johnson might have been consigned to similar obscurity.

The publication of his adventure tales The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and White Fang had securely established the literary reputation of Jack London. Now wealthy, London indulged himself by taking his wife on what was meant to be a two-year, around-the-world journey in his hand-built ketch, a voyage that would later be commemorated in The Cruise of The Snark. By November of 1908 London had become afflicted with what he feared might be leprosy (it turned out to be psoriasis).

Leaving The Snark moored at Guadalcanal, he was transported to Sydney in search of medical treatment. While hospitalised there he was visited by the editor of the Australian Star, who persuaded him to cover the upcoming bout between Burns and Johnson. Once he had agreed, London made arrangements for simultaneous publication of his dispatches in the New York Herald.

A man of seeming contradiction, London was a champion of socialist causes throughout his life, but at the same time, an unapologetic racist. And while he gave Johnson his due for beating Burns, his report also included a passage often mistakenly ascribed to his subsequent coverage of the Jeffries fight in Reno: “He was a white man and so am I. Naturally, I wanted the white man to win.”

London’s report also included the first salvo that would eventually lead to a public clamour that would bring the reluctant former champion out of retirement: “Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson’s face . . . Jeff it’s up to you.” (When he finally agreed to the Johnson bout, Jeffries announced he was fighting “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro”). Convicted of violating the Mann Act by “transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes”, Johnson fled the country via Canada and lived in exile, mostly in Paris, for the next eight years.

Tommy Burns fought on for several years after the Johnson fight, and didn’t lose again until he was stopped in the seventh round of a Commonwealth title bout against Joe Beckett at the Royal Albert Hall on July 16th, 1920. Four days later, by prearrangement, Jack Johnson walked across the Mexican border and surrendered to waiting United States Marshals.

Initially jailed in Los Angeles, he was transported to Leavenworth that autumn, and there, in November, duplicated Burns’s feat by fighting two men on the same night.