Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  Stephen “Crusher” Casey (1908–1987), from Sneem in Kerry, was a world freestyle wrestling champion, a rower and a tug-of-war champion. He had natural talent because his father had been a sparring partner of the legendary John L. Sullivan, and a rower in a team of Sneem rowers in New York sponsored by the Vanderbilts.80 Casey emigrated to London in 1933 where he began work as a hotel porter. He twice threw a wrestler out of the ring who had unwisely issued a challenge to all-comers in the audience.

  After 201 European professional victories he moved to America to wrestle there. In sixteen months of wrestling in America, during which he had 316 victories, he finally defeated Louis Thesz for the undisputed world title in 1938.

  Crusher Casey had a famous rivalry with another Irish wrestler, Dan O’ Mahoney (1912–1950), whose ring name was Danno Mahony. Danno was from Ballydehob in Cork. He established his reputation for extreme strength when he lifted a car belonging to the school inspector out of a drain when he was twelve years old. When Danno and Crusher fought each other in Dublin in 1938 in front of a crowd of 16,000 people there was no winner. Danno had invented a wrestling move called “the Irish whip” that Crusher Casey actually used to defeat him later that same year at Mallow, Co. Cork in the twentieth round in front of just 3,500 witnesses. The crowd was small because the Bishop of Ross had declared that dutiful Catholics should not attend wrestling on a Sunday.

  Crusher Casey reputedly had the most powerful hands and he also invented his own move, “the Killarney flip”. In four fights against Crusher Casey, Danno never managed to win. There is a statue of Danno in Ballydehob village.

  Crusher Casey turned to boxing. In 1940, under his new identity as “The Sneem Machine”, he challenged Joe Louis, the then world heavyweight boxing champion, to a fight for a purse of $50,000 that he put up himself. Louis wisely refused the challenge. The Sneem Machine’s brother, Jim Casey (1912–2000), won the Texas, Canadian, Southern United States and Pacific Coast heavyweight wrestling titles, but neither brother would agree to fight the other. There is a statue of Crusher, aka The Sneem Machine, in Sneem village.

  Jack Doyle (1913–1978), from Cork, was a boxer, singer and playboy, which is a rare combination of talents, even in Irish history. While working as a docker and a farm labourer, he read a boxing instruction manual called How to Box, which inspired him to become a pugilist. He wasn’t deterred by the fact that he was never technically impressive. He had a glass jaw and a lethal right hand, which meant that most of his fights never went on longer than two rounds, because he would either knock out his opponent or be promptly knocked out himself. Furthermore, he reasonably ignored his fitness, which wouldn’t be needed over a mere two rounds. But he also neglected to develop any defensive techniques, which would have been useful. He boxed under the names “The Gorgeous Gael”, “The Body Beautiful” and “The King of Clout”, but not under the names “The Jaw of Glass” or “The Tub of Lard”.

  Doyle began his boxing career with ten straight knockouts, that is, he knocked out ten of his opponents. He then quickly became addicted to alcohol and women. During a particular boxing match against the undistinguished Jack Pettifer in either late 1932 or early 1933, one of his few fights to go beyond two rounds, he was so exhausted from his social life that he had to be revived with brandy between rounds. He managed to barely win that one. In 1933 he fought for the British heavyweight title. However, by then he was suffering badly with venereal disease (VD).

  In an effort to even his odds, he decided to concentrate on damaging the below-the-belt anatomy of his opponent. He was disqualified, banned and fined. His Irish supporters loved him and were happy to believe his disqualification was a British conspiracy. No one in Ireland could imagine that Doyle actually had VD; it was not a recognised disease in Ireland at that stage because no one in Ireland had sex. Serendipitously, the disqualification allowed him to pursue his singing ambitions.

  Doyle starred in several local films and travelled to Hollywood in 1934 where he landed the lead in two films, McGlusky the Sea Rover (1934) and Navy Spy (1937). There he married the actress Judith Allen in 1935. They performed together in concerts. However, his fans in Ireland had cooled on him because he had married a divorcee, which was a state of being also not recognised in Ireland at that time. In Hollywood his friends Errol Flynn and Clark Gable did recognise both divorce and VD. He divorced Allen and re-entered the ring in Britain in 1937, after preparing with three wins and one loss in Madison Square Gardens in New York.

  He was far ahead in his first British fight following his film career. But when he punched his dazed opponent as he was sitting on the bottom rope, he was disqualified again. In another fight, as he advanced to finish off his bewildered opponent with a haymaker right, he missed and fell through the ropes and into the press seats, knocking himself out. His gallant opponent gave him an opportunity for revenge in another fight. This time Doyle put his semi-conscious adversary on the canvas twice before closing in for the coup de grâce. As he rushed in, he fell onto the end of his challenger’s fist, knocking himself out again. He was then beaten in Dalymount Park in Dublin in the first round of a Heavyweight Championship of Ireland exhibition fight against an untrained blacksmith.

  Doyle earned a vast amount of money from his boxing, singing and films. At one time he kept a mansion at Ascot in Britain, with bodyguards, servants, chauffeurs and a singing teacher. He had an affair with the car heiress Delphine Dodge, her fifteen-year-old daughter and her sister-in-law. The Dodge men had to both threaten him at gunpoint and pay him £10,000 to keep him away from the Dodge women. An actress, Betty Strathmore, took poison in front of him in a hotel room, so desperate was her love for him. She wasn’t famous enough for us to know if she survived. He married the actress Maria “Movita” Castaneda, who appeared in the 1939 film Mutiny on the Bounty. They toured together until divorcing in 1945. He also had an affair with the actress Diana Dors.

  After this, he had a period of homelessness when he slept in a van on Henrietta St in Dublin. In desperation, he became a wrestler. He lost his first fight to his friend Michael “Butty” Sugrue (1924–1977).

  Butty, from Kerry, had joined Duffy’s Circus, as you should, as “Ireland’s strongest man”, which involved him dragging a cart filled with ten men around the big top with a rope clenched between his teeth. Butty became a successful wrestler, and used his winnings to open a chain of popular Irish pubs in London. For publicity, he persuaded one of his barmen to spend sixty-one days in a coffin buried in the garden of one of his pubs. He challenged his friend Jack Doyle to a wrestling match in Killorglin in Kerry in 1953 to help resurrect Doyle’s wrestling career. Unfortunately, Doyle lost in the first round, ruining the entertainment for the crowd and his own comeback. Butty also promoted a fight at Croke Park in 1972 between Muhammad Ali and Al “Blue” Lewis, which was also a disaster for him. It was badly organised and only a small crowd turned up, despite Butty’s promise that any profits would go to “the mentally handicapped children of Ireland”.

  Butty often paid an impoverished Doyle to sing in his London pubs. But Doyle’s singing career took a knock when Butty died while carrying a refrigerator up the stairs in one of his pubs in Shepherd’s Bush in London. Doyle spent most of the rest of his life in relative poverty and homelessness. In 1972 he returned to Cork, where a huge crowd turned out for his own cabaret act. In 1978 they turned out again for his funeral.

  If you couldn’t sing, act, or box clean, you could get exercise by becoming a famously dirty boxer like James Elliott (1838–1883). Elliott was born in Westmeath but emigrated to America when he was an infant. He specialised in being a dirty fighter, which is not surprising considering he started his boxing career as a member of an Irish street gang. He had a destructive right hand combined with a capacity to withstand terrible punishment from superior boxers. Unlike Doyle, he didn’t have a glass jaw. He had a concrete one. He also had a devastating head butt, eye gouge and bite. In 1861 he kno
cked out Nobby Clarke in ten rounds as a heavyweight boxer. He then fought Hen Winkle. That fight was declared a draw after ninety-nine rounds. As prizefighting was illegal in America, you could win if your opponent was arrested on his way to the fight. After getting several potential challengers arrested, Elliott was himself eventually arrested and sentenced to two years in Trenton State Penitentiary.

  When Elliott got out of gaol in 1865 he went into the protection racket business to support his drink and gambling interests. In 1866 he was with General John O’Neill in his invasion of Canada.81 By 1867 he beat Bill Davis in a nine-round fight to take the heavyweight title of America. In 1868 he defended his title against Charles Gallagher. After twenty-three rounds, Gallagher’s seconds refused to allow their man back into the fight because of all the gouging, biting and butting from Elliott.

  Elliott found it increasingly difficult to find opponents because of his reputation, so he drifted back into crime. In 1872 he was convicted of the highway assault and robbery of the popular Negro minstrel Hugh Dougherty, who almost died from the attack. Elliott got eighteen years in gaol. After eight years he was released, partly due to his going blind.

  He was back in the ring in 1879 to challenge the reigning American champion John J. Dwyer. Blind and out of shape, he was badly beaten after twelve rounds. So he dipped his gloves in turpentine and attempted to gouge out Dwyer’s eyes in the thirteenth round to even the odds. Dwyer’s seconds managed to wash out his eyes. Dwyer had to knock Elliott out in the fourteenth round to retain his own sight.

  Elliott’s next fight was against the great John L. Sullivan under the Queensberry Rules, which didn’t suit him. He was flattened in the third round. In March 1883 Elliott was shot dead over a gambling row as he left a saloon in Chicago.

  Not all prizefighters were dirty. There were a few honourable ones. Michael McCoole’s (1837–1886) popularity soared after he refused to hit his opponent, Joe Coburn from Co. Armagh, when he was down on one knee, something which he was allowed to do. He turned his back to give Coburn a chance to get up. Coburn won the fight by hitting McCoole behind the ear. Nice! There were other things a clean fighter could do. If you were being bitten, for example, you could rely on your supporters to rush in and rescue you. That was allowed.

  Sometimes the audience was more of a hindrance than a help. Jack McAuliffe (c.1866–1937) was knocked out only once in his entire boxing career when the father of a man he had just beaten hit him with a chair. Though knocked out that time, he was never declared beaten over seventy-five fights, one of which went on for sixty-four rounds.

  Some people imagine that boxers end up in the sport because they have limited opportunities in other areas. But Isaac Weir (1867–1908) could have been a jockey, a pianist, a dancer or a comic singer. His father had wanted him to become a priest. Instead, Weir ran away to Manchester in 1885 where he won several minor boxing matches. The following year he went to America to become a featherweight bare-knuckle boxing champion. He holds the record for participating in the longest world title contest in any weight division when the police stopped his fight against Englishman Frank Murphy in the eightieth round. Weir was never the undisputed world featherweight champion because of the unwillingness of the American boxing authorities to recognise world title fights that did not include an American.

  The Dreaded Pedestrianists

  Even if our ancestors didn’t value physical fitness as much as we do, they still managed to move quicker than us. We know from the archive of black and white silent films of athletic events from the end of the nineteenth century that people ran faster than we do now, and they jumped faster, if not higher – all without the aid of exotic performance-enhancing drugs. However someone must have been on drugs, if only for the sake of science.

  Being a runner was outrageous enough without using drugs to add to the stigma. A professional runner was one of the lowest forms of sporting life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps the greatest anxiety a parent could have had at that time was that their child would become a professional runner, commonly known as a “pedestrianist”. The brief relief that your little angel wasn’t going to become an attorney or a poet could be instantly destroyed by this unhoped-for career choice. Picture the tableau of the distraught home where the mother sobs inconsolably into her apron at the kitchen table, while the father, clutching a shotgun in one hand, points to the door with the other, indicating that his would-be pedestrianist son should get out and never return.

  Beauchamp Rochfort Day (1881–1946?) was a pedestrianist. In Day’s case we don’t know the details of why or how he was the victim of such a fate. Perhaps his mother was threatened with having to become a boxer, attorney or prostitute, so he chose to sacrifice his own honour to save her from having to go on those games. We will never know. What we do know is that he was fast.

  Day, from Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, first demonstrated his weakness for running when he won the 100 yards in 10.2 seconds in a school sports event. In 1900 he won a 440 yards race in 49.4 seconds, which was half a second quicker than the American Olympic champion at the time, Maxey Long. The race official couldn’t believe his eyes. The time was officially amended to 50.8 seconds so that it became a new Irish record but nothing more dramatic. However, a racing promoter, the pimp of late nineteenth-century life, was present at that race. He persuaded Day to turn professional.

  From 1902 to 1906, Day travelled the world openly as a pedestrianist. At that time, runners often raced under assumed names, probably to reduce the personal shame. Gambling syndicates sponsored them. A syndicate demanded that their runners should race strategically, which meant finishing in a pre-agreed order. Bookies had learned from bitter experience that it was easier to get people to obey orders than horses or greyhounds. Day had an ongoing rivalry with the Australian pedestrianist Arthur Postle, who was known as “The Crimson Flash”. In April 1907 in Perth, Day bet every penny he had on himself, and set a new world record in the 450 yards of 47.8 seconds. In America he won $3,00082 for running 100 yards in 10 seconds flat. Sport historians regard Day as our greatest Irish sprinter ever.

  A Horse of the Same Colour

  Horse racing, or racing anything, is one of the oldest and most popular sports in Ireland. In the past, if you were of a plump build you could have tried tug-of-war. If you were skinny you could have become a jockey. Michael Dawson (1865–1926) weighed in at just 5 stone, 7 pounds and was one of the most sought-after jockeys in the country.

  If you were fat and couldn’t competitively ride your own horse in an actual race, you could own one. For that, you just needed money. Richard “Boss” Croker (1841–1922), from Cork, was one of those rich people who had money and nothing else. When Boss was five, before he earned his nickname, his father, Eyre Croker, took his family to live in America. Eyre became a horse doctor.83

  Boss wasn’t a noted student. But he did distinguish himself with his fists in the school yard, and then in the boxing ring. The Tammany Hall Organization84 that controlled the Democratic Party in New York needed people like Boss to help maintain political order. In 1865 he became a hired thug for Jimmy O’Brien, who was a ward boss.85 He became an alderman in 1868 and a coroner in 1873, which gave him an official income of $25,000 per annum. As the Hall was mostly an Irish political organisation, there just had to be a split. In the split, Boss sided with the Young Democracy faction, which was led by the notoriously corrupt “Honest” John Kelly against the even more corrupt William H. Tweed. Kelly eventually succeeded in becoming the lead man after Tweed’s surprise conviction.

  Boss Croker held just one other official post, that of city chamberlain from 1889 to 1890, but he unofficially controlled the city’s Democratic Party, manipulating all city offices for seventeen years. Under his influence there were property and planning frauds, protection rackets, prostitution and saloon bars. He amassed about $8 million of personal wealth.86 He was probably the most corrupt person in the world at that
time. However, in 1894 his “career” stalled when a reforming candidate became mayor. This marked the end of his political life. By 1903 he had emigrated to Europe to start anew as a respectable person.

  He saw horse racing as a means by which he could pursue respectability from his English base. However, being a famous thug, even a fabulously rich one, didn’t help his cause. But horses became his passion. They didn’t care about his pedigree because only their own equine bloodlines mattered to them. Against advice, he raced imported American horses that did badly. He split with his trainer and acquired new horses. He decided to have these horses trained at Newmarket in England, which would have helped his quest for respectability: if his horses could be respectable so could he by association. However, the Jockey Club refused his request for a licence because he wasn’t a gentleman. In a rage he moved to Ireland where he had another falling out, this time with his Irish horse trainer. But money can address some problems. He bought a fast horse called Orby. By 1907 Orby became the first Irish-trained horse to win the Derby. King Edward VII refused to greet Boss in the winner’s enclosure after the race. However, this royal snub did help him to become a national hero back in Ireland.

  Orby romped home first in the Irish Derby in 1907 to make Boss a freeman, if not a gentleman, of Dublin in 1908. Orby’s half-sister Rhodora won the English 1,000 Guineas race for him. Boss then had an ungentlemanly idea that he hoped would make him instantly socially acceptable. He insisted on incestuously mating the two champions in an effort to produce a super-horse. The two respectable horses must have been horrified, but what could they do?

  The birth of a hideously deformed foal killed Rhodora. Despite this eugenics setback, Boss won two Irish Oaks races and was the leading owner in Ireland in 1911. However, notwithstanding the exciting genetic engineering experiments, he was becoming bored in Ireland. His death ended the boredom. He left $5 million to his second wife, Bula Benton Edmunson, who was fifty years younger than him. There are no reports of Edmunson being bored after her husband’s death.