Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  But as they had in every town, people asked the same question. Do you really think you can beat the Great Jacquelin? A skeptical reporter for the Boston Globe, who had just written a gushing article about the Triple Crown winner, went right ahead and answered the question for him. “Major Taylor will have to ride faster than he ever did in his life. Taylor can sprint, but the Frenchmen, when he turns loose on the last eighth of a mile, he whizzes around a track like a meteor dropping from the skies.”

  The train backtracked, pausing in Verviers, Roubaix, and countless small European towns before arriving in Paris in the still of the cool April night.

  Upon his return, it became clear that Major Taylor had really arrived in life. He began opening letters from home addressed to: Major Taylor Paris France. Since nearly everybody knew who he was and where he was at every waking moment, no address was necessary. The young black man had his own zip code! “Major Taylor,” gushed Victor Breyer, echoing the sentiment of others, “was awaited like the Messiah.”

  On May 2, the train carrying Taylor, Breyer, and Buckner pushed out of Paris’s Gare de Lareze rail station. It cut through the emerald vineyards leading into Bordeaux. Next to Paris, Bordeaux was France’s most cycling-crazed city. Fans stood around the rail station waiting in lively clusters for the coming hero. The trio pressed out into a flock of fans that had been sipping the local flavor and nattering at length of his pending visit.

  The three were immediately whisked into a waiting Dorsey automobile by local track owner Henri Barbareu-Bergeon and his personal chauffer. Taylor stared in amazement as the open-air six-seater passed the marble monument of the revered French cycling hero Georges Cassignard, who died young after being thrown off his horse. They continued rolling by a picturesque string of grapevines along the Gironde estuary before wheeling into the dish-shaped Velodrome du Parc. It was all quite a sight for the twenty-two-year-old from Indiana. “Neither the living nor the dead,” wrote his friend Arthur Zimmerman, “could take exception to taking residence in Bordeaux.”

  Like most of his races in Europe, people arrived from all corners of the continent and wedged themselves into every available square inch of the track. It was the largest crowd ever seen in Bordeaux. Fans in a medley of shades pushed up against the rail, waving the tricolors of the republic. Busy concessionaires crisscrossed the velodrome, making sure the dense pack was sufficiently topped-off with their favorite beverage. “The French,” Zimmerman told the New York Times, “enjoy themselves at the races in grand style. People sit around the grounds drinking, smoking, and discussing the races.” They resembled picnics, he continued. “Everyone is in good humor.”

  As the sun fell over the city, Barbareu-Bergeon flipped the switch on the newly installed night lights; unfortunately, the only thing staring back was the moonlight. Unable to safely see the track, the riders waited for the lights to be repaired. After a half hour under the moonlight, some of the fans in the one-franc or “democratic” upper-section—who may have been sousing themselves throughout the day—started to stir. Forty-five minutes in the stir turned into a steady stream of profanities, their anger building and building.

  The humiliated track owner, working frantically to repair the track lights, started getting a bit panicky. After an hour, flying objects appeared. Riders scattered. Bergeon’s voice wafted out over the packed grandstand. “Due to a problem with the lights,” he announced, “the race is off.” The crowd was irate. They stood and hollered their disapproval in every conceivable language. Bergeon tried pacifying them, saying he would kindly issue a full refund and that he would simply reschedule for the next day.

  Now, the good cycling fans of Bordeaux, having waited patiently for years and having paid a generous premium to see the “Flying Negro” had reached a boiling point. In an act of destruction that would have been the envy of the most unruly Wild West American crowd, the frenzied Frenchmen tore the track asunder—mowing over and breaking up the track railing, tearing lights down from poles, busting tables and chairs, and setting the place ablaze.

  As a plume of smoke blew across the track, a ripple of horror spread through the peloton. Riders ran out into the street and bolted for cover. They glared out in astonishment as the anarchic crowd took out their anger with fire glinting in their eyes. With portions of the edifice crackling in the night, the fire brigade and local gendarmeries appeared out from under the smoke. With guns and sabers at the ready, they hauled the perpetrators off to jail and hosed down the inferno until midnight. Taylor could not have said he hadn’t been forewarned. “A French crowd is the most amiable thing, extant” his mentor Arthur Zimmerman wrote in his 1895 autobiography, “up to the point where it becomes convinced that an imposition is being practiced. Then, of course, quite Jacobin-like, it pulls up the stakes and makes a bonfire on the spot.”

  A local reporter, who had probably been planning a literary tour de force for months, had few words the next day. “Utterly deplorable,” he reported, pithily.

  The following afternoon, Taylor reappeared amid the remaining ruins before what must have been a hungover crowd. He proceeded to ride the legs out from under an Italian cyclist named Ferrari, then immediately retreated to his quarters. The sellout crowd would have none of it. They cheered continuously, waiting and waiting for him to make a curtain call. When he didn’t reappear, Bergeon, frantically trying to avoid another pyrogenic incident, hustled into his locker room and talked him into a solo exhibition ride. Taylor mollified the crowd by riding one lap around the track, 333 meters in 20: 1/5 seconds, a new world record. Later that day, after being mobbed as a spectator at the famous Paris-Bordeaux road race where even more alcohol was served, Taylor quickly hotfooted out of the city.

  It was wet and miserable again. Through much of the weeks before the 1901 International Match Race, the air sang with the pattering sound of rain. Paris, enduring one of the wettest and coldest seasons in years, seemed like an endless string of wide open silk parasols. At Parc des Princes, a dark cloud hovered around cabin 57. At times, Taylor had been visibly despondent. “Besides five or six days that were passable,” he had moaned, “it rained constantly.”

  Buckner had watched as a shivering Taylor looked sullenly out at the moist cabins and soggy racetrack. Having trained six-day race winners, Buckner knew a thing or two about keeping exhausted men motivated, but he had his hands full with the warm-weather Taylor. At first he tried humoring him. Then he poked and prodded and cajoled. Some days his persistence worked and Taylor either mashed a punching ball hanging from the ceiling or made a cameo appearance before a crowd of hardy Europeans burrowed under umbrellas. On other days when he couldn’t get Taylor to budge, he lit a fire and the two men wrote home, took photographs, strummed the mandolin, or read the Scriptures in silence. On one particularly gloomy day, Breyer looked at Taylor’s sad disposition and droopy eyes and said he’d never seen anyone so morose. In ninety-degree heat, Taylor was spry, smiley, and alert. But since the only thing April showers brought were May showers, he just couldn’t get used to the cold, damp Parisian spring. “I’m an African, not a European” he snapped, as the rain continued dancing off cabin 57.

  The weather was having such an effect on his mood, even photographers and the press, who couldn’t find enough good things to say about him, occasionally set him off. The atmosphere alternated between being mildly amusing and openly truculent. One day, when yet another photographer wanted to take yet another picture alongside yet another fan, an angered Buckner shooed them all away so Taylor could brood in private.

  It was of little use. Mystified by the black Horatio Alger who had turned away so much money to avoid Sunday racing, fans continued showing up. Railroad companies even began organizing special “spectator” trains to haul in carloads of people wanting to view him as if he was a rare panda at a zoo. Reporters continued pecking away. They really had no choice in the matter. “He is,” one of them wrote, “as much talked about as the premiere.”

  Jacquelin was also growing ag
itated with the press. Like most superstar athletes, superhuman feats were expected—and reporters had a love-hate relationship with him. When he won, they practically prostituted themselves to get an interview with him, always following it up with gushing praise. When on the rare occasion he actually lost, no matter the circumstances, he was but a washed-up has-been. “What would I have to do to convince these half-dozen stubborn journalists who enjoy doubting me every year, always looking for someone better than I?” he barked to a reporter. “Now they were going to unearth a Negro?”

  After losing a few races to a couple of middling riders at Turin, Italy, in mid-April, some reporters all but wrote him off. “He will have to undergo a miraculous change in form,” wrote Cycle Age, “if he expects to defeat Major Taylor.” There was even talk of plucking the Great Bourrillon, a former French rider who had become an opera star, out of mothballs to take on Taylor in his place. For a flicker in time, Jacquelin’s subpar showings made Taylor a 5 to 1 favorite.

  But it was all just Jacquelin being Jacquelin. In early May, shortly before the International Match Race, Jacquelin strapped his feet into his toe-clips, bound his hands in tire tape, and utterly incinerated Louis Grognia at the prestigious Grand Prix of Nantes in Nantes, France, winning by an embarrassing number of lengths. In a move that completely silenced even his most hardened critics, he then crushed Danish strongman Thor Ellegaard in the International Sprint Race one day later. Ten thousand mouths gaped in the grandstand. No one was more impressed than Major Taylor, who had wriggled into the stands after being enveloped by a swirling horde of spectators. Ellegaard, one of the fastest men in the world, leaned against his bike and marveled at the Frenchman. He walked over and shook Jacquelin’s hand. “You will eat that American up next week,” he said humbly. The crowd yelled, “Yes! Yes!”

  After the race Cycle Age backpedaled; Jacquelin “could not be had at even money.” “If you think this Darkey scares me with his airs of wanting to swallow everything winner-take-all,” Jacquelin told track director Henri Desgrange, “you can tell him I accept what he proposes [Taylor, as always, had demanded that the winner receive the entire purse]. We’ll see who is the chocolate guy.”

  As race day neared, a gripping tension swept across the backstretch. The race was becoming a global fixation, sucking up all the media oxygen. “Interminable calculations” were being made in editing rooms across Europe. The cablegrams and papers reaching the States were thick with notices and photos of Taylor. The muscles of Jacquelin and Taylor had been studied by doctors and reporters in astonishing detail. The French populace, one American paper decreed, “has gone practically crazy over the coming meets.”

  Regardless of the weather, hundreds if not thousands amassed around the track daily. Next door in cabin 56, the Jacquelin camp was outwardly confident. Jacquelin and his brother, who was also his trainer, looked out at the inclement weather and sneered.

  Underneath the certitude, an enormous amount of pressure was being placed on him by the vast number of adoring French racing fans. “Those who are familiar with Jacquelin and understand the pedestal pose in which he has been placed by the enthusiastic French,” proclaimed the New York Sun on race eve, “say that it will about break his heart and nearly be his ruin if he loses.”

  Taylor seemed to be aware of his place in history, an awareness that began early on. Before bedding down, as he had done since his first races, he cut out newspaper articles about himself and his races, had some translated, and then glued them into a large book that he carried with him always.

  Parked inside his cottage on May 15, an apprehensive Buckner surely looked at the forecast: cloudy and cold again.

  He kept his mouth shut.

  Paris didn’t care. All across town, lively race-eve gatherings sprang up. The Moulin Rouge, Le Chabanais, and the Café de l’Esperance entertained an unprecedented number of visiting racegoers throughout the night. Race tickets selling at twenty times face value changed hands. Press coverage reached astronomical levels.

  Chapter 16

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  Below a dull bank of clouds in the early morning hours of May 16, 1901, track director Henri Desgrange, co-creator of what is now the most heavily attended sporting event in the world—the Tour de France—sauntered onto the frigid Parc des Princes Velodrome. A brisk, cutting wind whipped across the track. Desgrange blew hot air into his chilled hands and gazed out at the swaying trees lined with spring foliage only grown to half-mast. Above him, black clouds bubbled over, threatening to unleash their liquid contents all over the city again. An army of concessionaires crisscrossed the grounds, stocking up on food, drinks, race programs, and souvenirs. A handful of amateur riders preparing for undercard races rolled past while an early crowd gathered outside the track.

  Desgrange surely had mixed feelings about the threatening clouds and unseasonably cold weather. After months of intensive buildup and having already collected unprecedented gate receipts, part of him was no doubt deeply concerned that a heavy rain might cancel what the press was calling one of the most anticipated sporting events in history. But as long as it didn’t rain hard, he reasoned, the inclement weather may actually help keep the crowd at the eighteen-thousand-seat track within controllable levels.

  As race director, the decision about whether to run the race rested squarely with him. Following an agonizing moment, he made his decision; barring a heavy rain, he announced, the race was a go. His words spread like wildfire. Back in the States, Taylor’s American challengers eagerly awaited cables with the results. “Major Taylor is having little trouble to trim the riders on the other side of the ocean,” wrote the Daily News, “and the sprinters on this side are beginning to wonder if the Major will return and sweep everybody.”

  Already preparing for Taylor’s return, Brady’s newsroom friends down at the New York World set the stage for the grand match. “All interest in cycling awaits the result with the keenest interest. To both men the result means everything. It will be as if they are gambling with their last dollar. For the winner there will be worldwide renown, for the loser the reputation of being a defeated champion.”

  Back in New Jersey, Arthur Zimmerman, the man whose insight and friendship had inspired Taylor to his current heights, surely read the frenzied overseas cables with a great big smile. Some writers had come close, but now, except for a few hardened traditionalists, most elevated Taylor to the top of the world’s most popular list. “Taylor is already more popular then Zimmerman was,” wrote one veteran racetracker. “Should he defeat Jacquelin, I cannot venture to predict to what length people will go.”

  People began congregating around the entrance as early as six o’clock in the morning. All morning and early afternoon, bicycles, special trains, and elegant horse carriages disgorged thousands of passengers from every major city in Europe. On harrowing sojourns over dusty roads, enduring flat tires, clogged carburetors, and shotgun fire from angry farmers, primitive automotive caravans puttered in from the most remote provinces of France. A flotilla of boats drifted down the River Seine, dropping off thousands more at the track’s gates.

  Just before noon, nearly four hours before the race, Desgrange flung open the ten access gates, loosing a cavalcade of humanity. People who didn’t know the difference between a bicycle and a horse cart—and normally didn’t care—waved one hundred francs in the air, pleading for tickets. In the boxes along the tape where tickets sold for $16, many times their normal cost, nearly every nation in Europe was represented by a baron, duke, duchess, prince, king, or prime minister.

  The money being wagered was almost certainly a record. William K. Vanderbilt, owner of the first Madison Square Garden and an avid cycling fan who attended Taylor’s first race, dropped $3,000 on Taylor to win. Pennsylvania railroad tycoon Harry Thaw and gold rush millionaire William Moore bet $20,000. World famous artist William Dannat and the Countess Castellane, daughter of wealthy financier Jay Gould, sunk their thousands on Jacquelin. A supremely nervous Pennsylv
ania senator named Clark kept his monetary allegiances to himself. It was now any man’s race: of the twelve major Parisian dailies, six picked Taylor, six Jacquelin.

  By one o’clock, the grandstand was jam-packed, so Desgrange opened portions of the infield, charging $20 for the privilege. The horde kept coming. By one forty-five, not knowing how far to push it, a nervous Desgrange began turning fans away. “No more,” he kept hollering to his attendants. “No more.” The track was bursting at the seams. On a threatening, bone-chilling Thursday, and at a time when the population was one-quarter its current size, twenty-eight thousand people—one of the largest crowds of any single day sporting event—wedged into the famous but somewhat neglected track. Five thousand fans stood along the rails.

  Outside the track, thousands upon thousands more, including some of Paris’s elite, unable to get in, congregated in thick formations around the gates, fences, and neighboring areas hoping to catch a glimpse inside. A solid row of French gendarmeries fanned out around the infield, preparing to keep the throng off the track. Over in the press area, journalists from all over were penning their prerace reports.

  At three-thirty, the two men emerged onto the track to an eruption of noise normally reserved for opposing battleships, all but drowning out the wailing band. Like a prizefighter, Jacquelin had a superstition about entering the stage first. So Taylor, cold and frowning, walked ahead of him in a full-length African cloak, hood over his head, hands in his pockets, head down. Right behind Taylor, with his perpetual grin and bulging muscles, waltzed the supremely confident Jacquelin. Amid a gripping tension that enveloped everyone at the Parc des Princes, the Triple Crown winner exuded utter insouciance, strutting in with a look of a proud prince, eyes glaring down, but chin up.