From New York to Tashkent: How an American Champion Became a Soviet Boxing Legend

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

This story sounds so fantastic that it's hard to believe in its reality. American Lightweight Champion Sydney Jackson, who was called the hope of the nation and one of the most talented and promising boxers, moved to the USSR, took up coaching work and raised dozens of champions. The American Jew became a Soviet citizen and the founder of the Uzbek boxing school, considered one of the strongest in the world. And this was facilitated by a fatal coincidence of circumstances that became fateful for Sydney …

Sydney Jackson was born in New York in 1886 to a poor Jewish family. When he was 6 years old, he lost his father. At the age of 12, the boy started boxing, and at 18 he was already a professional. Sydney understood that boxing was his only opportunity to earn money to support his family. He soon became the US Lightweight Champion, and the newspapers called him "America's future glory" and "the new flourishing of the sport." In 1914, Sydney Jackson, along with other athletes, went to England for demonstration performances. In one of the fights, he injured his finger and, expecting recovery, succumbed to the persuasion of a teammate to go to the Russian Empire - the first boxing sections opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and foreign athletes were invited to perform.

When it was time to go back, the First World War broke out and the western direction was closed. There was only a way through Afghanistan. In Tashkent, Sydney and his friend Frank were expecting money transfers from their homeland, but only Frank managed to get out - the Jackson family was in poverty and could not help him. For a long time he came to the post office every day, but he did not wait for translation and travel documents. He had to stay in Uzbekistan, and he himself could not imagine that this temporary refuge would become his second homeland.

At first, Sydney worked in a garment factory, took Russian lessons, and in return taught boxing and wrestling. Meanwhile, the Civil War began, and the boxer turned to the military commandant of Tashkent Yakimenko with a request to issue him new documents and enroll him as a volunteer in the army. So the American athlete became a fighter of the international detachment on the Transcaspian front.

After the war, Sydney Jackson (or Jackson, or even Jackson, as the newspapers wrote at that time) organized a boxing section in Tashkent and started coaching. Together with the pupils, according to his drawings, he assembled all the parts of the ring, pears and gloves were also homemade. The athlete was preparing his team for the Olympics when in 1921 the US Ambassador handed him his travel documents. A few years ago, a boxer dreamed of this moment, but now he replied: "".

Since the 1930s. and until the end of his life, the boxer was engaged in coaching and raised dozens of champions in the USSR. In addition, he became an English teacher at the Tashkent Institute of Foreign Languages. Until the age of 70, Sydney himself was engaged during training with "Jacksonians", as his students called themselves. The Uzbek boxing school created by him was considered one of the strongest in the world.

His pupils have achieved outstanding success not only in the field of sports: four of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, five - doctors of science, thirty - candidates of science. All of them believed that they had received training for life in the "school of Sid's grandfather." When Sydney Jackson, one of the first in the USSR, was awarded the badge of the Honored Trainer, the chairman of the meeting joked: “I figured out who you can be compared with in training scientific personnel. Only with Academician Landau! " Twice the boxer was under the threat of arrest, like his compatriots accused of espionage, but his student, who at that time became the deputy chairman of the KGB of the republic, saved him.

All his life, the boxer dreamed of visiting his homeland and meeting with his family. Only in 1958 did his sister Rose manage to visit him in the USSR. She brought him an invitation to the United States, but the boxer's requests for an exit visa were rejected. The second time his sister came to him was in 1964, and this time he managed to get permission to leave. However, at that time, the elderly athlete was already seriously ill and physically could not leave the USSR. Three months before his 80th birthday, Sydney Jackson died of stomach cancer.

Once, having remained in Uzbekistan against his will, he became a legend of Soviet boxing, and in the photographs the American cannot be distinguished from other athletes of the USSR: a unique collection of photographs of Soviet athletes from the 1920s to the 1930s.