Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  His was a jagged upbringing, which would shape and define him in adulthood. “Plenty of times I sat hungry and shivering in an unheated room, waiting for Father to come home with bad news and crying myself to sleep when he didn’t.”

  Life became even rougher when his combative father was found on the street, the life mysteriously squeezed out of him. Grief-stricken, teenaged Brady was eventually booted out of his shabby room in the heart of New York’s East Side, and then began “rustling whatever cash was rustleable.” He took on odd jobs waiting tables, delivering newspapers, stoking fires, and shining shoes. His first introduction to sports came when, for thirty cents, he delivered updates of the six-day races at the first Madison Square Garden to local newspapers. “I never met the late Horatio Alger Jr.,” he later wrote, “but he would have liked to meet me. I was no such high-flown prig as his newsboy’s heroes—I’d have shied a brick at one in real life—but if anybody ever went through the whole mill of the traditional how-to-get-along-on-the-cold-streets-of-a-great-city racket, I was that somebody.”

  Before his decade-long involvement with bike racing and boxing, he satisfied his first love by haunting local theaters. Shabbily dressed and usually flat broke, he would scrunch up on the edge of the hard gallery bench, while fifty feet below, the heroes of the day—Tony Hart, Edwin Booth, and Nat Goodwin—captivated crowds.

  In the bright lexicon of his youth, Brady’s restlessness often landed him in trouble. After being booted out of town for mouthing off outside theaters in the finer districts of New York, he booked a train west, got off in his hometown of San Francisco with no money but large dreams. “I felt the West owed me and I was scheduled to own it.” Upon arrival, he became a peanut butcher, selling everything from reading material to groceries, hardware, tobacco, and candy on trains.

  But starting a brawl with a traveling Chinamen assured his career as a peanut butcher was not long for this world. So the ex–peanut butcher took to haunting theaters around San Francisco, eventually sweet-talking his way into contract plays. He played everything from soldier to sailor, stage door Johnny, medieval swashbuckler, and Indians of every tribe—“including some,” he said, “that never existed outside a hack dramatist imagination.” Clearly, the pay for the future bike race promoter was barely enough to cover the basics. “If you couldn’t starve well on occasion,” he often said, “you didn’t belong in the old-time theatre.”

  Stiffed by one too many managers, Brady decided to take a stab at managing himself. Around the time Major Taylor roamed the Southards’ estate with his first bicycle, Brady got his first big break. He paid fifteen cents for a copy of Dion Boucicault’s famous melodrama After Dark, which had played to standing room crowds for thirteen straight weeks. Success bred cockiness: “It gave me a swelled head that wouldn’t have gone through a man-hole without shoving.”

  But his early managerial success was fleeting. One night he noticed a distinguished gentleman sitting in the crowd with a wide grin on his face. Following the show, the man complimented him on the fine performance, then asked him how the play had been doing. Shortly after Brady had finished boasting about the show’s financial success, the man introduced himself as none other than Boucicault—the owner of the story. When Boucicault threatened legal action, Brady handed him a paltry $1,100 for the rights to the play. At first glance, it seemed like a steal considering the daily sellouts. But it was, he said, “the worst pup I was ever sold in the course of a highly checkered career.”

  So Brady took the act east, only to be greeted with an injunction. The injunction was initiated by a sophisticated gentleman named Augustin Daly. Daly claimed that Boucicault had plagiarized his play Under the Gaslight. Unfortunately, Daly did not like Brady. “I was an upstart pigmy, a barnstorming sharpshooter, trying to crash New York with a pirated manuscript.” Thirteen years and thousands of dollars in legal costs later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a famous precedent-setting case that Daly was indeed the rightful owner. But in a strange twist of fate, it was discovered that Daly’s copyright for Under the Gaslight had since expired, leaving Brady sole owner “lock, stock, and barrel.” Brady would go on to make a fortune on the play, which he would use to finance sports promotions.

  Since play managing was getting him in trouble, he began seeking other opportunities. Sometime in 1891, around the time of Taylor’s first race, he ran into an old friend he’d met in San Francisco during his peanut butcher days. The man had grown tremendously since he last saw him. Brady sized him up, scanning his brawny arms, sweeping back muscles, and lady-killer good looks. A light bulb went off in his promotional mind: I’m going to get this man in the ring.

  His old friend was “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, a man Taylor would soon meet. Since boxing was illegal in most states and frowned on in others, Brady offered him $150 a week to box in private clubs and in bootlegged bouts on barges. Corbett rose through the ranks rapidly, prompting Brady to try pitting him against the world champion, Jim Sullivan. Knowing that nearly every fighter and promoter in the world was after Sullivan, Brady tried every promotional trick under the sun to get Sullivan’s attention. In the end, he simply outbid everyone else; after approaching wealthy horseman Phil Dwyer, co-founder of the Dwyer Stakes horse race, they were able to foot boxing’s largest purse ever.

  The nation had rarely seen a more natural promotional wizard. Brady papered New Orleans periodicals with huge ads. He littered the main railway lines with screeching lithograph posters announcing in huge letters that James J. Corbett, champion of the world, would appear at Madison Square Garden the week after the fight.

  His aggressive promotion paid off, though, as a raucous sellout crowd wedged into the Olympic A. C. in New Orleans in 1892 to see the fight of the century. Brady’s zeal for life was on full display as he pranced up and down during the entire fight, screaming his lungs out and throwing wild jabs into the smoke-filled air. Corbett cut Sullivan to ribbons, netting Brady another fortune. On his first try, Brady’s keen eye for spotting talent had uncovered a world champion.

  Around the time Major Taylor landed a job at Hearsey’s Bike Shop, Brady and Corbett clattered into Butte, Kalamazoo, Tombstone, Ashtabula, and other Wild West towns. On one occasion, their train drifted onto the open continuity of Arizona’s San Bernardino region for another brawl in another dark, smoky saloon. While Corbett was pummeling another sorry young man in the ring, Brady kept an eye out for “deadheads.” Behind him, he heard a rasping voice from somewhere in the shadows—“the kind of voice,” he claimed “a rattlesnake would have if it could talk.”

  “Corbett,” the man hollered, “lay another hand on that boy and I’m telling you now that you’ll never live to tell about it.”

  Brady swung around and saw a man he’d met during his peanut butcher days with his hands in each pocket, ready for business. It was the notorious Virgil Earp, Wyatt Earp’s brother. Brady pinned Earp’s arms to his side while Corbett skedaddled out of the building. “I don’t know what kind of begging, pleading, cajoling nonsense I poured into his ears,” he remembered, “but it worked.” With Earp lying prostrate on the ground, “I abandoned my loving embrace of Mr. Earp,” wrote Brady, who then quickly followed Corbett out the door. The two men bailed out of Arizona minus the $300 prize money, but sparing the life of a world champion.

  Brady combined his two vocations and wrote Gentleman Jack, a hugely successful play starring Corbett. They were besieged by frantic “feminine theatergoers” everywhere they went. “They got in our hair, they clogged our mail, they made themselves the worst nuisance possible—and we took it like men, and we liked it . . .” First After Dark, then Corbett, Brady was rolling in money and living lavishly. He began dressing in the most expensive suits money could buy, wore loads of diamonds, rarely left home without a brown felt hat, and was always seen puffing on an expensive Cuban cigar.

  His interest in pugilism waning, Brady looked elsewhere for excitement and profit. After a failed bid to buy the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team
(called Browns at the time), he promoted exotic contests like cake-walking, tug-of-war, kangaroo fighting, and lion shows. Most of them had a short shelf life. The lion show came to a screaming halt one eventful evening when part of the trainer’s hindquarters disappeared following a losing battle with the beast. The kangaroo fighting also died an early death when his human sparring partner—who took over for Corbett who was deathly afraid of the animal—quit after the animal floored him.

  Brady’s first love was the theater, but the economic depression hit some of the flossier theaters hard. They were not alone. Complaints came from hatters, booksellers, jewelers, and shoemakers. The worst hit were horse dealers and tobacco manufacturers—horse dealers were going out of business daily and cigar consumption was declining at a rate of a million a month. Theatrical managers searched for the root cause of their misfortune. Like other businessmen, they sensed something beyond the troubled economy was out there wrecking their businesses, something cryptic and insidious. After careful analysis, they finally had an answer. The cause of their hard times, the New York Evening Post decreed, “was not the tariffs, not the currency, not the uncertainty of the McKinley financial position, but the bicycle.”

  William Brady was never one to ignore profitable and exciting new trends. With his air of inevitability and a steady stream of cash from his plays, he began searching for something fast-paced and, to match his colorful past, something with an element of danger. While delivering updates on six-day races to newspapers in the early days of racing, he fell wildly and incurably in love with bike racing. He decided to get involved with race promoting and later managing.

  But as much as he loved the sport, he was unimpressed with the condition of many of the tracks and set out to do something about it. During his days on the boxing circuit, the fighting man had met Pat Powers, president of baseball’s minor leagues, and James Kennedy, a wealthy, rotund boxing promoter, newspaperman, and avid racing fan. The three men had kindred spirits: all were great orators, prodigious spotters of talent, and natural leaders. “None of these men,” wrote the Minneapolis Journal, “were known to purchase a dead horse or bet on a shell game.” They were also control freaks who were as good as friends as they were as enemies. During the day, they were known to fight like cats and dogs, occasionally suing one another just to make sure the other was paying attention. In the evening, they’d swill champagne together, flirt with showgirls, and puff on Cuban cigars like best friends.

  Shortly after meeting, they formed a business partnership called the American Cycle Racing Association. Then, as was their nature, they set out to control some of racing’s top tracks. Through much of the second half of the 1890s and early 1900s, they controlled Madison Square Garden, home of the wildly popular six-day races, the immense bicycle conventions, and the annual horse show. They also controlled the Mechanics Pavilion in Brady’s hometown of San Francisco, the popular Coliseum in Chicago, Willow Grove Park Racetrack in Philadelphia, Charles Park Track in Boston, a track in Rochester, New York, and Manhattan Beach Track in Manhattan, site of many of track racing’s greatest showdowns.

  With this tight control over several major tracks, the triumvirate wielded such considerable power it was sometimes unclear who was in charge of racing—them or the potent League of American Wheelmen. Despite occasional clashes with racing’s governing body, their New York–based organization helped make bike racing among the most modern sports in America. By pooling their capital and promotional skills, they increased the number and the comfort of seats at several tracks, outfitting some with as many as twenty-five thousand seats. They installed modern press boxes, race scoreboards, dark rooms for cameramen, more comfortable dressing rooms, massage salons, and billiard rooms. They hired entertaining race announcers and added more and friendlier concessionaires. They improved tracks by laying fresh concrete or steeply banked, bowling-alley-smooth wood surfaces, vastly improving racers’ speeds.

  Using his promotional skills, Brady introduced an important element to the sport: women. Before it was proper for women to attend boxing matches, he designed ads specifically tailored to their unique interest. He coaxed sportswriters into penning articles that were less male-centric in tone. In so doing, he took boxing out of the alley and into the “royal suite.” Women who formerly had no interest in sports began dressing up as men so they could sneak into matches without incident. Brady brought these pioneering promotional methods into his partnership with Powers and Kennedy, much to the delight of male race patrons.

  Unlike baseball, football, and basketball, the sport that emerged from their era was, with a few minor exceptions, largely the same as it is today: people on one-speed bicycles with no brakes tearing around a steeply banked track, first one to the tape wins.

  Their influence was such that if a biker was having trouble turning pro and wanted to race on the best tracks, he—say, a talent like Major Taylor—would likely have appealed to them. On a fall day in 1896, in their second-floor office inside Madison Square Garden, Brady, Powers, and Kennedy heard the phone ring. On the other end of the line came a crackly but lyrical young voice. It was Taylor, asking if he could “engage” in a major race they were sponsoring at Madison Square Garden, one of the indoor tracks under their control. Since it was a professional race, Taylor also needed their help securing a professional license. With the writing already on Munger’s factory walls, Major Taylor’s livelihood—indeed his very future—was riding on their answer.

  There was a long, agonizing pause on the line while Kennedy and Powers weighed the harmful effects of a black man in the professional peloton. Powers, a beady-eyed, portly, cigar-chomping man whose language and disposition were more forceful than eloquent, had experience in racial matters. As baseball’s International League president, he had presided over an era that played under a “gentlemen’s agreement.” This was a silent agreement among teams to bar nonwhite players—a bar which stood until the days of Jackie Robinson in 1947.

  If this was Taylor’s future, his prospects were looking bleak. “They [Powers and Kennedy] contended that the presence of this little Negro would not be right at the race,” wrote French journalist Robert Coquelle. “It would stir the whole of New York.” After careful deliberation, they were ready to send him away, “that is,” Coquelle continued, “to shine the Fifth Avenue gentlemen’s shoes.” Taylor appeared to have reached the end of a road that had begun as a restless eight-year-old on Southard’s given bike.

  Taylor’s prospects changed when the commanding voice of the fighting Irishman entered the conversation. From his days living atop a cold bowery saloon, William Brady had also felt the sting of racism. At the time the Irish, like blacks, were ridiculed for their skin and their distinctive dialect, and were often told by employers that “no Irish need apply.” They were dubbed “drug-abusing monkeys” and “white Negroes.” In 1867 American cartoonist Thomas Nast drew “The Day We Celebrate,” which was a cartoon depicting the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day as violent, drunken apes. And, in 1899, Harper’s Weekly featured a drawing of three men’s heads in profile: Irish, Anglo-Teutonic, and Negro, in order to illustrate the similarity between the Irish and the Negro (and, the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Teutonic).

  For Brady, whose emotions were as fluid as a flowing river, few things raised his dander more than racism. He was, in fact, one of the few white men who had treated Peter Jackson—the black boxer who fought Corbett to a draw—with respect. “Black or not, he was as fine and intelligent a man as ever walked,” he often said. As he did with Jackson, Brady reportedly fought on Taylor’s behalf. He apparently pushed, shoved, and cajoled to get what he wanted. He contacted several men—probably including A. G. Batchelder, a race handicapper, future business partner, and future head of racing’ s governing body—and demanded they push their substantial heft around the racing board.

  Whatever he said, and in whatever tone, it seems to have been effective. In short order, “one of the greatest innovators in entertainment,” wrote c
ycling historian Peter Nye, “Brady helped Major Taylor obtain a League of American Wheelmen license to compete professionally in segregated America.” The fighting man wasn’t about to allow any racism toward Taylor without a fight. “He has sworn vengeance on anybody connected with those acts,” a reporter later wrote. With a few turns from William A. Brady’s persuasive Irish tongue, one of history’s most controversial and celebrated athletic careers was free to begin.

  With his hard-fought pro license in hand, all Taylor needed was his race jersey. Someone handed him a jersey that had been kicking around in the league’s stockroom for ages; the one no one else wanted. Pro cyclists, like most athletes, are a superstitious lot; stenciled on the back of his new jersey was the number 13. Several riders who wouldn’t come near the jersey surely snickered at the irony of the lone black man wearing the unluckiest number in the peloton. Taylor would wear that unlucky number for much of the next fourteen years.

  With one hard slog behind him, an even harder challenge lay ahead. The race Taylor had signed on to was no ordinary event. It would, in the end, require every fiber of his being just to finish. He no longer had time for factory life. Taylor temporarily moved to Brooklyn where he joined the South Brooklyn Wheelmen and later the Calumet Wheelmen. In preparation for what would be a brutal and rather odd professional debut for a sprinter, Munger—perhaps wanting to astonish the broader world with his extraordinary find—laid out an equally brutal training routine. To help carry out his instructions, he set Taylor up with a noted trainer named Bob Ellingham.