Minnesota’s Chief Boxing Historian agrees to undertaking
Jake Wegner has agreed to writing a history book on Minnesota boxing’s long and storied past. He’s keeping the title of Land of 10,000 Bruises from his previous book he began years ago, but has changed the focus from in-state rivalries, to that of an all-encompassing history of Minnesota boxing, and more than one publisher is interested, including his friends at the Minnesota Historical Society.
I asked Jake about it. “Well, it’s something I’ve been asked to do for a very long time, including by many of the families of our most famous boxers,” said Wegner, “but then there is my own family and career, and the first suffered for a while because of the second, and then of course there was the Minnesota Boxing Hall of Fame that I started and ran for years and then you and I started the state title rankings. I sort of just stepped away from boxing for a while. But I have over 11 large notebooks and dozens of files of research from my last 25 years of being the “resident historian guy”, that I sort of re-thought the whole thing. I’ve decided to give it a good go, but it will have to be done on the side a bit but the plan is to do it all Jesse. I’ll include many different state records, statistics, and interesting facts, some of which will make national news within boxing circles because people simply won’t know some of these things. Also, I’m going to take chapters from my original book. I didn’t finish that dive deep into serious state rivalries that we’ve had and include those towards the back. There’s actually a lot more that I have planned, but this is gonna take me a year or two since I can only work on it on a limited part-time basis. But when it’s done, it should scratch every itch and cover every topic from the 1800’s to the year 2000, and maybe to 2020. I have a few publishers that have expressed interest, yes including the Historical Society which has the ability to get it into libraries, and then yet I might also go the self-publishing route to maintain creative control. You can lose a lot of that sometimes with publishers because they are footing the bill. But yes, I hope to make it an all-encompassing one, giant, volume piece of work that frankly, there won’t be a need to write another, at least not for a long time, and if I go the self-publishing route, I may only issue a few hundred copies.”
When asked his goal for the book, Wegner quickly ruled out money. “No one makes a lot of money writing about boxing. Let’s establish that first,” Wegner said laughing, “So that’s definitely not the goal for me. My goal is to simply author the best book on Minnesota boxing history that people can enjoy and learn from for long after I’m gone.” So what won’t it have within its covers? “It won’t have amateur boxing in it. That’s for someone else to write. My focus my entire life on Minnesota boxing, has been solely the professional ranks. Minnesota amateur boxing history could easily be its own book, but that’s not one for me to write.” Given Wegner‘s flair for colorful writing, his reputation for accuracy and research (to date, he has just under 7,000 boxrec edits, many of which were missing and undiscovered fights), and his passion for Minnesota boxing, this is one book readers will want to get their hands on.
On a side note, Jake shared that he still gets inquires about the legendary Willie Pep-Jackie Graves fight and is writing a “case closed” article on this once and for all for The International Boxing Research Organization (IBRO) and will subsequently publish it online with MinnesotaBoxing.com. For those wondering, this is the alleged fight where Pep supposedly won a round without throwing a punch on all three judges scorecards. “Complete and udder hogwash, fantasy, and fiction,” says Wegner. “I thought I thoroughly disproved this like 10 years ago in a piece I did for Boxing Digest magazine as well as with ESPN when they called about it, but after I write this, anyone who still believes that Pep did this against Graves will have lost all credibility when they speak.”
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