* McLaglen abandoned boxing in 1915, served as a captain of the Irish Fusiliers and as provost marshal of Baghdad during World War One, and then went into the theater. In 1935, he won the Best Actor Oscar for his work in John Ford’s The Informer and later became an important member of Ford’s Hollywood stock company.
* Henry Johnson is thought to have died around 1907.
* Johnson and Hattie McClay had failed to coordinate their stories. An enterprising reporter for the Milwaukee Free Press tracked her to the Martin Street home of Mr. and Mrs. George Brown and wangled a brief interview: “Mrs. Johnson gives evidence of considerable business ability. She believes herself capable of conducting her husband’s business affairs and admits that hereafter she will have an important part in the arrangement of matches.
“ ‘Mr. Johnson is a splendid fellow and I am very fond of him,’ declares the woman. ‘He is a big-hearted and brave man. Some people may criticize me for marrying a black man, but I am satisfied and happy and that, after all, is the best test of marriage.’
“Every effort to conceal the whereabouts of Mrs. Johnson was made by friends yesterday. They even went so far as to deny that the woman was in the city. Ed Howard of the Howard Hotel said, however, that Mrs. Johnson was a guest at the Brown home.” Later, asked point-blank if she was black or white, Hattie McClay refused to answer. (Milwaukee Free Press, March 16, 1909.)
* At least four other Everleigh Club employees were fired for the same reason that spring: Virginia Bond, Lillian St. Clair, Bessie Wallace, and Bertha Morrison, known as “Jew Bertha.” All of them would travel at one time or another with Jack Johnson or members of his entourage.
* There was only one caveat: “Should Stanley [Ketchel] win [against Johnson] I would discontinue training as the title would be where it rightfully belongs”—i.e., in white hands.
* O’Brien’s most prominent booster was Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, an eccentric millionaire and fight enthusiast from one of Philadelphia’s best-known Main Line clans. Biddle held “boxing matinees” at his home, inviting some of the best white fighters of his time to spar with him in the stable before an audience of eminent invitees and then to share a sumptuous buffet. (When Bob Fitzsimmons was asked to say grace at Biddle’s home, he was so impressed by the richness of the fare he said, “May the good God ’elp us to eat all wot’s on the tyble.”)
Now, when the new heavyweight champion came to town, Biddle wanted to spar with him. Having a Negro at his table was out of the question, however, and so, his daughter remembered, he made his way to Johnson’s training camp across the state line in Merchantville, New Jersey, gave his name as “Tim O’Biddle,” and quietly took a seat on the bench from which the champion picked local youths with whom to go a round or two. When his turn came, Biddle tore out of his corner, evidently intent on showing Johnson who was boss. “Now you boy there,” Johnson said. “Don’t get yourself stirred up.” “But Father was always stirred up,” wrote Biddle’s daughter, “and Johnson finally had to fetch him a smart whack on the side of the head to settle him.”
When Johnson entered the ring against Jack O’Brien two nights later, he was startled to see Biddle working as a second in his opponent’s corner. “Boy, you got yourself all mixed up,” he said. “You belong in my corner.”
The professionals Biddle invited to spar with him generally went easy. He was their host, after all. The sole exception was the big California heavyweight Al Kaufmann, who took one look at the onrushing amateur and knocked him cold. Biddle went on to teach hand-to-hand combat to the U.S. Marines during World War One and to FBI agents during World War Two. (Biddle, My Philadelphia Father, pp. 12–13.)
* Jack Earl, the ex-amateur heavyweight champion of Ireland, was less than impressed by Jeffries’ bluster and appalled at the derisive coverage given to Jack Johnson. “I have followed the newspaper comments on these two men for the past twelve months,” he wrote to the New York Times. “I have been offended at the gross and undeserved abuse poured over the ‘nigger’ by the American newspapers…. That the colored man, Johnson, is the superior man, physically and mentally, no intelligent person can doubt…. [Johnson] at least has not to keep people waiting while he takes the Carlsbad waters and otherwise patches himself up to meet championship demands.” (New York Times, November 3, 1909.)
* According to George Little, Sam Berger was so startled at having been outargued by Jack Johnson that he refused ever to deal with him directly again: “Berger did not like to talk to Johnson as he knew Johnson could best him.” (George Little’s 1910 “Confession.”)
* After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Britt sued the city for damage done to his property. When the city attorneys argued that the earthquake had been an act of God, Britt countered that that could not possibly be true, since several churches belonging to Him had been destroyed.
He had stolen his latest meal ticket from a less wily manager, or so boxing lore has it. Ketchel’s manager Joe O’Connor had thought he’d safeguarded his prized possession by confiscating his clothes and locking him in the room of his San Francisco boardinghouse while he went out on an errand. It was a fatal error. The diminutive Britt is supposed to have shinnied up the drainpipe—or climbed the fire escape, accounts differ—talked his way through the window, and painted such a rosy picture of what he and the other members of Jim Coffroth’s so-called boxing trust could do for the impressionable young man that Ketchel agreed to sign on right away. There was only one problem, he said: “I got no pants.” “Think nothing of it,” Britt replied. “Let’s go to Coffroth’s saloon. He’s got spare pants.” Whatever the truth of the story, Britt became Ketchel’s manager, and Jim Coffroth would promote many of his biggest fights. (John Lardner, “Yesterday’s Graziano,” Sport, April 1948.)
* According to one story, they had actually encountered one another earlier that day. Ketchel and Britt were on their way to the stadium in Ketchel’s Thomas Flyer when Johnson pulled up beside them in his and tried to pass. Ketchel gunned his motor, and the two racers careened through the city streets at better than seventy miles an hour before Johnson pulled away, laughing. (Vernon Gravely, “Willus Britt: More Than Just a Manager,” The Ring, June 1954.)
* George Little—soon to join the parade of Johnson’s discarded managers—would later claim that everything, including the controversial climax, had been prearranged. Jim Coffroth had been in on it, too, he said, and had personally driven Johnson and himself to Willus Britt’s home for a rehearsal. There they shifted the furniture, rolled back the carpets, and rehearsed the final round. Johnson had no trouble playing his part, falling again and again with a suitably agonized look, then springing back up to throw his uppercut. The problem was Ketchel: try as he might, according to Little, he couldn’t seem to collapse convincingly. Finally he held up his hand. He wasn’t an actor, he said; “he couldn’t fake a fight and never did. It would be better to make it real as he could stand the punishment.”
Denver Jack O’Keefe, one of Johnson’s sparring partners, recalled the practice sessions differently. They’d taken place over ten days at Seal Rock, he said, and Ketchel hadn’t been there at all. Johnson knew of Ketchel’s “excitable manner when he sensed the kill and planned to take advantage of it” by feigning a knockdown, then jumping up and catching him with “the terrific right uppercut Johnson had in those days.” For the record, Sunny Jim Coffroth emphatically denied that there had ever been any reason to prolong the contest for the motion picture cameras: “These pictures were contracted for by burlesque houses and would have been worth just as much money if there had been only half as many rounds.” To further complicate things, Johnson would later claim he had only pretended to be knocked down. Precisely what happened in the moments leading up to the final punch will probably never be known. But there was nothing inauthentic about that final uppercut. (George Little, “Confession”; undated story from Chicago Daily News, 1944; Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 196.)
CHAPTER SEVEN
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THE GREATEST COLORED MAN THAT EVER LIVED
ON THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 29, 1909, in the banquet hall of New York’s Albany Hotel on Broadway, Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries were scheduled to meet face-to-face. They had not seen each other since the summer of 1905, when Jeffries had refereed the Jack Root–Marvin Hart bout in Reno, Nevada, and Johnson had fruitlessly challenged the winner from the ring. The ostensible reason for their getting together was to sign a second set of articles for their upcoming battle. The real reason was publicity, and a crowd of several hundred sports and sportswriters was on hand to help drum it up.
Jeffries entered promptly at three o’clock, his every move recorded by an awed reporter for Harper’s Weekly.
He swings through the door amid a burst of cheering and marches down the middle of the crowded room, while men hurry as close as possible to him and a few daring ones whack his big back and cry “H’lo, Jeff!” He answers no word but smiles and nods right and left…. [H]e stands six feet one and a half inches and in his thin serge suit weighs nearly two hundred and fifty pounds; yet his footfall is as light and brisk and sure as the step of the swiftest dancer. “Moves like a feather!” exclaims a hero-worshipper as he gazes in ecstasy….
The … connoisseurs are … intently staring at his waistline. They admire it. It is very brief. The man within has already worked so hard in training that he has burned away the surplus flesh…. The brilliance of his eyes and the glow of his clear, bronzed skin are eloquent of good physical condition. The throng press close to him, gaze, study, scrutinize, admire.
Jeffries took his seat at the head of the table on which the papers were to be signed, “like the master in his house,” the Harper’s writer thought, and when Johnson turned up fifteen minutes later, the room fell silent.
One could not help feeling sorry for the negro. Clearly, he felt ill at ease among these hundreds of whites who if not actually hostile were certainly not friendly. Two other black men were in the room, but they were hidden in the throng. Johnson is as tall as Jeffries but fully thirty pounds lighter. There is something of the grace and power of the panther in the long, easy swing of his walk ordinarily; but now that he encountered so many curious and unsympathetic stares, the poor fellow seemed to shrink in upon himself. His gait had lost its springy quality. He bore himself as if he expected a scolding….
This black, who properly fought his way to the championship of the world, … advanced like an abashed servant. A vacant chair was placed for him some six feet from the chair of Jeffries.
The moment Johnson appeared … [Jeffries’ smile] froze…. I have seen him in other matchmakings when he was indifferent or friendly or merely polite to the enemy, but never like this. Down came the black brows in a frown, and the eyes beneath them glared at the negro as the eyes of a stern judge glare when he tells the prisoner how sorry he is that the law won’t let him impose a heavier sentence. Not a word did he utter, but kept the glare fixed on the unhappy visitor. The negro looked down at the floor, around among the crowd, but not at his adversary. Anything but that….
Was he frightened? I think not. He has always shown himself a brave man in battle, and he probably will be brave when he faces Jeffries in the ring but coming suddenly against that glare in the presence of so many unfriendly strangers disconcerted for a time the present champion of the ring.
If Johnson really was disconcerted, he recovered fast. He and Jeffries were each supposed to put up $5,000 as a side bet. Jeffries slapped five-thousand-dollar bills on the table. Johnson came up with just $2,500. It was all he had in the world, he said.
Jeffries insisted that he produce the whole amount.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do Mr. Jeffries. We’ll throw the dice to see whether you get my money or whether I have to put up five thousand.” Jeffries turned him down—and waived the requirement. “While there was no attempt at undue civility,” said the Cleveland Advocate, “the pair showed a determination to get down to business.”
Nearly everyone in the room seemed to be smoking, and after the discussion had gone on for a while, someone suggested they open a window to let out the thick blue haze. Johnson grinned. “Say,” he said, “if the ‘Smoke’ goes out the window there will be no match made here this day.”
In the end they agreed to fight for forty-five rounds on or about July 4, 1910, at a site still to be chosen. The winner was to get 75 percent of the winnings, the loser 25. (It was originally to have been winner-take-all but, as George Little later explained, he and Johnson decided that, in the unlikely event Jeffries won, “we didn’t want to eat snowballs all winter”; by fight time, the split would be 60–40.) Promoters had thirty days to submit their bids.
The next morning, Johnson hurried out to Long Island for the fifth running of the Vanderbilt Cup road race. Immaculately turned out as always, and with a bottle of champagne jutting from his coat pocket, he approached the reviewing stand, assuming that he could talk his way into the exclusive box that afforded the best view of the finish line. A uniformed guard told him to go away. Blacks were barred. Not even the heavyweight champion of the world would be allowed to mingle with the wealthy automobile fanciers inside.
That rebuff alone might have made Johnson’s visit to Long Island memorable, but a chance meeting that same day made it unforgettable. While he stood with the rest of the crowd waiting to see the racers roar by, someone Johnson later identified only as one of his “theatrical connections” introduced him to Mrs. Etta Terry Duryea, a twenty-eight-year-old white woman from Brooklyn. She had appeared on the stage and was currently living apart from her husband. “Famed on Long Island for her beauty,” according to the New York World, she was elegantly dressed and slender, with dark hair, large dark eyes, and a lovely sad smile. Johnson was taken with her and she with him. They arranged to keep in touch by telephone. Jack Johnson had had numberless similar encounters. This one would turn out to be perhaps the most fateful of his life.
Meanwhile, with the Jeffries fight still nine months away, Johnson returned to the stage. In late November, he was in Pittsburgh, appearing in a revue called The Cracker-Jacks and living at Frank Sutton’s hotel with Belle Schreiber. One afternoon, a tall, lean stranger appeared at the door and asked to see the champion. His name, he said, was Tex Rickard, and he had a proposition to make.
Johnson eagerly ushered him inside. He already knew his visitor’s reputation. George Lewis Rickard was a reckless gambler and a relative newcomer to the promotion of boxing matches. He knew almost nothing about the game, but he had already proved he knew more than anyone else about turning it into big business. Born in rural Missouri in 1871 and raised in the state that afforded him his nickname, he had herded cattle as a small boy, served as a town marshal at twenty-three, and then made himself rich in the Yukon, not by mining gold but by providing miners with lavish gambling establishments in which to lose their gold to him. In 1903, he shifted his operation to Goldfield, Nevada, where he presided over a gambling palace that took in about ten thousand dollars a day. But he was always on the lookout for ways to do better.
In 1906, Rickard had heard that the managers of Joe Gans and Oscar “Battling” Nelson, rival claimants to the lightweight title, were interested in arranging a contest to decide who was the real champion. The only fights Rickard had ever seen were amateur bouts he’d staged to pull more customers into his Alaskan gambling halls. But he saw instantly that if he could attract the fight to Goldfield, he could put the little mining camp on the map and make a tidy profit for himself besides. Gans was black; Nelson was white. Rickard thought he could sell their meeting as a struggle for racial superiority, not just a boxing match. He sent off telegrams to both managers, promising a thirty-thousand-dollar purse—unheard-of for a lightweight fight—then stacked the whole sum in gold coins in his front window to show he meant business and stole the bout from established promoters elsewhere who thought they had it sewed up.
Rickard made
sure the papers were filled with enthusiastic prefight stories by passing out twenty-dollar gold pieces to thirsty sportswriters. “Somehow, crude, uneducated guy though he was, he managed to do this graciously,” one grateful recipient remembered. “You had the impression that it was you who were doing him the favor by accepting the money. It was always a token of friendship, never a bribe.”
It all paid off. Eight thousand fans turned up for the fight on Labor Day, doubling Goldfield’s population overnight. The bout went forty-two rounds before referee George Siler gave it to Gans on a foul.* The fight’s savagery was remembered for years; so was a phrase from the triumphant telegram Gans sent home to his mother: BRINGING HOME THE BACON. Everybody involved made money. Gans used some of his to open the Goldfield, a handsomely fitted-out café for the sports of Baltimore, where, the pianist and composer Eubie Blake remembered, Jack Johnson was a frequent and conspicuous visitor whenever his travels took him to that town.
Now, huddled with Johnson and Belle Schreiber in their Pittsburgh hotel room, Rickard promised to make them rich, too. The Goldfield fight had been a mere dress rehearsal, he said; the coming clash between Johnson, the “Negro’s Deliverer,” and Jeffries, the “Hope of the White Race,” would be likely to dwarf anything that had ever before happened in American sports. The films of the Johnson-Ketchel fight had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and further whetted the white appetite for seeing Johnson bested.* The films of the upcoming fight should do far better.
Bids from promoters hoping to get in on the action were not supposed to be submitted until November 30, but Rickard saw no reason to wait. The champion didn’t, either. The promoter spelled out his offer: a $101,000 purse, the largest in boxing history; two thirds of the film rights to be split between the fighters; a bonus of $5,000 more for Johnson on signing ($2,500 in cash that very afternoon and another $2,500 before he entered the ring); and, as further incentive, “the finest sealskin coat he could find” for “Mrs. Johnson.”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 23
