The Great White Hopes (10 page)

Boxing in New York was still in a state of contradiction, being both illegal and tremendously popular. Anyone engaging in a prizefight stood in danger of being arrested and fined $500 or sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. To get around the law and cater to public demand, ‘athletic clubs’ sprang up all over the city. Ostensibly private institutions, membership was available in every saloon for the price of a couple of dollars, which entitled the new ‘member’ to attend one so-called exhibition at the club. Even so, the clubs could still be raided if the local police had not been bribed adequately enough. Nevertheless, boxing flourished and eager young men were to be found in training all over the city.

Being in attendance at a Stanley Ketchel training camp, however, should have carried with it a health warning. When the tough onetime featherweight champion Abe Attell was asked how he had come by his newly broken nose, he lamented, ‘Ketchel did it with a brick. He was throwing it at a sparring partner and I walked into the line of fire.’ On another occasion the temperamental fighter fired a shot out through the door of his bedroom when roused too early for a training run. The bullet from his Colt .44 went through the leg of his backer and friend Pete (the Goat) Stone, a nightclub owner.

On yet another occasion, before an exhibition fight, Ketchel went missing. Desperately, Mizner searched the local brothels and saloons. Eventually he found his fighter drunk in bed with two young ladies. When asked afterwards what he had done at the sight, Mizner had shrugged. ‘What could I do?’ he asked. ‘I told him to move over!’

Mizner was never much of an example to his fighter. Emil Friedlander, who had a room next to the playboy’s apartment at 142 West Forty-Fourth Street, complained bitterly of his neighbour’s habit of serenading visiting wealthy widows at all hours with soulful ballads. Friedlander also objected to Mizner’s self-proclaimed ‘Campfire Boys commuting to the Orient’, the manager’s colourful description of his frequently held and wellattended opium-smoking parties.

Most of Ketchel’s minor opponents on the road were not nearly good enough for him, which sometimes led to lapses in concentration on the part of the fighter. Once, when a friend visited the middleweight in his changing room before a fight, he found Ketchel in his fighting gear but concentrating on learning the words of a song from a sheet of paper in his hand. It transpired that local dignitaries were giving him a testimonial dinner after the bout and Ketchel had promised to sing a comic song called ‘O’Brien Had No Place to Go’. Even as Ketchel was jogging down the aisle to the ring through the screaming crowd his lips could still be observed moving as he sang the song to himself.

Mizner sometimes displayed an equally perfunctory approach. The manager put elegance before everything. When he seconded Ketchel against Jim Smith, the former gunslinger turned sports writer Bat Masterson, writing in the
New York Morning Telegraph,
reported, ‘Wilson Mizner was on deck, of course, bossing the fight in the champion’s corner. He was dressed as though for a party instead of a fight and did not soil his immaculate attire by swinging a towel or dashing water with a sponge.’

The happy-go-lucky Mizner was perfectly prepared to let his friends and drinking companions share in his management chores. One of his saloon-bar associates was the sports writer for the
New York Morning World,
‘Hype’ Igoe. Igoe had received his nickname because he was so thin that he reminded his friends of a hypodermic syringe. On one occasion, Igoe was deputed by Ketchel and Mizner to handle the fighter’s incidental training expenses. Feeling that he was being overcharged, Igoe refused to pay a bill. A court order was taken out against him and the obdurate writer was forced to spend a day or two in the Ludlow Street jail. When he emerged from his brief incarceration, Igoe was met by Mizner and a crowd of well-lubricated cronies, all dressed in convicts’ striped suits, waiting to take him to a ‘coming-out’ party at Healy’s restaurant.

Managing Ketchel might have done wonders for Mizner’s social life but it was not providing the express train to wealth that the new manager had hoped for. In fact, the depressing fact dawned on the handler that despite his youth Ketchel was probably already a shot fighter. Years of hard fighting and high living had already taken their toll on the champion, and he had little left but his reputation. Wurra Wurra McLaughlin, the splendidly named sports editor of the
New York World
, was one of the first to bring this to the attention of his readers when he wrote that Ketchel had ruined himself by ‘hitting the hop’, or excess drinking.

There was only one hope left, another lucrative pay-day with Jack Johnson in a return match for the heavyweight title before Ketchel retired. To get that bout, two things were needed: Ketchel had to defeat a few well-rated fighters and he had to beef up to genuine heavyweight proportions.

The problem with the first stipulation was that Mizner could not be sure that, on his current form, Ketchel could defeat the top-ranked heavyweights. Accordingly, Mizner decided to help things along. He matched Ketchel with the great black fighter Sam Langford. Langford was regarded as second only to Johnson in ability, and was avoided by most white fighters and their managers. When he did fight white men, Langford was often under wraps, knowing that he would only get paid if he let the other man go the distance.

It was an important piece of matchmaking.
Boxing
summed up its significance: ‘A victory for either man will give the winner a clear claim which Jack Johnson will find it difficult to ignore.’

Early in 1910, Langford and Ketchel fought a six-round, no-decision bout in Philadelphia. The black fighter was generally regarded as having ‘carried’ Ketchel throughout the fight. Beforehand, the promoter, Sunny Jim Coffroth, called both fighters in and explained to them that if they agreed to fake an exciting six-rounder, he would then build on the public interest aroused by rematching them in a genuine forty-five-round bout for the middleweight title and a purse of $30,000.

Both men agreed to the proposition, but Ketchel, paranoid after having failed in his own attempt to double-cross Jack Johnson, was afraid that the black fighter might cheat him. Accordingly he hired men to follow Langford to ensure that he was going easy on his training as promised.

Mizner later told his lawyer that the fight had been choreographed like an old-time melodrama, with first one boxer apparently in trouble and then the other almost going down before making a miraculous recovery. As Langford was fond of saying, ‘Never bet on anything that talks.’ Ketchel and Langford shared $13,000 for their fight, $9,000 – the larger share, of course – going to the white fighter, but that was before Ketchel and Mizner had to start making disbursements to various interested parties. Ketchel needed as much as he could get: his latest bill for a hectic twoweek stay at the Bartholdi Hotel in New York had amounted to $593.00.

Three weeks after the Langford fight, Mizner was called upon to use all his managerial wisdom when Ketchel fought heavyweight Porky Flynn in Boston. There was a dreadful storm that evening and Ketchel got it into his head that the bad weather presaged the imminent end of the world. If this was the case, he reasoned, what did it matter who won the fight that night? Wilson Mizner managed to persuade the fighter that settling some of their gambling debts would be a matter of considerable urgency should Armageddon be postponed for a couple of days. Ketchel saw the point and knocked Flynn out in the third round. Magnanimously he then brought his opponent round by throwing a bucket of water over him.

Next Ketchel fought Willie Lewis in New York. Increasingly concerned by the fragile state of his charge, Mizner took care of Lewis, who agreed not to strive for a knockout. The night before the fight, fellow manager Dan Morgan noticed Dan McKetrick, Lewis’s manager, lighting several candles in a church before dropping twenty-five cents into the offertory box. This gave the wily Morgan the idea that Lewis would be trying for a knockout after all, and he placed his bets accordingly. He was right. From the first bell Lewis swarmed all over Ketchel, forcing his opponent to fight back desperately. Revealing a flash of his old form, Ketchel managed to knock Lewis out in the second round. Morgan told his biographer John McCallum in his book
Dumb Dan
that afterwards, when McKetrick bemoaned their failure to capture the championship, Morgan had commented that obviously Lewis’s manager had not put enough in the offertory box. ‘You tried to get the world’s middleweight title for only two bits!’ he pointed out reprovingly.

Things were looking grim for Mizner and Ketchel. They had received a great deal of bad publicity over the Langford affair, and there were even stories circulating that an up-and-coming young middleweight called Frank Klaus had also been paid to go easy with Ketchel in a no-decision bout around this time. As if this was not enough, Ketchel had been diagnosed with syphilis and was believed to be addicted to opium.

In 1910, gambling, especially on sports, was flourishing in the USA. Where there were wagers there was always the possibility of corruption. The results of more and more major sporting events were suspected of being ‘fixed’ by gamblers. In 1908, the team physician of the New York Giants baseball team was expelled from the sport for offering an umpire $2,500 to favour the Giants in his decisions. In the same year, New York outlawed betting on horse racing after a number of scandals concerning horses being ‘pulled’ by their jockeys so that they would not win. There were many rumours of fighters being encouraged to box to orders.

It was the misfortune of Mizner and Ketchel at this time to come up against the dangerous young gambler and fixer Arnold Rothstein, who was just beginning to make a mark as an illegal bookmaker with his expressed philosophy of ‘If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you?’ Rothstein wanted Ketchel to take a dive in a fight, still to be arranged, as part of a betting coup. Mizner and his fighter were already spending more money than they could afford on paying opponents to lie down, so they could hardly now entertain the reverse procedure. Virtuously they rejected Rothstein’s overtures. This annoyed the gambler, and it was rumoured that he had put a price on Ketchel’s uneasy head.

Wilson Mizner decided that it was time to regroup. For some time he and his fighter had held court at the Woodlawn Inn on the outskirts of New York, where it was always open house and where free booze flowed for reporters, writers and show-business personalities. A change of image was patently required. Mizner announced to the newspapers that from now on Ketchel’s only objective would be to ready himself for another bid to take Jack Johnson’s title. So determined was Ketchel to fight as a heavyweight, Mizner went on, that he had already put on extra muscle and could no longer make the middleweight limit and consequently would give up his claim to the title and become a fully fledged heavyweight.

Before buckling down to training, Mizner and Ketchel went to Reno, to see Jack Johnson make his latest defence of his title, against former heavyweight champion James J.Jeffries. It was apparent to both Mizner and Ketchel that Jeffries had no chance against the champion. As Mizner later told the story to several newspapers and many hangers-on, Ketchel suddenly decided that it would be unthinkable for Jeffries to let whites down by being humiliated in the ring. He approached Mizner with a plan. Ketchel was due to be announced to the crowd from the ring before the fight. He told the horrified Mizner that as he shook hands with Jeffries in front of the assembled thousands, he would suddenly unleash a right-hand punch to the former champion’s jaw, knocking him unconscious and thus rendering him unfit to fight, so cancelling the bout.

Mizner was able to point out a slight flaw in his fighter’s reasoning. They had both bet all the money they could spare on Johnson to win. If the fight should be cancelled, bets would be called off. Fortunately, after much persuasion, Ketchel was able to see the point of this argument and reluctantly abandoned his project. Anyway, he had been recruited as one of the timekeepers for the contest, so it would be a pity to bring the bout to a premature conclusion when he was going to have such an excellent free view of it.

After Johnson had won easily, Mizner and Ketchel left, scattering challenges to the champion from all directions. They travelled back to San Francisco in the company of writer Jack London. They got very drunk and at one point the three of them stole a hansom cab and hurriedly drove off in it, with Ketchel throwing money to the irate pursuers.

It was easy enough for Mizner to get newspaper space by now. Reporters were always willing to devote columns to a man who could coin such maxims as ‘The gent who wakes and finds himself a success hasn’t been asleep’ and ‘Be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down.’

To show that he was taking his boxing seriously, Ketchel even left New York and set up a training camp on a farm near Conway in Missouri. The ranch belonged to the self-styled Colonel R.P. Dickerson, a former private in the Spanish–American war, a wealthy and influential local landowner and sports enthusiast.

Wilson Mizner temporarily left Ketchel to his own devices at the camp. Mizner’s first successful play,
The Deep Purple,
was running in Chicago and for the moment monopolising the manager’s attention.

Ketchel and Mizner had become involved in so many scams and con tricks that the fighter became nervous and travelled about armed. Sports writer and honorary assistant manager Hype Igoe, who often accompanied the former middleweight, said, ‘I never knew him sit down to a meal in any big town without first laying his big blue six-shooter across his lap.’

Ketchel’s meals on the farm were served in a cook’s small house by a woman called Goldie Smith. Almost automatically, Ketchel hit on her to such an extent that he aroused the jealousy of a farmhand called Walter Dipley, Smith’s boyfriend. On the morning of 15 October 1910, as Ketchel sat eating his breakfast, Dipley crept up behind the fighter and shot him with a .22-calibre rifle. The bullet lodged in Ketchel’s left lung. As his victim slumped to the ground, Dipley picked up the boxer’s revolver, hit him on the head with it and fled, taking with him a ring from the dying man’s finger and the contents of his wallet.