Iain07

Hi, welcome to Wikipedia. If you need any help drop by my talk page. (It's here [1]). You sign your name with four tiles (the upper case thing over the hash key).  Giacomo  18:31, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

John Heenan

Hi, I notice that you've been doing a lot of the editing of late on the John Heenan page. I'm looking for published sources about Heenan’s life. I have The Manly Art on order and have a large number of original New York Clipper issues covering 1856-1861, thus covering the Heenan's peak of popularity. Do you know of any good other sources for information on Heenan? Thanks for any insight you can give. Fenevad (talk) 22:02, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your response

Thanks for the response. I actually read your book after posting that query and enjoyed it. I've done quite a bit of digging and found some really interesting things about Heenan that have not made it into works about him: a first-hand account of a fight in California, accounts of him standing guard on a shipment of arms bound for the anti-vigilants in San Francisco, and a few other things, I'm actually getting started finally on writing my own work about him. No time frame for completion, but I found your book to be an excellent source for some aspects of his life (although your focus is on the fight more than mine will be). As of yet I do not have a time frame to finish my work. But I do appreciate the response.

Best regards,

Arle Lommel

Hello, Iain07. You have new messages at Scewing's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Editing the existing article

Since I have contacted both of you I feel good about finding both of you here. I am the source for the mention of Heenan's previously undocumented California fight if you recall. (As yet, still no publication on that.)

My one suggestion initially would be to address the insulting nature of the second sentence, which posits that Heenan "had only three formal fights in his entire career, losing two and drawing one." In those days there certainly was no universally accepted definition of what a "formal" match was, and Heenan certainly had many more fights than the three mentioned here. I see no need to denigrate his accomplishments on the basis of someone else's acceptance or rejection of the "qualifications" of specific matches. If the comment must for some reason remain, then at the very least it could be tempered with an explanation of who it is that feels his other fights don't count for much, as in "had only three formal fights as recognized by ..." Coedne (talk) 16:47, 9 June 2012 (UTC) Coedne

Many apologies for this absurdly late reply. I did pick up your message, but was awfully busy at the time, and managed to forget about it. But better late than never, I hope.

I have to admit that I don't know quite how you would define a formal fight in the US at the time, so you may have a point. We know a good deal more about the early fights of Tom Sayers, and there's no doubting which can be called formal and which can not: it's all to do with taking place under the auspices of a governing body. But I don't know what the status of fights was in the US at the time.

I would certainly consider changing things to reflect your research. Could you give me some detail, since I'm not sure I can find your earlier message? Look forward to hearing further from you. Iain07 (talk) 15:48, 19 June 2012 (UTC)