More boxing cigarette cards from the NYPL Digital Collection.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Boxing Personalities
More boxing cigarette cards from the NYPL Digital Collection.
Boxers of the Early Twentieth Century
More cigarette cards from the NYPL Digital Collection.
Boxers circa 1903-1917
Rocky Marciano
Rocky Marciano (September 1, 1923 – August 31, 1969), was the heavyweight champion of the world from 1952 to 1956. Marciano, with forty-three knockouts to his credit, remains the only heavyweight champion in boxing history to retire having won every fight in his professional career.
Joe Louis
Joseph Louis Barrow (May 13, 1914 - April 12, 1981), was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949.
Nicknamed the Brown Bomber, Louis' championship reign lasted 140 consecutive months, during which he participated in 27 championship fights, including 25 successful title defenses – all records for the heavyweight division. In 2005, Louis was named the greatest heavyweight of all time by the International Boxing Research Organization, and was ranked number one on Ring Magazine's list of 100 Greatest Punchers of All Time and is widely regarded to be the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.
Louis' cultural impact was felt well outside the ring. Louis is widely regarded as the first African American to achieve the status of a nationwide hero within the United States, and was also a focal point of anti-Nazi sentiment leading up to and during World War II.[4] He also was instrumental in integrating the game of golf, breaking the sport's color barrier in America by appearing under a sponsor's exemption in a PGA event in 1952.
Roberto Durán
Roberto Durán ,born June 16, 1951Panama, widely regarded as one of the greatest boxers of all time. During his career he was nicknamed "Manos de Piedra", "Hands of Stone".
He held world titles at four different weights - lightweight (1972-79), welterweight (1980), junior middleweight (1983-84) and middleweight (1989). He was the second boxer to have fought in five different decades. Saoul Mamby, whom Durán defeated in 1976, was the first boxer in history to compete in five decades. Two weeks later, Duran accomplished the same feat, becoming the second fighter to do so.
professional record of 119 fights, 103 wins with 70 KOs.
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (January 17, 1942)three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who is widely considered to be one of the best heavyweight boxing champions ever. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. As a professional, he became the first person to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times.
Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, subsequently converting to Sunni Islam in 1975. In 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. military based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges, stripped of his boxing title, and his boxing license was suspended. He was not imprisoned but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ali was well known for his fighting style, which he described as "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee".
Sugar Ray Robinson
Sugar Ray Robinson (May 3, 1921 – April 12, 1989) . Frequently cited as the
greatest boxer of all time, Robinson's performances at the welterweight and
middleweight divisions prompted sportswriters to create "pound for pound"
rankings, where they compared fighters regardless of weight.
He turned professional in 1940 at the age of 19 and by 1951 had a professional
record of 128-1-2 with 84 knockouts.
Robinson was named the greatest fighter of the 20th century by the Associated
Press, and the greatest boxer in history by ESPN.com in 2007. The Ring magazine
rated him the best pound for pound boxer of all-time in 1997, and its "Fighter of
the Decade" for the 1950s. Muhammad Ali, who repeatedly called himself "The
Greatest" throughout his career, ranked Robinson as the greatest boxer of all
time. Other Hall of Fame boxers such as Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Leonard said the
same.
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