The Golden Age of Boxing
Recalling the sport's epic history in Louisiana high schools
In 1948 the brothers Gascon, Tommy, and Donald, moved with their family up river from Plaquemine to Port Allen, where their father got a new job. There was only one problem: Port Allen didn’t have a boxing team. As a junior with some big wins, Donald was invested in the sport. But Tommy, a senior, was a three-time state champion. Quitting was unthinkable.
So, the boys hatched a plan. Every weekday morning, they would rise early, walk to where the ferry landing met Highway 1, stand out in front of the local bakery, and hitchhike to school.
“We never were late for a day of school,” said the younger Gascon, now eighty-nine. “We made it every day.”
That decision proved fortuitous. Tommy won state for the fourth and final time and earned a scholarship to Louisiana State University (LSU). It was the same year (1949) the Tigers took their only national championship in boxing. The next year, Donald joined the team. LSU finished undefeated for the second straight season. Two years later, their coach, James T. “Jim” Owen, was invited to coach the American team at the Olympics in Helsinki, a team much celebrated for obliterating the competition and taking five golds.
Meanwhile, Plaquemine High School continued to fill its gym on Friday nights. Then, after a slow decline, in 1958, it all shut down. Once a rival to football for Louisiana’s favorite sport, boxing was ultimately deemed too dangerous, disappointing the fighters and fans alike. From that point forward, competitive high school and college boxing became a relic of another era, like horse-drawn buggies and telegrams.
On a recent morning, I sat in Donald Gascon’s kitchen and sipped coffee while he dazzled me with stories. He allowed me to rummage through yellowed newspaper clippings, black and white photos, and other ephemera from his boxing days. On the wall hung a framed certificate honoring his induction to the Louisiana High School Boxing Hall of Fame. (Tommy, another Hall of Famer, passed away in 2006, after succumbing to cancer at seventy-five.)
The sport may have lost its luster in Louisiana, but the boxers never forgot. One night, two decades after the last bell rang, two boxing alumni from Crowley were at a bar in Texas when they ran into another pair of ex-fighters from a rival school. No longer foes, the men relished the chance encounter and got to talking about the good old days. After a few beers, they decided they’d organize a rendezvous. It was high time. They looked through old yearbooks, made some calls, compiled a mailing list and sent out invitations. In August 1978, the first of many Louisiana State Boxing Reunions was held in Lafayette. Purportedly, over five hundred people showed up.
Despite the great turnout, the reunion didn’t happen again until 1989. In the program that year, the event promised to “stoke the fires of the past and renew the fraternity created by past and current association.” Bobby Freeman Sr., the Lieutenant Governor from 1980 to 1988, who boxed in high school and at LSU, gave a speech titled “What Boxing Has Done For Me.” Floyd East, a boxer-turned-boxing referee, shared some choice words. The local band Jamie Berzas and the Cajun Tradition serenaded a lively dance.
After that, the boxers met every few years, the location always changing: Crowley, Mamou, Ville Platte, and other towns, mostly in the Southwestern part of the state, where boxing’s heyday was most prominent. These were large, festive, two-day bashes, with plenty of food and live music, a perfect forum in which to fraternize and reminisce. The organizing responsibilities rotated between alumni groups. The men formed committees, found sponsors, printed commemorative programs. A real culture developed.
“Even the wives loved coming to those reunions,” Gascon recalled. “My wife told me the first time she went to the reunion, she said, ‘That was the most fun I’ve ever had, watching you guys stand around telling lies about each other. None of you ever lost a fight.’”
Things went on that way for more than twenty years—the boxers’ tight-knit but enclosed world garnering little attention from anyone who wasn’t already a part of it. But in 2008, Don Landry attended the eleventh reunion, and left with a desire to share this microculture with the world.
[Read Ed Cullen's essay An Ode to Old Sportswriting here.]
A one-time boxer from Lafayette, Landry had just moved back to Louisiana from Florida at the conclusion of a successful career in collegiate and professional sports. His resume included head basketball coach of Nicholls State from 1966 to 1979 and athletic director until 1987, serving as commissioner of the Sunshine State Conference, among other executive positions. Now retired, with more time on his hands, Landry set out to interview dozens of former boxers. He pored over microfilm and other documents, and eventually compiled enough material for a book. Boxing: Louisiana’s Forgotten Sport appeared in print in 2011, a self-published volume that presented the notable names and stats of what he called “Louisiana’s Golden Age of Boxing”.
“Even the wives loved coming to those reunions,” Gascon recalled. “My wife told me the first time she went to the reunion, she said, ‘That was the most fun I’ve ever had, watching you guys stand around telling lies about each other. None of you ever lost a fight.’”
Louisiana might have never embraced competitive high school boxing if it weren’t for the efforts of Army Lieutenant (later Colonel) Francis G. Brink, who Landry calls “the father of Louisiana High School Boxing.” In 1929, Tulane and LSU founded programs, and the Tigers hired Brink as coach. Brink knew, according to Landry, that without high school boxing there was little chance to build a solid college team. Brink wanted to create a “feeder system” in other words, and so he traveled from town to town pitching a statewide tournament, convincing several schools to sign on and form teams.
The first tournament took place on LSU campus in April 1931. “Brink organized the event, set the weight classes, established tournament rules, hired officials, prepared the Gym Armory, and promoted the tournament,” Landry writes. Over the next few years, dozens of schools formed boxing programs. According to Landry, Plaquemine dominated the sport in the 1930s and ‘40s, and New Iberia in the 1950s.
For the youngsters, the sport offered an entirely new athletic experience, especially for those “too light to play football or too short to play basketball,” as Landry writes. Case in point: Donald Gascon boxed at ninety pounds his freshmen year. Boxing gave the boys self-respect. It gave them respect from their neighbors and peers. And, of course, it gave them discipline and strength. It’s no surprise that so many of the boxers wound up in the service. Donald Gascon, for example, left LSU shortly after he began to join the National Guard.
After two cups of coffee, Gascon drove me to Plaquemine to visit the Louisiana High School Boxing Hall of Fame. The exhibit, also Landry's handiwork, is housed at the Iberville Museum. Placards there explain all of this history, and there are numerous artifacts: original boxing gloves, robes, and trunks, photographs of the boxers striking their fiercest pose. The crown jewel is the actual bell used in bouts at Plaquemine High.
The museum was chosen, firstly, because it was interested, but more to the point: because the Plaquemine Green Devils won the most state championships of any Louisiana school, nine of them, from 1939 to 1949.
The day before we arrived, an ex-boxer from New Iberia had stopped by and handed off a photo album to the museum’s curator, Meghan Sylvester, inviting her to add it to the collection. The album was full of photos from the reunions over the years. Smiling, Gascon flipped through the pages and rattled off names.
The Hall of Fame itself was a product of those reunions, too. In 2013, the Louisiana High School Boxing Association was established, its purpose to hold ceremonies and induct members into the Hall of Fame. Gascon was one of fifteen board members. The group met in an old cockfighting ring in Sunset, Louisiana, Landry told me by phone. The site was ideal, he said, a ring in the middle with seating around it. “We were able to get that facility free of charge.”
On our tour of Plaquemine, Gascon showed me his old haunts: the little house where he grew up, the junkyard (now gone) where he and his brother played, the grocery store (permanently closed) where they’d thumb rides back to Port Allen after school. We passed by the café where, for decades, boxing alumni met once a month to shoot the bull; a local get-together to tide them over until the statewide reunions they so looked forward to.
We finally made it to Plaquemine High, a dark red brick structure, and drove around back to take a look at the very same gym that once hosted the fights. The building is in impeccable shape. It was Election Day, and the gym served as a polling site. Townsfolk were showing up one by one to vote.
“Boy, they used to pack that thing in,” Gascon said with a nod toward the gym.
He has an original photo of a boxing match there, a wide-angle view of a district tournament in 1942, according to a handwritten caption at the top. It’s the same photo that graces the cover of Landry’s book. In the center of the ring, two boys are going at each other, while a ref stands close, keeping careful watch. Above them hangs a large floodlight that resembles an upside down terra cotta pot. The image is dynamic, vivid, likely a professional job. You can almost hear the ding ding ding of the bell, almost smell the talcum powder wafting off the gloves. The crowd sits ringside in wooden folding chairs, or on bleachers further back. The men wear jackets and ties, the women dresses. They are animated, like the boxers. All eyes are on the action. A few men lean in, perhaps with secret bets on the line.
Gascon said that at the season’s end, the ring broke down in pieces and was stored beneath the stage to make way for basketball—which, he said, didn’t amount to much back then. In Plaquemine, boxing was king.
“A lot of people said boxing was a dangerous sport,” Gascon said. “You want to see danger? Go out here at LSU and watch one of those football games. That’s dangerous. That’s violence.”
“Everyone who was associated with boxing,” he continued, “from the boxers on up through to the coaches, the officials, the referees, the judges . . . took very special pains to try to make sure that no kid got hurt . . . Sportsmanship at that time was promoted vigorously.”
In 1950, the state mandated that boxers wear protective headgear. The public wasn’t convinced enough was done to ensure the sport was safe. They associated it with the undeniably brutal professional fights. Landry quotes the sports columnist Bud Montet, in 1957, in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate: “To keep the sport going the group must educate coaches, fans, and school officials that boxing is a sport, not a back alley brawl.”
But by then it was too late. Boxing had been in decline across the state, across the country, since World War II. In Louisiana, only a few programs remained. The 1958 season in Louisiana would be the last.
Amateur boxing has made a comeback in recent decades. In 1979, the United States Amateur Boxing Federation was founded (later changing its name to USA Boxing), and is overseen by the United States Olympic Committee and the International Boxing Association. In 1993, the organization officially allowed women to participate, and since that time, boxing has only gained popularity for women and girls.
“Everyone who was associated with boxing,” Gascon continued, “from the boxers on up through to the coaches, the officials, the referees, the judges . . . took very special pains to try to make sure that no kid got hurt . . . Sportsmanship at that time was promoted vigorously.”
In 2019, Lake Charles hosted the USA Boxing Olympic Team Trials. And the next year, USA Boxing’s nine-day National Championships were scheduled to take place in Shreveport. It was postponed due to the pandemic until the following March, and when it did finally happen, it was the organization’s largest tournament ever, according to the Shreveport-Bossier Sports Commission, bringing an estimated $3.9 million to the state. The tournament enthusiastically returned to Shreveport this past December.
It’s a different sport now—more regulated, more diverse—and certainly of a different time. I asked Gascon if he still watched boxing, and he said he did on occasion, a bout here and there on TV. “I actually like the Mexican fighters,” he said. “Those guys are really good. They go into the boxing ring for business. They go from bell to bell.”
For him, it was always about good sportsmanship. It was never about the fame. He just enjoys a good, clean, and honest fight.
See the Louisiana Boxing Hall of Fame exhibition, curated by Landry, at the Iberville Museum in Plaquemine, Louisiana. ibervillemuseum.org.