T.R. and Boxing at the White House

Theodore Roosevelt did not merely host the occasional boxing match at the White House. He maintained an active sparring routine. Roosevelt had boxed since his Harvard days as part of his lifelong effort to overcome the frailties of childhood. As president, he regularly sparred with military aides, young officers, and accomplished amateurs in a gym set up at the mansion where president Trump has invited guests to watch a set of UFC fights. Though Roosevelt preferred not to appear in public with black eyes or a swollen nose, he expected no special treatment in the ring and insisted that opponents hit him honestly.

The sport for Roosevelt, like all sport, was about character as much as physical fitness.

In late 1904, during a bout with Captain Daniel T. Moore, a thirty-one-year-old Army artillery officer, Roosevelt suffered a blow to his left eye. The punch caused severe retinal damage. Roosevelt said little about the injury, but over the following years the vision steadily deteriorated until the eye was effectively blind.

What followed revealed something about Roosevelt’s character. He never publicly dwelled on the impairment and apparently never informed Moore of its lasting consequences. Roosevelt seems to have understood the burden the younger officer might carry if he learned he had cost the president the use of an eye.

In his 1913 autobiography, Roosevelt described the injury, attributing it only to a sparring match with an artillery captain. Reading the account, Moore realized he had been the man in the ring. He later remarked, “Could you ask for any better proof of the man’s sportsmanship than the fact that he never told me what I had done to him?”