Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Grudge matches have always sold tickets, and when two prizefighters feel no actual animus toward each other, promoters routinely do their best to manufacture some. Neither Johnson nor Burns needed any help. (“Looking back in memory,” Burns wrote later, “I realize that [the fight with Johnson] was the first … in which I found myself hating my opponent.”)

  Johnson’s anger intensified every time he remembered how little he was being paid in comparison to the champion. He called on McIntosh so often to make his case for a bigger cut, and did so with such vehemence, that the promoter—mindful of what had happened to Alec McLean when he had dared argue with Johnson over money—kept a lead pipe on his desk, wrapped in a roll of sheet music for the song “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.”

  An early meeting between the two fighters concerning the size of the ring did not go well. Johnson arrived at McIntosh’s office with a friend’s seven-year-old daughter in tow. Burns told him he’d once been a good fighter but was now washed up and would have to “take your medicine.” Johnson said it would be Burns who would be forced to do the swallowing. The champion countered with a string of curses, or so Johnson recalled.

  When Burns started to perform I drew his attention to the presence of the child and remarked, “I would not do that if I were you.” I sent the child away. Burns grabbed a chair and his language was something beautiful. He could have gotten to me had he liked. Although he had the chair & an inkpot I said to Mr. McIntosh, “Turn him loose, Mac.” Burns had cabled that he wanted a 16-foot ring, and my reply was that he could have a 10-foot one if he liked. I don’t move round much, and that office would have suited me as well as anywhere.*

  Then there was the matter of who would referee. McIntosh had wired Jim Jeffries, asking if he was willing. He said he’d do it for five thousand dollars plus travel expenses, but Johnson wouldn’t hear of it: “I would never agree to allow that man to referee over me. He has always been very bitter against me, and would not fight me after I beat his brother.” He believed McIntosh wanted Burns to win and therefore distrusted everyone the promoter suggested. Instead, he asked that two judges be appointed in addition to the referee, as they now sometimes were in America. “For every point I’m given I’ll have earned two, because I’m a Negro,” he said. “But I want to be sure I get my point, anyway.” Burns rejected that notion, and Australian boxing authorities refused to allow it. Johnson would have to agree to let a lone referee decide who had won and who had lost.

  The issue remained unresolved. With just two days to go, McIntosh called another meeting. He offered more names. Johnson rejected them all, then directed a question at Burns himself: “Before going any further with this match, I want to know if you and McIntosh are good friends.”

  “We are friends, the best of friends.”

  Did McIntosh feel the same way toward Burns?

  He did.

  “If you and Burns are such good friends,” Johnson told McIntosh, “then you must referee the fight.”

  Sam Fitzpatrick tried to object.

  Johnson angrily cut him off. “I am fighting this fight,” he said, “and am going to have some part in naming the referee.” He didn’t much like McIntosh, but he knew the man wanted to continue as a big-time boxing promoter and therefore would presumably not dare be blatantly unfair.

  In the end, McIntosh—who had never refereed a boxing match before—agreed to oversee a contest for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  Given the checkered pasts of both fighters, it is not surprising that there were last-minute rumors of a fix, rumors powerful enough for Johnson to issue an informal denial.* In a letter said to have been written to “one of his wife’s relatives in Chicago” and published in several U.S. papers on Christmas Eve, Johnson did not deny that such a deal may have been discussed but swore he would have no part of it.

  I am going to win, no matter what money they give me, and I want you to get busy. Put down all the money you can raise, and get the boys to come through with all they can gather.

  I don’t care what Fitzpatrick and Burns may have fixed up. I don’t care what I am supposed to do. They are playing hog with me anyhow, and the most money I can get out of it is almost nothing. Here’s one time I can’t be handled.

  Just remember this: they are fixing it all up to hand me the lemon, but I won’t fall for the game. I’m going to double-cross all the schemers in the world and get the title. Can’t I make more out of the title than I could get on all the frame-ups that ever happened?

  Fans began lining up at the ticket windows at two-thirty in the morning on Boxing Day, and by the time 250 policemen got there at six-thirty, thousands of spectators were waiting for the gates to open. At midmorning, twenty thousand men were in their seats—and about thirty thousand more remained outside, some perched in trees or on telegraph poles in hope of getting a glimpse of the action.

  The bout was scheduled to begin at eleven. A few minutes before Johnson was to start his walk to the ring, as McIntosh remembered it, he made one more stab at getting paid what he thought he deserved. He sent word from his dressing room that he would not fight unless he got more money—and he wanted to see the cash before he laced on his gloves. The promoter stormed into Johnson’s dressing room. “So you want your money first, do you cobber? Where’s my check book?” He reached into his jacket as if it were hidden there but pulled out a revolver instead. “If you’re not in the ring right on time,” he said, “I’ll skin you alive.”

  Johnson subsided and started for the ring. As soon as the crowd spotted him in his hooded robe, the old shouts of “coon” and “nigger” began. “All the hatred of twenty thousand whites for all the negroes in the world,” the Bulletin called it. Australians had come not to see a fight, it continued, “so much as to witness a black aspirant for the championship of the world beaten to his knees and counted out.” As always, Johnson appeared unconcerned, smiling and nodding as he and his seconds walked up the aisle. “He didn’t get much homage,” the Bulletin continued, “but made a lot of what he did get.”

  Then Burns appeared, wearing a felt cap and a rumpled blue suit, “and was nearly blown out of the Stadium by the crash of applause.” The crowd stood and cheered its “Tommy Boy.”

  Johnson extended his hand. Burns refused it. “Hello” was all he said, and went to his corner.

  Johnson betrayed no emotion, but according to one ringside reporter he did take a mouthful of water and spit it with “uncanny accuracy between the heads of one of his seconds and a pressman onto a vacant space about the size of a handkerchief.” Then he leaned over the ropes and checked with one of his seconds to make sure his own sizable bet on himself had been placed.

  When Burns removed his suit, folding it neatly before stuffing it into a battered suitcase, Johnson saw that he was wearing elastic bandages on both his elbows and shouted that he would have to take them off. Otherwise, he said, he wouldn’t fight.

  The crowd roared its disapproval. The “yellow streak” already seemed to be on display.

  Hugh McIntosh—wearing a referee’s costume of his own devising: gray cap, white turtleneck, white slacks, white shoes—ruled that Burns could keep the bandages on.

  Johnson shook his head, sat on his stool, and folded his arms. “Don’t care,” he said. “I’ll sit here for an hour if necessary. They must be there to do him some good, and if he don’t take ’em off, there’ll be no fight.”

  Burns settled onto his stool, too.

  Unsure of what to do, McIntosh appealed to Larry Foley, the dean of Australian boxing experts, who happened to be sitting at ringside, to climb into the ring and have a look at the bandages. He did—and pronounced them illegal.

  Burns angrily tore them off. The crowd rose to its feet again to cheer for the fine sportsmanship their new hero was showing.

  The bell finally rang at 11:07 a.m. Burns was favored 5 to 4 to win.

  “All right, Tommy. Here I am,” Johnson said. A few seconds later, Burns was sitting on the canva
s, a bewildered look on his face. A short right uppercut had lifted him off his feet and put him there. “The world spun crazily,” Burns recalled, “a huge red blur obscured everything.” He signaled to his anxious seconds that he was all right, managed to get back to his feet at the count of eight, hurled himself at Johnson, and remained on the attack until the bell rang, doing his best to reach Johnson’s body while the bigger man counter-punched and taunted him: “Poor little Tommy,” he said. “Who told you you were a fighter?”

  Between rounds, while Burns’ anxious seconds flapped towels and sponged him down with champagne in hopes of refreshing him, Johnson took another big gulp of water—and sprayed it over the reporters nearest his corner. They ducked. Johnson laughed.

  “Come right on!” he shouted at the bell, and as Burns rushed toward him, Johnson moved his head just enough to allow Burns’ right hand to whistle past, then landed another uppercut on the champion’s chin. Burns collapsed a second time (he would later claim his ankle had given way), rose again at eight, and held on to Johnson in the middle of the ring.

  Burns called Johnson a “yellow cur.” “Come on and fight, nigger!” he said. “Fight like a white man!”

  Johnson just continued to smile. “Burns got through his other opponents easily by simply kidding them to death,” he remembered. “He would work them up to a condition of nervous excitement.” Johnson was neither excited nor nervous, and he was himself a master of mouth-fighting. “Burns started it by calling me a yellow cur,” Johnson remembered, “and used other language which it would be impossible for me to report. I only kidded him in a nice way but he used the other sort of language…. If I had killed Burns for the language he used to me I would have been fully justified.”

  Instead, he slammed Burns in the body, then smashed his mouth. As Burns went back to his corner there was blood on his lips, and his left eye had begun to close. It was already clear the challenger was too much for Tommy Burns to handle. Johnson was not surprised.

  I had forgotten more about boxing than Burns ever knew. Burns was a strong fellow & had a good right hand punch if he could have landed but my defenses prevented that. No crouching little man can hit a good big man. He has to straighten up to deliver and if the other chap’s good & fast enough, all he has to do is get him when he is coming up….

  My aim in the fight at Sydney was to show Burns, after all his boasting and his talk about the yellow streak down my spine, that I could out-box him and out-slug him. I wanted to beat him in a clever way without a chance of being beaten myself. If I had knocked him out quickly, the public would have said it was a fluke. When I beat him in a long fight it gave the other side no chance to talk.

  The few surviving minutes of silent film that Hugh McIntosh’s camera crew made that day are an incomplete record—no footage remains of the first few rounds or the climactic moment of the last round—but they do provide the first glimpse we have of Jack Johnson in action. Standing over six feet and weighing nearly 192, with a massive, chiseled upper body and surprisingly slender legs, he is an authentic heavyweight, while Burns, at five seven and 167 pounds, looks like the overblown middleweight he was, a boy who has somehow found himself sent into the ring to do a man’s work. He had made a career of beating bigger men, but even he privately doubted he could do so this time: “I don’t think I can beat that nigger,” he’d confided to Peggy Bettinson back in London, “but I’ll give him the fight of his life.”*

  He tried, but as the old film shows, it was hopeless. Again and again Burns rushes at the bigger man, who hits him on the way in, then gathers him into his long arms, rocks his head back and forth with uppercuts, and shoves him away again. And all the time Johnson keeps smiling and talking. He had set out to beat Burns “in a clever way,” as he said he would, but as the rounds tick by, it is clear he has a second agenda as well: to disprove, one by one, the racist theories put forward by writers like Bohun Lynch.

  Were blacks weak in the stomach?*

  An American writer at ringside described how Johnson beckoned Burns inside and let him pound his body.

  “Hit me here, Tommy,” he would say, exposing the right side of his unprotected stomach, and when Burns struck, Johnson would neither wince nor cover up. Instead, he would receive the blow with a happy careless smile directed at the spectators, turn the left side of his unprotected stomach and say, “Now there, Tommy,” and while Burns would hit as directed, Johnson would continue to grin and chuckle and smile his golden smile.†

  Did blacks betray a yellow streak when under pressure?

  Johnson did not flinch from Burns’ best body punches—“You punch like a woman, Tommy,” he said. “Who taught you how to fight, your mother?”—and he won most of the inside exchanges at which the champion was supposed to be so good. “I was positive he would fold up under punishment,” Burns admitted many years later. “How badly had I underrated his boxing skill, his tremendous strength and unquestionable cunningness! He backed slowly about the ring, employing a slow shuffling technique, coupled with superb arm blocking and head rolling.”

  Were black fighters less able to think on their feet than their white opponents?

  “They talked of [Burns’] being a man of brains,” Johnson wrote. “If I had not more brains than him I would have been sorry for it.” Hugh McIntosh remembered:

  He is a funny fellow, that Johnson. He stood up before Tommy and when the latter rushed would say, “This is what is known as a left hook, Tommy,” and then he’d let go. Then he’d step back and as Tommy rushed in would say, “I will now give you another little lesson on boxing, Tommy; look out for your eye!” And then he’d let go on Burns’ eye. He just kidded Tommy to death.

  Burns floundered after him, always game but always outfought and out-thought.

  In the sixth round, Johnson turned his head to chat with the press so often, his seconds shouted that he should keep his eye on the champion. “I see him, oh yes,” Johnson said, “though he is so small.” Catcalls followed: “Flash nigger!” “That’s flashness!” One Australian newspaperman declared Johnson’s chatter “devilish gloating.”

  No one objected to Burns’ foul language.

  Johnson hit the champion with another left hand; when Burns started to sag, Johnson hauled him upright again as the bell rang, then pushed him back toward his corner.

  In the seventh, he knocked Burns down for a third time. He also made a reference to Burns’ wife, Jewel, that especially enraged the champion. “He said something about my wife in the ring and if the public had heard him they would have lynched him. I tell you that if he had made the same remarks about my wife in America, or about any white woman, that he did to me, he would have been lynched very quickly.”*

  In the tenth, the old footage shows a press photographer sliding his big camera under the ropes to get a picture. Johnson stops, smiles, and holds Burns nearly motionless, then moves him away again. “Did you get that?” he asked.

  Halfway through the thirteenth round, Burns’ legs buckled again. Johnson grabbed him under the arms, lifted him up, and set him straight in order to be able to punish him some more. As Burns staggered back to his corner, one eye was closed, the other closing; blood trickled steadily into both. His battered jaw had ballooned to twice its size, and his gaping mouth was bleeding.

  Some in the crowd began to call for the fight to be stopped. Police officers, empowered to step in if they thought one or the other man was about to be injured, clambered up into Burns’ corner to ask him if he’d had enough. He waved them off. He was not going to lose his title sitting on his stool.*

  As the bell rang for the fourteenth round, Johnson rushed from his corner. Burns did his best to keep away, but another right hand sent him down. He got up and Johnson cocked his right hand to knock him down again when the police signaled for the fight to be halted. McIntosh shouted—“in a voice fit to wake the dead,” said the Bulletin—“Stop, Johnson!”† McIntosh declared Johnson the winner. “As McIntosh’s voice rebounded from the
walls of the stadium that mighty concourse remained silent,” the Bulletin continued. “Johnson waved his hands to the crowd that did not cheer him. A few straggling voices were raised but they were mere flecks of sound in an ocean of silence.”

  Burns angrily protested, and when his seconds got him back onto his stool, he began to weep. The fight should never have been stopped, he said through his torn and swollen lips. Johnson couldn’t hit “worth a cent.” If the police hadn’t interfered, he added, “I might even have won because the big nigger was tiring fast.”‡

  The crowd fell silent and began to drift out of the stadium. In twelve minutes the whole place was empty. “The Australian nation, which welcomed Johnson as a challenger, had never seriously considered the possibility that he might turn into a champion,” one city resident recalled.

  The experience of a leader of the Sydney bar, who happened to have been a famous amateur boxer, was typical. He had arranged a dinner-party for twenty-four on the night of Boxing Day, to celebrate Burns’ victory. The champagne was on ice. It was an occasion for the noblest brandy. When the fight ended in Johnson’s victory, the host left the ringside and walked home, as unconscious of the world around him as a sleep-walker. When he got to his house he went straight to bed, like a man suffering from shock. If his friends chose to turn up and drink his champagne that was their business. They must excuse him if he kept to his bed. He need not have worried. Every guest went home too, and stayed at home, like a man suffering a bereavement.

  Johnson greeted the press after the fight while lying on the rubbing table in his dressing room. There wasn’t a mark on him. “Burns can’t fight,” he said, and then thinking better of it, “I don’t want to say that. He’s a game, straight fighter.” But, he said, as his masseur rubbed eucalyptus oil into his shoulders, he did hope he’d disproved once and for all the myth of the yellow streak.