Donald Trump is throwing himself a huge 80th birthday party on Sunday with a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, but he’ll be a mere spectator. Nearly 120 years ago, another brash New Yorker turned president took a much more hands-on approach to sparring at the White House, when Theodore Roosevelt lost sight in his left eye during a 1905 boxing match there.
Roosevelt, the 26th American president, made the revelation in 1917, eight years after leaving the White House.
“When I was president I used to box with one of my aides, a young captain in the artillery,” he recounted in a meeting with reporters in Stamford, Connecticut. “One day he cross-countered me and broke a blood vessel in my left eye. I don’t know whether this is known, but I never have been able to see out of that eye since. I thought that as only one good eye was left me I would not box any longer.”
Roosevelt had staged boxing matches dating back to his time as governor of New York. His final fight took place in 1908, his last full year in the White House. He suffered a detached retina, which ultimately caused blindness in the left eye.
The late John Gable, who served as executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Oyster Bay, New York, said in a 2002 interview that Roosevelt’s physicians put a stop to his fighting after that harrowing experience. As the former president wrote in his autobiography, as a result of the injury, “I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling.”
He described how the blow “smashed the little blood-vessels”.
“Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot,” Roosevelt wrote. “Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.”
The “elderly” Roosevelt was only about 50 when he stopped boxing.
As the New York Times reported in a 1917 story: “Weighing 202 pounds and with a waist measure of 42½ inches Colonel Roosevelt received newspaper reporters and posed for moving picture photographers this afternoon at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm in North Stamford Avenue. In the course of an interview which he gave he revealed the interesting fact that while boxing in the White House with a young artillery officer, the latter by a blow broke a blood vessel in the president’s left eye and he had been blind in that eye ever since.”
According to Gable, back when he suffered the injury, the president told only a handful of confidantes about how serious it was – in part to protect the identity of the man who dealt the fateful punch.
That man turned out to be Lt Col Dan Tyler Moore. Moore only realized he had caused the president’s injury when Roosevelt made the remark in 1917, speaking at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm, which appeared to be a health spa.
“But could you ask for any better proof of the man’s sportsmanship,” Moore said, “than the fact that he never told me what I had done to him, never told anybody else that I know of – at least, it never got around to me till I saw in the papers the other day – that he had said that he lost the sight of his eye while boxing with a captain of artillery who was his aide. He didn’t name anybody then, but I knew that he must have meant me, for I happen to have been the only boxing aide he had who was in the artillery.”
Roosevelt had ascended to the presidency at the age of 42 following the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, becoming the youngest person to serve in the role. (John F Kennedy was the youngest elected president, at the age of 43, in 1960).
Trump, by contrast, became the oldest to take the oath of office when he returned to the White House last year.
Roosevelt, a politician who was famously physically active, had begun the boxing tradition in Albany, when he was the governor of New York. Before that, he had boxed intramural competitions as an undergraduate at Harvard, in the light heavyweight category.
It’s clear that Trump has no interest in following in Roosevelt’s footsteps. On a recent episode of the Pod Force One podcast, host Miranda Devine referenced TR’s tradition, and asked Trump: “Are you planning to get into the cage?”
“We’ll have to think about that,” Trump replied. “It sounds like not a good idea.”
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Frederic J Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book on 1970s baseball.
