by Graeme Kent
Mizner sometimes displayed an equally perfunctory approach. The manager put elegance before everything. When he seconded Ketchel against Jim Smith, the former gunslinger turned sports writer Bat Masterson, writing in the New York Morning Telegraph, reported, ‘Wilson Mizner was on deck, of course, bossing the fight in the champion’s corner. He was dressed as though for a party instead of a fight and did not soil his immaculate attire by swinging a towel or dashing water with a sponge.’
The happy-go-lucky Mizner was perfectly prepared to let his friends and drinking companions share in his management chores. One of his saloon-bar associates was the sports writer for the New York Morning World, ‘Hype’ Igoe. Igoe had received his nickname because he was so thin that he reminded his friends of a hypodermic syringe. On one occasion, Igoe was deputed by Ketchel and Mizner to handle the fighter’s incidental training expenses. Feeling that he was being overcharged, Igoe refused to pay a bill. A court order was taken out against him and the obdurate writer was forced to spend a day or two in the Ludlow Street jail. When he emerged from his brief incarceration, Igoe was met by Mizner and a crowd of well-lubricated cronies, all dressed in convicts’ striped suits, waiting to take him to a ‘coming-out’ party at Healy’s restaurant.
Managing Ketchel might have done wonders for Mizner’s social life but it was not providing the express train to wealth that the new manager had hoped for. In fact, the depressing fact dawned on the handler that despite his youth Ketchel was probably already a shot fighter. Years of hard fighting and high living had already taken their toll on the champion, and he had little left but his reputation. Wurra Wurra McLaughlin, the splendidly named sports editor of the New York World, was one of the first to bring this to the attention of his readers when he wrote that Ketchel had ruined himself by ‘hitting the hop’, or excess drinking.
There was only one hope left, another lucrative pay-day with Jack Johnson in a return match for the heavyweight title before Ketchel retired. To get that bout, two things were needed: Ketchel had to defeat a few well-rated fighters and he had to beef up to genuine heavyweight proportions.
The problem with the first stipulation was that Mizner could not be sure that, on his current form, Ketchel could defeat the top-ranked heavyweights. Accordingly, Mizner decided to help things along. He matched Ketchel with the great black fighter Sam Langford. Langford was regarded as second only to Johnson in ability, and was avoided by most white fighters and their managers. When he did fight white men, Langford was often under wraps, knowing that he would only get paid if he let the other man go the distance.
It was an important piece of matchmaking. Boxing summed up its significance: ‘A victory for either man will give the winner a clear claim which Jack Johnson will find it difficult to ignore.’
Early in 1910, Langford and Ketchel fought a six-round, no-decision bout in Philadelphia. The black fighter was generally regarded as having ‘carried’ Ketchel throughout the fight. Beforehand, the promoter, Sunny Jim Coffroth, called both fighters in and explained to them that if they agreed to fake an exciting six-rounder, he would then build on the public interest aroused by rematching them in a genuine forty-five-round bout for the middleweight title and a purse of $30,000.
Both men agreed to the proposition, but Ketchel, paranoid after having failed in his own attempt to double-cross Jack Johnson, was afraid that the black fighter might cheat him. Accordingly he hired men to follow Langford to ensure that he was going easy on his training as promised.
Mizner later told his lawyer that the fight had been choreographed like an old-time melodrama, with first one boxer apparently in trouble and then the other almost going down before making a miraculous recovery. As Langford was fond of saying, ‘Never bet on anything that talks.’ Ketchel and Langford shared $13,000 for their fight, $9,000 – the larger share, of course – going to the white fighter, but that was before Ketchel and Mizner had to start making disbursements to various interested parties. Ketchel needed as much as he could get: his latest bill for a hectic twoweek stay at the Bartholdi Hotel in New York had amounted to $593.00.
Three weeks after the Langford fight, Mizner was called upon to use all his managerial wisdom when Ketchel fought heavyweight Porky Flynn in Boston. There was a dreadful storm that evening and Ketchel got it into his head that the bad weather presaged the imminent end of the world. If this was the case, he reasoned, what did it matter who won the fight that night? Wilson Mizner managed to persuade the fighter that settling some of their gambling debts would be a matter of considerable urgency should Armageddon be postponed for a couple of days. Ketchel saw the point and knocked Flynn out in the third round. Magnanimously he then brought his opponent round by throwing a bucket of water over him.
Next Ketchel fought Willie Lewis in New York. Increasingly concerned by the fragile state of his charge, Mizner took care of Lewis, who agreed not to strive for a knockout. The night before the fight, fellow manager Dan Morgan noticed Dan McKetrick, Lewis’s manager, lighting several candles in a church before dropping twenty-five cents into the offertory box. This gave the wily Morgan the idea that Lewis would be trying for a knockout after all, and he placed his bets accordingly. He was right. From the first bell Lewis swarmed all over Ketchel, forcing his opponent to fight back desperately. Revealing a flash of his old form, Ketchel managed to knock Lewis out in the second round. Morgan told his biographer John McCallum in his book Dumb Dan that afterwards, when McKetrick bemoaned their failure to capture the championship, Morgan had commented that obviously Lewis’s manager had not put enough in the offertory box. ‘You tried to get the world’s middleweight title for only two bits!’ he pointed out reprovingly.
Things were looking grim for Mizner and Ketchel. They had received a great deal of bad publicity over the Langford affair, and there were even stories circulating that an up-and-coming young middleweight called Frank Klaus had also been paid to go easy with Ketchel in a no-decision bout around this time. As if this was not enough, Ketchel had been diagnosed with syphilis and was believed to be addicted to opium.
In 1910, gambling, especially on sports, was flourishing in the USA. Where there were wagers there was always the possibility of corruption. The results of more and more major sporting events were suspected of being ‘fixed’ by gamblers. In 1908, the team physician of the New York Giants baseball team was expelled from the sport for offering an umpire $2,500 to favour the Giants in his decisions. In the same year, New York outlawed betting on horse racing after a number of scandals concerning horses being ‘pulled’ by their jockeys so that they would not win. There were many rumours of fighters being encouraged to box to orders.
It was the misfortune of Mizner and Ketchel at this time to come up against the dangerous young gambler and fixer Arnold Rothstein, who was just beginning to make a mark as an illegal bookmaker with his expressed philosophy of ‘If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you?’ Rothstein wanted Ketchel to take a dive in a fight, still to be arranged, as part of a betting coup. Mizner and his fighter were already spending more money than they could afford on paying opponents to lie down, so they could hardly now entertain the reverse procedure. Virtuously they rejected Rothstein’s overtures. This annoyed the gambler, and it was rumoured that he had put a price on Ketchel’s uneasy head.
Wilson Mizner decided that it was time to regroup. For some time he and his fighter had held court at the Woodlawn Inn on the outskirts of New York, where it was always open house and where free booze flowed for reporters, writers and show-business personalities. A change of image was patently required. Mizner announced to the newspapers that from now on Ketchel’s only objective would be to ready himself for another bid to take Jack Johnson’s title. So determined was Ketchel to fight as a heavyweight, Mizner went on, that he had already put on extra muscle and could no longer make the middleweight limit and consequently would give up his claim to the title and become a fully fledged heavyweight.
Before buckling down to tr
aining, Mizner and Ketchel went to Reno, to see Jack Johnson make his latest defence of his title, against former heavyweight champion James J.Jeffries. It was apparent to both Mizner and Ketchel that Jeffries had no chance against the champion. As Mizner later told the story to several newspapers and many hangers-on, Ketchel suddenly decided that it would be unthinkable for Jeffries to let whites down by being humiliated in the ring. He approached Mizner with a plan. Ketchel was due to be announced to the crowd from the ring before the fight. He told the horrified Mizner that as he shook hands with Jeffries in front of the assembled thousands, he would suddenly unleash a right-hand punch to the former champion’s jaw, knocking him unconscious and thus rendering him unfit to fight, so cancelling the bout.
Mizner was able to point out a slight flaw in his fighter’s reasoning. They had both bet all the money they could spare on Johnson to win. If the fight should be cancelled, bets would be called off. Fortunately, after much persuasion, Ketchel was able to see the point of this argument and reluctantly abandoned his project. Anyway, he had been recruited as one of the timekeepers for the contest, so it would be a pity to bring the bout to a premature conclusion when he was going to have such an excellent free view of it.
After Johnson had won easily, Mizner and Ketchel left, scattering challenges to the champion from all directions. They travelled back to San Francisco in the company of writer Jack London. They got very drunk and at one point the three of them stole a hansom cab and hurriedly drove off in it, with Ketchel throwing money to the irate pursuers.
It was easy enough for Mizner to get newspaper space by now. Reporters were always willing to devote columns to a man who could coin such maxims as ‘The gent who wakes and finds himself a success hasn’t been asleep’ and ‘Be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down.’
To show that he was taking his boxing seriously, Ketchel even left New York and set up a training camp on a farm near Conway in Missouri. The ranch belonged to the self-styled Colonel R.P. Dickerson, a former private in the Spanish–American war, a wealthy and influential local landowner and sports enthusiast.
Wilson Mizner temporarily left Ketchel to his own devices at the camp. Mizner’s first successful play, The Deep Purple, was running in Chicago and for the moment monopolising the manager’s attention.
Ketchel and Mizner had become involved in so many scams and con tricks that the fighter became nervous and travelled about armed. Sports writer and honorary assistant manager Hype Igoe, who often accompanied the former middleweight, said, ‘I never knew him sit down to a meal in any big town without first laying his big blue six-shooter across his lap.’
Ketchel’s meals on the farm were served in a cook’s small house by a woman called Goldie Smith. Almost automatically, Ketchel hit on her to such an extent that he aroused the jealousy of a farmhand called Walter Dipley, Smith’s boyfriend. On the morning of 15 October 1910, as Ketchel sat eating his breakfast, Dipley crept up behind the fighter and shot him with a .22-calibre rifle. The bullet lodged in Ketchel’s left lung. As his victim slumped to the ground, Dipley picked up the boxer’s revolver, hit him on the head with it and fled, taking with him a ring from the dying man’s finger and the contents of his wallet.
Ketchel was rushed to a hospital in Springfield, where he died. Dipley was hunted down and arrested high in the Ozark Mountains. He and Goldie Smith were both tried for collusion to murder. Dipley was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The same verdict was also brought against Goldie Smith, but it was later reversed and she was released.
The great sports writer Damon Runyon wrote solemnly of Ketchel’s pre-eminent place in the hearts of many boxing fans. ‘It has been my observation that the memory of Ketchel prejudiced the judgement of everyone who has ever been associated with him. They can never see any other fighter.’
The news of Ketchel’s death was brought to Wilson Mizner as he sat playing poker for high stakes at the Millionaires’ Club. Selfish, flamboyant, untrustworthy but with a great gift for a phrase, Mizner murmured, ‘Start counting to ten; he’ll get up!’
5
A HOT DAY IN RENO
As many would-be managers were beginning to discover to their cost by the beginning of 1910, it took time and money to develop a White Hope. Great raw-boned giants with the bloom of youth on their cheeks and an avaricious glint in their eyes were beginning to emerge from the factories and farms in response to newspaper stories about the fortune that awaited a successful white heavyweight. As soon as they appeared they were being snatched into cluttered big-city gyms by wrinkled and ever-optimistic handlers looking for meal tickets.
For most of the clumsy tyros there lay months of expensive training and tutoring ahead before they could be launched in the ring against punch-drunk trial horses, but, when they did meet these hand-picked opponents, too often the Hopes were flattened by the hopeless ones. Credible challengers would eventually emerge, the managers were sure of that, but it would take another couple of years before any of them were ready to face Jack Johnson.
In the meantime the public was clamouring for a white man to defeat Jack Johnson. Promoters were circling like sharks, waiting for the opportunity to match a White Hope against the champion. One of the first to announce his intentions was the Australian Hugh D. McIntosh, who had put on the Johnson–Burns championship fight. Weeping crocodile tears of remorse at having given a black man the opportunity to win the title, in April 1909 McIntosh arrived in New York and told a reporter from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin, ‘Now that a negro is the champion, because of the fight which I promoted in Australia last fall, I shall do all that lies in my power to reverse the situation . . . If possible I will bring the present champion into conflict with a white man who may wrest the honours from him.’
There was only one possibility on the horizon. That was the retired, undefeated former champion James J. Jeffries. A solitary man, he had given up trying to cash in on his former fame. For a time he had toured as Davy Crockett in a stage production of The Man from the West. The intended dramatic climax had been for Jeffries, clad in fringed buckskin, to use all his strength to hold a broken door shut against the attacks of the real wolves being used in the production. At the same time the former champion had to make sure that he was not obscuring from the gaze of the audience the slender form of his 6-stone leading lady. Neither the wolves nor the anorexic actress had satisfied many audiences, so in a revised version the former champion would take his curtain-calls, hurry into the wings and reappear in fighting costume to go three rounds with a sparring partner. Sometimes he would even spar between the acts. Even this did not catch on. William Brady, his producer, complained, ‘Although Jeff was a fairly good actor, the public would not go to see him.’
With some relief Jeffries had given up the stage and had been living quietly until the requests for him to make a comeback. Jeffries did not want to fight again. He was happy with his alfalfa farm and saloon and, at more than 4 stone overweight, knew that it would take months of agonising training to get back into condition again – that is, if at the age of 34 he could ever regain his old fitness and agility.
The pressure from the public for Jeffries to fight Johnson was tremendous. In April 1909, the Chicago Tribune even printed a photograph of a young girl pointing tremulously at the camera, with the caption: ‘Please, Mr Jeffries, are you going to fight Mr Johnson?’
Slowly Jeffries began to consider the prospect of a comeback. He went on a diet and began stepping up his exercise. Finally he decided that if the doctors cleared him and told him that he could get back into shape, he would consider fighting Johnson.
First he approached his old manager, William Brady, who had guided him to the heavyweight title back in 1899. To his dismay, Brady rejected him out of hand. The reason that the veteran gave was that he was too busy producing another Broadway play. However, during his partnership with Jeffries he had put on as many as eight Broadway shows a year without letting it affect his manag
erial duties.
In fact, the producer would not entertain resuming his association for two reasons. He had grown disillusioned with the prize ring, especially in New York, because of the amount of corruption which had crept into the sport. ‘Night after night,’ he complained in his autobiography Fighting Man, ‘fake fights were pulled off all over the city.’
Another reason for Brady’s refusal was his fear that Jeffries would get badly hurt by Johnson if the two should meet. When Jeffries said that he was determined to go through with the fight, Brady told him, ‘If you do, you’ll regret it as long as you live, for Johnson will surely beat you.’ Brady said that following this Jeffries never spoke to him again.
As a result Jeffries called upon an old friend, Sam Berger, to handle his affairs. Berger, a studious, reflective sort, had won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1904 St Louis Olympics, the first time that boxing had been introduced at a modern Olympiad. In Athens in 1896, it had been rejected by the organisers as ‘ungentlemanly, dangerous and practised by the dregs of society’. Only Americans had entered in 1904. Berger, a member of the San Francisco Olympic Club, turned professional after winning his Olympic championship but did not have a glittering career. The highlight of his paid record was a six-round, no-decision bout with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.
By the time he was approached by Jeffries in 1909, Berger had abandoned the ring in favour of a successful business career, which was to culminate in the ownership of a large San Francisco clothing store. However, he was prepared to put all this on hold to handle negotiations for Jeffries and act as one of his sparring partners in the initial stages of the old champion’s comeback.
