The Great White Hopes

by Graeme Kent

  Only against the gigantic Jess Willard was Jimmy Johnston able to display his true managerial skills. This was Rodel’s first bout with the gigantic Kansan heavyweight. Willard was going through a bad time. In a recent fight with Bull Young, he had hit his opponent so hard that the other fighter had died.

  Johnston, as callous as ever, did his best to take advantage of Willard’s distress. He managed to convince the credulous giant that Rodel had a faulty heart. If Willard should hit the South African too hard, declared the manager, Rodel might suffer the same fate as the unfortunate Bull Young. Willard accepted the story. On the night of the fight he treated his opponent with such reverent care that Rodel not only lasted the ten-round, no-decision bout, but was also declared the winner by a number of sports writers in attendance.

  The preamble to the bout was too good a story to be kept a secret. The way in which Willard had been duped became common knowledge in New York, and the angry giant demanded a rematch. Rodel, ignoring the rumours that his manager had tricked Willard, believed that he had won the first fight on merit and that he could do so again. He was mistaken. In a return match Willard flattened him in six one-sided rounds.

  Rodel had a few more fights and even managed to beat those two professional losers Fred McKay and Sailor White, but he knew that his brief time in the sun was over. He was knocked down so many times that he began to be known as the Diving Venus, after a wellknown aquatic stage performer. He retired from the ring in 1914, at the age of 25. Jimmy Johnston started looking for a White Hope more worthy of his efforts.

  For a few weeks he thought he had found one in ‘Agile’ Andre Anderson from Chicago, whose real name was Fred Roesenilern. The heavyweight’s career did not get off to a good start when, in his first important contest, he was knocked out in five rounds in Lexington, Kentucky by the much lighter Jack Dillon. However, Anderson was barely out of his teens and New York fight followers did not much care what happened in Kentucky. Johnston had the tall youth brought to New York and ran his eye over him in the gym. The manager liked what he saw and gave the Chicago fighter a spot on a promotion he was organising.

  The selected opponent was the doughty black fighter Battling Jim Johnson. Johnson was coming to the end of his career and suffered badly from arthritis in his shoulders. Jimmy Johnston paid a visit to the black fighter’s dressing room and found him huddled in a blanket, praying out loud that his shoulders would not seize up during the contest.

  This was all that the manager-cum-promoter needed. Always in search of an edge for his fighters, he tiptoed away with Johnson’s second and bribed the latter to throw ice-cold water liberally from a bucket over Battling Jim Johnson’s upper body between rounds.

  The hireling did as he was told. At the end of each round, when the perspiring Johnson returned to his corner he was greeted by a tub of iced water being thrown over him enthusiastically by his traitorous handler, who then refused to towel the black heavyweight down. Johnson protested long and loud at this cavalier treatment. On one occasion after the bell, he even remained sullenly in the middle of the ring and had to be ordered back by the referee to face his freezing deluge.

  Even so, the experienced Johnson was able to drop Anderson three times in the first five rounds. Then the inter-round water treatment began to take effect. Johnson, suffering agonies, found it increasingly difficult to lift his arms. By the ninth round, tormented beyond endurance and with his gloves dangling at waist level, he was finding it almost impossible to defend himself. With Johnston screaming dementedly at him from his corner, Anderson moved forward and knocked his opponent out with a roundhouse right.

  It was a triumph of managerial chicanery, but one Johnston found it almost impossible to repeat. Anderson’s next opponents were almost distressingly fit and well, without a hint of sciatica among them, a fact made abundantly clear when the young Chicago heavyweight was knocked out by Fred Fulton and Charley Weinert.

  Anderson was given one last chance to redeem himself when he was matched against an unknown heavyweight from the Midwest called Jack Dempsey. Dempsey was starving and giving away 3 stone in weight to his much taller opponent. However, he had a friend. A young reporter called Gene Fowler had seen Dempsey fight in the sticks and had given the young heavyweight a letter of introduction to a friend of his, the famous New York sports writer Damon Runyon.

  Fowler had asked Runyon to help Dempsey get started on the New York fight scene. Against Anderson this was not going to be easy. Briefly the writer considered bribery, but said to a friend, ‘We can put handcuffs on Anderson, but that’ll cost too much money.’ Instead, Runyon decided in advance to cast his newspaper’s decision in favour of the newcomer.

  For a while it looked as if this would prove difficult. For the first few minutes Anderson raised Jimmy Johnston’s hopes when he smashed Dempsey twice to the canvas. This turned out to be a big mistake. Dempsey got to his feet, weathered the storm and finished the fight strongly. All the same, most onlookers thought that Anderson had done enough to win the unofficial decision. But Runyon swung the weight of his newspaper, the New York American, behind Dempsey, and naturally that counted for much more than the unbiased opinions of a few hundred genuine fans.

  Dempsey had one more fight in the capital, sustained a couple of broken ribs but linked up with a new manager in Doc Kearns who, three years later, was to steer Dempsey to the world title. Anderson was less fortunate. The newspaper attribution of a loss to the unknown Dempsey dented his confidence and caused Johnston to lose interest in his White Hope. After the loss to Dempsey, Anderson lost four contests on first-round knockouts and won only four more fights over the next five years.

  It was getting hard to see the wood for the trees. So many huge lummoxes were claiming to be White Hopes, or else to have been White Hopes, that it became difficult to sort them all out. To have been one of the contenders for Jack Johnson’s title was always worth newspaper space in a subsequent career, and many made use of this fact.

  A typical example was the Californian Edgar Kennedy, a film comedian later to become famous for his ‘slow burn’, in which he reacted almost in slow motion to an on-screen insult. Kennedy claimed to have been a White Hope, who had won the Pacific Coast championship in 1912, and to have gone the distance with the up-and-coming Jack Dempsey. There is no record of Dempsey ever meeting an Edgar Kennedy, but admittedly this was during a period when the young heavyweight would ride the rods into town, go to the nearest saloon and challenge any man in the house to fight for a few dollars or a collection to be taken after the bout.

  The story went that Kennedy turned up in Hollywood on the Mack Sennett studio lot in 1913, when he was 23, and when asked what he could do said he could lick anyone on the lot. This proved to be the case and Kennedy got a job from fight fan Sennett. The actor’s claims to have been a White Hope emanated from the studio publicity department, as did the erroneous claims that Edgar was the brother of true White Hope Tom Kennedy.

  A more genuine claimant was Australian heavyweight Colin Bell. He came to Great Britain in 1914, supposedly the winner of over thirty contests and never having been knocked out. Actually, a year earlier he had been stopped twice inside the distance back home by Sam McVey, but McVey was so ferocious and such a scourge of white fighters that a loss to him hardly counted. Soon after his arrival in England, Bell lost on a foul to Petty Officer Nutty Curran. Again this was largely dismissed by the boxing public. If you fought Nutty, either he would foul you early on or he went so crazy that he railroaded you into fouling him, if only to get out of the ring as quickly as possible.

  Eleven days later, on 4 May 1914, Colin Bell went in with the outstanding black American Joe Jeanette. It was taken as a sign of Jeanette’s confidence that only two nights earlier he had knocked out Kid Jackson in seven rounds in Paris. Everyone expected the Australian to go under early in the fight. Instead he fought doggedly and went the distance, and there were even cries of dissent when the American was given the decision after twenty rounds.<
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  Bell’s display was so good that in June 1914 he was matched with Bombardier Billy Wells at Olympia. Wells was making one of his almost annual comebacks, this time after being stopped in the first round a few fights before by the Frenchman Georges Carpentier. The tournament was the first to be promoted by the flamboyant, well-known showman C.B. Cochran.

  True to his theatrical roots Cochran made a great show of the production, with no expense spared and a well-oiled publicity machine set in motion beforehand. He gained acres of newspaper publicity when he announced that the master of ceremonies for the evening would be a parish priest wearing full canonicals. Bell was boosted as the greatest heavyweight ever to emerge from the colonies. It all worked, because on the night 10,000 seats were sold at prices ranging from five shillings to five guineas.

  Bell showed no sign that he was fit to be in the ring with even a faded White Hope like Billy Wells. The Australian was knocked out in two rounds. Spectators wondered out loud how a man who could push Joe Jeanette all the way could have crumbled so quickly before the Bombardier. The answer came some time later from hints dropped by an indiscreet Joe Jeanette. The black fighter let it be known to friends that he had been paid to make Bell look as good as possible in their contest, to build up interest in a Wells–Bell bout. Whether the bribe came from C.B. Cochran or Wells’s connections was not made clear.

  The man who did best out of the bout between Bell and Wells was not C.B. Cochran, who soon followed Hugh D. McIntosh into a disillusioned exit from boxing promotion, but a Liverpool comic called Harry Wheldon. For years afterwards he toured the halls in a sketch called White Hope. Wheldon appeared as a gormless heavyweight, together with a stooge acting as his manager, challenging ‘any lady . . . any lady . . .?’ in the hall to a contest. Should any virago show any signs of accepting the challenge, Wheldon would cower behind his manager and implore him, ‘Tell ’em what I did to Colin Bell!’ Then he would add in a stage whisper, ‘But don’t tell ’em what Colin Bell did to me!’

  Something of a laughing stock in Britain, Bell decided to abandon ferocious European heavyweights and snide comics and, like so many others, try his luck in North America. He did little better there, being on the receiving end in no-decision bouts with Porky Flynn and Battling Levinsky in New York and Gunboat Smith in Montreal. Bell then abandoned his ring career and returned to Australia, presumably in the fervent hope that Harry Wheldon was not contemplating a world tour.

  After Colin Bell, with the political situation changing in Europe, fewer expatriate White Hopes landed on the shores of the USA. Trench warfare in France was killing tens of thousands of soldiers. In 1915 the Allies abandoned Gallipoli to the Turks, leaving Australia with a permanent distrust of Britain and a growing sense of disillusionment about the future of the Empire. In the same year, Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic literally lost most of its momentum when his vessel the Endurance became trapped in pack ice. It drifted slowly with the ice and then, in November, disintegrated, spewing twenty-eight men over its sides. In the field of science the first direct transatlantic radio-telephone call was transmitted from Canada to France.

  And the White Hopes plodded on. A big Irishman, Jim Coffey, the Roscommon Giant, made an impression for a time, but he had already emigrated to New York before he turned professional. He worked for a time as a motorman, driving a trolley car for eighteen dollars a week, but was then lured from his trade as a garage mechanic by the shrewd manager Billy Gibson, and rattled off a series of knockout victories, including one over Gunboat Smith, until two defeats at the hands of Frank Moran destroyed the Irishman’s hopes of a tilt at Jack Johnson’s title.

  Coffey’s first encounter with Moran was almost cancelled. The American was still smarting from his unpaid Paris encounter with Jack Johnson, when the purse had been impounded by the courts. For some reason, minutes before the scheduled start of his bout with Coffey, Moran still had not received his payment. Obdurately, the former seaman sat it out until the promoter hastily assembled the cash in notes from the box-office takings. Boxing legend has it that Moran then had the money stuffed into a bucket and carried to the ringside, where he could keep an eye on it while an obliging friend sat on the bucket until he had concluded his demolition job on the Irishman.

  However, Coffey by now was getting $6,000 a bout. This news reached the ears of one of his brothers, a Dublin policeman, who promptly announced his intention of joining his brother as a pugilist in the USA. ‘I could always lick that kid,’ he told the Beloit Daily News of 3 June 1915. ‘If he can get six thousand iron men for licking some sucker over there, it’s up to me to go over and get some of that coin.’

  Shortly after his announcement, the Lusitania was sunk just south of Queenstown in Ireland with great loss of life by the German submarine U-20. The action precipitated the entry of the USA into the war but disconcerted Coffey’s brother. Abruptly the policeman changed his mind about travelling. ‘I’ll tackle no submarine,’ he told the same newspaper with a shudder. ‘Jim can clean up all he likes undisturbed by me!’

  In the USA Jim Coffey’s training sessions attracted some attention in the newspapers. Before a number of his contests the 6ft-3in Irishman would repair to the Roman Catholic Maryknoll Seminary, near Ossining in New York State, and get into shape by joining in the daily tasks of the priests, rising before dawn for a day spent ploughing the fields.

  For all his size and strength, Coffey, like most of his peers among the White Hopes, was reluctant to tangle with the diminutive but waspish managers and promoters who inhabited the New York fight scene. On one occasion Coffey and fellow Hope Jess Willard tried to gatecrash one of feisty Jimmy Johnston’s promotions. They wanted to see the latest heavyweight prospect, Al Reich, the Adonis, in action against Gunboat Smith. Coffey and Willard, with a combined weight of nearly 30 stone, tried to force their way through the turnstiles without paying. However, when the courageous gatekeeper told the two boxers that former bantamweight Johnston was on his way down to deal with them, Coffey and Willard paid for their seats as meekly as lambs.

  When Coffey was knocked out by Jack Dillon, a fighter 3½ stone lighter than the Irishman and known as ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, he began to be written off as a White Hope. The Washington Post of 18 February 1916 declared judiciously of the Irishman, ‘He’s weak below the waist. That’s his trouble. His legs are bad. His legs go first and he can’t stand up to fight.’

  In 1917, in the throes of an unsuccessful comeback, Coffey found himself also in contention with the law. On 11 October, he appeared in a New York courtroom to defend a $50,000 breach-of-promise lawsuit brought against him by Miss Mamie Hughes, who claimed that she had consented to continue her relations with the boxer only on the understanding that he would marry her.

  Probably with some relief, in 1918 Coffey broke off from his fighting career and Miss Hughes by enlisting in the US Navy. Upon his return from the service he had only a couple more fights before retiring from the ring.

  By 1913, about the only major manager who had not found his own personal White Hope was that man of a few thousand words, Dumb Dan Morgan, commonly acknowledged to be the most garrulous of all the managers of his time. Morgan was doing fine with the lighter weights, but he felt it as a slight that, unlike Johnston, Gibson and all his colleagues and rivals, he did not have the boasting rights to a simpleton giant.

  Eventually one came along. One morning as Morgan was sitting with his feet on the table perusing a sports sheet and pencilling in his bets for that afternoon, a fighter whose given name was Barney Lebrowitz turned up begging for an audience. For six or seven years Lebrowitz had been boxing out of Philadelphia under the ring name of Barney Williams without attracting much public interest. He was a dogged and skilful, if totally unspectacular, boxer who had been making very little money and hoped to do better on the East Coast.

  Morgan could see at once that his caller was more of a light heavyweight than a behemoth, but at least Lebrowitz was bigger than som
e of the flyweights the manager had been handling lately.

  Shrewdly Morgan asked his visitor to describe his boxing style. He hoped that Lebrowitz was going to tell him that he was a banger with a jaw of granite. Instead the truthful fighter confessed that his usual style was to circle his opponent cautiously and then shuffle forward to tie him up in frequent clinches.

  It was not the answer Morgan had been hoping for, but at least Lebrowitz’s honesty gave rise to the hope that he was also naive and would not be too insistent in any future dealings on receiving a detailed breakdown of any fight purses Morgan might secure for him. In order to test his potential White Hope’s ability and lack of common sense, Morgan agreed to take on the fighter on a trial basis.

  First there had to be changes. The nom de ring ‘Barney Williams’ had to go in case it reminded people that under this name, in 1912, the fighter had taken part in twenty contests without winning one inside the distance. Morgan informed his man that from then on he would be known as Battling Levinsky. The first name would give the crowds the impression that he was a slugging attacker, instead of a soft-punching, back-pedalling cutie. Levinsky was selected to appeal to the ethnic sensibilities of ticket buyers, as at that time only Irish and Jewish fighters were drawing really good metropolitan crowds.

  Morgan threw Battling Levinsky in at the deep end. Callously he accepted a last-minute substitute fight for his heavyweight against Porky Flynn, on 30 July 1913. Flynn had been in with almost everyone and acquitted himself well against the best. His nickname came not from any excess of weight but because he was inordinately fond of pork scratchings. Surprisingly, Levinsky had not heard of him and accepted Morgan’s duplicitous assurance that he would be going in with a no-hoper.