Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  Back in the States, the question on the lips of racing fans appeared in glowing prose on the front of a major paper’s sports page: WILL MAJOR TAYLOR BE A WORLD’S CHAMPION? This question would be answered the next day.

  A pea-soup fog greeted the dawn of the following day. In the afternoon, it lifted, replaced with blue skies and an August sun that bathed the fans in the summer heat. From an international field of thousands of pro cyclists, only twenty-one qualified for the main event: the one-mile World Championship race. Through a series of preliminary heats, this original band of twenty-one elite riders had been further culled down to five of the world’s best athletes. After enduring fierce battles in the prelims, Taylor was one of those few men left standing for the finals.

  In what was the most important race of his life, Taylor learned that he had more than race judges to fret over. The duo of Nat and Tom Butler, two brothers who had trained themselves nearly into the ground for this one race, lined up next to each other on the inside pole. “My biggest concern,” Taylor said, “was being trapped in one of their pockets.” Next to the Butlers stood the tree-trunk thighs of Angus McLeod, the brawny champion of Canada. Rounding off the grupetto, swathed in the red, white, and blue uniform of France, stood the imposing figure of the French National Champ, Courbe d’Outrelon.

  The first big outburst from the fans, many of whom stood in aisles or the infield, could be heard when Taylor emerged from his locker room and circled the track during his warm-up laps. At five o’clock, Taylor rolled over to the starting line.

  A hush settled over Queens Park.

  The eerie silence was interrupted by the loud crack from the starter’s gun, followed by the resounding chants of thousands of racing fans. The pace of the first half mile was nervous and tentative, each rider gauging the other’s strength while jockeying for position. At the halfway marker, the pace quickened. The famous Butler brothers got down to business. Like eagles in flight, they swerved out in unison, tag-teaming Taylor to the outside and taking the lead. Staying composed, Taylor then gunned forward, passing Tom Butler before settling in behind brother Nat. Taylor powered toward the remaining brother, but Nat Butler, in the best form of his life, refused to let him pass.

  Once again, Taylor found himself in the middle of one of the most formidable combinations in the world. Just as he began his move to overtake Nat Butler, he saw a figure coming into his side view. It was Tom Butler out of his saddle, weight forward, stomping on his pedals in a mad dash. His explosive burst propelled him past Taylor, putting him right where he wanted to be—alongside his brother Nat.

  To everyone’s surprise, Angus McLeod, the large Canadian who had sympathizers from the hometown crowd, put on an unexpected display of power, gliding his way alongside the Butlers. They leaned toward him, trying to drive him to the outside. As the field arced around the first turn of the second lap, Taylor stretched out in the back of the pack, drafting, plotting, watching the race unfold in front of him. A fine position.

  On the backstretch of the second lap, the race tightened. Like a string of railcars trailing a locomotive, the quintet of riders blazed down the backstretch, one after the other. Rounding the far turn, the neat order of the formation disintegrated.

  Grown men began to crack. The first to unhitch from the speeding train was Angus McLeod, the big Canadian. Shortly afterward, having spent himself too early trying to keep up with his brother, Nat Butler faded.

  Taylor was in the third slot as the field veered around the far turn of the last lap. As he was being sucked along by the gathering momentum of the pack, many in the crowd wondered when or even if he was going to make a move. Taylor was biding his time, waiting for a clear opening in front of him. Another sixteenth of a mile ticked by and the positions had not changed.

  Some observers believed Taylor had plenty left. But Taylor could not have been so sure. He was putting out nearly everything he had, yet he was still trailing Tom Butler and Frenchmen d’Outrelon.

  From his position to their rear, Taylor saw a slender lane through the middle of the two men open. He had to act. Sinking in his saddle and bent over his bike as he streaked down the homestretch, Taylor was ripe for the kill. He pointed his front wheel at the gap, then punched his way toward the slender hole that had opened in the center of the track. Before long, he found himself splitting Butler and d’ Outrelon in two. Within 150 yards of the finish, the three riders pedaled into a virtual dead heat.

  As the field drew to within a football field of the line, the pace went from relentless to suicidal.

  Within yards of the finish line, the field of thousands of professional cyclists from around the world had been whittled down to just three men, Tom Butler, Frenchmen d’Outrelon, and Major Taylor. They forged onward, leaving everything they had on the track. They heard the distinct sound of chains gnashing, the whirling of wheels, and the hum of rolling tires. They felt the release of endorphins, and the ensuing rush of euphoria that only a cyclist blazing forty miles per hour under his own power feels. Out in front, nothing but a white line, open air, and a split second in time separated them from the title of the fastest bicyclist in the world. Butler lunged, d’Outrelon stretched, Taylor surged. There was no elbowing, pocketing, or intimidation—just three men at their limit, crossing the line within feet of one another.

  The crowd rose to their feet screaming. According to virtually everyone present, Major Taylor had just become the first native African American world champion.*

  The stewards grouped again. Several minutes ticked by without a verdict being announced. The crowd began to stir. Not again. The Montreal Star weighed in: “The crowd, fearing that their dark-skinned boy was going to get the worst of it again, began to be a little demonstrative.” Canada had never seen such affection given to an athlete. “The hold which Taylor has taken upon the sympathies of the people in the grandstand,” one reporter wrote, “is something wonderful.”

  William Inglis, the same presiding steward who had pronounced Taylor’s defeat in the half-mile race, trotted over to the bulletin board with his verdict. Twenty-year-old Marshall W. “Major” Taylor had rolled across the line as champion of the world!

  The crowd was hysterical. All around the grandstand swirled a bewildering maze of men and women dancing in the aisles. From the infield came the strain of “The Star-Spangled Banner” scarcely audible above the chatter of thousands. On the track, with an American flag wrapped around his waist and a huge bouquet of roses in his arms, Taylor circled to thunderous applause. Even with all the racism he had endured over the years, even though next to the article in a Montreal paper praising him for his World Championship title was another about a lynching back home, Taylor’s love for his country rang true. “My national anthem took on a new meaning for me from that moment,” he beamed. “I never felt more proud to be an American.”

  But he was disheartened about one thing. “During that joyous demonstration, there was but one regret,” wrote Taylor, “which was that Birdie Munger could not be present to witness his remarkable prophecy, that I would become the fastest bicycle rider in the world.” Taylor would go on to win the two-mile championship race as well, cementing his position as world champion.

  For a few fleeting moments during that summer of 1899, the wheel of Major Taylor’s life had spun to unprecedented heights. On the top step of the awards podium, flanked by Butler and d’Outrelon, he stood poised in the regal stance of a world champion—head high, eyes scanning the adoring crowd, gold medal glistening in the sun. All things shining!

  But three thousand miles across the vast Atlantic, a Frenchmen—said to be the most superior cyclist of all—read of Taylor’s win and smirked: “The Major hasn’t found his master on the other side of the water,” the Great Edmond Jacquelin, who was unable to make it to Montreal, would say to reporters. “So hear this, that is going to change!” With those fighting words, the first seed of one of the greatest sports showdowns in history was sowed.

  The summer of 1899 yielded to
fall. Taylor had somehow breezed through the rest of the season, winning an astonishing twenty-two out of twenty-nine races and walking away with the League of American Wheelmen Championship title. He was presented with a handsome gold medal struck from special dies made for the league. The Butler brothers received the silver and bronze. Across town, Tom Cooper outdueled Eddie Bald to win the American Championship in the rival NCA organization. Talk of pitting the two American titans against each other in a cycling world series was bandied about by the press. But because neither organization seemed willing to recognize the other’s existence, the grand match-race idea withered and died. As a result, the reverence toward Taylor’s accomplishments was partially muted. He became agitated that some people, mostly NCA riders, seemed reluctant to give credence to his title of American or world champion. Without the possibility of a grand showdown with Cooper, Taylor’s restlessness over the lack of clarity on the subject of American cycling supremacy mushroomed.

  While biding time with family and pitching the Sager-equipped Orient bicycle at H. T. Hearsey’s bike shop in Indianapolis, Taylor was interrupted by a rap on the front door. A courier handed him an urgent telegraph from Harry Sager, his bike-parts sponsor. Taylor ripped it open. He paced around as he read. It was not good news. His reign as the fastest man in the world had come to an abrupt halt. The rawhide-tough Bostonian Eddie McDuffee, who was also having a remarkable season, had dropped the one-mile world speed record all the way down to a shocking 1:21.

  Taylor had read enough. Rather than viewing the news as a negative, he looked at it as a challenge—and the ideal way to silence remaining critics. After congratulating McDuffee, Taylor contacted Sager, Munger, and trainer Hazard, and asked them to pack their bags.

  In November 1899, Team Taylor rolled west out of Union Station for Chicago’s Garland Park Track, primed for an assault on the new world speed record. But this time in the luggage compartment of the train, nestled alongside his trusted bicycle, sat new weapons. Instead of the thirty or so burly pacemen who had paced Taylor to world speed records one year prior, Sager commandeered two mechanics and a crude-looking, steam-powered tandem motorcycle, similar to the device McDuffee had used to eclipse Taylor’s record.

  If recent history was to be any guide, the mechanics would come in very handy. Earlier in the year, following a promotional blitz, seventeen thousand fans snarled traffic and cleaned out concession stands at Charles River Track, hoping to see Taylor and McDuffee break records behind the new machines. After several hours of futile mechanical adjustments, the event was finally called off. The overflow crowd went home disgusted, seriously questioning this whole motorized bicycle scheme.

  In the first few days of their arrival in Chicago, the mechanics were the most important men in attendance. Because the motorcycle was a new invention, they tweaked and adjusted and experimented and tweaked some more until it was finally reliable enough to pace the world champion for a one-mile sprint around the track. As they had earlier in the year, thousands of onlookers staked out their territories around the track rail and bleachers, peering on in bewilderment. Some traditionalists looked at the machine as an unnecessary nuisance while others wondered if they were witnessing the bicycle’s replacement. Taylor was concerned with only two things—the new machine lasting long enough and being fast enough to keep up with the tremendous pace he pictured himself riding.

  On November 15, eight official clockers stood on the side of the track braving frigid conditions. Taylor leaned over his machine at the starting line. All around the track, a hardy gathering of Chicagoans, hoping to witness history, chanted as the elongated machine whirled past. Taylor ripped out of the gate and tore around the first turn, trying to catch up with the speeding device. Somewhere along the backstretch, man and machine eventually drew even. Taylor clung on as if his life depended on it, drafting mere centimeters from the back of the machine. In a seat near the finish line, Sager couldn’t decide what he wanted to watch more—a gorgeous young woman in the stands he thought was Taylor’s wife, or Taylor’s relentless pursuit toward a world speed record achieved on his bicycle components. Being a gentleman of remarkable multitasking abilities, he managed both.

  Nearing his breaking point around the far turn, Taylor lunged to the fore with stunning rapidity. The machine, also on the rivets, steamed forward, draping him in a haze of miniature steam clouds. The dual battle of Taylor versus McDuffee and man versus machine was joined.

  At the time, America did not know which was faster—man under his own power or this newfangled motorized contraption. Taylor answered the question. On the homestretch, somehow finding that little extra energy, he pleaded with the drivers to step on it. There was no reaction. Within yards of the tape, he veered around the most advanced machine America could throw at him and blitzed across the line at a never-before-recorded, knee-buckling speed of 45.56 miles per hour. The crowd looked on in amazement. The team of clockers looked down at their watches. One mile in 1:19. He had wiped out McDuffee’s world record by 1 2/3 seconds. Watching from the sidelines, McDuffee charged home and retired from cycling.

  And with that, the doubting Thomases were all but drowned out by the sound of editors singing Taylor’s praises nationwide. In a long cover piece dedicated to Taylor, the Chicago Times expounded on THE COLORED BOY WHO HAS ASTONISHED THE WORLD. Back in the East, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle would boast that “their” man “Major Taylor, The Wonder is Now Back Home,” even though Taylor had only lived in Brooklyn for a few months. Taylor and Bert Hazard booked a train east for Worcester, pausing briefly at Sager’s Rochester headquarters where Taylor was treated like royalty. Seeing dollar signs, Sager immediately began a national advertising push linking his bicycle parts with Major Taylor, “the fastest man in the world.”

  As the curtain was about to fall on the 1800s, one sportsman stood a rung above all others having overcome incredible odds, including apparent attempts on his life. Having pierced through a seemingly impenetrable wall of prejudice and bigotry, Major Taylor found himself standing on the top step of one of the world’s largest sports stages.

  Back in Worcester, he could raise his window shades and scan the open sky. Outside, a rapidly expanding nation that had been so profoundly affected by the bicycle awaited the future. Henry Ford, Wilbur Wright, and Horace Dodge tinkered in their bike shops. The twentieth century was coming, and America tilted its highly industrious face skyward.

  Gazing out his window, Taylor could run his hands over his World Championship medals and crack a smothered smile. But underneath the smile, he would have felt a stab of apprehension. In the distant sky, a Nor’easter was forming. With it would come turbulent times.

  ___________

  * This attendance figure, like all others in this book, comes from published reports. Since attendance figures varied from one publication to another, the authors used a medium figure. At the World Championship in Montreal, some newspapers reported a total attendance of 40,000 and others as high as 50,000.

  * George Dixon won the bantamweight boxing World Championship title in 1891. Dixon, however, was born in Canada, making Taylor the first native-born African American world champion in any sport.

  CHAPTER 12

  UNDER THE CYCLE MOON

  The year 1900 rolled in under thick, gray clouds. Swirling winter winds whistled across the Appalachians. Worcester, at a virtual standstill, struggled to shovel out. Horse-drawn plows and carts skittered about the streets, horses snapping their legs under the strain. Large teams of immigrant shovelers earning twenty cents an hour unearthed snowed-in businesses.

  Never a lover of the cold, Taylor, who was caring for his very sick sister Gertrude, waited for a break in the weather. He would have to wait a long time. Substantial snowfalls continued throughout the Northeast, including five feet in neighboring New York, a one-day record. Like an expecting father, Taylor paced in his room.

  The heavy snow kept falling. Over most of New England tree limbs snapped, toppling telegraph, telephone,
and electrical wires, electrocuting horses on the streets below. Train and mail service slowed or, in some areas, halted altogether for the first time in forty years. For a fortnight, portions of the Northeastern seaboard were virtually cut off from the rest of the country.

  Over in New York, amid the mounting drifts, a quiet stir was forming. Word leaked out that the League of American Wheelmen’s racing board was holding secret meetings.

  Those brief snippets of information trickling down from race headquarters were not good. Rumor had it that the league was contemplating major changes that, if carried out, would directly affect Taylor’s livelihood—or worse yet, eliminate it altogether.

  Weeks passed and Worcester finally dug out. Feeling antsy, Taylor bundled up and rolled into town. There, he learned the world as he had known it had just come crashing down. After external pressure from the rival NCA and a crippling lawsuit from Brady’s group, the League of American Wheelmen—that venerable organization that had overseen all things “bicycle” through one of the greatest crazes in American history—voted to give up governing the sport. The league, it was decided, would focus its resources on improving the nation’s roads for cyclists, and the new horseless carriages that were popping up.