Prize Ring Career
The prize ring was in fact outlawed, but Heenan fought a legal exhibition bout against Joe Coburn, and made a living as a “shoulder hitter” – a strong-arm man who might be hired for enforcement or protection in the seamy and often violent worlds of New York business and politics. His efforts earned him a sinecure in the New York Customs House.
But Jim Cusick, determined that his easy-going protégé should not rest on his laurels, pushed him to challenge for the national title. The champion was his old foe John Morrissey, now one of New York’s most notorious thugs. After much wrangling, the two men finally met in 1858 – in Canada, where the US authorities could not intervene. Heenan, whose training had been disrupted by injury, and who was not fully fit, was an unlucky loser.
He found solace in the arms of Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress of little talent but huge impact, with whom he (innocently) contracted a bigamous and short-lived marriage.
When Morrissey, refusing a return bout, effectively retired from the ring, Heenan became champion by default, but had difficulty finding other opponents in America. Jim Cusick accordingly decided that his next fight should be against British champion Tom Sayers, to whom Heenan issued a challenge in 1859.
Read more about this topic: John C. Heenan
Famous quotes containing the words prize, ring and/or career:
“He saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.
Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a lover’s toil attends,
Few ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“I started out very quiet and I beat Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)