Sydney, 26 December 1909: The Lang–Fitzsimmons Fight

In the sweltering morning heat of Boxing Day 1909, thousands of Sydneysiders climbed aboard the King Street trams, which were leaving at the rate of one a minute, and rode out to the Stadium at Rushcutters Bay. They were going to witness a major international spectacle, the heavyweight title fight between ‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons and Bill Lang. Following his brief early career in Australia, Fitzsimmons had been taken to the United States by boxing promoter Larry Foley and became the first man in ring history to win three world titles. At his peak, he was said to have had ‘a mind like electricity and a punch as hard as a rivet gun.’ Since the 1890s, boxing had become not only a very popular form of urban entertainment, but also a common subject of the new actuality films. The Veriscope Company's The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was one of the earliest of them, premiering at New York's Academy of Music in May 1897. Around one hundred minutes long and accompanied by a lecturer's commentary and vaudeville acts, the film made up one of the first full-length entertainment programmes to feature moving pictures.

The promoter of the Sydney fight, Hugh D. McIntosh, was another Australian who had won international celebrity. Born in Sydney in 1876, he began as a chorus boy at the Tivoli and promoted his first boxing match between two visiting Afro-Americans in 1901.