Johnson barely bothered to train for the second Australian fight McLean had arranged for him. His opponent, in Melbourne on March 4, was Bill Lang, a former opal miner and Australian Rules footballer just beginning his boxing career. The promoters billed the contest as a GRAND INTERNATIONAL BATTLE BETWEEN AUSTRALIA’S STANDARD-BEARER AND THE INVADING FOEMAN … THE BUGLE CALLS TO ARMS!!! TO ARMS!!! and there were high hopes for ticket sales. But it poured on fight night. Only two thirds of the thirty thousand seats at the Richmond Racecourse were filled when the first of two preliminary bouts began, and forty soggy rounds later only those who’d thought to bring umbrellas remained in their seats. At about ten o’clock, Johnson made his way to the ring, wearing one of his patented bathrobes—made of “chintz or cretonne,” wrote one reporter, “besprinkled with damask roses and lilac sprays with frills round the hem and a hood similarly figured with flowers.” The soaked crowd started to jeer. “We don’t want to see Mrs. Johnson!” one man shouted. “Go away woman, and send your husband. This is no place for ladies.”
Johnson just grinned, popped his eyes at the crowd, and pulled up his hood against the rain drumming down on the canvas. Lang sent a message from his dressing room: it was too wet to fight. The crowd broke into “Waiting at the Church.” The promoters convinced Lang that he had to get into the ring. It took ten minutes. Ten more were wasted while local fighters issued challenges to one another. Johnson, soaked and bored, leaned over the ropes and talked to the press. “They’re all squabbling over something,” he said. “I’m getting a misery waiting here.”
Once things finally got under way, Lang splashed after Johnson for two rounds without landing a single solid punch. At the end of the second, Johnson was overheard telling his handlers, “This is a joke.” Certainly, he treated it as one. For the next four rounds, he carried the hapless Australian, eluding his clumsy rushes and battering his face from a distance, bringing blood in “little red rills.” He didn’t even bother to sit down between rounds. In the seventh, he knocked Lang down twice, then angered the crowd by breaking into a grinning cakewalk on the way back to his corner. Lang was on the canvas four more times in the eighth, and in the ninth stayed there long enough to be counted out.*
Afterward, Johnson and McLean went on the road, exhibiting their fight films and putting on shadowboxing shows in small towns in Victoria like Ballarat, Bendigo, and Geelong. Their plans for making big money had collapsed when the fight with Squires failed to materialize, and by the time they got back to Sydney in early March, Johnson was bored and restless and increasingly dissatisfied with McLean. “He began to decide that he was about the whole show,” McLean recalled, “and did not really need a manager after all.” Shortly after they had settled into the Commercial Hotel in downtown Sydney, James Brennan dropped by with their share of the proceeds from the Lang fight. McLean happened to be out. Johnson said he’d be happy to hold on to the cash and give McLean his share the moment he got back. When McLean did return, it was time to head for the racetrack. As the two men hurried along, McLean asked for his cut, and Johnson handed him a fistful of coins.
McLean counted it on the run.
“How much more is coming to you?” Johnson asked.
“About $510.”
Johnson promised to give him the rest of his share that evening. When the two men got back to their hotel after the races, Johnson told McLean he was going home. “I’m tired of this country,” he said, “and I can get more money there.” In fact, he planned to leave on the nineteenth, aboard the American steam mail ship Ventura, the same ship on which Bill Squires was sailing for America. If Squires couldn’t be made to fight him in Australia, Johnson said, he’d be right there to challenge him the minute he walked down the gangplank in San Francisco.
McLean argued for a while, but when he saw that Johnson was adamant, he asked for his $510 so that he could pay their hotel bill and be ready to go on the nineteenth. Johnson just smiled, McLean remembered. “Everybody for himself in this world,” he said. “Now I have the money and I am out for Jack Johnson. If you are big enough to take it from me, go ahead and do it.” McLean knew he wasn’t big enough and backed off for the time being.
On the evening of March 14, the Colored Progressive Association of New South Wales gave a farewell banquet for Johnson at the Leigh House on Castlereagh Street. The Tivoli’s chorus line appeared en masse. Lola Toy was there, too, escorted by her brother for appearance’s sake. Johnson gave an exhibition of bag punching and thanked the people of Australia for their cordiality.
Four nights later, Lola Toy came to call at Johnson’s hotel, and the two had farewell drinks in the lounge. He expected to board the Ventura the following morning. But he had underestimated Alec McLean’s resourcefulness. In public, McLean had supported his fighter’s decision to head home, but he knew that once Johnson was at sea it was unlikely he’d ever get what was coming to him, and so he turned up shortly after Toy left that evening with a court officer and a warrant for Johnson’s arrest for breach of contract. The three men walked outside. McLean showed Johnson the court order. The fighter threw it on the ground. McLean called him a “big black bastard.”* Johnson smashed McLean’s nose.
Johnson was arrested for assault by three constables and locked up. Jim Brennan hurried down to bail him out. Johnson was ordered to appear the following morning in the Sydney Water Police Court before Magistrate G. H. Smithers. McLean was not present; his lawyer, a man named Tress, claimed that his client’s injuries, the result of a wholly unprovoked attack, were far too great for him to leave his bed.
Johnson’s attorney, H. Levien, offered another explanation:
MR. LEVIEN: Your Worship, it appears that there was a legal difficulty between Johnson and McLean, and the two got to high words. They had not, I suppose, been drinking cloves and peppermint, and McLean called Johnson a big black [bastard] and, of course, got knocked down. That’s all there was. Johnson, like all pugilists, is a most quiet man.
MAGISTRATE SMITHERS: Mr. Tress says he broke McLean’s nose.
MR. LEVIEN: Oh well, that will soon be mended…
MAGISTRATE SMITHERS: If a man calls another man those names he is likely to get something for it.
MR. LEVIEN: Yes, I know, that’s what I would do if I were called names.
For punching his ex-manager, Johnson got away with paying only a five-pound fine. But McLean’s breach-of-contract suit had yet to be settled, and Johnson was forbidden to leave New South Wales. The Ventura and Bill Squires sailed without him.
He told the press he would go to Melbourne and fight either the veteran Billy Smith or an aboriginal heavyweight named Malley Jackson. McLean warned that his contract with Johnson precluded his fighting anyone, anywhere,without his permission. Johnson responded that Sam Fitzpatrick, not Alec McLean, was his real manager. But he did not leave for Melbourne. Instead, he rented himself a room in a working-class neighborhood in Sydney and waited for his dispute with McLean to come to court. “I expect to get married shortly,” he told the Sydney Sunday Sun. “I’m liable to make this my home…. I like the people here … and I’ll go into business after I’m here a while.”
No one knows whether he and Lola Toy were still seeing each other or whether they had ever really discussed marriage, but after McLean won his suit Johnson lost little time in making plans to sail for home aboard the Sonoma on April 24.* When Johnson went to pay what the court insisted he owed, and learned from McLean’s lawyer that McLean planned to be aboard the same ship, he cursed and muttered that there “were two men going aboard the ship but only one would get off alive.” The lawyer advised McLean to arm himself. “This was the first and last time I ever carried a gun,” McLean remembered, “and I never want to do so again.”
Johnson and McLean boarded the Sonoma separately the following day. According to McLean, they did not lay eyes on each other until they got to Honolulu, where the press was waiting. Each offered his version of what had happened during the Australian tour. In his account, M
cLean gratuitously suggested that Johnson hadn’t shown much aggression in the ring. This last, according to McLean at least, stirred Johnson to seek him out as soon as they had set sail again for San Francisco.
When he got within ten feet of me, he asked me what I had said in the press about him. I had my hand on my gun in my coat pocket. I told him to stop where he was, and he told me he was going to break my back.
“Did you say that I was not game?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, “and am going to make you quit right here to prove it.” Then he asked me if I had a gun, and I said yes, that it was loaded, too, and if he moved I would shoot.
“I have my gun, too,” he said.
“Well, go ahead and get it, and I will show you, you are not game, for this is the one place where I have an even chance with you.”
“You are not going to shoot while I am going after it?”
“No. Go ahead and get it.”
Somebody tried to stop him, and said, “Don’t go, Jack, we don’t want to have anybody killed here.” But Johnson went downstairs to get his gun.
He went downstairs all right, but he never did come back. In fact, he never appeared on deck again until we reached Frisco, and he did not threaten me with any more injury, either.
That was my last fight with Jack Johnson.
Johnson’s return to San Francisco on May 18 was eclipsed by newspaper reports of the latest doings of Tommy Burns. Just ten days earlier, Tom McCarey had staged a title fight in Los Angeles between Burns and Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. It hadn’t been easy to arrange. Their first fight—the one shown in the film Johnson and McLean had been showing in Australia—had officially ended in a draw, but O’Brien had absorbed the most punishment and, according to a widely believed story, was unwilling to meet Burns again unless the champion would agree to take a dive in exchange for ten thousand dollars. To get him into the ring, Burns said he would, then double-crossed him on fight night, telling McCarey the whole story just ten minutes before the main event. McCarey, in turn, ordered the referee to announce to the crowd that all bets were off. O’Brien blanched, had literally to be pulled off his stool by the referee after the opening bell, and then ran from the angry Burns for most of the next twenty rounds.*
Burns won the decision easily, but controversy continued to dog him. The whole business, W. W. Naughton wrote, was “about as astonishing a mess of crookedness as the game of the ring has known,” and some boxing insiders—including the editor of the Police Gazette—believed that both fights with O’Brien had been fixed, the first prearranged in order to ensure that there would be a second. Nor did Burns’ popularity improve when he refused a rematch with Mike Schreck—a big, awkward, left-handed heavyweight from Cincinnati who had been the first man to beat him—unless he received an unheard-of 75 percent of the twenty-thousand-dollar guarantee. Burns professed not to care about criticism. “I am not madly in love with the game,” he would tell a reporter. “We are out for the money, you know.”
Burns would always be out for the money. The poverty and deprivation out of which he came was at least as severe as that which had surrounded Jack Johnson as a boy, and he would spend his whole career trying to make up for it. He was born Noah Brusso in 1881 in a log cabin outside Hanover in southeastern Ontario, the twelfth of thirteen children of a German-Canadian cabinetmaker. Five of his siblings died in childhood. His father beat him. So did the drunk his mother married after his father died. Noah, in turn, beat up his classmates until his mother pulled him out of school at ten and put him to work as a finisher in a furniture factory. As a teenager, he was a skilled but savage field lacrosse player, a goalie celebrated both for his shutouts and for the rough treatment he relished meting out to opposing players who dared get too close. (One coach paid him a bonus every time he managed to finish a game without incurring a penalty for misconduct.) He drifted from job to job—house painter, foundry worker, saloon bouncer. While working as a baggage handler aboard a Great Lakes steamer, he beat the chief engineer unconscious for throwing a towel at him, then jumped ship at Detroit for fear he’d be arrested. He began boxing there in 1900 and ran up a string of thirteen wins and eleven knockouts over local heroes, both black and white, with names like Fred “Thunderbolt” Thornton, Billy “Battleship” Walsh, and Eddie Sholtreau, the “Bay City Brawler,” before his loss to Mike Schreck. Noah kept fighting and winning after that, but when his mother was distressed by headlines he made in 1904 for having beaten a hapless middleweight named Ben “Gorilla” Grady into a coma, he changed his name to Tommy Burns.
Burns was short for a heavyweight, and he often fought from a crouch, which protected his stomach and jaw but also made him seem still shorter. Some writers simply never believed him big enough to be an authentic heavyweight. He hit hard—more than half of his prechampionship bouts ended in knockouts—but he was perhaps best at upsetting and bewildering his opponents.
Worry your opponents as much as you can [Burns wrote]. Cultivate quick, slight movements or tricks with the eyes, hands and feet, which will convey the impression of a sudden, rapid movement, which you will not really carry out…. These tactics will cause your opponent to make a big lunge or a rapid jerk or spring backwards or sideways, such as will take a lot of steam out of him, without having distressed you in any way.
Like Jack Johnson, Burns enjoyed taunting his opponents and laughing at them in the clinches; also like Johnson, he did his most serious damage with short, jolting blows inside.
Admirers compared him to Napoleon, a notion Burns did nothing to discourage, billing himself as the “Little General” and the “Emperor,” sometimes even combing a few strands of his thinning hair over his brow to emphasize the resemblance. Burns dressed like a sport and was fond of poker and whiskey and late-night sing-alongs, but he revered his second wife—a Birmingham, Alabama, beauty he called Jewel, who made it a condition of marrying him that he never fight another Negro—and he was in total charge of his own finances. He had no manager and traveled with no entourage, because he could not bear to share his earnings with anybody.
Jack Johnson did everything he could think of to call attention to himself after he got home. As soon as Tommy Burns turned down a rematch with Mike Schreck, who had been the first man to beat him, Johnson challenged Schreck—who hastily drew the color line. And when Burns agreed to fight Bill Squires at Colma on July 4, 1907—Jim Jeffries having refused to leave his farm to fight the Australian title holder* —Johnson confronted the champion at his hotel. “I had $700 in my pocket & offered to box him for it right there,” he remembered. “Then I offered to go and get $9,300 more & make him a side bet, but this he declined, too…. Burns talked of going into a room with me to have it out. I said, ‘Come on,’ but he did not get any further.”
Johnson was at ringside for the fight. Squires was a 10-to-7 favorite, though he had never fought in America before. He entered the ring wrapped in the Australian flag. Burns wore the Stars and Stripes, and the band played the “Star-Spangled Banner.” (The Canadian Red Ensign, with its Union Jack in the corner, was not thought likely to appeal to American fans, especially on Independence Day.) Squires was big and muscular and had run up an impressive-sounding tally of knockouts, but he held his chin too high. Burns’ first right hand sent him down. A second toppled him again, and when he wobbled to his feet, a third kept him there until Jim Jeffries could count him out. Burns’ doubters continued to be unimpressed: Squires must have been overrated, they reasoned, for the so-called champion to have demolished him so easily.
On July 17, Johnson fought ex-champion Bob Fitzsimmons at the National Athletic Club in Philadelphia. Fitzsimmons had been one of the hardest punchers in heavyweight history—as Johnson knew firsthand, since he’d been one of his sparring partners before the New Zealander lost the title to Jeffries in 1902—but he was forty-five years old and out of shape, and he tore a ligament in his left arm just before the bout. It was a sad mismatch, though Johnson did all he could to make it sound exc
iting in his handwritten account:
In my fight with Fitzsimmons I did in two rounds just what it took Jeffries 8 rounds to do…. In the first round [Fitzsimmons] did well. He was clever enough to make me miss several times and when I miss [when] there is something in front of me [that] is out of the ordinary. Cheer after cheer rang out as he strutted to his corner, but soon it was quiet. In the 2nd round I walked over to Bob & feinted him into knots. I pulled him into a duck and then swiftly … planted my right on his jaw and Bob went over on his back. Fitz rolled over onto his face,… and at about the count of 6 was on his hands & knees with his head stuck to the floor. He tried to pull it up but no, he couldn’t budge it. He was like a hypnotized man who can’t take his finger from his nose. He knew what he wanted to do, started right, but that head seemed to weigh a ton. There wasn’t a chance in the world of him lifting it. Billy McCarney, the referee, lifted him to his feet and Bob reeled after me, thinking the go was still on. Tim O’Rourke led him to his corner, and washed his face with ice water, bringing him to.
Johnson had little sympathy for Fitzsimmons, whose “anxiety” about his color had kept the ex-champion out of the ring with him until he was too late to put up a fight. And it amused him afterward that his effortless win over “poor old Bob Fitzsimmons” was the thing that made some supposed boxing experts “finally begin to see that I counted for something.”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 13
