The Ultimate Boxing Archive

Every sport gets the archivist it deserves. The late Hank Kaplan, who passed away last year at the age of 88, was the preeminent boxing archivist in the world. After a middling career fighting as a middleweight (he had one pro bout, which he won), Kaplan hung up his gloves and devoted the rest of his life to collecting everything and anything he could get his hands on that had a connection to the fights.

At the time of his death, Kaplan’s home in Florida was crammed with 2,600 books on boxing; 300 tapes of fights and interviews with fighters; 500,000 photographs; 150 ringed binders of correspondence, telegrams and tickets; and 790 boxes of newspaper clippings dating from 1890 to 2007, that covered every aspect of the sweet science, from the most well-known to the decidedly obscure.

There were also hundreds of talismans in the Kaplan collection, which, by their very nature, bring the magic of the fight game to life: souvenir programs, boxing magazines, boxing licenses and contracts, broadsides, posters, trading cards, boxing trunks, boxing gloves, and punching bags.

There was concern in the boxing community that when Kaplan stopped standing sentry before his voluminous archive — whose estimated value is $2.7 million — his lifework would cease to be. But as foresight would have it, Kaplan, who was born in Williamsburg, bequeathed his collection to Brooklyn College, where it’s now housed for those who want and/or need access to boxing’s arcana.

Anthony M. Cucchiara, professor of archival management at Brooklyn College, told the New York Times, “I suppose some people would want to turn their noses up at a boxing collection. But the story of America is in this archive. Boxing is a prism for our cultural history, and is important for its associations with immigration, ethnicity, class, race and nationalism.”

“Even when I was 16 or 17,” Kaplan told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1995, “I said there’s got to be some way to remember [the fighters]. If someone were to ask me why I keep the archives, I guess that’s what I’d say: Someone has to be charged with remembering them.”

“None of this is for my own glory,” the ever modest and always accessible Kaplan added. “I have no dreams of great rewards. My love of boxing comes first.”