by Graeme Kent
When the fight finally got under way, this time Wells lasted only 73 seconds. The French fighter sallied towards his apparently transfixed opponent, battered him around the ring and knocked him out with a one-two to the body. As the heavyweight lay wretchedly prone on the canvas, the brilliant Welsh featherweight Jim Driscoll broke all the club rules by racing to the ringside and berating Wells furiously, calling him a spineless coward. The Welshman was ordered away from the ring, but some distinguished members of the club had also joined in and were by now hissing, ‘Fake!’ The New York Times of 9 December reported, ‘Wells finally rose, and attempted to make a speech, but his voice was not audible above the excited hubbub, and anyway the spectators were in no mood to listen to explanations from their fallen hero.’
Wells never recovered from these two defeats, but the victories fast-tracked Carpentier into the leading ranks of the White Hopes. Descamps, who was never averse to taking a gamble if the potential rewards seemed high enough, challenged Gunboat Smith to come to Europe to defend the White Heavyweight Championship of the World against the young Frenchman.
The lean and rangy Smith had been making steady progress since leaving the US Navy. He had gained valuable experience early on by acting as a doughty sparring partner for Jack Johnson when the champion had been preparing for his title defence against Stanley Ketchel. Johnson’s system of counterpunching had proved too much for the inexperienced Smith, but the ex-sailor had persevered and had secured a great deal of favourable newspaper publicity when, during a sparring session, he had staggered the champion with a potent right-hand punch. After this incident Smith went on to build an impressive record as a hard-punching and resourceful heavyweight contender. He defeated such big names as Frank Moran, Fireman Jim Flynn and Jess Willard, before going on to cause a significant upset by outpointing Sam Langford over twelve rounds in Boston. There were some, however, who thought that Langford, who was still hoping for a title shot, boxed gently with his white opponent in order to persuade Jack Johnson that he would be easy meat.
When Smith defeated Al Pelkey, still shell-shocked by the ring death of his opponent Luther McCarty, he also won the White Heavyweight Championship, for what it was worth. In Europe, with Carpentier emerging fast after his defeats of Wells, it was worth quite a lot. A number of European promoters submitted offers to stage a match between the two men for Smith’s unofficial championship.
To Descamps’s disappointment the bout did not take place in France. A British promoter, Dick Burge, a former British lightweight champion now promoting at the Ring in the East End of London, secured the contest with the offer of a large purse and hired Olympia as the venue.
A huge crowd met Smith at Paddington station. The American fighter trained at Harrow, where the atmosphere in the camp was light hearted. One visitor saw Smith’s trainer, one-time leading black heavyweight Bob Armstrong, encouraging a goat to charge at his fighter. One night Smith attended a tournament in London. Not impressed by the attitude of one British fighter who showed no appetite for conflict, the American heavyweight remarked scornfully that if the bout had taken place back home the offending boxer would have been shot so full of holes that he would not be able to swim for a year.
It was a sign of the influence still being cast over the scene by Jack Johnson in exile, and the respect extended to him even by the leading White Hopes, that, when Gunboat Smith was asked off the record when he was going to fight the black champion, the white heavyweight paused reflectively and then said curtly, ‘Johnson will wait, and the longer the better.’
When asked for his plan of campaign against Carpentier, Smith said, ‘I have never seen that French guy but when I meet him at Olympia, I shall bring a right hand punch over from my hip, and if I land he will think Olympia has fallen in.’ When asked for his intentions should he lose, the pragmatic Smith answered grimly, ‘Fight again! And after that, more fighting, for that is how I live.’
The contest, held on 16 July 1914 before a sell-out crowd, was exciting and controversial. Early on Smith was floored and saved by the bell, but he came back into the fight and, with his extra weight and strength, was beginning to back Carpentier up. In the sixth round, Carpentier missed with a powerful right hand, overbalanced and tumbled to the ground. At the same time Smith threw a counterpunch. The Frenchman was on his knees and in the act of rising. Smith’s punch grazed the top of Carpentier’s head.
The impact was minimal and the blow was obviously unintentional, but technically it was a foul. Descamps was too experienced to let such a golden opportunity for victory pass him by. The manager tumbled into the ring, screaming ‘Foul!’ and protectively cuddling the head of his bewildered and embarrassed heavyweight. The referee, Eugene Corri, at once disqualified Smith for striking his opponent while he was down. Later he wrote sternly in his autobiography, ‘It was no use discussing whether Smith intended to foul him or regretted having fouled him. The fact remains that he contravened the rules of the Ring by hitting his opponent when he was down.’
There was uproar in the hall. Smith’s manager, Buckley, rushed over and screamed (in questionable taste, as the referee mildly remarked), ‘How much, Mr Corri, did you have on Carpentier?’ Fred Dartnell, who covered the match for his newspaper, later wrote in his book Seconds Out, ‘I always thought that Mr Corri was rather bluffed by the French party.’
It was too late for recriminations. The fight was over and Carpentier could now claim to be the White Heavyweight Champion. A disappointed and resentful Smith returned to the USA, where salt was rubbed into his wounds when, in a return bout with Sam Langford, the black man, fighting with much less restraint than in their previous encounter, knocked out his white opponent. Smith, as he promised, fought on, but his time as the leading White Hope had come and gone.
Carpentier came back to Paris an even greater hero. He took on Tom Kennedy as a sparring partner and the Paris newspapers were full of the prospects of the handsome Frenchman fighting Jack Johnson for the latter’s world title. It never materialised. The canny Descamps realised that his charge, weighing little more than 12 stone and still only 19 years old, was not yet ready to concede 2in in height and 1½ stone in weight to the greatest defensive heavyweight the world had so far seen. Threatening noises were made by the French manager in the newspapers, and vague challenges were thrown out, but in the event Carpentier had only one more minor fight before enlisting in the French Air Force.
The French heavyweight did, in fact, take part in another unrecorded bout before his war service. In 1914, Carpentier received an unexpected challenge from a young Yorkshire amateur called George Mitchell. Disgusted by the fact that Bombardier Billy Wells had only managed to last 73 seconds against the French champion, Mitchell mentioned to a friend that he was sure he could elude Carpentier in the ring for longer than that.
The remark reached the ears of a family friend, a textile executive with business contacts in France. Boldly, he challenged Carpentier on Mitchell’s behalf. To the amazement of just about everyone, and the consternation of George Mitchell, the French heavyweight accepted.
Matters snowballed. Almost before he knew what was happening, Mitchell found himself smuggled into Paris to face Carpentier before a secret gathering of society men and women. Five Bradford businessmen raised a purse of 3,500 francs to compensate Mitchell for the beating he was about to take. It was now too late for Mitchell to back out, much as he regretted his original boast. While the crowd looked on with great enjoyment, Mitchell sustained a beating at the hands of the humourless Carpentier, for whom fighting was a serious matter.
Things got off to a bad start when, at the first bell, the Frenchman crossed the ring with his left arm extended in his customary pawing manner. Mitchell, who had never seen his opponent box, thought that Carpentier was holding out his glove for a handshake. Instead, Carpentier whipped his left into Mitchell’s body and followed this with a right to the jaw. Mitchell went down heavily.
Altogether, Carpentier knocked the Englishman down four times while
their bout lasted, but Mitchell, although groggy, lasted 22 seconds longer against the Frenchman than Wells had done. Honour satisfied, Mitchell’s seconds threw in the towel. Later the adversaries shared a bottle of champagne before parting.
Mitchell was one of two English amateur White Hopes of the period. The other was an all-round young athlete called John Hopley. As a heavyweight boxer, F.J.V. Hopley had won the public schools’ heavyweight championship in 1899, and then had represented Cambridge successfully against Oxford; he’d been picked as a fast bowler for the university cricket team, and, while playing for Blackheath, had won several rugby union caps for England. English newspapers played up his boxing background and claimed that the strapping young man was already good enough to fight Jack Johnson for his title.
Later, sanity prevailed when it was pointed out that Hopley had not even been good enough to consider entering the Amateur Boxing Association championships. The furore died down and Hopley departed from a boxing scene he had never even been particularly interested in inhabiting.
With Carpentier reluctant to meet Jack Johnson in anything other than a social context, more credible matches were being made in Paris. Johnson, a hedonist in a hedonistic city, was enjoying himself thoroughly but at the same time was rapidly running out of money.
He was happy to be living in France and continued to be aggrieved by his treatment in the USA. In an interview in La Boxe et les Boxeurs on 16 July 1913, he complained, ‘I can say that I have been the most persecuted man in the world. The Americans who definitely cannot accept my victory against Jeffries, the relatively important sums of money I have won nor my lifestyle, seem to have committed themselves to my downfall or at least my financial ruin.’
He was living in a luxurious furnished apartment and attending cabarets and nightclubs almost every night. By the end of 1913, he had not fought seriously for seventeen months, since his knockout of Fireman Jim Flynn in Las Vegas the year before. He engaged in several, probably fixed, boxer–wrestler encounters and was then forced to break his self-imposed rule of not fighting other black boxers by accepting a match against Battling Jim Johnson, a second-rate heavyweight who had once earned his living in a circus, feeding the lions and cleaning out their cages. It was the first gloved fight between two black heavyweights in which the world title was at stake.
Jim Johnson was one of the peripatetic circus of black boxers who kept meeting one another all over the world. He fought Joe Jeanette eleven times, Sam Langford on ten occasions and Sam McVey seven times. Jack Johnson was out of condition but his opponent was too limited to take advantage of the fact. After ten dull rounds the bout was declared a draw when Johnson announced that he had broken his arm and could not continue. For once the champion was lucky. Technically, with Jack Johnson refusing to box on, the bout and his title could have been awarded to his little-known opponent.
Many believed that Johnson had abandoned the fight for no good reason, but a doctor declared that the champion had suffered a slight fracture of the radius. Certainly Battling Jim, who fought out of a low crouch, had a reputation for causing his opponents to break their hands on his skull. Earlier that year in Paris, the English heavyweight Jewey Smith had been forced to retire when he fractured his knuckles hitting the bobbing head of Jim Johnson, and years later an outstanding black fighter called Harry Wills also had to retire with a broken arm when he took on Battling Jim. No one, however, had suggested that Smith or Wills should have been given a draw as a result.
Jack Johnson needed a big-money fight against a White Hope. As it happened, one of the best was currently plying his trade in Europe. This was the cheerful, libidinous red-haired American Frank Moran. Moran had spent some time in the United States Navy, serving President Teddy Roosevelt as quartermaster on the presidential yacht Mayflower, and he had also been a deckhand on the luxury yacht of the millionaire J.P. Morgan. Upon his discharge he had also spent several weeks as a student at a dental school at the University of Pittsburgh before deciding that there was more money in knocking teeth out than extracting them scientifically. His brief sojourn in the classroom had been enough to earn him the sobriquet of the ‘Fighting Dentist’ when he turned professional in 1910.
Moran was a hard-punching, handsome happy-go-lucky wanderer and ladies’ man, who numbered among his girlfriends the Hollywood serial queen Pearl White. In the ring he garnered a lot of newspaper publicity by naming his potent looping right ‘Mary Anne’. Moran was being managed, in a condition of mutual antipathy, by former newspaperman Dan McKetrick, who was promoting bouts in Paris. Moran always felt that his manager had little regard for him compared with McKetrick’s star heavyweight Joe Jeanette.
There were a number of other points at issue between the fighter and his manager. One of the main ones was Moran’s refusal to sign a contract with a man he considered was cheating him and would continue to do so.
The disgusted McKetrick retaliated by saying, in the manner of managers down the ages, that he would never employ Moran again, unless he needed him. Unfortunately, the cash-strapped Jack Johnson was willing to fight Moran or any other White Hope. McKetrick could not bear the thought of merely taking the promoter’s cut of the gate when he could appropriate a quarter of Moran’s purse as well.
As a result, McKetrick, against his better judgement, went ahead and organised the tournament, hoping to talk Moran out of his cut when the time came to settle up. The American employed a French frontman, Theodore Vienne, to handle the details. Johnson trained in a ballroom. The French public disparaged Moran’s chances. L’Auto of 22 June 1913 asked, ‘Why did America put its hopes in this new champion of the white race whom it put on the path on which the Negro had already found Tommy Burns and Jeffries and reduced both of them to nothing?’
Nevertheless the hall was packed for the event. Another selling point was the fact that Georges Carpentier had been persuaded to referee the bout. When the Frenchman entered the ring, to the loudest cheer of the night, it was noticeable how slim and frail he seemed next to the burly Jack Johnson.
The fight itself, held on 27 June 1914, was an absolute frost. Jim Brady, who had managed two heavyweight champions in James J. Corbett and James J. Jeffries and who knew his big men, covered the event for the New York American. He was scathing in his condemnation of the fighters’ feeble efforts.
It was a second-rate exhibition between two mixed-ale fighters. That’s my opinion. Johnson and Moran were misnamed fighters tonight. Had the fight been held in New York the spectators would have stopped the disgraceful bout in ten rounds. Not one effective blow was struck by either man during the entire contest. There was never a suspicion of a jar, much less a knockdown. The spectacle of a world’s champion, superior in weight, science, experience and strength, clinging to a smaller antagonist, expressing in every move and appealing glance his yearning for the final tap of the gong – this was Johnson in the last three rounds.
Johnson was now 36 years old and as usual had not trained hard. Nevertheless he had done enough to be awarded the decision on points by Carpentier. Many disgruntled spectators believed that this was just another cynical example of Johnson’s disregard for his audience and that the black fighter had just coasted his way through the bout as easily as possible. Reporter Fred Dartnell, present at ringside, thought otherwise. He believed that the hitherto-invincible world champion was beginning the long slide down the far side of the hill. ‘I got into the ring and cut the gloves away from his wrists, which were so swollen that it was impossible to untie the gloves. Johnson was dead tired, and although he assured me with a kind of distrait, far-away look in his eyes, that he had enjoyed the fight, I think the disillusionment of life was then already beginning to tell upon him.’
Even worse was to come for both fighters. McKetrick was so disgusted by his rows with Moran and the disagreements he had had with Jack Johnson before the bout that he saw to it that neither fighter got paid. The profits of $36,000 were paid into a French bank, while McKetrick tried his hand at litiga
tion. He claimed that Moran owed him money for training expenses and that this should be handed over before either fighter received his due.
A bruised Moran managed to catch up with the promoter at a racecourse the day after the fight. Reluctantly the promoter handed over 200 francs. It was all that the heavyweight was to see, and 200 francs more than Johnson ever pocketed from the bout. On 4 August 1914, war broke out in Europe and no banking transactions took place. The money was still there, vainly claimed by Johnson and Moran long after hostilities had ended.
No one in France was now interested in professional boxing matches. Raymond Poincaré, the President of the French Republic, made a public appeal to his countrymen to form a sacred union, L’Union sacrée, to face the Germans. Many of the American sporting immigrants hurried back home as quickly as they could. Only those whose high life had cost them all their money were forced to stay on.
For a time Jack Johnson was among those who stayed, unwilling to return to the USA and face the prison sentence hanging over him. However, as the war grew closer he left, in July 1914, for Russia; from there he went on to Spain, where he settled for several years.
In 1915, Frank Moran also was still in Paris. With the advancing Germans almost within earshot, there were no more boxing tournaments being held in the capital. An almost destitute Moran swallowed his pride and approached McKetrick again. He told the promoter that he wanted to get back to the USA for some easy fights. The unforgiving McKetrick told him that, as far as he was concerned, the only way Moran would get home would be by walking across the Atlantic.
Fortunately, Moran managed to get a bout with Bombardier Billy Wells in London, where fights were still being staged. By this time the British heavyweight had lost all credibility as a White Hope and was in bad odour with the public for his perceived reluctance to rejoin the colours when less fit men were fighting and dying in France.
Even so, a knockout victory over the still formidable Moran might have revived Wells’s fistic career. There was no chance of this. Wells entered the ring in his usual state of fluttering distress. The fact was picked up by Moran’s veteran second, Birmingham-born Charlie Mitchell. Mitchell went back a long way. Twenty-seven years earlier he had fought for over three hours to a thirty-nine-round bare-knuckle draw with world champion John L. Sullivan in the pouring rain at Chantilly in France.
