The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Ketchel’s most spectacular fight in New York was his ten-round battle with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Nobody knows who won it. O’Brien, the light-heavyweight champion, was one of the cleverest fighters alive—a jigging, feinting, shuttling, sidestepping, jabbing artist. For seven rounds, he played Ketchel like a snare drum. But his style required incessant motion and, beginning to tire in the eighth round, he spent the rest of the fight trying to save himself. Ketchel landed one of his authentic knockout punches in the closing seconds of the last round. As the referee was counting “six,” the gong sounded. O’Brien was unconscious for half an hour. Referees’ decisions being forbidden by law, there was only the “newspaper decision,” which was mixed, some writers declaring for Jack, since he had won the majority of rounds and was way ahead on points, while others maintained that no man could win a fight in a coma. Some weeks later, in Philadelphia, Ketchel knocked O’Brien out in three rounds. The contemporary accounts credit O’Brien with great gameness under a savage battering, but O’Brien told a different story to Leo McClatchy and other Washington correspondents nearly twenty years later, when he was in the capital in quest of publicity for Philadelphia Jack’s Gymnasium for Business Men, in New York. The newspapers had revealed that President Coolidge was taking off weight by riding a mechanical horse, and O’Brien had memorized a speech to the president in which he offered to come to Washington three times a week and fight the president into condition in the White House basement—FREE. But when he was presented to the president, Jack turned pale, trembled, and couldn’t say a word. He tried afterward to salvage a little publicity by telling the correspondents the nature of his mission, and he threw in the story of his life, including the statement that he had taken a dive in the third round of his second fight with Ketchel. Ketchel’s backers, he said, were willing to pay for a quick knockout, believing that it would convince the public that Ketchel was a genuine White Hope, with a real chance of delivering the great Caucasian race from its bondage to Jack Johnson, the colored champion.

  Nineteen hundred and nine was the big year of the White Hopes. The barrooms were the chief intellectual centers of the country at the time, and it was their despairing conviction that the long career of the fair-skinned peoples had ended with the defeat of Tommy Burns by Jack Johnson in 1908. The gymnasiums were full of clumsy giants training to save our pasty-faced civilization. Ketchel was the best bet of the disinherited albino, although he weighed only 155 pounds, while Johnson weighed over two hundred. This discrepancy was minimized by the use of crooked scales, which built Ketchel up to 170 and cut Johnson down to 195. The fight between Ketchel and Johnson was held in Colma, California, on October 16, 1909, and the high tide of Ketchel’s career came in the twelfth round, when he knocked Johnson down. Low tide came an instant later, when Johnson knocked him out. The orthodox analysis of this contest was that Johnson had agreed to “carry” Ketchel, or handle him carefully, but that Ketchel attempted to double-cross him. According to Marty Forkins, manager of the late Bill Robinson, the only agreement was that the men were to fight gently for ten rounds in order to let the motion pictures run for a decent length, and that after ten rounds it was each man for himself. Tiv Krelling, a photographer at the fight, says that both the knockdown and the knockout were faked in order to give a box-office climax to the fight pictures. The greatest of living ring chroniclers, Dumb Dan Morgan—nicknamed Dumb by the cartoonist Tad Dorgan because he once talked seven and a half hours without pausing for punctuation—was told by Johnson that Ketchel hit him honestly and hurt him badly. Johnson said that he had a few seconds of intense meditation when he was sitting on the canvas; he felt that his situation was distinctly awkward and that the only course to pursue was to put all he had into one tremendous punch. This was a critical resolution for Johnson to take, since he was preeminently a defensive fighter. A great defensive fighter hates to turn loose his best wallop at an undamaged adversary; it spoils his defensive arrangements, for if the punch misses, he is likely to find himself a wide-open target for a counterpunch. But Johnson didn’t miss. His final punch not only flattened Ketchel but knocked out his two upper front teeth, sensational relics that Willus carried in his vest pocket and displayed to spellbound crowds in San Francisco barrooms.

  Willus Britt died shortly after the Johnson-Ketchel fight, and Mizner became the full-fledged manager of Ketchel. In his first few months under the Mizner banner, the middleweight champion added little to his reputation. Wurra Wurra McLaughlin, sporting editor of the New York World, wrote that Ketchel had ruined himself by “hitting the hop.” Ketchel refused to leave a bar in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to keep a contract to spar in the local opera house, and he was chased out of town by a posse. Mizner pledged the appearance of Ketchel at another exhibition there, but he couldn’t find his fighter in time. He eventually located Ketchel lying in bed smoking opium with a blonde and a brunette. Mizner was later asked how he met this crisis. “What the hell could I do?” said Mizner. “I said, ‘Move over.’”

  Ketchel was a fighter who often took his training seriously, and, in spite of his wild life, he would at times work furiously at Woodlawn Inn, or at New Dorp, S. I., to get himself back into condition. His most famous fight under Mizner’s management was a six-round, no-decision battle with Sam Langford, the Boston Tar Baby, in Philadelphia, on April 27, 1910. According to the accounts, it was a savage affair in which each man gave and received terrific punishment. The Morning Telegraph said that Ketchel looked like the loser at the end of the fifth round but that he earned a draw by pounding Langford ferociously in the sixth. The New York Press also called it a draw. The Morning and Evening World reported that Ketchel had won by a wide margin. His share of the receipts was nine thousand dollars, the largest sum he ever collected for a fight in the East. In retrospect, it was the Battle of the Legends. Ketchel and Langford are the twin Paul Bunyans of prizering folklore. As a whim, Ketchel is said to have knocked out six heavyweights in Butte one afternoon and, while half stupefied with opium, to have knocked out four heavyweights by mistake at a charity benefit in New York. Damon Runyon wrote, “It has been my observation that the memory of Ketchel prejudiced the judgment of everyone who was ever associated with him. They can never see any other fighter.” There is an ever growing flood of reminiscences about Ketchel in the sporting pages and the gladiatorial magazines. Ketchel’s ghost is the biggest contemporary ring figure, next to Joe Louis. Langford is not the swaggering demigod that Ketchel is, but the old-time experts generally rated him above Ketchel. Dumb Dan Morgan, for example, claims that no fighter, with the exception of Jeffries, could have held his own with Langford in an unfixed combat. Langford was short and weighed only 165 pounds, but he had long, powerful arms, and staggering statistics are presented as to the number of ribs he broke with his left to the body. Jack Johnson is said to have fled three continents to avoid risking his title against Langford. Veteran fight fans tell of one of Langford’s exploits that parallels Babe Ruth’s alleged feat of pointing his bat toward the center-field bleachers and then driving a ball to the spot indicated. Langford, they say, once fought a White Hope whose manager had proclaimed him to be the coming champion of the world. Skillfully maneuvering the White Hope along the ropes, Langford knocked him into the manager’s lap, shouting, “Here comes your champion!” It is asserted that Langford, when he was old and almost totally blind, knocked men out by ear, getting the range of his opponent’s jaw by calculations based on the sound of the opponent’s feet shuffling on the canvas.

  Many of the thirty-third-degree experts of 1910 refused to make the trip from New York to Philadelphia to see the Ketchel-Langford bout. They were convinced that Ketchel wouldn’t enter the ring with Langford unless the fight was fixed. The newspapers said it was a glorious and evenly matched contest, but many of the experts were skeptical, and some of them are skeptical to this day. One of the Langford idolizers happened to be Mizner’s lawyer. He asked his client for inside information. “Why, the fight was written like
a play,” said Mizner. “We had it surge to and fro like a melodrama. First, Ketchel in dire distress, then Langford, then Ketchel, and so on. It’s the old, old plot.” Mizner told his lawyer that he would have had Ketchel win the newspaper decision had he not feared an outcry from the Langford fans that might hurt the fight business, so he arranged to have Philadelphia newspaper opinion add up to a draw. Mizner stated further that, in order to make sure that the scenario was enacted as written, Langford was authoritatively informed that he would not receive a cent of his five-thousand-dollar share of the purse if he knocked Ketchel out.

  Ketchel was matched to put on a similar six-act melodrama, ending in a draw, with Willie Lewis, a dashing middleweight. Both fighters gave their word of honor that they wouldn’t try for a knockout. The day before the fight, Willie’s manager went into a church and lit several candles before the statue of a saint—a common practice of pious fighters and managers. Dumb Dan Morgan, who accompanied Lewis’s manager to the church, was aware of the gentlemen’s agreement for a draw and was surprised to hear his companion utter a petition for a victory for Willie Lewis and then drop twenty-five cents in the contribution box. As the fight got under way, Ketchel began to swing with studied inaccuracy at his opponent. Willie, however, picked a nice opening, and hit Ketchel with all his power, and followed the blow up with a try for a knockout. Ketchel barely managed to weather the storm. At the end of the round, instead of sitting on his stool and being fussed over by his seconds, Ketchel stood up on it and fixed his eye on Willie with an eloquent and reproachful stare. In the second round, Willie kept running away, but Ketchel caught up with him and summarily knocked him out. “You are the smartest manager in the business,” said Dumb Dan Morgan to Willie’s manager. “You tried to get the world’s middleweight championship for two bits.” “I would’ve if that saint had stood up,” replied Willie’s manager.

  In New York, on June 10, 1910, Ketchel fought his last fight, his opponent being Jim Smith, a mediocre heavyweight. Reporting the Ketchel-Smith fight, the Morning Telegraph said, “Wilson Mizner was on deck, of course, bossing the fight in the champion’s corner. He was dressed as though for a party instead of a fight and did not soil his immaculate attire by swinging a towel or dashing water with a sponge.” The Telegraph added that Mizner’s face showed signs of anxiety under its icy gambler’s mask. Ketchel failed to exhibit his old power. He nearly exhausted himself before he succeeded in dropping Smith in the fifth round. The general opinion of the fight critics was that Ketchel was no longer the old Michigan Assassin. Bat Masterson said that Ketchel had been ruined by dancing masters and tailors. He also remarked that with his own eyes he had seen Ketchel leading a grand march at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and that he had a wardrobe of beautiful clothes that would sap any fighter’s vitality.

  Ketchel was still deeply concerned over the destiny of the white race. Its last Hope was the former champion Jim Jeffries, who after six years of retirement was matched to fight Johnson in Reno on July 4, 1910. Ketchel and Mizner went to Reno late in June. They were realistic enough to see that Jeffries was in no condition to save the white race, and they were philosophers enough to bet their shirts on Johnson, but Ketchel brooded and brooded. Shortly before the fight, he came to Mizner with a statesmanlike project. Just before the bout, the attending celebrities would be introduced to the spectators and would shake hands with the fighters. Ketchel proposed that, instead of shaking hands with Jeffries, he clip him on the chin. One punch, he said, would knock him cold. This would save the honor of the unpigmented, since a Caucasian wallop would have finished the career of Jeffries. “But think of our dough!” said Mizner. “Look at the money we stand to win when Johnson beats him!” It took an hour’s arguing to convince Ketchel that he ought to let the white race take care of itself.

  In August 1910, Mizner arranged for Ketchel to fight Bill Lang, an Australian heavyweight, in New York. At the last minute, Mizner cancelled the match, saying that Ketchel had a boil and a sore foot. Charles I. Meegan charged on the front page of the Telegraph that the bout had been shelved because Hugh McIntosh, manager of Lang, refused to post a five-thousand-dollar guarantee that Lang wouldn’t knock Ketchel out. Mizner treated the Meegan charges with haughty silence. He had his defenders among the insiders in the fight game. Most of them knew that Ketchel was on the downgrade when Mizner became his manager and that “knockout insurance” was necessary to prolong the colorful battler’s career.

  In September 1910, Ketchel went to a farm near Springfield, Missouri, to live the simple life for a while. A dispatch from Springfield to the New York Sun said that his doctor had told him that he could not last out the year at the pace he was traveling. Ketchel had been living at the Bartholdi Hotel in New York; the Morning Telegraph said that his bill for his last two weeks there had been $593—whirlwind spending at a time when highballs were ten cents apiece. Ketchel was only twenty-four and hoped to get back into fighting trim. By then Mizner’s first successful play, The Deep Purple, had opened in Chicago and he had lost interest in the prize ring. According to Bat Masterson, Mizner planned a stage career for Ketchel and was working on a vaudeville monologue for him. Out in Missouri, the middleweight champion behaved like a model boy at first, but there was a woman on the farm. Dispatches bluntly described her as ugly, but she possessed the irresistible magic of propinquity. She was known as Goldie Hurtz, and one morning Mr. Hurtz, a farmhand, shot and killed Ketchel with a .22 rifle. It looked for a time as if Hurtz would be saved by the plea that he only did what any honest farmhand would do under the circumstances. But it turned out that the honest farmhand was really a dishonest barber named Walter Dipley, a city slicker hiding out from the Kansas City police. The unwritten-law defense collapsed when it was found that Mr. and Mrs. Hurtz had never been married. Tried as accomplices in the crime, they were both convicted and sent up for long terms.

  1950

  “Sure, he’s pulverizing your face, but you’re chipping away at his likability.”

  A MAN-CHILD IN LOTUSLAND

  REBECCA MEAD

  Shaquille O’Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers center, lives, during the basketball season, in a large cream-colored mansion at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills. The exterior of O’Neal’s house is discreetly opulent, and it is not until you approach the double front doors that you notice, etched in the glass, two large Superman symbols. The first superhero that O’Neal ever felt an affinity with was the Incredible Hulk, because, as he told me recently, “he was big and green.” The young O’Neal knew what it was to be a physical oddity; when he was five years old, his mother was obliged to carry her son’s birth certificate with her around their hometown of Newark, New Jersey, to prove to bus drivers that he was not eight or nine. Somewhere around the age of seven, O’Neal switched over to Superman, and now, at the age of thirty, his allegiance is steady.

  Today, O’Neal, who is seven feet one, has a Superman S tattooed on his left biceps, and when he slams the ball into the basket with a particularly incontrovertible defiance at the Staples Center, the Lakers’ home court, the Superman theme is played over the loudspeakers. The Superman logo is engraved in the headlights of his silver Mercedes, one of about fifteen cars and trucks he owns. More than five hundred framed Superman comic-book covers hang on the wall of a corridor in his off-season house, in Orlando, where he also has a vintage Superman pinball machine. For a while, he had a Superman bedspread on his bed. O’Neal considers it lucky that he shares a first initial with Superman. “The only reason I call myself Superman is that it starts with S,” he says. “If my name was Tim, I couldn’t be Superman. It wouldn’t look right.”

  One of O’Neal’s grandmothers died recently, and at her funeral he contemplated the design of his own final resting place. “I started to think about what my mausoleum would look like, and I thought it should be all marble, with Superman logos everywhere,” he told me. “There would be stadium seating, and only my family would have the key, and they would be able to go in there a
nd sit down, like in a little apartment. My grave would be right there, and there would be a TV showing, like, an hour-long video of who I was.”

  O’Neal considers himself to have a dual nature. “Shaquille is corporate, nice-looking, soft-spoken, wears suits, and is very cordial to people, whereas Shaq is the dominant athlete who is the two-time champion,” he told me. “They are the same person, but it’s kind of like Clark Kent and Superman. During the day, I am Shaquille, and at night I am Shaq.” O’Neal also has a nemesis, an evil twin, whom he calls Elliuqahs Laeno. “That’s my name spelled backward,” he said. “That’s the person that I am not allowed to be because of my status. He does what a normal young rich guy would do—party, hang out, use bad language. He stays out all night, tries to practice the next day, isn’t focused. That is him. He’s dead, though. I killed him off.”

  We were talking in a back office at the Lakers’ training facility, in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles, after O’Neal had come off the court from an afternoon practice. His skin was tide-marked with drying sweat, and he sat with his legs spread wide, like those riders on the New York subway who laugh in the face of the one-man-one-seat convention. O’Neal, who weighs somewhere around 340 pounds, would need at least three seats, and perhaps four. His identification with Superman is based on his sense of himself as a crusading force for good—good being, for the moment, the continued success of the Los Angeles Lakers, who are currently in the NBA playoffs—but it is also grounded in a sense of physical supremacy.