Boxing
Events
- 4 July — Battling Nelson recovers his World Lightweight Championship from Joe Gans with a 17th round knockout at Colma, California
- World Middleweight Champion Stanley Ketchel loses his title on 7 September to Billy Papke by a 12th round technical knockout at Vernon, California, but regains it on 26 November at Colma, California, where he knocks out Papke in the 11th round
- October – Mike "Twin" Sullivan vacates the World Welterweight Championship which remains unresolved until 1914
- 26 December — Jack Johnson becomes the first African American World Heavyweight Champion by defeating Tommy Burns at Sydney, Australia. Johnson holds the title until 1915.
Lineal world champions
- World Heavyweight Championship – Tommy Burns → Jack Johnson
- World Light Heavyweight Championship – vacant
- World Middleweight Championship – Stanley Ketchel → Billy Papke → Stanley Ketchel
- World Welterweight Championship – Mike "Twin" Sullivan → vacant
- World Lightweight Championship – Joe Gans → Battling Nelson
- World Featherweight Championship – Abe Attell
- World Bantamweight Championship – Jimmy Walsh
Read more about this topic: 1908 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word boxing:
“... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)