John L. Sullivan, one of the most celebrated Americans of the nineteenth century, officially stepped into the ring for the final time on September 7, 1892. The flabby champion, a symbol of Gilded Age excesses, faced a fit San Franciscan with a perfect pompadour named James J. Corbett. “Gentleman Jim,” as he would eventually be known, learned to fight not in the streets but at a sparring club. He even had a few years of college behind him.

The great John L. never had much of a chance. From the fifth round on, Corbett toyed with him, finally delivering the decisive blow in the twenty-first round. “[Sullivan] lowered his guard from sheer exhaustion, and catching a fearful smash on the jaw, reached to the ropes, and the blood poured down his face in torrents and made a crimson river across the broad chest,” a newspaper wrote. “His eyes were glassy, and it was a mournful act when the young Californian shot his right across the jaw and Sullivan fell like an ox.” Afterwards Sullivan was his usual convivial self, telling a cub reporter named Theodore Dreiser that “I’m ex-champion of the world, defeated by that little dude from California, but I’m still John L. Sullivan—ain’t that right? Haw! haw! They can’t take that away from me, can they? Haw! haw! Have some more champagne, boy.” Dreiser admitted, “I adored him.”

The Sullivan-Corbett fight, staged eight years before the dawn of the twentieth century, was a glimpse of the modern future. It was held inside a stadium illuminated with electric lights in the heart of an urban center, in this instance New Orleans. The behavior within the ring was regulated by the (allegedly) civilizing rules devised by the Marquis of Queensbury: The fighters wore padded gloves, fought three-minute rounds followed by one-minute rest periods, and were allowed ten seconds to recover from knockdowns. The behavior outside the ring was supervised by police officers upholding the municipal ordinances of New Orleans, which, always ahead of its time in the celebration of the flesh, had sanctioned Queensberry fights two years earlier. The city’s former mayor had no qualms about announcing the fighters’ weights before the match.

The glorious era of illegal bare-knuckle boxing in America was over. Just three years earlier, on July 8, 1889, Sullivan had defended his title against Jake Kilrain under entirely different circumstances. The fight was held on turf, in a ring created for the occasion on the rural Mississippi Coast property of a sawdust proprietor named Charles Rich. Under the London Prize Ring rules, rounds lasted as long as both men stood, which meant they could “steal a few minutes to glare at each other, tacitly agreeing to slow down, return to their corners for a drink, and regain their strength,” Elliott J. Gorn tells us is his classic account, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, which appeared in 1986 and has just been republished in an updated edition by Cornell University Press with a new afterward by the author. Since the Mississippi governor had placed a $1,000 bounty for Sullivan’s arrest, the champion fled Mr. Rich’s land soon after dispatching Kilrain in seventy-five rounds. He was eventually brought back to the state to face charges for violating statutes forbidding prize fighting and assault and battery. Although the indictments would be quashed, Sullivan spent more money on legal fees that he had earned in the Kilrain fight. It is no wonder he was such a fixture in traveling variety shows, which made him a rich man and kept him out of legal trouble.

Sullivan had used his considerable influence to push for the introduction of Queensberry rules, writing in his autobiography that they provided for contests that were clean and honest, “conducted for the benefit of gentlemen, not rowdies.” But history has proven him wrong. Boxing has rarely been clean, honest or unrowdy. Observe Evander Holyfield’s ear (or lack of). Review Frankie Carbo’s testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee. (He cited the Fifth Amendment thirty times.) Cue up ESPN’s segment on the “top 10 boxing press conference brawls.” “[The] image of men pitted against each other in man-to-man warfare is too stark, too extreme, to be assimilated into ‘civilized’ society,” wrote Joyce Carol Oates in a profile of Mike Tyson.