Britain’s obsession with boxing is as deep-rooted as its devotion to cricket

Boxing has long been a British obsession, exported successfully to North America, but never widespread on the Continent. Mainland Europeans struggled to understand that in general there was no quarrel between contestants who assaulted each other so brutally. ‘Anything that looks like fighting,’ explained one bewildered French visitor, ‘is delicious to an Englishman.’ He might have said the same about drinking or gambling, pastimes embedded in the fabric of Georgian society to an ‘astonishing extent’. They were habits, moreover, upon which the popularity of boxing depended.

The story of Daniel Mendoza, little known except to sporting historians, is fascinating on both a personal level and more generally. The man one paper called that ‘celebrated hero of the fists’ was a ‘man for his time’, the late 18th century: a lavishly gifted boxer, as bare-knuckle fighting became vastly popular.

It was not unusual for fights, casually arranged and marketed by today’s standards, officially frowned upon if not forbidden, to be watched in rain-sodden fields by tens of thousands. ‘It is astonishing,’ reported one newspaper correspondent, ‘how numerous the crowds of people of all ranks and descriptions’ were.

What was additionally remarkable about Mendoza was that he was Jewish by birth — from a Sephardic family — and had to defy shocking levels of racial prejudice to reach the pinnacle of his sport. Wynn Wheldon calls his three encounters with Richard Humphreys ‘the greatest series of fights of the 18th century’, to be classed, he would argue, with those involving Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

This was a time when boxing moved from what was essentially a brawl into something closer, for all its brutality, to an art form. Mendoza’s teaching, long after retirement, along with his aptly named book The Art of Boxing, ensured him a lasting influence.