Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  “You have performed on the racetracks of the country in such a sportsmanlike manner,” beamed the merchant, “that you are now free to adopt the name Major Taylor.”

  Instead of losing customers, apparently all the positive international publicity had brought about a “Major” up-tick in his business.

  “I want to congratulate you as champion and wish you every success,” he continued.

  “I will do my best to uphold the proud name Major,” replied Taylor, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  It was a melancholy season for nearly everyone whose name wasn’t Major Taylor. During August, September, and October of 1900, Taylor went on a rampage. The warm summer winds blew him through Montreal, where another huge crowd vividly remembered him from the World Championship of the previous year; in Vailsburg, where ten thousand fans watched him crush Frank Kramer in another match race; in Hartford, where he was “greeted with a storm of applause” by a large crowd; in Worcester, where a new Taylor-inspired velodrome was built; in Buffalo, where he blew away the field and “astonished cycle fans”; in New Bedford, where he set a long-standing track record and was hailed as “the neatest rider who sits in a saddle.” “If America is to have a white champion this year,” wrote a New England reporter, “Major Taylor is the man they have to defeat.”

  Defeat him they would not. In the end, the 1900 outdoor season proved to be one of the most dominating in the history of American cycling. By the time Taylor arrived in Peoria, Illinois, in mid-October, the race for the American Championship title was a mere formality. There, as he had done all year long, he simply ran away from the field and, with double the points of his closest competitor, Frank Kramer, won the title Champion of America. These victories, wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “showed very plainly why the pros of this country took such care last season not to permit him to mettle against them.”

  But like ’97, ’98, and ’99, a few asterisks hung out there by his name. First, since the World Championships held in Paris were run on a Sunday that year, Taylor did not even try to uphold his World Championship title. Second, the Frenchman who took his title—a man unable to compete in Montreal in 1899—was hailed by many throughout Europe as the greatest rider the world had ever seen. Third, midway through the summer, Tom Cooper, the 1899 NCA champion and a man Taylor had been clamoring to square off with for four years, had accepted a large contract to ride overseas.

  Sometime in November, Cooper returned with deep pockets and a few medals around his neck. For some fans and reporters, the issue of American supremacy hung out in perpetual debate. As if they were two heavyweight prizefighters, the press once again began calling for a match race to settle the question once and for all.

  And no one knew prizefighting better than William A. Brady and his partner James Kennedy. A late-fall sun hung in the New York sky as William Brady stared out his window in deep thought. When the sport split into two leagues, wheelmen became concerned over what they had been reading in the press. Being a good friend of famous horseman Phillip Dwyer, who had helped Brady finance the Corbett-Sullivan fight, rumors that he was leaving the wheelmen for the dreaded horsemen had swirled through the peloton. But as much as Dwyer pressed the issue of thoroughbred racing, Brady’s passions lay elsewhere. In interviews with a few reporters, he said he was happy to see the sport governed by one body again, then put an end to all the speculation. “I’ve been all wrapped up in cycling, boxing, and the theatre and haven’t the time or the inclination for horse racing.” Besides, he later wrote of animals in general with his legendary sense of humor, “they’re just smelling machines.”

  But as he sipped brandy and watched the leaves fall outside his Manhattan window one day, something ate at him. Wanting to kick things off in his customary grand style, he and Kennedy had leased out Madison Square Garden and were preparing for the indoor event of the season: New York’s six-day bike race. But because human rights groups claimed the race amounted to cruel and inhumane punishment, the state legislature had threatened to ban any athletic event that exceeded twelve hours. While the ban included horse races, it was clearly aimed at the six-day bike race. Brady’s hardened past didn’t allow him to fully grasp the extent of the rider’s suffering. With tens of thousands in gate receipts on the line, the former bowery brawler lobbied against the ban with all his powers of persuasion. It was no use. The legislature banned the race anyway. “The politicians were simply not getting theirs out of the big money in cycle-races,” he griped.

  The event, almost certainly the most heavily attended sporting event in the country, was at a crossroads. And Brady found himself in a promotional pickle. But he did not give up altogether. Surely his rough riding friend and New York governor Teddy Roosevelt, a cycling fan and follower of Taylor’s career, would veto the bill. But then Roosevelt signed the bill, and with that, it was thought, the race was finished. “I will never understand,” wrote a disconsolate Brady, “why Roosevelt signed that bill since he was both intelligent and a lover of sport.” The events had been so successful, wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in a six-day postmortem article, “they were veritable mints for their promoters.”

  But their declaration of the event’s demise would prove to be greatly exaggerated. Refusing to let the issue disappear, Brady retreated into one of his private brainstorming sessions. He eventually emerged with a brilliant proposal whereby there would be teams of two, with each man riding no more than twelve hours in a day. The legislature was okay with it. A senator named Collins slapped his name on the bill and bragged to his constituents about his idea. Brady’s face-saving six-day race, now universally called “Madison’s,” was on.

  Unsure how the public would take to the new format, he and Kennedy knew they needed the strongest possible headliners. By 1900, even the greenest promoters knew who that was: Major Taylor versus Tom Cooper. When Taylor was asked to headline the event with a one-mile match race against Cooper, he salivated at the idea. Known as the Blond Adonis from the West, Cooper, fresh off a moderately successful overseas voyage, was only lukewarm. But after extensive arm-twisting, a $500 initial purse, and a strong Irish talking-to, he finally relented. The two men would skip the long six-day grind, but the question of absolute American supremacy in the one-mile sprint would finally be answered.

  On their way to the track, Cooper’s trainer, a silk-suited man nicknamed “Mother Web,” tried intimidating Taylor and his trainer Bob Ellingham. “Well, Bawb,” he bellowed in a fractured syntax, “Tawm will now proceed to hand your little darkey the most artistic trimming in his young life. However, Bawb,” he continued, “I have cautioned Tawm that in the best interest of the sport and for the good of all concerned, not to beat the little darkey too badly.” Without saying a word, Taylor laid down his Bible and carried on.

  Before the strike of midnight, on that same track where he had defeated Eddie Bald in his professional debut exactly four years before, Taylor waltzed out to a rafter-shaking ovation. Cooper, a wily veteran and one of the wealthiest (he would finance a then-obscure man named Henry Ford), most confident athletes in the country, rolled alongside Taylor. Cooper, his championship emblem embroidered onto his silk uniform, stripped off his colorful bathrobe, stared over at the man he had successfully evaded for so long, and smirked. Taylor looked back at the long imposing lines of the man who, as treasurer of the NCA, had done everything in his power to ban him from his beloved sport. “If ever a race was run for blood,” Taylor recalled later, “this one was.”

  Knowing Cooper was among the fastest closers but a slow starter—“He starts as a crayfish,” one rider remarked—Taylor got down to business. He pressed into the lead, twisting the screws into his evasive rival. In the stands, there was no doubt about the crowd’s loyalty. New Yorkers stood and cheered frantically for Taylor. Feeding off their energy, he bent around the dangerously steep forty-five-degree track, his body and his craft angling out nearly parallel to the ground, inertia the only thing keeping him from cascading to the floor. Cooper lay i
n behind, stalking him. In front, Taylor’s black legs bound up and down, gathering rhythm and peeling away. Cooper was already falling back. A length. Length and a half. Two.

  From their booth, Kennedy and Brady could look out and see Taylor storming by at more than forty miles per hour. They remembered the graceful stride, the absence of wasted energy, and the mysterious uncoiling of power from ’96 when their paths first crossed and ’98 when the world first took notice of Taylor. A few booths down from them, a stately French promoter who had been keeping a close eye on Taylor for years twisted his whiskers and sipped a drink.

  As the bell signaling the last quarter mile rang out, Taylor pressed down on his pedals and felt a certain correctness in his cadence, a confidence radiating in him and pushing out through his legs. He looked under his arms and saw Cooper becoming unhinged, wagging and wigging and spinning farther and farther away. The Blond Adonis was overheating.

  The crowd was in ecstasy. Fans reportedly stood on benches, tables, chairs, and railings to see the finish. A few booths down from Brady and Kennedy, a contingent of European promoters sat alongside European reporters. “Taylor,” one French journalist said in amazement, “was simply toying with Cooper.”

  In the final lap, by now largely ceremonial, Taylor glided past a blur of faces and a sea of noise, crossing the line well ahead of a humiliated Cooper. The crowd, knowing no one was left for Taylor to conquer in America, shouted him home.

  Hopping off his bike, Cooper’s face was long and drawn. Sweat seeped out of his cloth bandana, giving him the appearance of a melting candle, drooping under the weight of his ignominy. He left the track in anguish, retreating to the riders’ room without shaking Taylor’s hand or uttering a word. “I have never seen a more humiliated pair of ‘toms’ in my life,” one man wrote, referring to Cooper and his trainer.

  After the race, Taylor slid into the crowd and took on the role of genial spectator. The press circled him with questions such as: With no competitor left in America, are you going overseas? Tell us about the match race. What do you think of the tempo of the six-day racers? “It is a fearfully hot pace,” he said aphoristically, keeping his plans close to his vest. Eager to keep large crowds streaming in throughout the entire event, Brady and Kennedy cornered Taylor and asked if he would headline each of the remaining five days with stabs at various speed records—“name your terms,” they said. Taylor did, and promptly repaid them with two world speed records in the one-half- and one-third-mile sprints.

  All told, somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand fans showed up to an event that was supposed to have died.

  Over the previous four years, the nation’s riders had tried with all their collective might to impede Taylor’s remarkable ascension. But on one chilly December evening, he had finally conquered everything they could throw at him. He now stood as the undisputed champion of America. But there would be little time for respite, as much was happening in the vast world beyond her shores. In the cycling meccas of Europe where bike racing began, millions of impassioned fans and several high-powered racers who had been hearing tall tales of him for years eagerly waited.

  With his standing in America absolute, Taylor was eager to steam east and give the Old World a few lessons on Yankee supremacy. There were goliaths to spear across the pond in the spring of 1901. Among many others were Willie Arend, the uber-cyclist from Germany; Thor Ellegaard, the tall Danish powerhouse; Grognia, the champion from Belgium; and Momo, the champion of bike-crazed Italy. And there was another, a giant among men. As Taylor walked toward the Garden’s exits, two European riders named Gougoltz and Simar approached him. The Great Frenchmen Edmond Jacquelin, they said with absolute certainty, “will beat you as he had beaten all cyclists.” Taylor’s competitive blood boiled as he walked outside and out of the nineteenth century.

  Chapter 14

  EDMOND JACQUELIN

  Victor Breyer, one of the race promoters eyeing Taylor at the Garden, was the model of what Frenchmen wanted to be like—and the man with whom Frenchwomen wanted to be. To American observers, he had all the appurtenances of a prosperous Frenchman—a white, straw boater hat, flowing handlebar mustache, refined demeanor, and the quiet confidence that comes from success and popularity. Educated in Great Britain and fluent in English, Breyer strolled about with a relaxed, charismatic propriety, as though he knew people were looking at him. There was a decided omniscience about him, leaving the distinct impression he had advanced knowledge of things.

  Thirty-eight years old in the winter of 1901, Breyer was a rakishly handsome, smooth-talking sportsman from the Bordeaux region of France. From his days as a founding member of the sport’s international governing body, L’ Union Cycliste Internationale, Breyer had learned to spot racing talent from a mile away. Sometime in the 1890s, he stepped into race promotion and sports journalism at the French daily Le Velo. His outward appearance was mirrored by the elegant flow of his written and spoken words. He described the world poetically in a visual, tactile, aural way, creating that tang of feeling that drew people to him. Breyer teamed up with fellow journalists and former pro racer Robert Coquelle and began actively recruiting cyclists to race on the tracks of Europe. After a few fits and starts, their fortunes turned when they successfully enticed several well-known Americans to make the long voyage, including Eddie Bald, Tom Cooper, and the Great Zimmerman. Before long, it became known in cycling circles that if you wanted to race on European tracks, you would likely have to go through Breyer and Coquelle. By 1901, they ruled European racing.

  The French duo thought they had seen the best of them until the mid-’90s. That’s when men, women, and children began gathering at velodromes throughout France, peering up at the winners’ podiums with a look of awe normally reserved for those witnessing the second coming of Napoleon. Twenty-five years old in 1901, Edmond Jacquelin, the mercurial superstar grinning back at them, was simply the most extraordinary cyclist Europe had ever seen. A prototypical French rider, he was a Gallic quintessence of charm, breathtaking speed, and brute force. Foreign riders who had competed against him returned to their native lands and immediately pronounced him “the fastest sprinter in the world.” Also a skilled boxer and former soldier, Jacquelin’s appearance alone sent shrills down his rivals’ spines. He had powerful tree-trunk thighs, thick, striated calves, and the same commanding manners as the early French racing legends George Cassignard, Paul Bourrillon, and Constant Huret. Other riders didn’t dare cross him; he once clobbered a rival in a velodrome locker room for the unforgivable offence of “getting in his way.”

  On the track, he was a chameleon. One moment, usually the first half-kilometer, he was like a greyhound—graceful, polished, poised. The next, usually down the homestretch, he was athletically incorrigible—bucking, rocking, swerving violently side to side. Rival wheelmen swallowed hard at his intense competitiveness. The suddenness and swiftness of his effort, one man marveled, “surprises, paralyses, demoralizes his adversaries.” “When I have beaten everyone in speed,” Jacquelin would tell a rapt reporter, “I feel the need to take on the rest of them, to find out what they have in their guts.”

  But it wasn’t just his incredible speed that filled European racetracks. It was his raffish demeanor and his intolerance for authority figures. With judges and handicappers he was nothing short of a hellion, an early John McEnroe, delaying matches with his brashness and superciliousness. At one race, he was such a verbal menace, he was fined for, of all things, “incorrectness of attitude.” In Jacquelin’s confrontational psyche, raising the startman’s pistol was akin to a rodeo clown raising his red flag to a raging bull. But once on wheels, he tore across the tracks, leaving his rivals strung out behind him while fans pardoned him for his transgressions.

  Strangely, Jacquelin’s only weakness came because of his strengths. When he sensed there was no rider worthy of his energy, he was wont to occasional bouts of laziness. At night, he was known to indulge in the “unusual pleasures” of the Parisian nightlife. Duri
ng the day, in an era when few had autos, he’d motor around Paris in a twelve-horse Fournier while Parisians looked on.

  After thrice defeating American star Tom Cooper as though he were a “second-rater,” some believed the only way America stood a chance against this Frenchmen would be to turn back the clock and send over a youthful Arthur Zimmerman. In 1900, when Jacquelin felt like it, he exhibited such devastating speed he rarely even trailed in the homestretch of a race. When on form, he had no peer. His victory in the famous Grand Prix of Paris race came with little effort. His second of three French National Championships soon followed. The World Championships, the final leg of bike racing’s prestigious European Triple Crown, etched his name in the history books.

  As Jacquelin’s managers, the names Breyer and Coquelle had become perhaps the most widely known in European sporting circles. With him in their stables, they knew they held greatness in their grasp. But they had arrived at a quandary. Since Jacquelin had ridden the legs off everybody in Europe as well as top Americans he had faced, many believed no one was left who could make him crack a sweat. Others, including William Brady, thought maybe, just maybe, there was one exception.

  A few short years before, no one would have guessed that that one exception would have been Major Taylor. When he escaped rural Indiana and came east in the throes of a depression, he was a smallish, completely broke, largely unknown amateur trained by a washed-up former rider. His contemporaries had called him nothing but a little “pickaninny.” But by the winter of 1901, after filling out his frame and fighting his way through a wall of racism, the whole world knew who Taylor was. They also knew that the devout Baptist and one-time horse-tender would be a tough nut to crack.

  Any European race promoter interested in signing him faced the sticky subject of Sunday racing, which first had to be overcome. This was no simple matter: Avoiding Sunday racing was as important to Taylor as racing on Sunday was to Europeans. In Europe, following morning mass, Sunday afternoons were often all about bike racing. Sports fans throughout the Old World poured out of their gothic cathedrals, paused for coffee at one of their ubiquitous cafès, then fought over front row seats at the velodromes. In France, where bike racing was (and still is) not so much national pastime as a state religion, Sunday racing was hugely popular. After watching the incomparable Jacquelin terrorize his rivals at the famous Grand Prix of Paris, Brady was astounded by the French enthusiasm toward their hero and cycling in general. It is the big sport he told a New York Times reporter when he returned. “They go wild over cycle races in Paris. Why, there were more people at the Grand Prix cycle races than we turn out to a Suburban,” referring to the popular Suburban Handicap, part of horse racing’s Handicap Triple Crown.