up two arms and continually stare an opponent in the face required tremendous stamina and could make the difference in winning a spar. For perhaps the first time in his life, Shaw got a full measure of what it was like to focus his intellect and his body on a single goal, that of avoiding the sharp and sudden punishment in another man’s fist while trying to deliver offensive blows himself. Unlike other sports, a boxer must be concerned not only with what he does, but with what is done to him. Because Shaw was tall, with a long left arm that he could use to jab the other fellow in the face, he was surprised to find that he was often successful, especially against the shorter Beatty.
“I had an easy time with him,” a pleased Shaw would later tell his friend Gene Tunney. “He was not tall and I had such long arms that I held him off by keeping my left glove in his face. He was annoyed, very.”
For Shaw, the give-and-take rhythm of the game would resemble the tempo in his writing, from the sharp and saucy rat-a-tat-tat of his dialogue to the bold sweep of his convictions, hurled against an unsuspecting audience.
“There are,” he wrote later, “no sports which bring out the difference in character more dramatically than boxing, wrestling, and fencing...I soon got an imaginary reputation in my little circle as a boxer; and as I looked credibly like a tall man with a straight left and had in fact picked up some notion of how to defend myself, I was never attacked with bodily violence.”
Shaw and Beatty sparred between the flower beds and bushes in the Beattys’ garden and in the gym, read the sporting papers and regularly attended boxing competitions, often with friends and other amateurs. The inspiration Shaw was looking for came from an exhibition match featuring one of the cleverest fighters of the day, Jack Burke, “the Irish Lad” who used the scientific style taught by Coach Donnelly. Shaw had written three unsuccessful novels, and in writing his fourth, Cashel Byron’s Profession, decided to focus on boxing, using Burke’s exploits as a metaphor for the fighting spirit that he was to display in his own life through the pen.
His fictional hero was named for the medieval seat of kings in Ireland, the Rock of Cashel, and the popular, romantic poet Byron, who had been a well-known boxing enthusiast. Shaw endowed his protagonist with all the qualities that he thought a winner in and out of the ring should possess. Cashel was a young man of Shaw’s age who, in striving to create a better life, wills himself into an iron-nerved and fanatically committed fighter able to throw off the chains of the Irish underdog in English society. As an Irish Horatio Alger, Cashel exudes individualism and moral zeal, and he has the ability to control his life’s circumstances. He’s a thinking, “scientific” fighter who utilizes learned skills to fight defensively and physical strength to stand up to the most ruthless brawlers in the ring. Shaw learns to respect fighters who try to make a living with their fists, and he especially admires their confidence in the face of the condescension often heaped on them by society.
In casting Cashel as a man who becomes master of his fate, Shaw makes him the kind of man he wants to become himself — a writer and reformer. This new self-image is a dramatic change from the Shaw who departs Ireland as a wary, inexperienced intellectual, a boy of modest means who leaves school at 15. The timid young man who arrives in England unsure of himself, now feels that boxing in the gym like English aristocrats puts him on the same plane — and he’d outthink them and outtalk them as well.
Boxing has become a rite of passage, not for what he will win in the ring but as a bridge to self-reliance and a new, weightier identity.
Personal combat, Shaw said, is interesting, “not only technically as an exhibition of skill, but because it’s also an exhibition of character concentrating into minutes differences that years of ordinary intercourse leave hidden.”
“In the eyes of a phoenix, even the arena — the ring, as they call it — is a better school of character than the drawing room,” writes Shaw in the novel.
The fictional Cashel wins the world championship in an honest and skillful manner, raises the standards of a corrupt boxing world by never submitting to a bribe, retires at the top of his game, marries and raises a family, enters business and runs successfully for a seat in Parliament. Shaw wrote that he gave his Cashel “every advantage a prizefighter can have: health and strength and pugilistic genius. In plain fact, the pugilistic profession is like any other profession. Common sense, good manners and a social turn count for as much in it as they do elsewhere.” The novel was finished in 1883, and three years later was published in book form. When the publisher inferred from the book that Shaw was a formidable boxer, he said Shaw laughed and replied, “I know the moves, just as I know the moves in chess.”
St. Patrick’s Day of 1883, a Saturday, was a day that would confound future scholars who studied the worldly Shaw, a man not seen as one likely to risk himself in a sporting contest. In what may have been a flourish of Irish bravado, Shaw and Beatty entered a national amateur boxing competition. Wrote Beatty, referring to himself:
Old Plantagenet into training must get
Drink later, eat steaks that are raw
The Shaw’s nose has kist the tip of his fist
(And you won’t like it, George Bernard Shaw)
They signed up for the annual Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships far enough ahead of time so that their names could be printed in the large official program. The Queensberry Challenge Cup was not just a local tournament, but a public, advertised competition at the sprawling Lillie Bridge Grounds, the home of London’s major sporting events and fairs. The Amateur Boxing Association, the sport’s first governing body, had been formed in Britain in 1880, only three years earlier. P. Beatty, London, was listed in the lightweight and middleweight division. G.B. Shaw, London, was entered as a middleweight and a heavyweight. (A heavyweight in those days could be any weight, and boxers often changed weight divisions, depending on their opponents.) “I dont call no man a fighting man what aint been in the ring,” says Ned Skene, the coach (based on Donnelly) in Shaw’s novel. “You’re a sparrer, and a clever, pretty sparrer; but sparring aint the real thing. Some day, please God, we’ll make up a little match for you.”
The competition would have been about a year and a half after Shaw first joined Donnelly’s gym. Shaw had seen other amateurs injured and knocked out and had suffered injury himself. It is not entirely clear, but the record indicates that neither actually got in the ring that day. One version holds that Beatty was so nervous that Donnelly gave him a stiff dose of brandy before entering the ring, the effect being to paralyze him. The official ruling could have been that they did not have enough fights under their belts, or they may not have fought simply because their names were not drawn. The last tantalizing possibility is that one or both of them fought and lost, then sat in the stands to watch the winning match, as boxers often do. In any event, Shaw wrote the winners’ names on his official program, in the neat script that he had perfected as a teenage land agent in Dublin.
The raw drama of the ring in all its color, excitement and controversy had captured Shaw’s imagination. “Pugilism,” he said, “became one of my subjects.”
In 1901, Shaw added a preface to his novel in which he expressed surprise that the book had survived so long. He continued to follow prizefights from afar, but he was generally disgusted with the gamblers and the quality of the people who had taken over the sport and felt that his fictional, highly moral Cashel, his ultimate man of action, would never be equaled. Shaw moved on with his life and began writing plays, many of which were peppered with references to pugilism and boxing. Spirited idioms and commentary on the sport would also appear in his letters, books, prefaces and newspaper articles, and as stage directions and dialogue.
Only with Paquito, his old friend and sparring partner, did Gully Belcher Shaw discuss old times in the ring.
It would be another two decades before boxing became important to him again.
A woodcut by William Nicholson (1872-1949) in An Almanac of Twelve Sports, published in 1898 by William Heinemann, with words by Rudyard Kipling (Bridgeman Art Library).