Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in The 1920s Book

Louis Mbarick Fall, better known by his nom de guerre of "Battling Siki," was the first boxing champion to hail from sub-Saharan Africa. In the time between the racial maelstrom kicked up in the wake of Jack Johnson's reign as heavyweight champion, and the stabilizing influence of Joe "the Brown Bomber," Louis on America's riot-raw racial psyche, Siki was the black athlete who both vexed and fascinated the collective mind of the (mostly white) sporting public the most.

Siki's legend was built and garlanded with all the (already) tired tropes one would expect to surround an African fighter in this time (lots of reports focused on his alleged savagery, or, even worse, his being a potential walking, talking, Missing Link), as well as the usual squid ink journalists expended to sell a fight by weaving a web of lies that wasn't necessarily racist but just mendacious.

Peter Benson's "Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s" does a good job dispelling many of the lingering myths, half-truths, and legends that have accrued to the man's name. Although the author draws parallels to such modern fighters as Ricardo Mayorga (rightly in my opinion) and Manny Pacquiao (wrongly in my opinion) the man whose form Benson delineates strikes me as most resembling Chris "Simply the Best" Eubank or perhaps the ill-starred Emile Griffith. Siki comes off in the book, when he speaks, as an odd dandy with a gentle spirit but an occasional wicked wit and a bit of a mean streak (it helps in boxing). In short, like most humans, the man depicted is a paradox and a roiling cauldron of competing forces battling for ownership of his soul (to say nothing of the managers and hangers-on battling for a piece of his purses).

Battling Siki was a hard puncher in the ring, a bit lackadaisical in his training regimen outside the ring, and a truly quixotic Frenchman who kept a menagerie of exotic pets (though not as many as reported). He was a man who would shower passersby with cash when the whim hit him. He fought with distinction in the Great War, staked his flag in Gotham and defied the edicts of gangsters even under the threat of penalty of death, and when he toured for parts south he refused to be cajoled from restaurants or hotels under Jim Crow law, once again even though he knew such actions could leave him dead and depending from a tree branch like the "Strange Fruit" of which Billy Holiday sang.

The book is, ultimately, a solid corrective to a lot of nonsense written about a very good boxer who, as Marvin Hagler would have it, was at a disadvantage because he was black and he was good.

I'm left with the feeling that a full picture of the man is still somewhat occluded. Reading "Battling Siki" was a bit like straining one's eyes to see through the glass frame of a water-damaged ambrotype. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, for the mystery to abide and for the various Siki's to continue battling it out to see which one stays lodged longest in the imagination of the boxing historians. Recommended, though I don't think Benson's work will be the best, the last, or the definitive book, when all is said and done.