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Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s ReviewProfessor Peter Benson is a former boxer himself who came up the hard way, his father a Marine boxing coach who had his own son in the ring from the time he was a teen. "I dreaded those time when my dad would come home and suddenly sprung on me that some friend of his had a PAL or YMCA tournament lined up in a nearby town, and wouldn't I like to fill in for some kind who was sick (yeah, sick my @ss, I thought--try afraid)?" Stationed in Dakar (Senegal) on a Fulbright teaching gig, Benson noticed a pasteboard poster of a fierce African fighter, and learned that in Senegal they still idolize their homeboy, "Battling Siki," who had left Senegal and gone to Europe and beat Georges Charpentier, who was sort of the Maurice Chevalier of boxing.
This set Benson into asking himself why in the name of forgotten history had he never heard of Battling Siki, for he was a boy he grew up cutting his teeth on Bill Stern and his books for boys on famous boxing stories. When he returned to Stern's dog eared book he found out that, yes, Siki was in it for sure, but portrayed as a combination of a ninny and a savage. The present biography is a noble attempt to restore the real Battling Siki and to combat the legends and the misinformation inculcated around his name.
Nothing is too petty for Benson to dispute, for example, he launches immediately into refuting the idea that Siki was too ignorant to have heard of St. Patrick's Day. Benson shows us that racist promoters and an upset French boxing fraternity (aghast that their white boy had been beaten by an African athlete) had threatened to strip Siki of his precious boxing license, and that Dublin, on St. Patrick's Day, was the only place left to him to fight. He had indeed been backed into a corner. As we know from studying the career of Jack Johnson (whose reign preceded Siki's by perhaps 12-15 years), the white infrastructure of pugilism did not like seeing a black man smile in the ring.
And Siki, like Johnson, compounded his sins by marrying a white woman and in general carrying on as though he was the champion of the world. Benson compares his unsettling appearance to the "menace" claimed by many when Sonny Liston knocked out Floyd Patterson. And a "gangsta" image comparable to Mike Tyson's was foisted on him by the popular press. Benson puts it all in context, showing, for example, that his ownership of two cute little lion cubs was not all that unusual at the time, for it had become an affectation of many boxers, not just black ones, to parade unusual pets. (Siki's cute little cubs ate a dog during boxing practice one day at the ring. Oops!)
Benson is a vivid writer and brings you right back into the roaring twenties with a powerful wit and a knack for research that hits home every time. You'll learn not only about Siki but a whole host of other great personalities of the day, from Jack Dempsey to Kid Norfolk. And beyond the ring, you'll encounter the predominant culture from new angles. You'll see why some people of color preferred if at all possible to "pass," and you'll see the American South through the eyes of a king in slow motion decline. Even the sympathetic seemed to see Siki in terms of "gratuitous animal analogies: Siki as ape, Siki as peacock--creatures embodying rage, lust, sexual display." Funny to never have heard of a man, and then to find out that he was the key that opens up vast occluded regions of the early 20th Century. Good work, Professor Benson. It was worth it, all that early boxing training by your dad.
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