[Late last year, in preparation for a podcast appearance of my wife’s, we watched Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and through it were introduced to the groundbreaking cinematographer and all-around amazing American James Wong Howe. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for Howe’s exemplary life, leading to a post on that podcast!]
On two distinct but parallel sports history contexts for James Wong Howe’s impressive but brief semi-pro boxing career.
In the mid-1910s, after his father’s tragic passing, a teenage Howe moved to Oregon to live with an uncle (another example of the widespread Chinese American community about which I wrote at length in yesterday’s post). While there he began a brief (1915-16) career as a semi-pro bantamweight boxer, compiling an impressive record of five wins (1 by KO), 2 losses (none by KO), and one draw. I honestly don’t want to say much more in this paragraph, because what I really hope is that you will check out that above hyperlinked BoxRec page on Howe’s boxing career and statistics for what I can promise will be one of the most delightful surprises (in the page’s accompanying picture, which you can click on to embiggen if you so desire and believe me you will so desire) that this blog has ever featured.
Welcome back! (If you went to that page already; if not, go and then come back, I’ll wait.) The world of American boxing was a big community by 1915, and so too was the American West, so I don’t want to overstate the connections here: but I still think we have to contextualize Howe’s boxing career with the famous, controversial, white supremacist fight that took place in Reno, Nevada in 1910. After all, both the reason for that fight (ie, Jack London’s white supremacist pleas to Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement) and the racial violence that erupted after it had to do with the presence of a boxer and boxing champion of color, with the boxing successes of the Black fighter Jack Johnson (including easily winning that 1910 fight with Jeffries). This Criterion Collection biography of James Wong Howe suggests that he took up boxing because he had been bullied in school, and thus that it was an expression of his own individual identity and power—but I have to say that any American of color joining the sport five years after that Jeffries-Johnson fight was also potently challenging the overarching white supremacist narratives it had featured and spawned.
Speaking of challenging white supremacist narratives through sports successes, I can’t highlight a Chinese American semi-pro athlete without shouting out the story at the heart of my podcast’s first season: the Celestials semi-pro baseball team and their 1881 final game. While I’d love to imagine that Howe and his Chinese American family and community might have heard of the Celestials, even by his 1904 arrival in the United States I don’t believe that story and history would have had much place in collective memories; certainly by his boxing career a decade later that seems even less likely still. But nonetheless, there’s something really powerful about putting the young (many of them still teens, the rest in their early 20s at the oldest) Celestials players in conversation with this young Chinese American boxer, and thinking about the presence and role of sports in this American community across the decades of the Exclusion era. Whatever Howe’s own reasons for becoming an athlete, he was in the process becoming part of that larger story, and I love that for him.
Next Howe context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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