★ The Pennsylvania Avenue Athletic & Sparring Club ★
Washington City · Standing Bouts Held 1904–1908 · Admission by Presidential Invitation Only
Fisticuffsat 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
How Theodore Roosevelt ran a sparring club out of the White House — and quietly lost the sight of one eye to keep a gentleman's secret.
RooseveltThe Pugilist President
ComersAides · Cops · Champions
The Fight Club at 1600 Penn.
Roosevelt did not box in front of the White House. He boxed inside it — and that was somehow more outrageous. He kept a gymnasium on the premises and treated an invitation to Washington as an invitation to spar. Few men declined. When you put on the gloves with the President, one partner recalled, it was a fight all the way; he had no use for a quitter, and nobody who gave ground had much chance with him.
He had been at it his whole life — a sickly, asthmatic boy who willed himself into a barrel-chested college boxer, then kept swinging as a New York police commissioner, as governor, and finally from the most powerful desk on earth. As governor he once tried to expense a wrestling mat; the state comptroller refused to pay, calling it “un-gubernatorial.” It did not slow him down.
The Blow That Dimmed an Eye
One of his regular partners was Dan Tyler Moore — a young artillery officer, cousin to the First Lady, and a serious amateur. Somewhere in the middle of the decade, Moore landed a clean right hand square on the President's left eye. The blood vessels burst. The retina detached. The sight in that eye faded and never came back.
Roosevelt said nothing. He kept boxing a while longer, then quietly switched to jiu-jitsu, and told almost no one. His own account, years later, was pure Roosevelt: the loss didn't bother him much, he wrote, because at least it was the left eye — the right one still sighted a rifle just fine.
In His Own Words & the Record
The Outrageous File
“I do but little boxing, because it seems rather absurd for a President to appear with a black eye or a swollen nose or a cut lip.
— T.R., in a letter, 1903 · (he kept boxing anyway)
“If it had been the right eye, I should have been entirely unable to shoot.
— T.R., An Autobiography, 1913 · on going half-blind
“I did a good deal of boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attained to the first rank in either, even at my own weight.
— T.R., An Autobiography, 1913
“Could you ask for any better proof of the man's sportsmanship than that he never told me what I had done to him?
— Dan Tyler Moore, the aide who blinded him
The Gentleman's Secret
Here is the part that made the press lose its mind. Moore had no idea he had blinded the President. Roosevelt never told him — never told much of anyone — to spare the young officer the guilt. The country only learned of it around 1917, when Roosevelt described the injury in print without naming the man. Moore read the description, recognized himself, and finally understood what his right hand had done a dozen years earlier.
When the story broke, the Richmond Times-Dispatch gave it a full page. The papers marveled that the nation's “most strenuous citizen” had spent years governing a hemisphere with one good eye — and had said not a word.
Image: Udo J. Keppler, “‘Terrible Teddy’ waits for ‘the unknown,’” Puck, v.55 no.1422, June 1, 1904. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-25853. No known restrictions on publication.
Text sources: Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University · T. Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913) · Washington Post & Richmond Times-Dispatch archives · Chicago Tribune · U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs history.
Note: accounts place the blinding bout anywhere from 1904 to 1908; the public reveal came in 1917.