KEY POINTS:
When a gentle, Northland-born Maori boxer named Herbert Slade faced world heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan in a New York boxing ring in 1883, he made history for two reasons.
Slade, technically inept and of a passive disposition, lasted fewer than three rounds against Sullivan. Nevertheless, he was the first New Zealand-born boxer to contest the world heavyweight title and in doing so made history.
Historian Lydia Monin's recently published biography of Tom Heeney attracted considerable publicity, largely on a mistaken belief that Heeney is the only New Zealand-born boxer to contest the heavyweight championship (19th-century boxer Bob Fitzsimmons was born in England and David Tua in Samoa).
But 45 years before Heeney's unsuccessful 1928 tilt at Gene Tunney, Slade had his own crack at the title.
His appearance in that fight was remarkable for another reason: he was the subject of a huge promotional campaign in the United States at a time when the power of advertising, then in its infancy, was unheard of.
The marketing genius behind the hype was boxing promoter Richard K. Fox, who whipped up a fervour with massive promotion of the "Australian Maori half-breed".
Fox, publisher of the New York-based and widely read illustrated weekly The Police Gazette, had fallen out with Sullivan and was convinced, on hearsay, that the somewhat timid New Zealander was a ferocious, South Sea savage who would beat the champion.
The promotional hype meant that on the night of the fight, Madison Square Garden was sold out and thousands more waited in the streets to hear the outcome.
Such was the fervour generated, Sullivan earned US$14,000, a purse he was never again to match in his subsequent nine years in the ring during which his most famous bouts occurred.
It was not until the Jack Dempsey era four decades later that the American public were to be similarly beguiled by such news-media hyping, by now compounded by the advent of radio and the sophistication of the advertising industry.
It reached its zenith with the 1926 Dempsey-Tunney fight and descended into mass hysteria, generated by the great promoter Tex Rickard.
While it is true that newspaper reporters across the US were to some extent beguiled by Rickard's puffery, the reporters were nevertheless actively encouraged by their publisher bosses, who were quick to observe the sharp increase in sales as the hype fed off itself.
When the great Slade fight came, 130,000 spectators attended the fight in Philadelphia. Throughout the US, the public gathered to listen to the broadcast.
In Jacksonville, a sign-language exponent stood on a stage in the city centre to convey the round-by-round proceedings to the city's deaf. US President Calvin Coolidge ordered radios to be supplied to all veterans' hospitals.
Perhaps the most astonishing reflection of the bout's fascination was the delaying of executions so the condemned could learn the result before their demise.
Philadelphia's Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Lutheran clergymen joined forces to decry the "sophistry" of promoting "a bloody contest in which fighters are paid to disfigure one another". Their plea fell on deaf ears, not least with Catholic clergy, who were more concerned with obtaining a ticket.
Illuminated by 157 floodlights, the fight took place in the open air under pounding rain, drenching all in attendance.
Nearly every American newspaper published a special pre- and post-fight edition.
The New York Daily News sold an astonishing 1.5 million pre-fight copies.
As the Sullivan/Slade fight lasted less than three rounds, some boxing historians don't acknowledge the contest as a title fight.
Regardless, it was heavily promoted as a championship contest, and Sullivan devoted half a chapter to the Slade bout in his 1892 autobiography.
And while Slade will never be recorded as one of our great sporting figures, he nevertheless commands a place in social history as the first widely ballyhooed sporting figure.
Sir Robert Jones is a former New Zealand Universities boxing champion and university blue. He is an avid boxing historian, with a collection of more than 3000 boxing books.
