AMERICA AT LARGE:The Fighting Irishman exhibition revives memories of a famous Irish success in 1923

WHEN THE "Fighting Irishmen" exhibition opened at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan three summers ago, its piece de resistancemade the journey from Dublin to New York in the cockpit of an Aer Lingus flight and was carried into the country as part of the crew's hand luggage. This not only allowed Dan Donnelly's arm to avoid the scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security, but obviated having to explain why a human body part was listed on a customs form.

At the time, it was expected that the show would be on display for the next several months, after which its component parts would be disassembled and returned to their owners, but to the surprise of everyone, including James J Houlihan, who curated the exhibit, Fighting Irishmen proved to be a smash hit. After its stay at the Irish Arts Center, it moved to more spacious quarters at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and from there to the Burns Library at Boston College.

Three summers later, Fighting Irishmen officially opens a six-month engagement at the Ulster Folk Park in Omagh today, and a meeting was conducted in Dublin this past Monday to explore the possibility of bringing the show there early next year.

Houlihan’s collection includes everything from Barry McGuigan’s boxing trunks to John L Sullivan’s punch-bag, along with ephemera concerning what remains a high-water mark in Irish boxing history – Mike McTigue’s upset victory over

the Senegalese champion

Battling Siki to win the world light-heavyweight title at Dublin’s La Scala on St Patrick’s Day of 1923.

The exhibit is subtitled “A Celebration of the Celtic Warrior”, and at a farewell reception in advance of the Omagh opening, the New York Arts Center last week screened a BBC documentary on the show, along with Andrew Gallimore’s 2007 documentary on the McTigue-Siki fight, a film which had never been aired for an American audience.

McTigue’s points win in what proved to be the last scheduled 20-round championship fight was an upset of the first order, an upset so improbable that historians have viewed it with a jaundiced eye since.

A Clare-born journeyman whose record had been an unimposing 82-25-7 when he returned from America, where he had done all of his fighting, the previous summer, McTigue had won three fights in England when he met Siki, who had lost just one of 49 fights since resuming his career after the first World War.

It’s widely suspected McTigue was the beneficiary of a home-town decision. In Gallimore’s film, Siki’s American biographer Peter Benson even suggests the outcome might have been fixed by arrangement, although not a shred of evidence supporting that argument has ever been advanced.

Dr Gerald Early, an African-American essayist and historian, concluded, “Siki would probably not have beaten McTigue if he fought him in New York, Osaka or Tangiers. He simply did not fight well.”

The late John Lardner noted while McTigue “did not take the risks that are commonly expected of a challenger for a world’s championship, there was no need to. Nothing less than a knockout could have beaten him, and he avoided that possibility by boxing at long range throughout.”

In any attempt to place McTigue-Siki in its proper historical context, one must refer to its predecessor, the 1922 Paris fight in which Siki defeated French war hero Georges Carpentier to lift the light-heavyweight title.

It is believed that bout probably was fixed – but in Carpentier’s favour. Siki, possibly motivated by the racial slurs the Frenchman began to hurl his way, supposedly reneged on an earlier agreement to throw the fight and instead knocked out Carpentier in the sixth round.

(Referee Arthur Bernstein, purportedly a party to the fix, initially disqualified Siki after counting Carpentier out, producing a near-riot at the Buffalo Velodrome that was quelled only when Victor Bryer, the head of the French Boxing Federation, entered the ring and overruled the referee to uphold the knockout.)

One keen student of Irish boxing lore, Patrick Myler, has never subscribed to the Carpentier-Siki fix story, but opines that Carpentier was so certain Siki posed no threat that there was no need to arrange the outcome.

But in Gallimore’s film, Benson even supplied details of the alleged fix. According to Benson, Siki was supposed to be obligingly knocked down in the first and second rounds, and then to be counted out in the fourth.

As it happened, Siki was down in the first and was knocked down more convincingly in the third, but that is also the round in which he began to batter Carpentier.

Benson also claims Siki had been promised Carpentier’s end of the purse as well as his own, but after the double-cross was paid neither, creating a cash-flow problem that made Siki more receptive to the fight against McTigue in Dublin.

Watching the Gallimore film had inspired me to write a lengthy treatise on both the McTigue-Siki and Siki-Carpentier fights for TheSweetScience.com, one which produced some interesting feedback along with a note from my esteemed colleague Michael (Wolf Man) Katz in Las Vegas, who passed along details of a 30-year-old conversation which could only fuel the lingering controversy over the latter bout.

In the 1970s, Katz was the sports editor of the International Tribune, and from his base in Paris covered events all across Europe. In Madrid one night, he had a conversation with an elderly Gallic gentleman who claimed to have been Battling Siki's "manager" and provided inside details of the alleged fix.

Contrary to Benson’s assertion that Siki was never paid after double-crossing Carpentier, the old Frenchman told Katz, the money was personally delivered to him, in a paper bag, the night before the fight. It was paid in dollars, because Siki didn’t have a great deal of faith in the future of French currency.

Having received the cash, he raced to find Siki. “I went to a nearby brothel, where I found Siki, in a bed between two (white) prostitutes,” he said. When he began to berate the boxer, reminding him that he was supposed to be fighting for the championship in less than 24 hours, Siki replied “What is the use? I have to lose anyway.” To which the “manager” responded with a resounding “Non!”

“No, you don’t,” he told Siki, “Don’t you see, we already have the money!”

Not long after losing his title to McTigue, Siki also moved to America to box, which he did until 1925, when he was shot in a mugging in Hell’s Kitchen.

The police version – that Siki’s death was the result of a botched robbery – has been the accepted theory for the past 84 years, but on the night he spoke to Katz, the old Frenchman linked Siki’s death to his double-cross of Carpentier and his backers the night.

Alluding to the 1912 murder of middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, who was shot in the back by a man he had cuckholded, the old man nodded knowingly when he spoke of Battling Siki’s demise.

“This,” he told Katz, “was no jealous husband.”