What You Didn’t Know About The Fight Club Teddy Roosevelt Ran

Teddy Roosevelt’s fight club boxing days finally caught up with him in 1905, when he challenged Colonel Dan T. Meade to a fight that only Roosevelt could have appreciated. “He had no use for a quitter or one who gave ground, and nobody but a man willing to fight all the time and all the way had a chance with him,” Meade told The New York Times. “That’s my only excuse for the fact that I seriously injured him. There was no chance to be careful of the blows. He simply wouldn’t have stood for it.”

That serious injury resulted in losing his vision in his left eye (Teddy Roosevelt was grateful it wasn’t his right eye because that would have affected his ability to shoot a rifle.) “I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood vessels,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography. “Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing.”

Instead, he took up jiujitsu.