The Great White Hopes

by Graeme Kent

  When he had recovered Fitzsimmons walked unsteadily to the ropes and addressed the sympathetic crowd. ‘I’m through,’ he declared. ‘I will never box again.’

  The Philadelphia Evening Star of 27 December wrote sympathetically of the loser, ‘Though Fitz trained faithfully he lacked his old punch and cunning. Had it not been for the fact that Lang was a trifle awed in meeting a man of Fitz’s reputation, he would have finished the old man in half the time.’

  A week later Bob Fitzsimmons was the guest of honour at another Sydney boxing tournament. Between bouts he was summoned into the ring and presented with a gold card case by Bill Lang on behalf of the local boxing fans. Fitzsimmons made a gracious little speech in which he wished Lang well for the future. Later that night the veteran sat up late in his hotel room with the young Australian heavyweight and Billy Williams, his manager, reminiscing about his fighting career and showing the younger fighter his favourite punches.

  Although the Fitzsimmons bout was a meaningless one, it rehabilitated Lang in the eyes of his followers. Australian fans pointed out that he was still only 25, had never fought abroad, and that his two defeats had been at the hands of Johnson and Burns, the best men in the world at the time. Lang, it was decided, was definitely a White Hope and should be groomed for another shot at Jack Johnson.

  These hopes suffered a blow in April 1910, when Tommy Burns made a comeback and was matched in Sydney with Lang for the British Empire Heavyweight Championship. Again Burns defeated Lang, this time over twenty rounds.

  However, the ex-blacksmith reinforced his supporters’ hopes for him when he three times knocked out Bill Squires to assert his claim as Australia’s leading heavyweight. Apart from one abortive comeback attempt years later in 1916, Squires retired from the ring. He lived on to a hearty old age, dying in 1962 at 83 years old.

  Lang was taken up by the ever-hopeful McIntosh, who escorted his White Hope to the USA, boosting him as the fighter who had beaten one former world champion, the elderly Fitzsimmons, and put up stern fights against two others, Burns and Johnson. However, the Australian’s putative attempt to establish himself as a slightly passé contender soon foundered. In fact, Lang’s main claim to fame on his visit to the States lay in being an unwitting central figure in a fistic scandal.

  He was matched with former middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, now a burnt-out case at the age of 24 and increasingly reliant on his manager Wilson Mizner putting the fix in with potential opponents. There was an uproar when Ketchel suddenly pulled out of the bout, claiming a sore foot. The New York Telegraph caused a scandal when it published an interview with Lang’s manager, Hugh D. McIntosh, in which the latter claimed that he had refused to post a bond of $5,000 guaranteeing that Lang would not attempt to knock Ketchel out.

  The article in the Telegraph killed any thoughts of a Lang–Ketchel bout. Instead, the Australian was matched against Al Kaufmann in Philadelphia. This was almost exactly a year after the San Francisco heavyweight had been humiliated by Jack Johnson in their tenround, no-decision bout. Since then, Kaufmann had been outclassed in a couple of no-decision contests against Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and had the ignominy of being recruited as one of Johnson’s sparring partners in the champion’s preparation for his title bout with James J. Jeffries in Reno.

  No one considered the shot Kaufmann to be a White Hope any more, but merely a trial horse for aspirants to the cherished inner circle of good white big men. Lang was expected to knock out his tall opponent with little trouble. Instead he struggled over the course of a turgid six-round, no-decision bout with the Californian giant. True to prizefighting form, the Australian blamed his poor showing on an injured hand. In an interview with the Police Gazette of 21 January 1911, Lang claimed, ‘An injured hand prevented me from beating him. I almost had him out in the second round and could have finished him if I had been able to use my right hand. He saved himself by clutching me around the neck until the bell rang.’

  When it became evident that Lang would not draw flies in the USA, McIntosh decided on one more throw of the dice in an effort to establish the Melbourne man. He took him to England and matched the Australian with the wildly eccentric Irishman, Petty Officer ‘Nutty’ Curran, for the Heavyweight Championship of the British Empire. Curran was a battered adherent of the Iron Hague laissez-faire school of training who boasted that he had never met an opponent who could get past his face.

  Lang knocked Curran down in the first round but was disqualified when his follow-up blow struck the dazed Irishman while he was still in the act of rising from the canvas. But he redeemed himself slightly with a knockout win over American Jack Burns, and McIntosh decided to give his increasingly tarnished White Hope one last chance. In 1911, he matched Lang against Sam Langford at Olympia in London. Sports writer Trevor Wignall, present at the bout, described the build-up to the fight in his book The Story of Boxing. ‘The contest was boomed to such an extent that it was the only thing talked about for weeks. Lang had arrived in London with the reputation of being a world-beater.’

  McIntosh did his best to publicise the fight by writing a letter to the Baltimore American of 14 January: ‘I have just matched Sam Langford and Bill Lang, and I will endeavour to match the winner against Johnson. I will give it as my opinion now that Lang is the man destined to meet Jack Johnson for the championship of the world, and you can place me on record that Bill Lang will be the next world’s champion. I feel certain of this. He has improved out of all recognition.’

  Sam Langford and Bill Lang went into training in London, but neither was of much use to their promoter when it came to building up their contest in advance. Langford had good reason to be wary of too much contact with white people and refused to attend any social functions with them, while Lang was too bashful to do more than utter a few non-committal grunts when interviewed by the press. Andrew Soutar, a sports writer who tried to interview the Australian, gave up in disgust when Lang would only reply with the words ‘Oh, yeah!’ to any question.

  Nevertheless, the promotion was the most glamorous boxing tournament ever seen in England up to that time. Aided by ex-lightweight Jimmy Britt, who interrupted his vaudeville career to undertake publicity for the contest, McIntosh pulled out all the stops. On the night of 14 February the ringside glittered with men in dress shirts and white ties and bejewelled women in evening gowns. Stewards, many of them old fighters, looked incongruous in tight white linen jackets with gilt buttons, while pretty girls sold programmes.

  To help the film cameras and hopefully enhance the visual effect, Langford had been issued with a set of white boxing gloves. The black fighter was extremely suspicious of this departure from the norm, but as usual philosophically went along with his white boss’s whims. A military band played both men into the ring.

  During the preliminaries Lang, at 6ft tall and weighing 14 stone, towered over his opponent, outweighing Langford by 2 stone. From the first bell, the Australian was nowhere in the fight. Andrew Soutar, watching from ringside, wrote of Lang in his autobiography My Sporting Life, ‘He was like a rabbit fascinated by a stoat. The little black walked straight up to him arms down by his side . . .’ Lang tried to keep his smaller opponent at the end of his left jab, but did not have the experience to deal with Langford’s in-fighting style. Totally outclassed, Lang was knocked down in the second round and again in the third and the sixth. James Butler described Lang as spending the best part of each round bent almost double in an attempt to escape Langford’s punches. At one point Langford even dropped his arms to his sides and stuck out his chin invitingly. Lang struck him on his unprotected jaw with no fewer than four consecutive blows. Langford only laughed and turned to wink at his seconds.

  Towards the end of the sixth round Langford moved in for the kill. He swung his right, overbalanced and fell to the floor. Lang lashed out automatically in return. His glove slid across the top of his fallen opponent’s skull. It was a travesty of a real punch, but the referee Eugene Corri stepped forward and di
squalified the Australian for hitting his opponent while he was down. Afterwards Corri said that he was only too pleased to have an excuse to bring the bout to an end before Lang got seriously hurt. He may have been right, for Lang collapsed in his corner before he could leave the ring. Langford chatted idly with his seconds and before he returned to his dressing room ostentatiously smoked a cigar.

  As a fight it had been too one-sided to be interesting. Censoriously, Trevor Wignall reported from the ringside that Lang ‘was scared stiff when he entered the ring, and his display would not have done credit to a schoolboy’.

  There was an aftermath. During the bout, Sam Langford had been puzzled by his opponent’s apparent durability. Time after time Langford had toppled Lang with vicious blows, only to see the Australian doggedly get to his feet again. Langford was sure that he had struck Lang as hard as any man he had fought, seemingly to little effect. When he got back to his dressing room, he recounted years later, he split the gloves open with a knife. He discovered that the padding had been stuffed with the fur of a rabbit, to render it ineffective as a striking weapon and give the Australian an extra advantage. To all intents and purposes Langford might have been hitting his opponent with pillows.

  Langford took the offending gloves to the promoter’s office and threw them on the desk. ‘Oh, Mr. McIntosh,’ he said sadly, ‘you are a wicked man.’

  It was a bad night for the wealthy occupants of the ringside seats as well. As they left the arena, gangs of masked thugs were lying in wait to rob them.

  Lang received such a bad press for his inept showing against Sam Langford that he was no longer considered a White Hope. McIntosh, disillusioned with his man’s showing, drifted out of boxing, preferring to put on theatrical productions. Lang returned to Australia. Unfortunately, it was at a time when decent American fighters, sensing good purses and easy pickings, were visiting the continent on a regular basis. The black American Sam McVey knocked Lang out in two rounds in Sydney, while Tom ‘Bearcat’ McMahon dispatched the Australian in five rounds. In 1913, Dave Smith, who was little more than a middleweight, took the Australian title from Lang and the latter gave up boxing in favour of keeping a hotel.

  10

  FRENCH CONNECTIONS

  Boxing was late coming to France, but by 1913 la boxe was one of the country’s most popular sports. This was mainly due to the efforts of the precocious Georges Carpentier and his manager François Descamps. Since Descamps had started coaching the 13-year-old and three years later had steered him to the French lightweight title, the handsome and hard-punching Carpentier had become the sporting idol of his country. Before the end of his career he would go on to win the welterweight, middleweight, lightheavyweight and heavyweight championships of France and to become the light-heavyweight champion of the world.

  On his way up, Carpentier did not have it all his own way. As a 17-year-old he was thrashed by two tough American middleweights in Frank Klaus and Billy Papke. Unfortunately, Papke could not hang around for a return match, though he did also fight fellow American Willie Lewis while he was in Paris. At the weigh-in for that fight, someone in the crowd milling around the scales mentioned that Stanley Ketchel was the world’s middleweight champion. This was a sore point with Papke, who considered himself to hold the title. Believing that the remark had been made by Lewis’s manager, Dan McKetrick, Papke took a swing at him. The Milwaukee Free Press took up the story: ‘The act caused a small riot . . . and Papke would have been badly mauled if he had not taken it on the run.’

  The fine black heavyweight Joe Jeanette also defeated the Frenchman. Carpentier’s manager, Descamps, was shrewd enough after this to employ Jeanette to take a hand in the training of his protégé. As a result, by 1913, Carpentier was considered capable of beating any European heavyweight and was being groomed for a shot at the world light-heavyweight title, with a tilt at the heavyweight championship to follow.

  There were three major boxing halls in Paris alone, each one paying much higher purses to the right fighters than any in England or the USA. This led to a major migration of foreign boxers into the country. In addition, unlike the USA and England, there was no discernible colour bar in France. Jack Johnson himself made his home in exile there for a time, while Sam McVey was so popular in Paris that he settled there, and as a sign of his acclimatisation announced that from then, in homage to his adopted nation, he was to be billed as Sam McVea. In the three years he stayed in the capital he made so much money that he was able to stroll along the boulevards dressed in a frock coat, top hat and striped trousers as his daily attire. He lost only one of more than thirty fights in Europe, and this was in a thriller with his old adversary Joe Jeanette. McVey knocked his opponent down at least twenty times, but in the process shipped so much punishment that he had to retire in the forty-ninth round.

  Joe Jeanette arrived in Paris with his manager, the shrewd Dan McKetrick, ex-editor of the New York World, and opened a boxing school in the French capital before undertaking a number of fights there. In 1909, his fight with the sturdy Canadian White Hope Sandy Ferguson caused a sensation, especially in the thirteenth round, when both heavyweights landed their best shots simultaneously and each went tumbling to the canvas. They beat the count and the black boxer went on to win on points. Their first bout was so popular that the two men met in France on three other occasions before they went home for a summer holiday.

  France was undergoing a sporting renaissance, particularly in the air. In 1908, the Michelin brothers, André and Edouard, created the Michelin Grand Prix, with an award of 20,000 francs for any aviator who could achieve a flying distance of at least 20 kilometres. The prize was won by Wilbur Wright, the famous pioneer, with a distance of 125 kilometres. The competition became an annual one, with each year’s winner asked to fly at least twice as far as the previous winner.

  France also had its own early version of kick-boxing, which did not catch on in Great Britain. In an article in C.B. Fry’s Magazine of Sports and Out-of-Door Life in 1905, an English visitor to a French School of Arms in Paris wrote reassuringly, ‘The kick which the Frenchman introduces so nimbly into his sparring matches does not in the least constitute a reason for writing him down as an ass . . . They are not bred of an uncontrollable desire to turn his back on his opponent. They are matters of rule.’

  Some American big men who were a little past their best also settled for a while in France, claiming to be White Hopes in transit. The wily Kid McCoy, inventor of the corkscrew punch and onetime disputed claimant to the world light-heavyweight title, was 39 and had recently been declared bankrupt when he turned up. The USA had become a little too hot for him when his bout with former heavyweight champ James J. Corbett was declared to be fixed, practically ending boxing in New York for a while.

  Despite his advancing years, McCoy was still good enough to outpoint PO Nutty Curran in Nice. His victory was watched by a local resident, the poet, playwright and Nobel Prize-winner for Literature Maurice Maeterlinck, a boxing enthusiast. He took the American under his wing. The two men became friends and companions. McCoy taught the writer how to box, in preparation for a charity exhibition bout between Maeterlinck and Georges Carpentier. For his part, the American fighter learned French and tried to read his host’s books. The sardonic, witty and totally unscrupulous McCoy had always attracted the interest of writers. In 1904, when he was training for a fight with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, he had been visited at his training camp by the humorous novelist P.G. Wodehouse. The usually gentle and retiring Wodehouse had even volunteered to box a round with McCoy, but the fighter’s then wife (he was married six times) arrived and bore off her husband, a fact for which Wodehouse was to express his gratitude in later years.

  French interest in Carpentier as a White Hope grew when he was matched against Bombardier Wells in Nice on 1 June 1913. The bout was scheduled as part of the Ghent Exhibition and was billed as being for the European Heavyweight Championship, although Carpentier weighed less than 12 stone. Wells was 3in t
aller and more than a stone heavier than his younger opponent. There was a certain amount of feeling between the two men. Four years earlier, when Carpentier as a welterweight had been preparing for a fight at Leigh on Sea in Great Britain, he had sparred with Wells and had resented it when the much bigger man had not pulled his punches.

  The Ghent fight seemed an odd one for Descamps to agree to. Wells’s defeats by Americans had almost ruled him out as a White Hope, yet he appeared to be much too big and strong for his opponent. The French manager, however, thought that a decisive victory over the British heavyweight champion would cement Carpentier’s claim to being the best in Europe.

  Descamps told the 19-year-old Carpentier to stay close to Wells from the off. Carpentier did his best to snuggle up to the big man, but he was knocked down heavily in the first round and seemed fortunate to survive to the bell. Acting on his corner’s instructions, the Frenchman alternately clinched and ran in the second and third rounds. By the fourth round he was all right again, while Wells’s confidence was beginning to trickle away at the sight of his adversary apparently none the worse for wear. Then Carpentier moved in and knocked out the passively resigned Wells with a right to the head and a left to the body.

  Back home in Great Britain, many fans refused to believe that their champion could have run out of steam again. The National Sporting Club rematched the pair for a purse of £3,000 and sidestakes of £300. The hall was crowded, with onlookers anticipating a decisive win for the English fighter on his home turf. Wells did his best to psych out his opponent. He kept Carpentier waiting for five minutes in the ring, and then caused a further delay by complaining about the bandages on the hands of the French fighter.