This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's. Boxing has always attracted big and strange personalities who use the sport as performance art,

becoming what we might call professional trolls.

Comedian Andy Kaufman used to challenge random women to box with him in the ring

before pro wrestler

Jerry Lawler put him in a neck brace. But all these modern performance artist boxers were

preceded by an even stranger character, one who may have just been the first, professional

boxing troll. Born in 1887, Arthur Craven liked to introduce himself as, and this is the quote,

the world's shortest-haired poet, boxer, hotel rat, muleteer, snake charmer, chauffeur,

ilurophile, gold prospector, grandson of the queen's chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde.

Yeah, put that one on a tombstone. Oh, and if you're wondering what an

Eleurophile is, it's someone who loves cats. Arthur grew up in Switzerland, but always found

life there to be a little too constricting. He traveled around Europe and became a boxer.

He was always a big man, and so the sport suited him. But even trading blows in the ring wasn't exciting enough for him.

He liked to add a bit of theater to his matches by giving speeches on art,

trash-talking the other boxers, threatening suicide, firing a gun into the air,

and throwing his briefcase at the audience.

In other words, he'd like to troll the crowd. It's like he only

ever felt alive if everyone in the room hated him. He took this to a new extreme once he

arrived in Spain, where he arranged a match with world champion boxer Jack Johnson. Some

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