The brilliant economist and columnist Thomas Sowell writes beautifully of a time when even men paid to beat each other up in public conducted themselves as gentlemen, in “Old Boxing Matches,” on National Review Online. Key passage: The first thing I noticed about the boxers back in the era of Joe Louis, from the 1930s into the 1950s, is that they all wore regulation boxing trunks and they didn’t have tattoos. There was no trying to outdo each other with garish trunks or wild tattoos. They didn’t try to stare each other down when the referee was giving them instructions before the fight. Seldom did any of these boxers go in for showboating during the fight, and there was no denigrating the other fighter, before or after the fight. After Joe Louis knocked out an opponent, any comment he made was usually along the lines of “He’s a good fighter and very game.” Sometimes Louis would add, “He had me worried for a while,” though there was seldom any real reason to worry. One of the few fighters who did give Joe Louis a real battle, and who was ahead on points when Louis knocked him out, was Billy Conn.
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