RAPID CITY— Any tribal community is going to produce some great athletes, and the Rapid City Indian Community is no exception, starting in the 1950’s with basketball star Vince Whipple at Rapid City High. But back in the 1950’s another sport made the top of the sports pages in South Dakota, although you never see boxing there now. The two best boxers in the state during the 1950’s hailed from North Rapid by way of Pine Ridge, Edgar and Hobart Lonehill.

Hobart’s son Mark would one day become state welterweight champ. Born in 1962, Mark was not around for his father’s exploits, but Hobart told him plenty about the heyday of boxing.

“Those were good fighters back in the Fifties,” Mark told NSNT. “Way better than the fighters in the 1970’s or 1980’s. Those guys were dead serious, hard-hitting fighters. Their gloves were like pro gloves, they wore eight ounce gloves back then. They had more pro tactics back in the Fifties.”

Boxing was the second biggest sport in the country, after baseball, and so the knowledge even local trainers and coaches had was at its highest levels, and that knowledge produced well-schooled fighters, and they had no choice but to fight each other, which made all of them that much better. The time came for Mark’s Uncle Edgar to show him some of the tricks of the trade, and he dropped by before Mark’s next big fight.

Mark said Edgar said, “I wanna show you something. When you fight the guy, get him in the corner, when you do hit him with your right hand right under the ribs, and then step over and hit him right in his liver with the left. If you hit him right under that rib, you’re gonna stop him, I guarantee. Do that all in one motion.”

Time and again, during his career, Mark would win fights he might otherwise have lost by employing tactics learned from Hobart and Edgar. His next fight was one of those times: “When that bell rang, right away that guy came right across the ring at me, and I got him in the corner, hit him on the right side then I hit him on the left side, and he went down like a sack of potatoes.”

Hobart became Mark’s coach in 1979, as Mark says he finally “took boxing serious.” Mark sparred with his dad, who was then in his Fifties, “and I couldn’t hardly hit him, but he could hit me.”

An incident 20 years after that highlights what a difficult opponent Hobart must have been in his prime. Mark: “Somebody beat up my sister, and we had to go to Pine Ridge to take care of this. My dad was in his 70’s, and while I was fighting one guy, this other person (about forty) tried to sneak up behind me, and my dad seen him, and my dad just started beating the crap out of him.”

Both Edgar and Hobart have journeyed to the spirit world, and although they could have been inducted into the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame decades back, efforts did not get underway in earnest until this year. Fortunately the boxing pair have been inducted into the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2024.

Edgar was born in 1932, and Hobart in 1936. Both were highly skilled, but they fought with very different styles. Starting in 1947. Edgar laid down a reputation as a fearsome body puncher. Hobart told NSNT in 2016 that Edgar’s fighting style was “kind of like Joe Louis. Held his hands the same, and then when they mixed it up, he’d hit ‘em right in the body. Not many around here had been hit in the body like that. Edgar stopped a lot of guys.”

Hobart was smaller and quicker, and although he never lost that elusiveness, as he grew, his main weapon was not speed or defense, it was power, cleverly delivered in a two fisted attack that dropped many middleweight even though Hobart was never much more than a welterweight.

A friend of Hobart’s told him, “I could win the welterweight if you wasn’t in there.” So, Hobart jumped up to middleweight by weighing in with quarters in his pocket.

Middleweights proved a challenge. Hobart said they “were easier to hit, but in the clinches, they manhandled me pretty good. But…I knocked out most of them.”

Throughout the 1950’s Hobart won title after title, in South Dakota, and down at Sioux City, Iowa. In 1958, after he and Poxy Walking Elk were married, and they had their first son, Louis, Hobart found he had a heart murmur, and his boxing career was over.

Edgar seemed on the cusp of making a name for himself, either as a boxer or as an actor. He did not want to go all the way to the Nationals in Chicago. Hobart said, “Edgar was left handed, and God, he hit hard. I think he could have won that tournament, but he didn’t want to fall too far behind in school.”

Then came Edgar’s shot at Hollywood. Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor were slated to star in a movie, The Last Hunt, which gets an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the picture was to be shot in the Black Hills.

“They were advertising for Indian guys,” Hobart said. “Edgar tried out. They were really impressed, all the scenes they done with him, never had to do retakes. He enjoyed being in the movies. But he had a girlfriend here, and he wanted to stay and get married, so that was the end of his movie career. He could have been another Eddie (Little Sky).”

Mark speculates that Edgar came back from Korea with PTSD, “and he never really got over it.” The violence of boxing pales by comparison to the violence of war.

Because they fought at a time before TV, before the internet, when the only way you could see a local fighter was a black and white photo in the newspaper, little survived of their exploits. Record keeping was spotty in those days, and most of the people who saw them scuffle are no longer with us. But their uncommon talent and their skill and knowledge of the fight game, would translate well to MMA. We would all know who the Lonehill brothers are.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindiesel@msn.com)

The post first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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