Amazon.com description: Product Description: John L. Sullivan was the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. His womanizing and drunken escapades were godsends to a burgeoning newspaper industry, and he embodied the American dream for latenineteenth-century immigrants as he rose from Boston's Irish working class to become the most recognizable man in the nation. In the process, the âBoston Strong Boy❠transformed boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today. Strong Boy tells the story of America's first sports superstar, a self-made man who personified the power and excesses of the Gilded Age.