Nearly 120 years before President Donald Trump hosted a UFC championship fight on the White House South Lawn for his 80th birthday, President Theodore Roosevelt suffered partial blindness in his left eye during a boxing match at the White House — an injury he kept largely private for 12 years before disclosing it in 1917.
Roosevelt, the 26th president, revealed the injury during a meeting with reporters in Stamford, Connecticut, according to a contemporary New York Times report. “When I was president I used to box with one of my aides, a young captain in the artillery,” he recounted. “One day he cross-countered me and broke a blood vessel in my left eye. I don’t know whether this is known, but I never have been able to see out of that eye since.”
The blow, delivered during a 1905 match at the White House, detached a retina and ultimately caused blindness in the left eye, according to historical accounts. Roosevelt, an avid boxer who had staged matches dating back to his time as governor of New York, fought his last match in 1908, his final full year in the White House. The late John Gable, who served as executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Oyster Bay, New York, said in a 2002 interview that Roosevelt’s physicians put a stop to his fighting after the injury.
As Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, the blow “smashed the little blood-vessels.” He added: “Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.”
Roosevelt, who was about 50 at the time, had ascended to the presidency at the age of 42 following the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, becoming the youngest person to serve in the role. Trump, by contrast, became the oldest to take the oath of office when he returned to the White House last year.
According to Gable, Roosevelt told only a handful of confidants about the severity of the injury, in part to protect the identity of the man who landed the punch. That man turned out to be Lt Col Dan Tyler Moore, an artillery officer who served as Roosevelt’s boxing aide. Moore said he learned he had caused the president’s injury only when Roosevelt made the remark in 1917 at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm, which appeared to be a health spa.
“But could you ask for any better proof of the man’s sportsmanship,” Moore said, “than the fact that he never told me what I had done to him, never told anybody else that I know of — at least, it never got around to me till I saw in the papers the other day — that he had said that he lost the sight of his eye while boxing with a captain of artillery who was his aide. He didn’t name anybody then, but I knew that he must have meant me, for I happen to have been the only boxing aide he had who was in the artillery.”
As the New York Times reported in its 1917 story: “Weighing 202 pounds and with a waist measure of 42½ inches Colonel Roosevelt received newspaper reporters and posed for moving picture photographers this afternoon at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm in North Stamford Avenue.”
Trump, who turned 80 on Sunday, will be a spectator at the UFC Freedom 250 event on the South Lawn. On a recent episode of the Pod Force One podcast, host Miranda Devine referenced Roosevelt’s boxing tradition and asked Trump: “Are you planning to get into the cage?” Trump replied: “We’ll have to think about that. It sounds like not a good idea.”