by Graeme Kent
Things were going so well that McLaglen sent for his brother Fred, the sibling who had fired his incipient wanderlust by going off to fight the Boers. By this time Fred had engaged in a few boxing matches himself and was able to impart such skills as he had to his brother and to act as his sparring partner. It was during this period that McLaglen developed his main training exercise. He would saw logs of wood at chest-height for long periods. He never became a skilful boxer, but he was strong and his exercise routines helped him to develop a fair right-hand punch. He also enjoyed boxing. ‘I always loved the flicker of the gloves,’ he once reminisced, ‘the tap of feet on the canvas, the snort of breath as the punches beat home.’
For a time, he and Fred toured the thriving mining areas, challenging all comers at boxing or wrestling. When no one accepted their challenges they put on exhibitions of both sports. Fred soon tired of the rough-and-ready conditions of Ontario and decided to try his luck further south, in the USA, where he would fight as Fred McKay. Before he left, he saw McLaglen fixed up as a professional wrestler with a touring circus, where the young man accepted challenges from the audience, paying twenty-five dollars to anyone who could last three rounds with him. McLaglen’s main venue was the Happy Land Park in Winnipeg. Here his most notorious and highly publicised stunt was to defeat an entire football team in the ring, taking its members on one at a time.
This job did not pay very well, and although it got him away from the dangers and hardships of the mining camps McLaglen soon became fed up with it. He quite liked the ambience and the relatively easy way of show-business life, but aspired to something a little higher up the evolutionary scale than the small circus with its cowed animal acts and unfunny slapstick clowns. At some time during this period he worked as a barman, then as a railway policeman driving hobos away from the sidings and dissuading them from ‘riding the rods’.
Next, with a partner called Hume Duvel, he put together a physical culture and strongman act that entailed being clad in silver paint and involved displays of muscle-flexing and strength, including the lifting of impressive weights which were perhaps not quite as heavy as they looked. McLaglen’s speciality at this point, and one he was rather proud of, was to lie in a wrestler’s bridge on the stage with an anvil balanced on his chest, while his partner used a sledgehammer to break a rock placed on top of the anvil. The new act, calling itself the Great Romanos, was almost immediately successful once they started looking for work.
The two of them were booked for a tour of the Pantages circuit. This was a chain of vaudeville theatres running down the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada. When McLaglen joined it, the circuit had only been in operation for four or five years, but it had a good reputation. It was definitely to be preferred to the notorious ‘Death Trail’, another chain of Pacific seaboard halls, or, even worse, the Shitty circuit, as the underfunded east-coast Sheedy circuit was known to artistes unfortunate enough to be booked on it.
On the Pantages circuit there were between eight and ten acts on a typical bill, including acrobats, contortionists, comics, singers, dancers and speciality performers. Admission cost ten cents. Shows seldom lasted more than an hour, and in order to make the maximum amount of money the next audience was shoehorned in just as the last one departed.
The Great Romanos was a so-called dumb act, meaning that the protagonists did not speak. Usually they were in the lowly regarded first or last positions on the bill, sometimes known as ‘walk-in’ or ‘walk-out’ acts, as spectators either arrived or departed during their performances. These spots notoriously went to the strongman and alley-oop, or acrobatic, artistes. They performed in front of the curtains while the scenery was set for the more expensive ‘flash acts’ involving a large number of performers. Bottom-of-the-bill acts like McLaglen’s were lucky to earn twenty dollars a week and to work for thirty weeks in the year.
At least the bishop’s son got to see more of North America as he moved round the country with the act. By now he was beginning to supplement his income by boxing in properly organised professional tournaments, usually picking up bouts in towns along the route of the circuit, or during weeks when he had no theatrical bookings. For a time he settled in Milwaukee and he is next recorded as engaging in three bouts in the Washington area during this period. He fought a no-contest bout with Phil Schlossberg, outpointed Emil Shock and knocked out Curley Carr, all of them little known. The fight manager Doc Kearns, who met McLaglen at this time, described him as ‘a big-chested youngster with a booming laugh and he could fight like a tiger’.
The bout with Schlossberg, the Heavyweight Champion of the US Navy, occurred in Tacoma in 1908, where the English fighter’s bad luck kicked in yet again. According to his own account, McLaglen had been holding his own up to the end of the fourth round. During the interval, however, an overexcited second, ‘Longshoreman’ Bill Burke, inadvertently administered the coup de grâce to his already exhausted fighter. Writing about the incident in the Ring magazine of January 1932, almost twenty-five years later, McLaglen’s manager of the time, Biddy Bishop, described how McLaglen’s second tried to administer water to the heavyweight: ‘He raised the bottle with the same hand in which he was holding a smaller bottle of ammonia. Vic opened his mouth with the intention of taking a gulp of water, and as he did so, the ammonia was spilled down his throat, and with a moan he sank to the floor, completely out.’
The referee declared the fight abandoned. The stricken McLaglen was carried back to his dressing room, where a doctor revived him. It was midnight before the heavyweight was fit enough to leave the stadium and return to his digs, where he was confined to his bed for a few days.
By 1908, he was firmly based at Tacoma in Washington and taking part in wrestling matches as well as boxing contests. Then, as now, wrestling was mostly a case of fixed, choreographed matches, and McLaglen was obviously already showing signs of latent thespian ability. On 4 November 1907, the Tacoma Daily Ledger reported, ‘In the fiercest and at the same time very cleanest wrestling match ever seen in Tacoma, Dr B.F. Roller of Seattle last night twice pinned “Sharkey” McLaglen, the South African champion, to the mat and won the bout after a forty-two-minute struggle before an assembly of 800 appreciative lovers of sports at the Savoy Theater.’
During this part of his career, McLaglen sometimes claimed to be South African, although, having left the continent when he was a boy, there was no way in which he could have been the champion of that country. Ever the pragmatist, he was also billed as a Scottish heavyweight when fighting in cities with large Caledonian immigrant populations. He adopted the nickname of Sharkey in deference to a barrel-chested heavyweight challenger from a former era, Sailor Tom Sharkey.
Although he enjoyed fighting, the extroverted McLaglen never bothered to keep a complete record of his contests, a sign that he did not take boxing very seriously. He was a self-avowed ‘pork-and-beaner’, someone who often fought only for his next meal. When he could on his travels, on arrival at a new town he would challenge a local champion purely as a means of garnering publicity for his vaudeville act. This meant, of course, that he was always up against the district favourite, something that never particularly bothered him even though he was only just out of his teens: ‘I always liked a mixed reception,’ he claimed. ‘The knowledge that some of the fans were against me always inspired me to do my best.’
The fight with Jack Johnson came out of the blue. McLaglen just happened to be available when the champion’s original opponent, Denver Ed Martin, dropped out. The fact that Martin had been selected as an opponent in the first place was a sign that Johnson was not being fed with ‘a live one’ so early in his reign. Martin’s recent record was spotty in the extreme. At one time he had been a leading heavyweight, noted for his footwork, but that had been a decade earlier.
Martin had already met Johnson twice. In 1903 in Los Angeles he had gone twenty rounds with the up-and-coming Galveston man for the so-called Coloured Heavyweight Championship, a synthetic title dreamt up
by Californian sports writers. Martin had held his own with the younger man for the first ten rounds but had then been floored several times, leaving Johnson to run out an easy winner. A year later they had met again. By now Johnson had improved considerably, while Martin had deteriorated commensurately and was knocked out in the second round.
Since then, over a period of five years, Martin had almost drifted out of the game, fighting on average only once a year, with a solitary win to his name. He had been resurrected on this occasion merely to provide an easy opponent for Johnson, who had barely trained since winning the championship three months earlier, in December 1908. No reason was given for his late withdrawal from the exhibition; it was merely announced that Martin had been called away unexpectedly to Seattle.
When the black fighter pulled out of the fight, there was consternation in the Johnson camp. Every seat in the Vancouver Athletic Club had been sold and Johnson had already collected his share of the box-office receipts. They had to get someone to sit in the opposite corner. It did not matter who this was. In boxing parlance, the only stipulation was that the opponent should at least have a pulse.
It was then that Victor McLaglen appeared, swaggering, charismatic, capable of engendering his own headlines, with a few fights behind him and showing absolutely no sign of being able to bother Jack Johnson in the ring. He was made for the part and was quickly imported from his temporary home in Tacoma.
At the time, Johnson had other things on his mind. Arriving from Australia by way of Hawaii, because of his colour he had been refused admittance to half a dozen hotels in Victoria on Vancouver Island and was dossing down in a cheap lodging house on the waterfront. To make matters worse, he had decided in future to look after his own affairs and was in the messy process of dispensing with the services of his indignant manager, Sam Fitzpatrick, one of at least eight managers Johnson was to employ over the course of his career. The forthcoming fight was merely the beginning of a long process for Johnson of cashing in on his championship with a minimum of effort.
The bout was billed as a no-contest affair, which meant that McLaglen would have to knock Johnson out to win, a most unlikely eventuality. Because of this it was not billed as a worldchampionship defence. In fact, it was little more than a glorified exhibition match, designed to show Johnson off to the Canadian audience.
This meant nothing to the British heavyweight. Later in life, when he was a more-than-capable character actor in Hollywood, McLaglen was known for never turning down any role offered to him, no matter how unsuitable, as long as the money was right. Whatever his private reservations might have been about entering the ring with the most deadly heavyweight of the age, McLaglen jumped at the offer.
He was well aware that he had little or no chance against the champion, but not only would the money offered be useful, McLaglen knew that the fame that would follow would carry over into his show-business career. From now on, no matter what the result, he would always be known as the first man to fight Johnson after the latter became champion, an item which soon found its way into his billing matter for the halls. And anyway, there was always the chance, no matter how faint, that he might just manage to connect on Johnson with one lucky sucker punch.
Such was Johnson’s fame, even this early in his career as a titleholder, that the fight was a sell-out. McLaglen recorded later that engrossed spectators were practically hanging from the rafters. It mattered little that local newspapers were contemptuously dismissing the challenger as an unknown.
The evening’s entertainment began with Johnson, resplendent in white tie and tails, being introduced to the enthusiastic audience from the ring. He made a short speech, complimenting the citizens of Vancouver for being fair-minded and good sports. He paid a tribute to Canadian former champion Tommy Burns as ‘that great, game little fellow’. Johnson concluded his peroration by announcing that he was ready and waiting to meet ex-champion James J. Jeffries at any time, adding, ‘No matter where or when I fight I will be trying, and if I am beaten it will be by a better man.’
Johnson then left to change into his fighting gear, while McLaglen entered the ring to wait for him. Nervous as he was at the time, years later McLaglen was able to describe vividly the preamble to the fight. Upon the champion’s return, he recalled, Johnson was wearing bright blue trunks and received a warm welcome from the spectators. The champion’s weight was announced as 15st 1lb, while McLaglen was almost a stone lighter at 14st 2lb.
The fight itself was to prove an anti-climax. Johnson felled McLaglen with almost the first punch he threw. The two men broke from an early clinch and Johnson shot a hard straight left to his opponent’s body. Entering into the spirit of the event McLaglen had been smiling at the time, but the grin turned to a grimace of agony. The Englishman backed away slowly, then his legs buckled, he sank to his knees and his body doubled up, his forehead resting on the canvas. When he staggered to his feet at the count of nine, all the fight had already been knocked out of him.
The next day, Vancouver’s Daily Post reported contemptuously the white heavyweight’s reaction: ‘For the rest of the bout he was looking for a soft spot to fall. As McLaglan [sic] had no business in the ring in the first place, not having the speed to cope with the shifty black, he made but a sorry showing thereafter.’
Onlookers were struck by Johnson’s sheer strength in throwing around the burly McLaglen at will, and commented on the fact that the champion did not move his feet much, being content to occupy the centre of the ring and force McLaglen to circle warily around him. The champion impressed with his ability to tie up his opponent in a clinch, using only one hand, while walloping McLaglen with his free fist. Above all, Johnson’s hand speed was marvelled at; when he delivered combinations of punches the effect was little more than a blur.
Satisfied that he had little to beat, Johnson toyed lazily with his big opponent throughout the rest of the bout and resorted to his custom of talking idly to ringsiders as he held off the sweating, swinging Englishman. The champion did not sit down between rounds and was heard idly discussing the latest fashions in male costume jewellery with an acquaintance seated close to the ring.
For his part, once the initial effects of Johnson’s body punch had worn off, McLaglen did his best to land a haymaker, gaining slightly in confidence as the bout went on. ‘I tried my best to rattle him in the last two rounds,’ he wrote later in his autobiography, ‘conscious of the immortality that would be mine were I lucky enough to slip him a sleeper.’ Better men than McLaglen had tried unsuccessfully to do that and would continue to do so for the remainder of the champion’s reign. Magnanimously, Johnson allowed McLaglen to last the sixround distance, and the official verdict was that of a no-decision.
After the exhibition, some forty representatives of the black community in Vancouver gave a dinner in Johnson’s honour at the Bismarck Café in the city. Several white members of the Vancouver Athletic Club were also present. In a short, dignified speech Jack Johnson commented that he was glad to see members of both races sitting in amity at the long table. He repeated his intention to fight any challengers. ‘Be my next opponent yellow, grizzly, gray or black,’ he announced, ‘I will fight him with the same courage and determination that I have shown in the past.’
The next afternoon, the world champion was seen off at the railway station by a large crowd of all colours. Johnson took the Canadian Pacific Railroad as far as Moose Jaw and caught a connection to Chicago, where he was to make his home for a few years.
The Vancouver fight made so little impression on the champion that, like the Daily Post reporter, he could not even spell McLaglen’s name correctly and had forgotten that there had been no referee’s decision when, years later, he mentioned the episode in his autobiography. ‘Between stage appearances I had some minor ring affairs,’ he wrote dismissively. ‘One of these was with Victor MacLaghlen [sic] in Vancouver, 10 March 1909, which I won in six rounds.’
Victor McLaglen continued to box. After the Johnson bout
he returned to the Pantages circuit with the Great Romanos, this time with his brother Arthur as his partner, performing in tableaux vivants clad in white body stockings and duplicating well-known Greek statues. When stage work dried up they would take work with circuses between engagements. McLaglen was never a top-ofthe-bill act, but his unexpected six rounds with Jack Johnson had given him, as he had anticipated, a certain amount of fame in the sticks.
He was never shy of cashing in on the attendant publicity, giving interviews to local newspapers all along the Pantages route, not unexpectedly allowing himself the best of it for the press stories. What had in reality been an extremely one-sided exhibition bout was transmogrified for the public into a thrilling close encounter, with McLaglen, in his version, taking the champion to the wire.
His favourite publicity-seeking ploy for the act was to turn up at a gymnasium in whichever city he was appearing in that week, and noisily challenge the best-known local heavyweight to a bout. The fact that it would be almost impossible to arrange and stage such a contest in the seven days that he was in the vicinity was not lost on the strong man, but he usually managed to have a few journalists waiting in the gymnasium to take down the affronted reaction of the local hopeful.
In Springfield, Missouri, in 1911 it all went horribly wrong. The local fistic hero was a heavyweight called Joe Cox. In the hope of getting the customary headlines McLaglen swaggered along to the town gymnasium, accompanied by a coterie of reporters, and noisily challenged Cox.
Unfortunately for the Englishman, a wily local promoter called Billy McCarney had joined in the managerial scramble to find a White Hope. He had a secret prospect hidden away and was planning to match his hopeful with Cox in the near future. His heavyweight’s name was Jess Willard, known as the Pottawatomie Giant, a man of 6ft 5in in height and weighing 18 stone. Willard was slow and clumsy and at this stage almost completely untutored in the fistic arts. However, he was terribly strong and the possessor of a hard and extremely long left jab. He had won a few contests, but so far he had been kept under wraps and the ingenuous McLaglen had not heard of him.
