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Telling Truth From Tales

Anyone who has ever tried to carry out research on the history of sports in the United States will no doubt have confronted significant problems of evidence. Rarely do sportsmen and women leave archives documenting their achievements, either on or off the field of play. Memoirs, oral testimonies, and-more often than not-the popular press are really all that scholars have to work from when they set about writing their accounts of particular figures, sports, or competitions. Occasionally, as Andrew Kaye notes in his new study of Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, such scarcity of material leaves us with almost no knowledge of certain contests-like southern smokers, those warm-up bouts intended to entertain through demeaning blacks. Even when scholars do have more to work from than just journalistic tidbits, the fact such coverage is so often generously laced with distorting even pernicious biases, poses its own problems of interpretation. Writing at the end of his new book, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey Ward describes the press reports on which he based his account as simply "a condescending blend of truths, half-truths, and stereotypical distortion[s]" (p. 431). Years after Jack Johnson's fight with fellow black heavyweight Sam Langford, legendary boxing commentator Nat Fleischer would still remain unsure about the nature of the bout because of the rumors spread by Langford's manager.1 All of which seems vaguely reminiscent of Daniel Boorstin's assessment that "popular biographies can offer very little in the way of solid information. For the subjects are themselves mere figments of the media."2 Recounting the