Transcript
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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms apply. For more information, visit americanexpress.com withamx welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a.
Aaron Manke (0:41)
Production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.
Narrator (0:47)
Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Aaron Manke (1:10)
Boxing has always attracted big and strange personalities who use the sport as performance art, becoming what we might call professional trolls. Comedian Andy Kaufman used to challenge random women to box with him in the ring before pro wrestler Jerry Lawler put him in a neck brace. But all these modern performance artist boxers were preceded by an even stranger character, one who may have just been the first professional boxing troll. Born in 1887, Arthur Craven liked to introduce himself as, and this is the quote, the world's shortest haired poet, boxer, hotel rat, muleteer, snake charmer, chauffeur, ailurophile, gold prospector, grandson of the queen's chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde. Yeah, put that one on a tombstone. Oh, and if you're wondering what an ailurophile is, it's someone who loves cats. Arthur grew up in Switzerland, but always found life there to be a little too constricting. He traveled around Europe and became a boxer. He was always a big man, and so the sport suited him. But even trading blows in the ring wasn't exciting enough for him. He liked to add a bit of theater to his matches by giving speeches on art, trash talking the other boxers and threatening suicide, firing a gun into the air and throwing his briefcase at the audience. In other words, he liked to troll the crowd. It's like he only ever felt alive if everyone in the room hated him. He took this to a new extreme once he arrived in Spain, where he arranged a match with world champion boxer Jack Johnson. Some claim the match was rigged from the start to earn both boxers a bunch of money, and others claim that Arthur was just out of his depth. Either way, the match ultimately resulted in Arthur being knocked out in the sixth round. This caused such an Uproar that the crowd rioted and Arthur had to escape out the side of the venue. He fled to New York, where he seemed to step away from boxing, instead focusing on his performance art. He continued to troll, writing articles and making speeches where he insulted just about every other artist he could think of, whether they were a poet, painter, actor or otherwise. He was even arrested once for exposing himself on stage again, anything to get a rise out of people. But as much as Arthur seemed to like to antagonize his fellow human beings, he did have a soft spot for the poet Mina Loy. She too had left Europe after being dissatisfied with life there. And although she didn't like Arthur when they first met, she soon fell for him. He had a passion for life and a fearlessness that endeared him to her. They decided to move to Mexico in late 1917, as Arthur was always worried that one allied country or another would try to draft him into the Great War. The boxer, poet, troll seemed to finally calm down, content to teach boxing lessons and pass his days with Mina. They got married, and soon she became pregnant with a daughter. But life in Mexico was hard, and the couple struggled to make ends meet. They heard that they could live more affordably in Buenos Aires, but they could only afford to buy passage there for Mina. So going, that's what they did. And in late 1918, Arthur decided to go there ahead of her by traveling with a friend in an old rowboat. It's maybe not the best plan to try to sail the length of South America in such a small vessel. And maybe this was yet another one of Arthur's strange performance art stunts. It turned out to be his last too, because after Mina waved goodbye to him on the dock, she never saw him again. Now, conventional wisdom would say that he drowned, right? Although there have been theories over the years that he was merely escaping responsibility and started a new life elsewhere. If Mina believed this, she didn't hold it against him, though. Even after his disappearance, she claimed that her happiest years were the ones she spent with him. She gave birth to their daughter the following year. In 1919. Arthur left behind a curious legacy of trolling audiences with a body of work that mostly consisted of insulting diatribes against other artists. And as despicable as he could be at times, he set a bold example of living life to the fullest and refusing to bow to the expectations of others. He had no fear. An endless curiosity.