by Graeme Kent
All the same Flynn was tough and experienced. At 5ft 9in he was short for a heavyweight, but had developed into a swinging, gutsy, dirty, very brave second-rate fighter, far too good for the novice Morris.
Morris’s backer, the oilman Frank Ufer, was well aware of this and tried to bribe Flynn ‘to go into the tank’. Flynn agreed, once he had bartered the price up to $7,500, to throw the fight. Unfortunately rumours of the impending transaction reached the ears of the fearless sports writer of the New York Morning Telegraph, Bat Masterson, a former frontier-town gunslinger of the Old West. In his column of 10 September 1911, Masterson caustically wrote, ‘There have been a good many cooked-up affairs pulled off in the prize-ring, as everybody knows, but hardly one quite as daring or that smells so much like a polecat as the one between Flynn and Morris.’ Masterson then bullied Fireman Jim into admitting his role in the fix-up and gave the confession the leading spot in his next column.
As a result the fight was conducted fairly, if bloodily. Flynn subjected Morris to a solid thrashing over the entire distance. For a while spectators marvelled at the White Hope’s fortitude, but even the most hardened among them eventually became sickened at the slaughter. By the halfway stage the referee had been forced to change into a fresh shirt and the ringsiders, with no changes of wardrobe available, were soaked in Morris’s blood. The New York statutes may have declared that no decision could be announced, but reporters covering the contest wrote that Morris had lost by a street and had his inadequacies highlighted in the process.
The next day the New York Times described Morris’s condition in sickening detail. ‘When the bout ended the right side of Morris’s face was battered out of shape. His right eye was completely closed in the third round, and not even a bit of surgical work by one of his attendants, who lanced the swollen flesh beneath the eye, did anything to restore sight to the closed optic. His mouth was out of shape, too, and a huge bruise extended from his temple to his lower jaw. It is doubtful if any pugilist has been battered out of shape as he was in this bout.’
It was time for damage limitation. Morris’s handlers kept him out of the ring for several months while they employed black star Joe Jeanette to coach their man in the gymnasium. Jeanette did what he could to iron out the more glaring deficiencies in the white man’s style, but no one could transform the lumbering former fireman into a skilled exponent of boxing.
There still remained the punch. Morris was always capable of flooring novices and no-hopers, and for a time after the Flynn debacle the heavyweight was fed a diet of glass-jawed secondand third-raters. Before the end of the year he had rehabilitated himself to a certain extent by disposing inside the distance of such unknowns as Bill Bass, Denver Jack Geyer and Al Williams.
But every seasoned member of the fight game who had witnessed the thrashing Morris had received from Fireman Jim Flynn knew that Carl Morris would never scale the heights. Fellow prospects like skilled boxer Tom Kennedy and tough-jawed Jim Stewart were able to avoid or soak up his heavy punches and take him the no-decision distance easily.
After a time, Morris became disillusioned with the fight game and went back to Oklahoma. However, he soon realised that even being a trial horse was preferable to the back-breaking and ill-paid task of feeding the insatiable maw of a locomotive for ten hours a day. He returned east, found another manager and became a fulltime fighter again. He still rattled off his quota of knockouts against lesser opponents, but he was now regarded as a good, tough man, not a promising contender.
Morris managed to reinvent himself several times. First he cashed in on his former glory by billing himself as the Original White Hope. Patrons would still pay to see someone who once had been touted as Jack Johnson’s next opponent. A clergyman-turned-press agent called Ingraham was employed to sell the new Carl Morris to the public: ‘Morris trains diligently, and at all times refrains from doing anything that would in the least impair his ability,’ ran one unctuous release. ‘He denies himself many things that appeal to his appetite lest they should endanger his chances of victory.’ Then the former reverend concluded with a flourish, ‘If the Apostle Paul could recommend the Roman Soldier as an example to the Christian, why may we not learn a lesson from this victor of many a hard-fought bout?’
But virtue was not a particularly saleable quality. Morris’s goody-two-shoes persona did not last long. Instead his next manager in the string came up with the image that was to remain with Morris for the rest of his career. He was now billed as the world’s dirtiest fighter. What is more, he lived up to it. The youngster who once had been comprehensively out-fouled by Fireman Jim Flynn became the more mature past master at such extra-curricular activities as gouging, hitting below the belt, kneeing, hitting on the break, butting and rabbit-punching to the nape of the neck. And that was in his more restrained exhibitions.
So effective was Morris at his new skills that he even secured the reluctant admiration of Wild Burt Kenny. Until the advent of the revamped Carl Morris, it had been Kenny who claimed to be the foul fighter of the century, noted for his triple lead with the head, the elbow and the knee. He had been celebrated on a notorious one-man invasion of Ireland for being disqualified in two successive bouts for kicking his opponents after he had decked them.
After his latest makeover, Morris in mid-career made Kenny look like a sissy. In the ring he was said to resemble a mad grisly bear. If there was not a riot at the end of one of his bouts, with spectators throwing chairs and bottles at him, Morris felt that he had failed in life. Towards the end of his career, one newspaper suggested that, in consideration of his skill in stunning opponents with his head, the soon-to-be-ex-boxer might consider looking for a new post ‘with the Butterick Company on Goat Island at Butte Monte’.
Carl Morris was still around a decade later as cannon fodder for the up-and-coming Jack Dempsey and other young heavyweights. At one time, the Salpulpa heavyweight had employed Dempsey as a seventy-cents-a-day sparring partner and had treated the younger fighter with such contempt and meanness that Dempsey developed a lifelong animosity towards the giant. At the tail end of Morris’s career he was knocked out three times by the emerging Dempsey, once in the first minute of the first round. Dempsey admitted later that Morris had been the only opponent he had genuinely hated.
Morris’s time as a prospect may have passed him by, but there were plenty lining up to take his place.
The first semi-official gathering of some of the White Hopes occurred on 11 May 1911 at the National Sporting Club in New York. Promoter Tom O’Rourke announced that, in order to produce a Caucasian heavyweight capable of challenging Jack Johnson, he was bringing together the cream of the white heavyweights in a knockout tournament. In the same month the influential sporting newspaper the Police Gazette commented approvingly on his efforts: ‘Tom O’Rourke is the only promoter who is making a rational effort to develop new material in the professional heavyweight division with a view to bringing out a man capable of battling against Johnson and winning back the title of champion for the white race.’
O’Rourke was a charlatan and conman of sufficient calibre to maintain the reluctant admiration of such hard men as Coffroth and Curley. He broke into the game as manager and promoter of a number of black fighters in the lower weight divisions whom nobody else wanted to look after; in the ring parlance of the time, black boxers ‘did not draw flies’. O’Rourke compensated for his altruism by taking 50 per cent of his fighters’ purses and by forcing them to box to orders. Even as early as the turn of the century, when the phrase ‘anything goes’ could be said to have been the motto of professional boxing, O’Rourke was famed for his wheeling and dealing and was often accused of ‘fixing’ the results of the fighters he managed in order to engineer betting coups. The Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin of 8 February 1900 was so incensed by the manager’s finagling that it accused O’Rourke of choreographing many of the bouts in which his fighters were involved:
The following is a list of some of the battles that have
taken place within a year over which there have been charges of crookedness, wrong decisions or some kind of foul play.
In all of them Tom O’Rourke has been a prominent factor, either as manager of one of the principals or manager of the club. In several cases it has been clearly shown that the battles were ‘fakes’ expressly made for betting purposes . . .
Walcott vs. Lavigne
Sharkey vs. Corbett
West vs. Bonner
Walcott vs. Creedon
etc. etc.
San Francisco, Oct 29, 1897
Lennox Club, Nov 22, 1898
Lennox Club, Jan 17, 1899
Lennox Club, April 25, 1899
All these bouts involved champions or near champions. It is a sign of O’Rourke’s influence that he was able to attract such luminaries.
Despite his best efforts, Tom O’Rourke found that managing black fighters, even fistic geniuses like Joe Walcott and George Dixon, was not a passport to the sort of wealth he envisaged. The big money lay with the big white men, specifically the White Hopes. So he opened the New York National Sporting Club and organised a series of tournaments in the hope of discovering a suitable white heavyweight. The Police Gazette described one of these events: ‘O’Rourke firmly believes that the only way to discover real white heavyweights is by holding a tourney open to all comers, the contestants to be matched by lots to meet in bouts of four rounds each, the elimination process finally bringing the two best men together . . .’
Presumably O’Rourke got around the restrictions of the Frawley Law by having cronies among the newspaper fraternity rendering unofficial decisions to decide which fighters went on to the subsequent rounds of his shows.
At first these White Hope tournaments attracted a reasonable number of entries. The contestants for one of O’Rourke’s competitions were announced as being a 6ft-9in heavyweight from Jacksonville; a Texan backed by a wealthy banker from his home state; 20-stone Herman Tracey from Bradford, Illinois, who it was claimed (by the club’s press agent) had killed an ox with a right-hand blow; Joe Rogers, a 19-stone wrestler;the amateur heavyweight boxing champion of Canada; and a Philadelphia entrant with a considerable reputation as a slugger in his home city.
Unfortunately, the standard of boxing offered by these putative White Hopes was bad enough to discourage the promoter considerably, and he decided to concentrate on an Iowan amateur called Al Palzer, whom O’Rourke had seen in an unpaid bout in a small New York hall. This was generally known among the New York fighting cognoscenti, who treated the 11 May tournament with considerable suspicion.
Accordingly, the more capable and better managed of the White Hopes were steered well clear of the tournament by their handlers. For one thing, the purse money on offer was negligible. For another, no self-respecting manager was going to allow his charge to run the risk of walking into a sucker punch and thus losing all credibility so early in the game. A clinching argument was that O’Rourke, the promoter, was going to ask for a share in the winning behemoth as a reward for staging the day’s proceedings. There was also a strong suspicion among the more cynical – that is, all the other managers – that the tournament was being staged mainly for the benefit of O’Rourke’s own novice heavyweight, the hard-punching 20-year-old blond Iowan farm boy of German descent, Al Palzer, in order to get his tall 16-stoner an instant reputation.
At the age of 12 Palzer had run away from home in Winneshiek County, Iowa, and for the next eight years had worked at a variety of labouring jobs as he made his way across the country, even serving a short hitch in the US Navy, before being spotted by O’Rourke winning an amateur heavyweight competition in New York. He had been promptly signed to a five-year contract by the manager.
It was announced that twenty-three heavyweights had been carefully selected for the White Hope tournament. In reality it was open to anyone, even one optimistic middleweight who turned up with his boxing shoes wrapped in a newspaper. On the day, eleven wannabes arrived and were matched against one another in a series of four-round eliminating bouts taking place over the entire day and evening. As the big fellows came and went, so did the spectators, disgusted by the abysmal standards of the boxing on display.
Pint-sized and irascible Liverpool-born manager Jimmy Johnston, who had turned up in the hope of stealing somebody else’s prospect, was so incensed by having to forgo his customary poker game in order to witness the display of mass ineptitude in the ring above him that he finally lost his temper. Tearing off his jacket, the pugnacious former bantamweight loudly offered to fight each and every one of the Hopes present in the hall. The diminutive Johnston, who was known in fight circles as the Boy Bandit, found no takers.
Among the sheepish entrants ignoring the feisty challenger was the dour Fred McLaglen, Victor’s brother. Fighting out of Winnipeg as Fred McKay, he claimed the heavyweight championship of Eastern Canada, but it was largely suspected that he had bestowed the title on himself after some obscure logging-camp free-for-all.
In his first bout in the tournament, McKay came up against a journeyman called Sailor White. It was a sign of the Sailor’s lack of ability that even Fred’s sibling Victor McLaglen had managed to knock him out, although in an earlier meeting White had defeated McLaglen.
In the first round of his bout with White, McKay was almost spectacularly successful. Even hardened handlers and managers had emerged from the dressing rooms to watch McKay hand out a thrashing to the ex-sailor. In the second round, however, White landed a solitary crushing right-hand blow, knocking McKay unconscious. The potential backers, realising that the Englishman was not going to provide them with a free ride on the gravy train, vanished like the melting snows. One of them, manager ‘Dumb’ Dan Morgan, noted of the abandoned fighter: ‘He had to carry his own bucket back to the dressing room when he came to.’
As had been generally expected, Al Palzer, the ‘house’ fighter belonging to Tom O’Rourke, emerged as the favourite to win the tournament. He had been training in secret for months, and before the tournament he had won two fights on knockouts and had fought a ten-round, no-decision bout with another prospect, Frank Moran.
In the first heat of the competition, Palzer outpointed an unknown called Joe Rogers. Most of the other entrants having either eliminated one another or been driven in shame from the club by the catcalls of the spectators, that left only Sailor White for Palzer to meet in the final.
White, still dazed by his unexpected victory over Fred McKay, knew better than to upset influential manager and promoter O’Rourke. Pacifically he allowed Palzer to cuff him around for four rounds. During the fight, Jack Johnson made an ostentatious entrance and sat at the ringside for a few minutes watching with unconcealed disgust as the two finalists went through the motions. When asked if he was learning anything from the two sweating White Hopes, the champion gave his wide, gold-toothed smile. ‘I’m learning plenty,’ he replied contentedly.
All these moves and countermoves were followed avidly by a boxing-mad public. The wily politician Theodore Roosevelt, who always had his finger on the general pulse, capitalised on this interest by disinterring a phrase from the old prize-ring when, in 1912, he announced his intention of seeking his party’s nomination as candidate for the presidency. ‘I have’, he said proudly, ‘thrown my hat into the ring!’
Back in the real ring, O’Rourke’s tournament achieved its ambition in establishing the winner as an up-and-coming heavyweight, and when Palzer went on to knock out another White Hope, Tom Kennedy, and stopped trial horse Al Kaufmann in the fifth round, some followers of the ring actually began to concede that perhaps Palzer was the best young white heavyweight around. Shrewdly, at this stage O’Rourke would only let his protégé box in New York, where the Frawley Law decreed that fights should last no longer than ten rounds and that no points decision could be rendered at the end of a bout. This meant that unless Palzer should be knocked out, officially he could not lose.
The heavyweight, like most of his peers, was also picking up so
me loose change on the vaudeville circuit. The Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin of 2 April 1912 announced, ‘Al Palzer, the New York heavyweight, who has challenged the present champion, Jack Johnson, will be seen at the Star next week as an added attraction with the Jardin de Paris Girls and Abe Leavitt, the “live-wire” comedian. Palzer will box six rounds with his sparring partners and local aspirants at every performance.’
His bandwagon gathered momentum in 1912, when the English heavyweight champion Bombardier Billy Wells visited the USA for several fights. With some trepidation, Tom O’Rourke accepted a contest with Wells on behalf of his charge. Palzer had been marking time, like most current heavyweights, by knocking out Sailor White, but had then been forced to take time off to have an operation on his damaged nose.
The bout with Palzer was intended to gain Wells an international reputation. Palzer was the heavier of the two by several stone but both men were comparative novices. Palzer was engaging in his eleventh professional bout, while Wells was having his tenth, although he had boxed as an amateur and in the Army.
Their Madison Square Garden contest, while it lasted, was spectacular. Wells started by outboxing the Iowan with his famous straight left. Towards the end of the round Wells dropped his opponent heavily, but Palzer regained his feet, shook his head and was fighting back at the bell. The second round was a repetition of the first, with Palzer plodding forward gamely while Wells boxed his head off. In the third and final round things changed. Palzer had worked out the Englishman’s style, or had had it worked out for him by his cornermen. He ducked under Wells’s left lead and hit the Bombardier hard in the stomach. Wells floundered miserably on the canvas, like a landed fish, and did not regain his feet in time.
The result did far more for Palzer than winning the dubious White Hope tournament had done. While Wells disconsolately returned to England after one more fight, Palzer was suddenly in great demand, his white heavyweight championship taking on a fresh international lustre.
