by Graeme Kent
A genuine hard man, Mitchell was contemptuous of Wells’s temperamental approach to the business of boxing, and saw a chance to win the fight for Moran almost before it had started. Both fighters had to wait in their corners while a bulldog was auctioned from the ring for war charities. Mitchell took the opportunity to encourage his fighter in loud stage whispers designed to reach the ears of the quaking English champion. ‘Look at him,’ sneered Mitchell, indicating the boxer in the other corner. ‘He wants his mama, doesn’t he? Come on now, get the bull pup sold and send for an undertaker and a coffin!’
Moran’s second kept up his stream of vituperation until the bell sounded to start the fight. Wells’s left jab was in evidence early in the bout, but his dogged opponent wore the Englishman down and knocked him out in the tenth round, earning enough money for his passage home to the USA.
Wells fought on for another ten years, retiring in 1925, but he was never again regarded as a prospect for world honours. In his book Boxing and Physical Culture, his one-time trainer, strongman Thomas Inch, wrote of the heavyweight, ‘I was asked to take over his training at a difficult time in his career [1911] and found him a particularly pleasant person to deal with. Handled in rather different fashion throughout his career he might easily have met with far greater success.’
11
THE LAST HOPES
In 1913, the USA once again became the centre of the White Hope campaign. By this time most of the major overseas contenders, like Bombardier Billy Wells and the Australians Lang and Squires, had had their chances and lost them. Carpentier was biding his time in the hope of putting on more weight. Other aspiring heavyweights never really had what it took. But still new young giants were imported by American managers unable to find home-grown prospects. Most of the fresh batch proved no better than their predecessors.
All the same, American newspapers and the public were still optimistically demanding the emergence of a white heavyweight to defeat the world champion. From France Jack Johnson issued a defiant challenge, telling the sports editor of the Defender on 10 August 1913 that he was prepared to fight any white challenger for $30,000.
Johnson showed no sign of wanting to leave the relative tranquillity of France. He was probably wise to stay where he was. The year 1913 was not an easy one for the black population of the United States. By the end of the year, forty-five black males had been lynched there, many of them in the Southern states of Mississippi and Georgia. The pretexts for these examples of summary mob rule were mostly accusations of murder or rape. More and more black boxers with reputations left for Europe, where they could pursue their violent craft in relative peace. At the same time, an increasing number of European heavyweights were imported into the USA to meet the need for a credible White Hope.
One of these shooting stars was Irishman Con O’Kelly, Corkborn but a resident of Hull on the east coast of England. O’Kelly, 6ft 3in tall, weighing nearly 16 stone and with a chest measurement of 50 inches, certainly looked the part of a White Hope. The former policeman also had the distinction of having won a gold medal in the freestyle heavyweight wrestling class at the 1908 Olympics. This feat had been all the more impressive because a few months before the Games had started, O’Kelly had been hospitalised after being buried by a falling wall when helping the fire brigade to effect a rescue.
After winning his gold medal, O’Kelly had resigned from the police force to turn professional and tour the musical halls. The minutes of the Hull Watch Committee noted that PC 249 O’Kelly was leaving ‘to enable him to wrestle with Jose Levette, the champion of Spain’. However, his enthusiasm was dampened slightly when he was thrown all over the stage during a ring encounter with the famous George Hackenschmidt, the Russian Lion.
Realising that he would never make much headway in wrestling as long as Hackenschmidt was around, the pragmatic O’Kelly changed sports and became a professional boxer. He rattled off a series of victories and in 1909 was matched in Hull with the American White Hope Tom Kennedy. By this time the Irishman had built up a considerable following, and the purse of £750 was said to be the largest so far offered for a boxing match in the north of England.
Kennedy had been in France at the time and knew nothing about O’Kelly when he signed up for the match. The American was the first to enter the ring, and, in order to psych out his opponent, Kennedy did not turn round when the local hero came down the aisle to a tumultuous storm of applause. ‘I figured I’d scare him to death by ignoring him,’ explained the American.
It was a ploy that was to rebound on Kennedy. When the referee called both men to the centre of the ring for their pre-match instructions, Kennedy made a leisurely turn and saw Con O’Kelly for the first time. He goggled at the giant glowering at him from the other corner. ‘I had never seen such a monster,’ he recalled with awe, ‘and when he stripped, the chills ran up my back. He had arms like steel bands. His chest was the chest of a Jeffries!’
It was a case for quick thinking, and Kennedy was equal to the occasion. He realised that to win the fight he would have to gain the upper hand psychologically in the few seconds left before the fight started. As the referee started his preamble, Kennedy suddenly whipped his right hand into the solar plexus of the unsuspecting O’Kelly, doubling the Irishman up. ‘That sort of punch won’t be called a foul, will it?’ asked Kennedy casually.
The referee was so amazed that he could only shake his head dazedly. O’Kelly’s seconds, equally dumbfounded, helped their stricken man, still bent over in agony, back to his corner. The bell went and Kennedy raced eagerly across the ring as the halfparalysed O’Kelly turned feebly, and started pummelling his Irish opponent. Kennedy kept on top throughout the contest, and also showed the Irishman one or two other tricks of the trade he had not experienced before.
After being butted particularly painfully by the American in the third round, O’Kelly responded in kind. Unfortunately, Kennedy had disguised his use of the head by waiting until O’Kelly’s broad back obscured the view of the official. O’Kelly’s illegal rejoinder was seen by everyone in the hall and the scandalised referee disqualified him at once. ‘What about him?’ wailed O’Kelly to no avail. ‘That guy nutted me!’
It was considered that, under the circumstances, O’Kelly had done well enough against Kennedy while their fight had lasted to justify his being exported to the USA to join the ever-swelling ranks of White Hopes. He made his base among the Irish expatriates of Boston, and was even advised for a time by former heavyweight champion Bob Fitzsimmons. Fitz recommended the heavyweight to manager Tommy Ryan, the one-time middleweight champion and opponent of Stanley Ketchel. Ryan took on the huge O’Kelly and for a time entertained high hopes for his charge.
O’Kelly was promised a dozen fights in the USA at about $500 a time. This was not a bad return for his efforts. At about the same time Jim Thorpe, the great Native American athlete, had just been recruited by the New York Giants for $7,500, a year after being stripped of the gold medals he had won at the 1912 Olympics for the pentathlon and decathlon because it was discovered that as a youth he had once earned a few summer dollars as a semiprofessional baseball player.
The better American college footballers were also being offered increasingly tempting rates to turn professional. Willie Heston, a graduate from Michigan, was paid $600 for his first game for the fledgling Canton squad. Unfortunately he broke his leg early in the game and never played again.
The biggest money, however, remained in prizefighting. In the year that O’Kelly started his North American tour, former champion Tommy Burns, well past his best years, still took home $5,000 tax-free after his bout with Arthur Pelkey. A good or even promising white heavyweight could still earn the big bucks.
The 24-year-old O’Kelly started off well by winning his first five bouts in the USA. Then he was put in with the ageing fighter Hank Griffin. Griffin was coming to the end of the road, but back in 1902 he had twice drawn with a young Jack Johnson. Johnson always said that the 6ft 4in Griffin ha
d been the hardest puncher he had ever faced.
Ryan figured that a victory over the veteran black fighter would justify O’Kelly’s claim to being a White Hope. Unfortunately, Griffin proved too experienced for the Irishman and knocked him out in five rounds. Ryan decided to stake everything on one throw of the dice and matched O’Kelly with Griffin in a return fight. The Irish heavyweight had one of his best nights and knocked Griffin out in the fifth round.
This result gained O’Kelly plenty of publicity, and in his next fight, against another black boxer, Jeff Madden, in January 1911, the Irishman was billed as ‘the new White Hope’. O’Kelly secured a creditable draw against a good heavyweight and went on to outpoint the durable Porky Flynn.
One problem faced by O’Kelly was the fact that he had been a police officer in England. There was a great deal of anti-English feeling among the Irish population in the USA, and large crowds gathered, hoping to see the former guardian of the law defeated.
Even hardened reporters were beginning to wonder whether O’Kelly might have something, and there were many demands in the sports pages for the visitor to be matched against a top man. He was put in with Jim Barry, apparently on the downslope after defeats by Al Kaufmann and Porky Flynn. Barry, a one-time friend and sparring partner of middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, had once been considered a White Hope himself, but had fallen on hard times. The son of an Irish father and a French mother, he was one of the few white heavyweights willing to meet the leading black fighters, but Sam Langford, who fought the white boxer on at least eleven occasions, had once unkindly speculated that this was because Barry was often so incapacitated by drink or dope that he could hardly make out the shape, let alone the colour, of his opponent.
On this occasion the fuddled American soon proved to be much too good for his opponent. He gave the game O’Kelly such a dreadful thrashing that the ringsiders called for the bout to be stopped.
It was virtually the end in the USA for O’Kelly. Before he left for England he twice defeated Jeff Madden in return fights, but it was reckoned that if an over-the-hill heavyweight like Barry could toy with the Irishman, he had no future as a White Hope, even though he had won nine, drawn one and lost only one of his fights on his tour. Barry, a notorious hellraiser, was shot and killed in a saloon brawl in the Panama Zone in 1913.
O’Kelly had a few more fights in Great Britain, but was badly beaten by the black American Battling Jim Johnson, who was based in Paris. The Irishman used his ring earnings to take over a pub in Hull. There was talk of a northern promoter matching O’Kelly with Bombardier Wells for the British title, but the outbreak of war put an end to the proposal. In 1914, at the age of 29, O’Kelly retired from the ring.
Another White Hope who tried his luck in the USA was George Rodel, a South African. Born Lodewikus van Vuuren in the Free State village of Smithfield, he had a successful run as an amateur heavyweight in his home country. Rodel came to England in 1911 to try his hand at the professional game. He won a few fights, and then attracted some notice by beating the wild PO Nutty Curran three times. Admittedly, two of these wins were the results of his opponent’s disqualifications, almost inevitable where Curran was concerned, but the other seemed genuine enough. Rodel decided that he was ready for a better class of opponent. He was then misguided enough to go into the ring with the great black fighter Sam McVey, who knocked him out in the first round. This was followed by an eleventh-round stoppage at the hands of big Joe Jeanette.
The South African was sure that these setbacks would finish his career, but he did not appreciate the machinations of boxing. Bombardier Billy Wells, the British heavyweight champion, was in the process of rebuilding his career after a three-round knockout at the hands of Al Palzer at Madison Square Garden. His connections were looking for an easy opponent for their man before he took on the much more formidable Gunboat Smith.
With the early exit against McVey on his record, Rodel was an attractive prospect for Jim Maloney, Wells’s manager. The South African fought Wells at the King’s Hall in London on 6 December 1912, living down to Maloney’s expectations by going out in the second round.
There was little left in England for Rodel, so he did what many White Hopes had done before him and crossed the Atlantic to try his hand in New York. Here he had a rare stroke of luck. A devout man, Rodel encountered a priest who was a boxing enthusiast. The man of the cloth urged the South African to try to persuade manager Jimmy Johnston to handle his affairs.
Rodel managed to get into Johnston’s office, forcing a way past the chancers, gamblers and assorted low life who formed the bantam-cock Englishman’s regular entourage, and put his case to the tiny ex-Liverpudlian. Johnston listened sceptically. He had tried as hard as any manager to find his own personal White Hope and was beginning to wonder if he would be forced to rely on smaller fighters to keep him in comparative luxury. Certainly the South African looked big enough, and Rodel had the sense not to mention his quick-time defeats at the fists of McVey and Wells.
Johnston sent Rodel off to the local gymnasium to be tried out by some of the perpetual losers who hung around there, hoping to earn coffee-and-cakes money. An hour later his trainer returned to the office, shaking his head and reporting that the South African had been knocked all round the ring by several of the resident patsies.
That should have been the end of the matter, but Johnston, who was not a religious man, had nevertheless been flattered by the fact that a priest had considered him worthy of building Rodel’s career. He also had the germ of an idea. Instead of showing the battered Rodel the door, Johnston put on his hat and took him round to the office of sports writer Bob Edgren. He had fed Edgren a number of stories for his column in the past, and, while the writer was not a gullible man, Edgren had been known to go along with a weak story as long as it was interesting enough.
The one pitched to him by Johnston that afternoon was worthy of any sports writer’s attention. Indicating the shy, broad-shouldered South African, the manager announced proudly that not only was Rodel a fine White Hope in the making, but that he had been a hero of the Boer War.
Even the blasé Edgren took notice of this. He started scribbling as Johnston went on to inform him glibly that, in the conflict between South Africa and Great Britain, Rodel and his older brothers had been fearless commandos operating behind the British lines. As Johnston rattled on, improvising madly, Rodel slumped in a chair, paying little attention to what was being said as he recovered gratefully from the maulings he had taken in the gym that morning.
The next morning the exploits of the hastily rechristened ‘Boer Rodel’ formed the main story in Bob Edgren’s influential column. Adhering to the proud traditions of the press, other writers freely purloined Edgren’s copy and by the end of the week Rodel was being hailed as a fitting contender for the world’s championship. To keep his fighter in the public eye, Johnston ordered Rodel to parade up and down Broadway in an army greatcoat.
Then, after providing his charge with a couple of set-ups in Art Nelson and Tim Logan, Johnston had to kill the goose that lay the golden egg by actually matching the South African against some reasonable opponents. The manager did not want to do this, but there was no money in matching his prospect with any more pork-and-beaners. To make matters worse, several sports writers had worked out that ‘Boer Rodel’ would only have been 12 years old when the South African war had ended, a trifle young to be a sharpshooter.
To deflect the growing tide of resentment among the writers, in 1913 Johnston hastily matched Rodel against the hard-punching Irishman Jim Coffey, managed by Billy Gibson. Coffey did the Boer’s cause no good by knocking him out in nine rounds. Johnston was not going to give up yet. For his next fight he put Rodel in with the leading White Hope, Gunboat Smith.
Even hardened fight fans regarded this as overmatching to the highest, or lowest, degree. It was plain that the master of ceremonies shared their views. Having introduced both fighters, he added that the bout would take place over ten
rounds. He then glanced at the apprehensive Rodel and added caustically, ‘Or less!’
As it happened Rodel put up a brave show. He even managed to break his opponent’s nose. Despite all his enraged efforts, Smith was unable to put the dogged South African away and had to be content with the almost unanimous decisions of the newspapers at the end of their no-decision bout. After the bloody battle, the Milwaukee Free Press of 12 April 1913 congratulated the South African on his courage. ‘Rodel, a big, awkward fellow, came back after he had been knocked down ten times and in the last three rounds outgamed, outgeneraled and outfought the leader of the white hopes.’
Only one newspaper declared that Rodel had easily defeated Gunboat Smith. This was one in which the sports writer had not turned up at the arena, preferring to spend an evening of passion with his girlfriend. Blinded by lust, the hack had even believed Jimmy Johnston when the manager telephoned him after the bout to swear that Rodel had given the Gunboat a merciless beating over ten rounds. With his mind on other things, the hack had scribbled his report of the fight based on Johnston’s version. This was the solitary cutting that the handler used when trying to book more fights for Rodel with promoters.
Johnston might have been able to get his heavyweight bouts, but Rodel could not make the most of the opportunities presented. In a return bout with Smith he was knocked out in three rounds. He won only one more fight in 1913, and that was against an unknown on a foul. Over the next few months the fearless Johnston put the South African in with such big punchers as Fireman Jim Flynn, Jack Geyser and the up-and-coming former ranch hand Jess Willard. Most of these bouts were no-decision affairs, but Rodel was adjudged to have come off second best in the majority of them.
