Donald Trump's 80th birthday bash this Sunday includes a UFC spectacle on the South Lawn, but the president will remain a spectator. His predecessor Theodore Roosevelt took a starkly different approach to combat sports roughly 120 years earlier, paying a steep physical price for his hands-on enthusiasm.
Roosevelt disclosed in 1917, eight years after leaving office, that he had lost vision in his left eye during a 1905 boxing match at the White House. Speaking to reporters in Stamford, Connecticut, the 26th president recounted the incident with characteristic directness: "When I was president I used to box with one of my aides, a young captain in the artillery. 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 injury was far more serious than a simple blood vessel rupture. Roosevelt had suffered a detached retina during that 1908 bout, his final year in the White House, which ultimately caused permanent blindness in the damaged eye. His physicians forced him to retire from boxing immediately after the accident.
In his autobiography, Roosevelt described the moment in vivid detail. The blow "smashed the little blood-vessels," he wrote, and robbed him of sight on one side. "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," he reflected. "Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing."
The president was only about 50 when forced to abandon the sport. He subsequently took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two as a substitute.
Roosevelt had kept the severity of the injury quiet at the time, revealing it to only a handful of confidentes to protect the identity of the man who dealt the punch. That person turned out to be Lt Col Dan Tyler Moore, one of his military aides. Moore did not realize the consequences of his blow until reading about it in newspapers in 1917, when Roosevelt finally went public.
Moore's reaction revealed the bond between president and aide. "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 that he had lost the sight of his eye while boxing with a captain of artillery who was his aide."
Boxing was central to Roosevelt's identity as a physical specimen and man of action. He had started the tradition as governor of New York before bringing it to the White House. Even as an undergraduate at Harvard, he had competed in intramural bouts in the light heavyweight division. The habit reflected a broader philosophy about vigor and masculine leadership.
Roosevelt had ascended to the presidency at 42 following William McKinley's assassination in 1901, making him the youngest president in American history. Trump, meanwhile, became the oldest to take the oath when he returned to office last year, a gap that extends to their sporting philosophies as well.
When asked recently on the Pod Force One podcast whether he might enter the UFC cage himself, Trump gave a flat answer. "We'll have to think about that," he said. "It sounds like not a good idea."
Author James Rodriguez: "Roosevelt's blindness reads like a cautionary tale about the perils of presidential athleticism, a lesson Trump seems to have learned without having to suffer the consequences."
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