Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He rarely actually handed over diamonds to the women he lived with. Instead, he hung them with baubles for their nights out together—and took them back when the women moved on.

  * John L. Sullivan had been a dandy, too, boasting, “I’ve got the prettiest clothes you ever saw,” and was given to novel combinations: a Prince Albert cutaway and teal blue vest, for example, with black-checked trousers of salmon pink. (Quoted in Isenberg, John L. Sullivan, p. 225.)

  † He had evidently not paid for all of them himself. “Not many fights back,” the Los Angeles Times would report that autumn (November 6, 1903), “Johnson asked [Tom] McCarey if he would stand good for some clothes. He supposed Johnson meant one suit and said yes. The tailor shop happened to be next to where the two had been talking and Johnson ducked into it. The tailor’s head popped out a minute later with an inquiring expression. ‘How about it, Mac?’ he queried. ‘All right,’ says Tom. When the bill came in it was for three suits and six pairs of trousers, not to say an overcoat.”

  * There had been trouble in the dressing room before this bout when a white lightweight named Harry Burke loudly demanded that Johnson lend him his towel. Johnson refused, saying no white fighter would ever do him that favor. After the fight, while Johnson was shaking hands with well-wishers outside his dressing-room door, Burke slipped up behind him and smashed a bottle over his head. Johnson’s scalp required several stitches, and Burke was jailed overnight.

  * So named because, as Jack “Doc” Kearns, Jack Dempsey’s manager, once said, “he was always doing something mysterious. Like he would step on your foot and when you looked down, he would bite you in the ear.” (Quoted in Ward, American Originais, p. 52.)

  † Rufe Thompson, Johnson’s sparring partner at the Century Athletic Club training quarters on East Fourth Street, was a short, thick-bodied veteran with a colorful private life of his own. In 1901 alone he’d been stabbed in a saloon brawl and arrested on suspicion of conspiring with “Alice Adams, a pretty woman of the half world,” to lift the wallet of one of her drunken clients. Thompson was a specialist at making his prospects look good, and on October 2, he helped put on a show for the press, landing a loud but painless punch to Johnson’s belly and then cowering melodramatically as the supposedly enraged Johnson battered him until Tom McCarey stepped in to stop it. (Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1903.)

  * After McVey woke up he asked his trainer, Spider Kelly, “Was it a draw?” “Yes,” Kelly answered, “and they robbed us.” (San Francisco Examiner, April 23, 1904.)

  * Neither man may have been trying very hard. They’d already fought each other twice, and Johnson had, in their contest in Los Angeles, settled the old score growing out of Childs’ early treatment of him. With more prominent white opponents largely out of reach, there was little to be gained by either man from hurting the other—or risking being hurt by him. Glorified sparring matches like these helped spread suspicion of black fighters for indulging in what the sports pages called “fakery.” So did contests in which black fighters like Joe Gans and Joe Walcott, wishing to remain profitable, were sometimes expected to take it easy on white opponents they would otherwise have annihilated. The underlying problem, of course, was the unwillingness of the managers of white boxers to put their prospects’ futures on the line against often superior black opposition. But in an article headlined BLACK DAYS FOR BLACK FIGHTERS that appeared on April 26, 1904, just four days after Johnson’s third win over Sam McVey, the Los Angeles Times blamed the Negro boxers themselves for their plight: “The old days of little George Dixon and old Peter Jackson will have to be recalled to set colored fighters on a popular basis once more. The game and honest negroes have passed away and a generation of Africans has come in of a different pattern.”

  * “Alec always acted as referee as well as matchmaker, manager and pretty nearly everything else,” remembered DeWitt van Court, athletic director of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. “He never allowed his scrappers to do any stalling. It was at his club that the famous incident occurred when a huge negro heavyweight named Sam Pruitt boxed a tough Irish boy and Sam, after piling up a good lead in the opening round, didn’t like the rough tactics of the Irishman and, taking one punch in the jaw, went down and refused to get up. Greggains counted something like this: ‘One—get up Sam. Two—will you get up Sam? Three—if you don’t get up you don’t get a dime. Four. You better get up before I count you out. Five—get up and fight or you get no more fights.’ At which point Sam looked up … and said, ‘Mr. Greggains, you can count right on up to a hundred but you can’t get me up off this floor.’” (Van Court, Making of Champions, p. 37.)

  * The boxing historian Nat Fleischer offered his own blunt explanation for Jeffries’ decision to quit the ring: “The period between 1905 and 1910 produced four great colored fighters: Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, Joe Jeannette and Sam McVey. There really wasn’t a white man who could be classed with this dusky quartet and that was the real reason why Jim Jeffries retired.” (Fleischer, Fifty Years at Ringside, p. 78.)

  * “For all the authority he had,” a friend remembered, “Jeff might as well have proclaimed Marvin King of Rumania.” Later, when Jeffries was considering a ring comeback, he would claim he’d never meant to confer the title on Hart. “If I had the power to choose a champion I’d give it to somebody in my own family,” he said. “No man has the right to turn the championships over to any other man. They must be fought for.” (Inglis, Champions Off Guard, p. 230; van Court, Making of Champions, p. 98.)

  * According to the Baltimore Sun (December 2, 1905), Jackson tried as hard as he could to get himself fouled in this fight, even falling down twice without being hit in one round in the hope Johnson would get so frustrated he would try to punch him while he was on the canvas. Johnson didn’t fall for it.

  * A unique feature of the night’s card was a four-round preliminary, fought by two young men with broadswords. The Topeka Daily Capital (January 27, 1906) called it “a very pretty affair,” but it didn’t catch on.

  * Ed “Gunboat” Smith, who barely survived a twelve-round fight with Langford in 1913, remembered that he was “never no good after it. Every time that Langford hit me, by God, he’d break the shoelaces.” (Heller, In This Corner, p. 39.)

  * If this was true, Johnson himself was partly to blame. In his French autobiography, Mes Combats (p. 22), he seems to confirm Woodman’s story: “I found him [Langford] one of the toughest adversaries I ever met in the ring. I weighed 190 pounds and Langford only 138. In the second round the little negro hit me on the jaw with a terrible right hand and I fell as if up-ended by a cannon ball. In all my pugilistic career, not before and not afterwards have I received a blow that struck me with such force. It was all I could do just to get back on my feet just as the referee was about to count ‘Ten!’ I made it, but I assure you that I felt the effects of that punch for the rest of the fight. (I recovered, but I would have had to take my hat off to him if I hadn’t had so much science at my command.) In the fifteenth round I was declared the winner on points.”

  * Boxing lore resists close examination. As a boxer, Sam Fitzpatrick is best remembered for having taken part in a bout in which he and his opponent landed simultaneous knockout blows. The problem is, there are two versions of the same tale. In one, Fitzpatrick and a boxer named Abe Aitken felled each other during a fight in Australia. Since neither man so much as stirred before the count of ten, the referee wasn’t sure what to do. He finally awarded the fight to Aitken because he woke up first.

  The other story has Fitzpatrick facing Patsy Mehegan at the California Athletic Club in San Francisco. Paddy Carroll, the Chicago promoter who would later bring Jack Johnson to Chicago to fight Klondike, was the referee. Each man threw a right hand. Both landed at the same instant. Both men collapsed to the canvas. Carroll counted them out. Each was carried helpless to his stool. Club officials told Carroll to wait until both were conscious, then send them at each other again. Carroll, himself a former boxer, refused to require the
woozy fighters to punish each other further. They divided the purse. (Buffalo Express, December 30, 1908; Washington Post, November 28, 1915.)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ____________________________________________

  THE MAN THEY ALL DODGE

  BOXING WAS BIG IN AUSTRALIA at the turn of the twentieth century, and Jack Johnson’s arrival in Sydney on January 24, 1907, was big news. When the Sonoma entered the harbor, she was met by a flotilla of launches, their decks crowded with sports eager for a glimpse of the man the Sydney Truth called “the cleverest exponent of the [boxing] game that America has ever produced.” Negroes were a great rarity in Australia—the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 had effectively barred nonwhites from settling there—and Australian newspaper coverage of Johnson was a blend of patronization and fascination. The Truth headlined its January 30 story JAUNTY JACK JOHNSON DE NEW COON COMES TO TOWN. “Johnson is a big coon … 28 years of age,” it said; “he has a genial face, somewhat babyish looking and of the type of the little coons who may be seen devouring watermelons in a well-known American picture.” But when the promoter James Brennan held a reception in Johnson’s honor at the National Amphitheater, the local fight crowd serenaded him with “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”; the editor of the Sportsman assured him that he would not have to face any color line in Australia, since “it wasn’t an Australian’s or a Britisher’s game to run away from a rival”; and Johnson responded with a well-received toast of his own: “He said he liked the trip, he liked the city better, but he liked the people who had welcomed him so enthusiastically best (Cheers).”

  Brennan had already signed Johnson for a fight on February 19 with Australia’s “coloured champion” Peter Felix, for the “coloured heavyweight championship of the world.” Once Felix had been dealt with, Johnson hoped to beat Bill Squires—known to his Australian admirers as “Boshter Bill” because of his bashing straight-ahead style—and then use that victory to lure Jim Jeffries out of retirement for one more big payday. “Jeffries has stated that he will not fight a colored man,” McLean told the press, “but if Johnson beats Squires he will have a right to make demands.” Squires, however, had other ideas: he was planning to sail to America to see if he could get Jeffries to return to the ring and face him. McLean and Squires’ manager,Jack Wren, began weeks of negotiation, some of it behind the scenes, much of it in blustery newspaper exchanges, to see if a bout could be arranged before Squires set sail. But the Australian champion was not eager to risk his American venture in a fight with Johnson, and in the end nothing would come of it.*

  Meanwhile, Johnson and McLean set up headquarters several miles south of the city at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel on the beach at Botany Bay. Surrounded by formal gardens and named for the naturalist aboard the first British vessel to anchor off Australia, it had once been the most fashionable resort in the region and the most popular sporting ground in the country. Its two-story restaurant could serve a thousand guests; its ballroom accommodated five hundred whirling couples and a full-size orchestra; tens of thousands turned out on weekends to picnic, see the caged tiger, ride the miniature railroad, or watch the footraces on four cinder tracks. But accusations of rigging eventually undercut the races, Sydney’s citizens found other things to do closer to home, and by the time Johnson and McLean moved in, bringing with them Stephen Hyland, an American trainer who’d been a messmate aboard the Sonoma when they hired him, the old Italianate hotel had seen better days.

  Its owner, a man named Marshall, saw a chance to pull in new crowds by putting up a big wooden pavilion so that every afternoon as many as a thousand people could watch Johnson go through his training routines while McLean stood to the side with a stopwatch, waiting for the moment to say, “Now, Jack. I think you’ve done enough.”

  “Jack’s ‘enough’ would be more than a feast to most of his calling,” the editor of The Referee wrote after traveling south of town to see him.

  He is undoubtedly a great glutton for work. Johnson side-steps, springs round in a 10- or 12-foot circle, and changes front with the rapidity of a lightning flash in pursuit or evasion of an imaginary foe. This is “shadow-sparring”—an exercise Australian boxers (latter-day men, I mean) brought from America.

  That same afternoon, the editor reported, Larry Foley, the elderly Sydney publican and onetime fighter who had trained Peter Jackson and many other Australian boxers, put on the gloves with Johnson for a little gentlemanly sparring. Foley had himself been a student of Jem Mace, the British bare-knuckle champion, and he worked from the straight-up stance familiar from nineteenth-century lithographs. To men of the Mace school, Johnson’s style seemed like “heresy.” The Referee continued:

  The American stands with the weight mostly on the front foot, and has only the toes of the back—the right—foot on the boards. Mace school boxers have the weight of the body on the back foot, leaving the front free to be used for stepping in or coming away. Johnson rarely steps in with a blow. How could it be otherwise, standing as he does; and he frequently stretches his legs wide apart, and gets very low down in consequence. The Mace school teaches that a man should always make the most of his height, and undoubtedly that is right. There is no height in Johnson’s favor when he spreads himself out as stated, and looking at it from another point of view had he lived a decade or two back, the black could never have recovered … before some of the high class men of the time would have been in on top of him.*

  But all this notwithstanding, Johnson is a great fighter and a fine fellow, and one has only to see him going to understand why Jim Jeffries sheltered behind that cowardly protection, the color line, and why the cleverest boxer had to come all the way to Australia.†

  •  •  •

  Wherever he went, Jack Johnson could be trusted to find excitement, and at some point early in his Australian stay he and several companions spent an evening drinking at the Grand Pacific Hotel, a boisterous pub at Watson’s Bay on South Head, across Sydney Harbor from the city. Afterward, the proprietor, a Mrs. Ashworth, discovered that a gold pin was missing. The next evening, her husband and Alma Adelaide Lillian Toy, his twenty-year-old stepdaughter from his wife’s first marriage, drove in a carriage to the Queen Theater in downtown Sydney, where Johnson was sparring onstage, to see if he could help them get it back. He said he had no time to talk then, but if they came to see him at his hotel, he’d see what he could do. Miss Toy and her mother turned up there the following afternoon. The pin was produced—someone in Johnson’s retinue had evidently lifted it—and he invited the two women to watch him train. Afterward, he asked if he could escort them home, and Mrs. Ashworth agreed to let him ride along. The older woman was dazzled. “He’s a beautiful man,” she told the milkman when he called at her pub the next morning. “You ought to see him stripped!”

  Her daughter seems to have been dazzled, too. It is not possible fully to reconstruct the history of the relationship that developed between her and Jack Johnson over the next few weeks—or even confidently to characterize its nature. Accounts differ. Only bits and pieces of evidence remain. But there was enough there to scandalize the Sydney sporting world for months, and Johnson evidently dared to think he and she might one day be married. Toward the end of his Australian sojourn, he would tell the Sydney Sunday Sun as much without identifying his bride-to-be, and when he returned to America, he told the same story and gave her name as well, an indiscretion she would come bitterly to regret.

  Known as Lola to her friends, Toy played the piano well enough to accompany her violinist brother, Ernest, on tours of small-town theaters and opera houses in Queensland, but she lived at home and disliked it there, mostly because of the coarseness of the stepfather she detested. Soon she was finding excuses to call at Johnson’s hotel. She went with him for sulky rides, returned several afternoons to the pavilion to watch him train, and huddled close to him on the verandah, helping to fend off the mosquitoes that began swarming out of the gardens as the sun went down. When the Tivolians, chorus gi
rls from the Tivoli Music Hall, turned up at noon one day for a picnic and a look at Johnson, Lola Toy posed with him for a group photograph, his arm around her shoulder. At a hotel dance in the boxer’s honor, she begged off dancing with one guest, saying it was too warm, but the moment Johnson entered the ballroom she hurried into his arms. He called her Baby. She called him Jack and visited his room so often and at so many different times of day and night that Stephen Hyland took Johnson aside and told him he couldn’t keep working for him if he persisted in inviting her upstairs. Johnson paid no attention (and Hyland remained on his payroll).

  One evening at the Grand Pacific, her stepfather accused her of disgracing the family by seeing a black man, then threw her out and locked the door behind her. She called a constable, who forced Ashworth to let her back into the only home she had, but not before she had called him a cad in front of the customers, insisted that Johnson was a real gentleman, and threatened to telephone and have him come over and thrash Ashworth for his insults.

  Meanwhile, the night of Johnson’s fight with Peter Felix at the Gaiety Athletic Hall arrived. Felix was half a head taller than Johnson, and, as a sports-writer for the Sydney Bulletin wrote, the crowd had rallied to him: “Felix suddenly found himself the popular idol, for the Australian ring-sider is patriotic even with his black man when the opponent is a foreign colored man.” Height and popularity turned out to be Felix’ sole advantages. It took Johnson just two minutes and forty seconds to demolish him. Felix did all the leading, according to the Newcastle Herald and Miners’ Advocate, but “Johnson, laughing and with aggravating coolness, merely parried the blows aimed at him… [and] made the local man look very awkward.” Felix stumbled and fell twice throwing punches that met only empty air before Johnson landed an uppercut on the point of his chin. After the Australian was counted out, said the Bulletin, he “staggered to his feet amid a storm of hoots and looked around the howling house with the pathetic expression of a motherless foal. It was an awful fiasco and a shocking finish to Felix’s bruising career.”