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Sirica worked three nights a week at $100 per month as a boxing coach at the K. of C. while studying law, got his degree in 1926, and then joined his family in Miami. There he became the top sparring partner of Jack Britton, who was working to regain the world welterweight championship. Fighting at 148 lbs., Sirica won a ten-round semifinal match in Miami, leading a local newspaper to head line him as a "Great Little Mitt Artist." Sirica fought a few other local "smoker" matches but quit boxing after his mother "raised all kinds of hell with me." She thought that he ought to be using his law degree.
Sirica returned to Washington later the same year and hung out around the courtrooms, waiting for judges to ask him to take on indigent defendants without pay, just for the experience. In the late 1920s he sat through some of the trials related to the Teapot Dome scandals, fascinated by the courtroom skills of such lawyers as Frank J. Hogan and William E. Leahy: "Perhaps the greatest trial lawyers of this century." He never imagined, of course, that he would one day preside over proceedings in an even worse scandal.
In 1930, Sirica finally landed a job as a prosecutor on the staff of a Herbert Hoover-appointed U.S. Attorney in Washington. He developed a reputation as a fair but somewhat excitable courtroom lawyer. Aroused by the tactics of opposing counsel in one trial, Sirica impulsively shouted: "It ain't fair; it ain't fair!" In another case, he jumped up to protest to a judge: "Not a single objection of mine so far has been upheld by the court." When one defendant made a threatening move toward him, Boxer Sirica, ready for a fight, told a restraining lawyer: "Let him go; let him go."
There were hard times again for Sirica when Roosevelt became President and appointed a Democratic U.S. Attorney who brought in his own staff. Sirica and a partner went into private practice in Washington, renting a three-room office at $30 a room and paying a secretary $10 a week to answer the phone, ("That was the right salary because the phone didn't ring very often.") Sirica's independence was demonstrated in 1944 when Democratic Congressmen selected him, although he is a Republican, as chief counsel for an investigation of the Federal Communications Commission. Sirica quickly sensed that the committee intended to bury rather than expose a budding scandal. He therefore resigned, declaring, "I don't want it on my conscience that anyone can say John Sirica is a party to a whitewash."