Battling Siki Print, Vintage Boxing Poster, Senegal Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

BATTLING SIKI — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Battling Siki, 1922-1925.

He was born Amadou Fall in Saint-Louis, Senegal, around 1897. He fought in the French army in the First World War and was decorated for bravery. Then he became a boxer in France, under the name Battling Siki.

On 24 September 1922 in Paris he fought Georges Carpentier for the world light heavyweight title. Carpentier was the most popular athlete in France, a war hero and a matinee idol.

The widely reported understanding beforehand was that Siki would lose, and that the fight would be a showcase. Accounts differ on whether Siki agreed to it. What is not disputed is what happened in the ring.

After absorbing the early rounds he stopped cooperating, and in the sixth he knocked Carpentier out.

The referee initially disqualified Siki for tripping. The crowd, which had come to see Carpentier win, objected so loudly at the injustice that the decision was reversed and the knockout stood.

He was the first African world champion in the history of boxing.

Paris then spent three years unable to decide what to do with him. He was written about as a curiosity, described in the press in terms that were openly racist, and followed around the boulevards where he walked a lion cub on a lead and wore expensive suits and refused to behave the way a colonial subject was supposed to behave.

He defended the title in Dublin on Saint Patrick's Day 1923, against Mike McTigue, in a city under martial law during the civil war. He lost on points, in a decision almost nobody outside Ireland accepted.

He moved to the United States, fought often, drank heavily, and was shot dead in Hell's Kitchen in New York on 15 December 1925. He was around twenty-eight. The killing was never solved.

He was buried in a pauper's plot on Long Island. In 1993 his remains were returned to Senegal.

Two things are worth holding on to. The first is that his war record was real: he served in the French army through the First World War and came out of it decorated, which is not a footnote in a country that had just lost a generation. The second is that the French press of the period wrote about him in terms no publication would print today, and that this was the ordinary register, not the extreme.

After Dublin, Mike McTigue avoided a rematch. Siki never got another title fight.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.