The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity.

The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity. By Andrew M. Kaye. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2004. Pp. [xii], 208. $26.95, ISBN 0-8203-2590-2.)

I found very intriguing Andrew M. Kaye's book, The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity. Theodore "Tiger" Flowers began his boxing career in the 1920s and won the middleweight championship on points at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 26, 1926, against Harry Greb. Flowers avoided humiliating or viciously beating his white opponents. Intellectual problems start with the book's title: Flowers was not a "pussycat" boxer but a very religious man. Also, he had polite ring and public manners in deference to white society, and his behavior followed close to the Victorian mode of his times.

Second, this is a short book with four chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. The first chapter, "Black Prizefighters as Slaves and Free Men," is historical background. Kaye's second chapter, "Jack Johnson, White Hopes, and Battle Royals," covers the seamy side of boxing and shows that in and out of the ring interracial boxing symbolized the psychology of race war in the United States. It appealed to the worst human instincts for blood and racial hatred. Jack Johnson purposely brought out, in Kaye's views, the worst features of this blood sport.

Amazingly, Kaye blames Johnson for racial turmoil and treats the conduct of vicious and violent white racists as normal. Kaye's last two chapters, "Becoming the Georgia Deacon" and "The Whitest Black Man in the Ring," finally deal with the life and career of Tiger Flowers, whose boxing career unraveled in scandal and suspicions with his death in 1927.

Tiger Flowers won over parts of the white South because of his deference to the social conventions of white supremacy. Although Kaye's bibliography included Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994) and Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (New York, 1998), he does not embrace race rebels. This reviewer's book, From Harlem to Hollywood: The Struggle for Racial and Cultural Democracy, 1920-1943 (New York, 1992), on how polite black entertainers used their celebrity for civil rights and singers used their voice for democracy, might be useful to Kaye's thesis.

The author's intellectual dilemma is a result of not fully thinking through his subject. He fast forwards to boxers like Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali. Where is Sugar Ray Robinson? His real unnamed role model for boxing is the polite and disciplined conduct by baseball player Jackie Robinson, a sort of Martin Luther King Jr. of sports.

Kaye notes that for Tiger Flowers's funeral in Atlanta up to seventy-five thousand blacks and whites filed past his coffin, ten thousand crammed the city auditorium for a memorial service, and seventy-five thousand lined the streets for his funeral procession. These numbers meant that whites and blacks were coming together--but on the old principles of white domination rather than in a challenge to white racial dictatorship.

Kaye notes the old and new scholarship on assertive blacks in the public eye, but it is abundantly clear--and he uses these words--that Jack Johnson's "racial brinkmanship" does not appeal to Kaye (or to the white public of the 1920s) because Johnson added fuel to the fire rather than put out racial fires and hatreds (p. 12). But neither did Tiger Flowers, "the Pussycat of Prizefighting," with his polite accommodation to white authoritarianism.

BRUCE M. TYLER

University of Louisville