Talk:Benjamin Brain

The nature of the English Championship pre-1800

In the absence of any central organising body (and perhaps more importantly in the absence of a belt), it isn’t always straightforward to determine exactly who was champion from what dates during the early period of prizefighting. (This issue is also complicated by the fact that sometimes the word ‘champion’ is used in contemporary sources in what would seem to be  rather a looser way than the word would be interpreted in the modern day.)

If we take the example of John Jackson, who everyone accepts was English Champion, he only fought three fights (with record WLW) and the only one of those fights in which he could have won the English Championship was his third fight, the victory over Mendoza in 1795.

So, Mendoza was evidently the English Champion until 1795 (when he lost to Jackson), and the only fights in which Mendoza could have originally won the title are his two fights against Warr in 1792 and 1794. However, if you look at those three fights, Mendoza-Warr I, Mendoza-Warr II and Jackson-Mendoza, none of the contemporary accounts state that they were ‘for the championship’. Indeed, I’m not convinced that many of the earlier bouts (e.g. those of Johnson) which are generally accepted these days as having been ‘for the championship’ are specifically described as such in contemporary accounts.

Prior to about 1800 the reality seems to have been that ‘the championship’ was determined entirely by public consensus – which may have only emerged some time after specific results. This explains why it is so rare that contemporary accounts of boxing during that period (or the later writing of Pierce Egan, when describing this period) ever describe a particular fight as having been anticipated as a battle for the championship, or as someone having specifically become champion directly after a victory. This being the case, the whole idea of specific pre-1800 bouts being ‘for the championship’ (in the modern sense of that term) is probably completely anachronistic. See also, for example, Mendoza’s own autobiography and the complete lack of any mention of particular fights having been ‘for the championship’.

Anyone who has read a lot of prizefighter biographies on Wikipedia will be aware that there is a lot of anachronistic prose present – at one end of the spectrum there used to be plenty of incorrect mention of weight-category championships which simply did not exist at the time (derived ultimately from the very flawed ‘cyberboxingzone’ website), but at the other end of the spectrum there is frequent reference to specific victories having been by ‘knockout’ (an unknown concept at the time, as pretty much all fights ended approximately in that way), to fighters having ‘turned pro’ (they are almost all known to have had other regular jobs), to the existence of ‘promoters’ (really, in an era when the sport was illegal?), etc, etc. All of this illustrates the great difficulty that we sometimes have in shaking off the trappings of modern-day boxing – which, on terms of its organisation, was entirely different to prizefighting in almost every way.

So, this note is essentially a request that editors consider quite carefully whether it is actually useful to describe specific pre-1800 fights as having been ‘for the championship’. It seems that it would be far more useful to locate contemporary source material to directly support the idea that specific fighters were recognised as champion at a particular time. E.g. in many cases it may be more appropriate to omit reference to ‘Fighter X fought Fighter Y in a battle for the English championship’, and instead to say ‘After this victory Fighter Y seems to have begun to be recognised as English Champion’ and provide contemporary sources as references.      

[I have cross-posted this note in the talk sections for Johnson, Brain, Mendoza and Jackson. Hopefully it is useful.] Axad12 (talk) 05:06, 14 March 2023 (UTC)