Tommy Rawson

East Boston Fighter

Thomas Rawson was born in East Boston on December 10, 1908, into a family of boxers. His father, a master electrician who also boxed, knew the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. Tommy started boxing at twelve, working a day job, going to night school and training at St. Joseph's gym in Bowdoin Square, a place better known as the “Bucket o' Blood.”

He became one of the best amateurs in the country. In 1929 he won the national amateur junior lightweight championship, and by his own count he won 223 of his 227 amateur bouts. “The four decisions that I lost,” he later said, “I beat those fellas afterwards.”

Rawson turned professional and fought for eleven years, losing only a handful of bouts, and in 1936 he won the New England professional lightweight championship. He retired from the ring in 1941.

Sixty Years at Harvard

The year he hung up his gloves, Rawson came to Harvard as coach of the boxing team. When the NCAA ended intercollegiate boxing in 1961 and the team became the Harvard Boxing Club, he stayed on, coaching the club and its famous Thursday-night sessions until he retired in 2001, sixty years after he started.

His gym had rules. “Nobody uses cuss words when I'm around,” he said. “They're all gentlemen at the gym.” When the club opened to women, he became one of their biggest champions: “Oh, the girls are fantastic! They have better footwork and coordination than the men.”

Students came back year after year because of him. As one club president put it in 1981: “If he wasn't the coach, I wouldn't do it.”

Beyond Cambridge

Rawson's reach went far past the Harvard gym. He worked with a young Rocky Marciano and, in 1972, coached Burma's boxing team at the Olympic Games in Munich. He refereed for more than thirty years, served as chief of officials for the New England AAU, and sat on the Massachusetts Boxing Commission, first from 1958 to 1964, when Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, was preparing to fight Sonny Liston, and later as its chairman beginning in 1981.

Outside boxing he worked as a general contractor, and he stayed fiercely active: at eighty he hit two holes-in-one in a single round of golf, and in his nineties he was still shoveling his own driveway.

A Gentleman for the Ages

Tommy Rawson died in September 2003 at the age of 94. He was survived by four daughters, fifteen grandchildren and twenty-eight great-grandchildren, and remembered by generations of Harvard boxers as “a gentleman for the ages.”

Every member who steps into the ring for Harvard today trains in the tradition he kept alive for sixty years.