Years ago I was a student of art history at Ohio State University where I discovered the boxing paintings of Thomas Eakins in a class on American art. Eakins, who broke with academic conventions and elitist views of art, pushed toward a realism that actually offended sensibilities of the era. What fascinated me about the three paintings was the way they revealed the social history of the period, especially in regard to class. The paintings, Taking the Count, Between Rounds, and Salutat, were completed in the 1890s during the Gilded Age, when an increasingly  industrialized economy was dominated by ultra-rich robber barons who depended on and often exploited the immigrant and working classes for labor. The differences between the classes is depicted in Between Rounds by the physical distance between them: The working class and immigrants watch the fight in the cheap seats high above and far away from the middle and upper classes on the floor or in the boxes. Fighter Billy Smith rests in the corner of the ring as his second Billy McCarney fans him with a towel, and manager Ellwood McCloskey offers encouragement. Smith’s neck and face are suntanned and ruddy while his body and legs look pale, revealing Smith to be an outdoor laborer during the regular work week. As a boxer at The Arena in Philadelphia, Smith displays the physicality and skill that is admired by the very classes who employ and exploit him during the workweek. And through boxing, Smith is attempting to advance his position in society and make something of himself with the only path open to him and the only tool available—his body.

Studying boxing in relation to social class as reflected in Eakins’s trilogy of paintings gave me a respect for the sport. Boxing—a mano e mano competition in which minimally clad contestants beat each other for money—doesn’t try to mask its brutality as do other popular competitive sports. There’s no ball, sticks, hoops, or pucks to hide behind; no pretense that spectators are watching for the finer points of “the game.” There is no equipment in the arena other than the boxers’ own bodies and no protective gear beyond the padded gloves. It’s simply brutal; that’s why spectators watch and that’s why it’s not the sport of kings.

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