Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
Was gifted this card yesterday, which was very exciting. I have poured a ton of time into trying to decipher N332 and researching it, and little time collecting it as a set as a complete set is effectively impossible and the images have faded so much on most of the cards. Thompson is only my second N332 I actually own.
Mervine Thompson is a guy I don’t know anything about. He is credited as beating Pat Killen in modern sources, but apparently "won" after Killen was DQ’d when his fans stormed the ring after he knocked Thompson down several times and period sources mostly say Mervine lost. I am unable to find another picture of him, only several copies of this photograph on his N332 card. Thompson is described as black in several sources I found, which I did not guess from the picture. An 1895 supplement describes him as “more powerful and more muscular than any of the colored pugilists since 1810”, which seems very difficult to correlate to his ring record or actual performance when Godfrey and Jackson had already had their primes. I always have a fun time with cards of the ‘randoms’ as it gives me a research project and fleshes out the boxing world beyond the bigger names of the time. “The Cleveland Thunderbolt” is an awesome nickname for a prize fighter.
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He does have a small section in Nat Fleischer's 1st "Black Dynamite" volume, but with very little useful information. It does mention he had a better reputation as a wrestler and general athlete, then as a boxer, but not really any info to back that up either.