Show description

We didn’t need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver. We didn’t require child-safety caps on our medicines. ”11 The Cold War reawakened the cultural icon of the armed father-protector. The Soviet threat could not be removed by a simple military invasion or a bombing run. Mutual atomic weaponry had ended that possibility. So a Chapter 2. The Regular Friday Coa xial Bloodbath 25 revitalized emblem of Americana, the Western gunslinger, returned. Like the boxer, the gunslinger spoke to a new desire for a purer moral world of redemption through straightforward violence.

There are also Boxing News shows on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, not to mention a good deal of Sports News broadcasts throughout the week that might also cover boxing. 26 With only three major national networks (and one lesser one, for a time) and programming that did not carry twenty-four hours a day, boxing wasn’t merely one of countless entertainment options. It was one of a few. Low production costs (around twenty-five hundred dollars per program in the early years)27 and easy translation to the small screen also helped.

Gladiators of the Age of Contentment watch the fights secretly in their room. They hid the set in a crawl space, waiting for Friday night. A young Dick Cheney watched the show with other neighborhood families on a new TV at a neighbor’s house in College View, Nebraska, in 1949. Actor Burt Lancaster enjoyed the show for “the ambiance of the thing,” pleased at how it reflected “the seamy underbelly” of sports. ”18 Perhaps it is in the small, simple memories, mostly left unwritten, that one finds the show’s truest significance.