2006, B&H, Seattle Washington, 429 pages

The dust cover of this book is a treasure in and of itself, in which Jack Dempsey is quoted speaking of Langford being the one fighter he feared and of Jack Johnson—the actual greatest—saying of Langford, “I don’t want to fight that little smoke. He’s got a chance to win against anyone in the world. I’m the first black champion and I’m going to be the last.”

The man Johnson was speaking of stood only 5’ 7” tall and owns at least 117 KOs, probably more. Langford was a working class black fighter who campaigned in a time when the sport of boxing was divided by a floating “color line.” Throughout the text Clay Moyle does a superb job of telling Sam’s story. He gives Sam’s view of the world, rather than use Sam as a lens. Coming to the very sensible conclusion that Sam was telling the truth when he said—old, blind and broke—that he was content with his life, the author goes on tell the remarkable tale of the most feared man in his sport, who began his career looking for janitorial work to feed himself and the small yellow dog he had adopted as he wandered New England looking for work.

The first 25 pages of Moyle’s book offers rare insights into the African American culture of Nova Scotia, Canada. These rural folk were descendents of 2,000 escaped black slaves who fought on the British side in the American Revolution and were evacuated to Nova Scotia by Sir Henry Clinton in 1783. His grandfather escaped from a New Jersey master in a stolen boat. The author notes that sales f slaves were known to occur in Nova Scotia into the late 1900s. Like the runaway slave culture that gave us Joe Frazier and other hard men, the escaped slaves in Nova Scotia brought with them a hard work ethic and a violent domestic disposition. Sam was literally driven from home by his father’s beatings.

The other aspect of workplace violence tied to America’s slave plantation origins that crops up in the narratives of Frederick Douglas and Solomon Northup, and in any interview a writer of the last century was likely to have with a working class man of any race ,was casual, ritual violence on the job. As a working class man in Baltimore I have seen the last of casual workplace violence which men like Sam grew up with and in his case grew to thrive on. Two things unite most of the black men I worked with over the years, the fact that they had been whipped with straps, paddled with shoes and beaten with fists by parents as a child and also the belief that two men who have even the slightest difference on the job may honorably settle that difference in an impromptu prizefight [one of which I refereed] with no hard feelings afterward.

This is what led Sam to boxing. As a boy he became the champion of numerous worksites and was fired for injuring the other employees. Eventually landing job in a bar, at 15 and 125 pounds, he beats the local brawling champion—an Irishman of 170 pounds—in a standup fight to collect the bar tab. From here o out we are into boxing history, which Clay Moyle excels in relating at the personal level. The first portion of this book is a valuable insight into the plight of children and young men in a society that has no ethos beyond material acquisition and accumulation. Despite this walking dead society men like Sam were able to—for a decade or perhaps three—find a niche for themselves as reprising the ancient role of the hero, an opportunity lost to those accepted by the cult of materialism that is modernity, the ethos that was the guiding morality of English America from the foundation of its first doomed plantation in 1585, to this one massive, plantation of the mind, where complaisance trumps productivity as an ethical value.