Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Toy’s attorney took Reid to task for employing sarcasm to entertain and mislead the jury when there had been nothing funny about The Referee’s gross irresponsibility. “Pugilism was one thing,” he said. “It was quite another thing to seriously publish the statement that a young white girl was going to marry a professional negro pugilist who even here in Sydney had committed an offense [by punching Alec McLean in the nose].” To believe Stephen Hyland’s testimony as to his client’s behavior, he said, “Miss Toy would be stamped as an abandoned strumpet.”

  The jury took less than two hours to render its verdict. The Sunday Times Newspaper Company was found guilty of libel and ordered to pay five hundred pounds plus court costs. Despite all the testimony, in Sydney, Australia, in 1907, the idea that a young white woman might have been romantically entangled with a black boxer, let alone have considered marrying him, was apparently unimaginable.

  Johnson never commented publicly on the Lola Toy affair, but within weeks of its resolution he was on his way overseas again, to London this time, accompanied by Sam Fitzpatrick and Hattie McClay. Since Tommy Burns wouldn’t come home to fight him, he said, he would “shame him out of King Edward’s islands” and force him to fight in Britain.*

  Negotiations with Sunny Jim Coffroth and an upstart promoter named Tex Rickard to stage a Burns-Johnson contest in San Francisco or Goldfield, Nevada, had fallen through, but Arthur Frederick “Peggy” Bettinson, manager of the National Sporting Club in London, had let it be known that the club might be interested, and within hours of reaching London, Fitzpatrick and Johnson were at its door. They were ushered inside, Bettinson remembered, and Johnson was made to wait in the foyer—“to stand on the mat until he was sent for,” to use the club historian’s phrase. “Johnson in those days was a normal nigger and in good hands,” Bettinson remembered, still “a tractable nigger, and … generally acceptable.”

  Inside, Fitzpatrick made his pitch: “This Johnson can beat Burns or any other man; the nigger knows it; Burns knows it. If Tommy will not fight here, we will follow wherever he goes.” Then a butler ushered Johnson inside as well, and he was asked to strip to his tights and put on a show of shadow-boxing. Impressed by Johnson’s style and obvious strength, Bettinson offered $12,500 for the championship contest, to be held at Covent Garden, with four fifths of the purse earmarked for the winner. Fitzpatrick accepted and said he was willing to put up $5,000 of his own as a side bet. “Johnson would sooner fight in the National Sporting Club than anywhere else,” he assured the press. “Money does not so much matter so long as Burns will get into the ring.”

  But money always mattered to Burns. The club’s offer was laughably low,he said. “If [Johnson] really wants to fight me he ought to be glad to accept any terms I offer. My terms are $30,000, win, lose, or draw.”

  No fighter in history had ever insisted on such a sum or such an arrangement. The Police Gazette thought the champion’s demand “quite the nerviest proposition that ever was made for a fistic match.”

  Surely he cannot sincerely believe that any promoter will give him such an unheard of sum…. Jim Jeffries, between whom and the present champion no comparison can be made, never could muster the gall to ask any club to compensate him for his services in any such sum, and when he was fighting he fought men like Sharkey, Fitzsimmons and Corbett, all of whom were better than Burns is…. No one wants to accuse Burns of placing insurmountable obstacles in the way of a meeting with the big negro, but unless he shifts his position quickly he will be charged with fearing to face the issue. No matter what is said of the ring career of Johnson or his personality, no one will say that he is not in earnest concerning a fight with the champion.

  Johnson was more succinct: “The whole truth of the matter is that Burns does not want to fight me. It is he and not me who has a yellow streak.”

  To demonstrate Johnson’s skills for British boxing insiders, Fitzpatrick had him spar several rounds at Hengler’s Circus in Argyle Street against what the veteran referee Fred Dartnell recalled as a “very good heavyweight.” “Not once,” Dartnell continued, “did [Johnson’s] opponent’s glove get past that invincible guard.” When an impatient man in the gallery shouted, “Go on, get at him!” the frustrated British boxer shouted back, “Gawd blimey! You come and have a go.”

  London writers were suitably impressed, though some, like John Gilbert, the novelist and literary biographer who wrote about boxing under the pseudonym of Bohun Lynch, could not get beyond his color. Johnson was “by no means unintelligent,” Lynch recalled,

  and not without good reason, was regarded generally with the greatest possible dislike. With money in his pocket and physical triumph over white men in his heart, he displayed all the gross and overbearing insolence which makes what we call the buck nigger insufferable. He was one of the comparatively few men of African blood who, in a half-perceiving way, desire to make the white man pay for the undoubted ill-treatment of his forbears.

  Meanwhile, Burns’ noisy concern with how much he was to be paid—he saw no reason to budge from his initial demand, he said, “as I’m called a grabber anyway”—had won him few friends in British boxing circles. Nor had his overly candid assessment of British boxing talent: “I shall not return to the United States yet,” he told the American press in remarks widely reprinted in Britain. “There are still some juicy lemons here that I haven’t squeezed … altogether, there’s too much easy money here for me to overlook it.” His boorish behavior at the bar of the National Sporting Club didn’t help, either. “Johnson strolled into the … Club yesterday,” Burns reported to the Police Gazette in June, “lording it in a disgusting way, and I turned him down cold—wouldn’t shake hands with the big dub.”*

  Burns saw himself as more generous and fair-minded than any of his predecessors: “I am the only heavyweight champion who has been ready to give a black man a chance.” But his blunt personality was losing him the propaganda battle. He printed up handbills addressed to the British people defending himself and had them passed out all over London. The proposed bout with Johnson was simply a business proposition, he argued, just like any other.

  Now, let me ask you a sensible question, for I judge that most of you are business people. If you were working for three pounds a week, and you know that you could get six pounds a week for a similar job, would you take the job at six pounds? The same thing applies to the offer for Johnson and myself. Why should I accept this amount when I can get twice that amount elsewhere?

  The handbills didn’t help. Edward VII himself, an avid sportsman, was widely quoted as having called Burns a mere “bluffer,” whose vulgar financial demands should never be met in Britain.

  Johnson followed Burns to France in June. There had been talk of a title fight in Paris with Johnson’s old opponent Sam McVey, who’d been there for several months and had knocked out all five men who’d faced him. Johnson, Hattie, and McVey were photographed making the rounds of Paris nightspots together, the two black fighters towering over French patrons; Johnson in a derby and a checked suit, leaning on a polished cane; Hattie, beneath a vast flowered hat, grinning from a bar stool. Johnson saw the city’s sights, too: Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the tomb of Napoleon, with whose rise from obscurity to fame and power he identified.

  When Burns’ proposed fight with McVey fell through—no one could be found to put up the big money the champion insisted on—he agreed to fight Bill Squires again on June 13. It took him eight rounds to knock Squires out this time. Johnson was again at ringside. “It’s downright weary work chasing a man around the world,” he told a reporter. “It makes one real tired, it does indeed.”

  Meanwhile, the best Sam Fitzpatrick could do for his fighter was to get him a bout at Plymouth with big, slow-moving Ben Taylor, ironically labeled the “Woolwich Infant” because of his size. In Johnson’s 1927 autobiography, written many years after Fitzpatrick had joined the long queue of white men who had tried and failed to tell him what to do, the fighter pretended he had been t
he underdog in this contest.

  This match was based upon the craziest terms under which I ever fought, and in view of the important prospects at stake, I thought Fitzpatrick had suddenly lost his senses. Taylor was in fighting trim and was much heavier than I. I was in poor shape, yet Fitzpatrick had consented to terms which provided that to win, I must knock Taylor out in ten rounds; that the rounds were to go only two minutes each; and that we should use six-ounce gloves. Had I lost this fight, and there was a chance that I might, it would have meant a sudden end to my theatrical engagements, for I would have ceased to be an attraction. Furthermore it would have placed me in a class which would have prevented serious consideration of me as a contender for the title.

  There was nothing for me to do but abide by Fitzpatrick’s silly arrangements.

  In fact, Johnson was so sure of winning that he had been drinking for the three days before the fight and appeared in the ring with bloodshot eyes, slowed reflexes, and a serious hangover. Still, as he remembered in his more candid handwritten memoir,

  it was my fight from the very beginning. I let Taylor stay just to give the spectators a run for their money. Not once during the fight did Taylor land more than a light jab on me. On the other hand, I had my man in a bad way many times during the fight but always let up on him when I saw that I had him going. However, in the 8th round I shot a terrific right hook to his jaw and he dropped like a log.

  Afterward, Johnson asked his handlers to bring him a restorative of his own invention: “an egg beaten up in a bucket of stout and champagne.”*

  Even Johnson’s innate optimism had begun to flag:

  It was just fatiguing to listen to [Burns’] miles & miles of excuses. For the last few years I had been half round the world trying to secure boxing matches but on the whole it seemed to me that I had not been successful. Like Micawber, I had changed my place of abode time after time in expectation of something turning up but it never came to pass.

  Later that month, he began a two-week run at the Oxford Theater, now billed as

  JACK JOHNSON

  HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

  THE MAN THEY ALL DODGE

  THE GREATEST FIGHTER THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

  THE MAN WHOM TOMMY BURNS WON’T FIGHT

  UNLESS THEY GUARANTEE HIM £6000

  JOHNSON IS A FIGHTER NOT A SHOWMAN

  * “Like the ‘villain in the play,’” Johnson told a reporter, “I was ‘foiled again.’ … There I was having gone half round the world, just dead keen for a fight, while the white fellows were beating it faster than ever to keep out of my way.” Wren and McLean both quickly understood that there would be no contest between their fighters but that did not prevent McLean from advertising, during a brief theatrical appearance in Melbourne, that “Squires will meet Johnson face to face on Friday night.” The theater sold out, its patrons eager to see the much-anticipated fight. Instead, Johnson and Squires merely strode onstage in evening clothes and solemnly shook hands. A man in the balcony shouted, “Aren’t they going to fight?” “Later,” said McLean as all three men hurried off, grabbed the receipts, and fled through the stage door as the disappointed crowd howled its disapproval.

  * To this day, experts marvel at Johnson’s ability to avoid getting hit while restricting his movements largely to moving forward and backward. In a recent interview, one of the shrewdest modern scholars of the sweet science, former light heavyweight champion José Torres, argued that Muhammad Ali provided the only parallel: “Jack Johnson … used to make guys miss by pulling back, and that’s a nono in boxing because pulling back is like being on the train track and … the train’s coming. Do you want to be hit by a train? What do you do? You don’t move back, because the train eventually is going to hit you. You move to one side or you move to the other. But Johnson and Muhammad Ali did not move to this side or [that] side, they went back, but the train never caught up with them.” (Ken Burns’ film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Episode One.)

  † Three years later, an Australian named Harry Brandon, who had attended this sparring match, offered a different version of how it came about. Johnson, he said, had admired a pregnant white bulldog owned by a Sydney sport named Jim Barron and asked if he could have one of her puppies. Barron said he could, provided he was able to land three punches on the elusive Foley’s nose. Barron, whose own nose had been broken by Foley in an amateur contest, wanted revenge. He talked Foley into going out to the Sir Joseph Banks and stepping into the ring with the American newcomer. “Foley fell for it,” Brandon remembered, “because he didn’t care much for niggers, anyway…. Well, they squared off and they hadn’t any more than got their hands up before bing! Johnson had landed that awful left of his flush on Foley’s nose. The blood shot out in a stream and Johnson grinned and said that there was one pup.” Johnson landed twice more, and “about this time Foley got wise and realized that he was up against the real thing and quit, for he couldn’t even touch the negro…. Barron got the laugh on him, and Johnson got the pup.” (Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1911.)

  * The former New Zealand middleweight Dan Creedon was one of Johnson’s seconds for this fight. Ten years earlier, Johnson had been in Joe Walcott’s corner when Creedon had fought him. Creedon hadn’t thought much of the smaller Walcott, he said sheepishly, and remembered having been ready to knock him out in the first round—and then waking up the next morning with resin still in his ear. He preferred the memory of the Johnson-Lang fight, he said, because it had involved a black man knocking out a white man other than himself. (Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1911.)

  * Alec McLean’s account leaves out this all-important detail.

  * If Johnson is to be believed, his financial prospects improved considerably after a trip to the track on Saturday, March 30. He bet what he called “my last five dollars” on a horse owned by the promoter Jim Brennan, then wandered around the track “greeting friends and acquaintances with a wave of the hand”—gestures the bookies misinterpreted as signals that he wanted to bet more. The following day was his twenty-ninth birthday, and when he went to collect his winnings he was stunned to find that his five-dollar wager had yielded a fifteen-thousand-dollar profit. The biographer Finis Farr offered a more cynical—and perhaps more plausible—explanation for Johnson’s windfall: he had actually bet seven hundred dollars, and only after learning from racetrack insiders that the race was fixed for Brennan’s horse to win.

  In any case, Johnson was delighted: “Nothing could have been more opportune for I had been in a predicament … wondering how I was to finance my trip back to the United States. If the long shot had not won—well it still makes me sweat to think about it. I would probably have been in Australia yet, wondering what had happened to me and making futile explanations to prison keepers.” (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, pp. 54–55; Farr, Black Champion, pp. 46–47.)

  * For his part, O’Brien claimed the fix had been McCarey’s idea, not his. “Jack,” he said McCarey told him, “the long-haired fellows [reformers] are going to kill the game soon, anyhow, and we are fools if we don’t get all the money we can, while we can.”

  O’Brien was a dapper, charming man and one of the most scientific boxers of his era, good enough to have knocked out Bob Fitzsimmons to win the light heavyweight championship in 1905 and to have engaged in more than 175 bouts over a sixteen-year career with only six official losses. He was a favorite with sportswriters, too, because of his distinctive use of the English language: once, describing to A. J. Liebling his own losing effort against the middleweight Stanley Ketchel, he explained that he would have “put the bum away early” had his timing not been “a fraction of an iota off.”

  But he also seems to have made a practice of clumsy fakery. Jim Jeffries would later claim that shortly after O’Brien’s first fight with Burns the Philadelphian had come to call at his Los Angeles farm with an offer of $80,000 from some Nevada boosters for him to come out of retirement just long enough to “take t
he count.” Jeffries said it “nearly paralyzed me—that he would come out with a bald-faced plan like that…. I told him that I didn’t need money that bad.” (London Free Press, May 15, 1907, quoted in McCaffery, Tommy Burns, p. 138.)

  * Billy Delaney, Jeffries’ manager and trainer for most of his career, actually offered Squires a fight with his former charge, convinced he had the retired champion’s agreement. When Jeffries repudiated thedeal he had made, the embarrassed Delaney—who believed his word had been called into question—denounced Jeffries as “the worst four-flusher in the world.” The two men would never reconcile.

  * “I didn’t court white women because I thought I was too good for the others like they said,” he told the sportswriter John Lardner (White Hopes, pp. 34–35) many years later. “It was just that they always treated me better. I never had a colored girl that didn’t two-time me.”

  * The Illustrated Buffalo Express (September 13, 1907) reported that Burke went down nineteen times.

  † If Jack Curley’s memoir is to be believed, Flynn had badly strained relations with his adopted hometown earlier in 1907. He’d heard a woman screaming from inside a house in “a tough section of the town … found a man beating the damsel about and promptly slugged him. The woman, as women sometimes will under such circumstances, repaid him for his gallantry by turning upon him and striking him with a poker.” When a policeman with a club rushed in to see what all the noise was about, Flynn decked him, then rushed down the street. He fended off subsequent attacks by the police chief and two other officers, fled the rail yards, commandeered “a switch engine, opened the throttle and steamed out of town in the best melodramatic manner.”