The Great White Hopes (17 page)

Disappointed by the cancellation of his proposed bout with Jack Johnson, Wells consolidated his position by knocking out the South African heavyweight Fred Storbeck at the National Sporting Club. During the contest, Storbeck offended Wells by swearing at him. This reaction betrays perhaps unexpected sensitivity in a former ranker, but the English heavyweight almost literally made the South African eat his words by repeatedly ramming a straight left like a telegraph pole into Storbeck’s mouth for the remainder of the fight.

There was some talk of a Major Arnold Wilson, the then major promoter, staging a bout in London between Wells and the fastrising American Luther McCarty for a version of the World Heavyweight Championship, cutting out Jack Johnson altogether. The fair-minded Wells would have none of it. Johnson was the champion and everyone knew it.

However, there was no doubt that some really promising young heavyweights were coming along in the States. The best way to prepare for a genuine tilt at the title would be for Wells to cross the Atlantic and defeat some of their home-grown White Hopes. Unfortunately, by this time it was widely known that Wells was always susceptible to a heavy punch. A future opponent, the American Frank Moran, said of the British heavyweight disparagingly, ‘His chin begins at his knees!’

7

THE HOPES AND HOPEFULS ASSEMBLE

I
n the USA, the Johnson–Jeffries fight in 1910, with all its attendant publicity and ramifications, gave boxing an enormous boost. Public interest was fanned even further by Johnson’s defiantly arrogant public attitude, and what to the white establishment was his annoying habit of regarding himself as the equal of any other man, no matter what his colour.

To a populace more accustomed to the anodyne stance outside the ring of less aggressive black fighters like the amiable Sam Langford, this was hard to bear. Langford, it was generally agreed, ‘knew his place’. Before one of his fights, promoter Hugh D. McIntosh had tried to persuade him to attend a banquet in order to publicise the tournament. According to sports writer Trevor Wignall, who was present, the fighter declined at once. ‘I wouldn’t feel good with all them white gentlemen,’ he averred.

The flamboyant Jack Johnson was succeeding in annoying a considerable proportion of the white population. He was often arrested for dangerous driving, and flaunted an increasing number of white women in his life. After his defeat of James J. Jeffries there was a growing public demand for another white challenger to be found.

There were plenty of hopeful backers looking to find one. All over the country promoters and managers were scuffling to dig up a big white youth who could both take a punch and deliver one. Boxing promised high rewards for fighters sufficiently charismatic or vicious to draw the crowds, especially if they weighed 15 stone or more.

Some of the searchers were big-time managers; others had nothing but glib tongues and hope in their hearts as they searched the highways and byways for the White Hope who would make their fortunes. At the lower end of the scale were impresarios like onelegged Otto Floto, who put on fights in Cripple Creek, Colorado. On Saturday nights Floto would drag fighting drunks out of saloons and propel them to the Butte Opera House, where he would thrust them into a ring and charge a dollar for admission.

Other promoters were more ambitious in their quests for White Hopes. Between them they travelled thousands of miles by train on their bizarre pilgrimages, stopping at every small hall where there might be the possibility of finding a promising big, young white heavyweight. On the West Coast, James J. Coffroth, a lawyer, had matters pretty well sewn up for a time, even if he had lost out to Tex Rickard in the competition to promote the Johnson–Jeffries bout. He was a shrewd, ruthless, cold man, always making alliances and then falling out with his partners. For a time he had promoted fights in San Francisco, but incurred the displeasure of the authorities for a number of reasons. As a result the promoter moved just outside the city limits and built an arena in rural San Mateo County, where he made a lot of money promoting world-title fights in the first decade of the twentieth century.

During the same period in the USA, boxing was legal only in the states of Nevada and California. This was emphasised by the fact that between 1901 and 1915 every heavyweight-title bout promoted in North America was held west of the Mississippi, many of them by Coffroth and his associates.

The Californian had some claim to being boxing’s first individual promoter. As a young man he had attended several tournaments in New York, usually put on by shady syndicates. Disgusted by the squalor and inefficiency of these events, the young man had decided to run properly organised promotions with just one man – himself – at the helm.

For all his faults the venal Coffroth realised that in order to succeed as a manager and promoter he had to keep his fighters happy. He had a fixed scale of payment for his main-eventers. He assigned 60 per cent of the gross receipts from his promotions to be divided between the two boxers. In the case of popular headliners this was sometimes increased to 70 per cent. It was left to the participants to decide how they would share their allocation. Sometimes the split would be 75–25, but now and again, in the case of grudge fights, it might be 90–10.

Coffroth boasted that the sun always shone on his West Coast promotions, thus gaining the sobriquet of ‘Sunny Jim’. He was also a well-read man and no milksop. At one stage in his career he fell foul of the law, allegedly by attacking the manager of Battling Nelson with a pair of scissors after a dispute while counting the gate receipts for a lightweight-title fight between Nelson and Coffroth’s man, Joe Gans.

One of his main rivals in the search for a White Hope, Jack Curley, had made a dubious grubstake from co-promoting the second Gotch–Hackenschmidt wrestling match in Chicago. This was so widely suspected of being fixed that the city police chief stepped into the ring before the contest could start and announced that all bets were off. The resultant scandal caused wrestling to be banned in Illinois for years, and Curley was now looking to promote topclass boxing matches, hopefully featuring his own heavyweight, if he could find or manufacture one.

Curley was a born showman and salesman, promoting anything likely to show a profit and also a number of events that had no chance of a financial return at all. A glib, persuasive onetime newspaper man and unsuccessful heavyweight boxer, he had managed the affairs of the elderly and constantly bickering former bare-knuckle fighters John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain as they toured giving exhibitions with tent shows. Over the next few decades he was to promote everything, from flea circuses to political meetings, wrestling shows, operas and boxing championships.

There were dozens of others of greater or lesser importance. Only Rickard, restless and iconoclastic as ever, had departed the scene for the time being. After his controversial Reno promotion, he had left for South America, to become a cattle-rancher in Paraguay, and was not to return for five years.

The only traits that most of the would-be managers and promoters had in common, now that the cold but straight Rickard was no longer around, were a complete lack of probity and a reckless willingness to rob anyone ragged. Rickard had been a Texas border marshal and as a professional gambler had faced down some of the toughest miners in the Yukon. He always claimed that the average boxing manager and promoter made the professional gunfighters he had encountered look like pussy cats.

Jack Blackburn, a top black lightweight of the era, summed up the attitude of his fellow fighters of all colours when he said that whenever he fought, although he took a size 8½ shoe, he always wore size 10s, so that he could keep his purse in them – which he insisted on being paid in advance in silver dollars and twenty-dollar gold pieces – ‘otherwise the promoter would have been gone when the fight was over’.

The major managers, like Jack Curley, Jimmy Johnston, Dan McKetrick and Dan Morgan, ran up enormous tabs for feeding, housing and training the huge labourers, lumberjacks and cowboys they were enticing into the gyms with their newspaper adverts for heavyweights of the right skin colour.

Many of the first White Hopes fell by the wayside. Others continued fighting, though merely as cannon fodder for the next wave of aspirants. Managers clinging gamely to the wreckage of their dreams tried to make up for the deficiencies of their white heavyweights by bestowing frightening names on them: George ‘One Round’ Davies, Tom ‘Bearcat’ McMahon, ‘KO’ Bill Brennan, ‘Roaring’ Al Reich, Joe Muller, the Fighting Gorilla, and so on.

The first White Hope to achieve any prominence from 1911 onwards was a Salpulpa heavyweight, Carl Morris, a railway fireman. When he had attained a certain amount of prominence, his press releases stated that the heavyweight had taken to the professional ring as a result of hearing the result of the Johnson–Jeffries bout at Reno on 4 July 1910. Morris, it was stated, had been coming into Salpulpa in the cabin of a freight train at the time. When he heard the outcome of the fight, he threw down his shovel and swore to enter the ring in order to avenge white honour by taking the title back from the black boxer.

It is more likely that Morris, aided and abetted by his friend, a telegraph operator named Bill Stone, realised how much money could be made under the circumstances by a successful white fighter. At first, after turning professional, Morris operated in the Oklahoma region. Cumbersome and slow but the possessor of a mighty punch, the heavyweight won his first seven bouts on knockouts. Among his victims was an over-the-hill but still wellrated Marvin Hart, one-time claimant to the world heavyweight title. There were murmurs, however, that Morris’s third-round knockout victory over Hart had been a little too easy, and that perhaps the new heavyweight’s record was being padded a little in order to further his career. The
Milwaukee Free Press
even published Morris’s rejoinder to such gossip: ‘Carl Morris, the Oklahoma hope, is out with a hot denial that his victories have been frame-ups.’

Nevertheless, the civic fathers of Salpulpa took great pride in their rising fistic star. Before long the town’s official letter-heading was changed from ‘Salpulpa, queen of the great Oklahoma oil-and-gas belt’ to a more prosaic ‘Salpulpa, home of Carl Morris, Oklahoma’s hope of the white race’. Mothers began naming their babies after the new local hero. Excursion trains, no longer stoked by Morris, were run from all over the state so that the heavyweight could be seen in training. To show their gratitude for the publicity he was engendering, the civic fathers launched a public subscription to provide the heavyweight prospect with a free house.

Before long, news of the hard-punching white giant percolated east. Big-city managers began to descend hungrily on Salpulpa, dangling all sorts of incentives before the dazzled eyes of the heavyweight. Bill Stone, the railway telegraphist who had persuaded Morris to turn professional, was bought out early in the deal. The
Milwaukee Free Press
of 30 January 1911 announced, ‘Tulsa, Oklahoma. A deal was consummated here late Saturday night and a contract closed by which F.B. Ufer, a wealthy oil man and sportsman of this city, purchased W.F. Stone’s contract with Carl Morris, the “hope of the white race”, for a consideration of $25,000 . . . Ufer is worth half a million dollars. He is a big oil operator and proposes to make a world’s heavyweight champion out of Morris at any cost. Tomorrow he will order equipment for a $5,000 dollar gymnasium with all the latest paraphernalia. He will employ Bob Armstrong, Joe Choynski and other well-known trainers to take charge of Morris.’

Ufer soon lost interest in his new charge and a series of managers began to play ‘pass the parcel’ with the former fireman. Jack Curley had him for a time, Tom Jones showed a fleeting interest, and towards the end of Morris’s career Nate Lewis took over. In between there were plenty of others.

The problem was that Morris soon lost his allure for the moneygrabbers. It all went wrong in his first fight in New York, on 15 September 1911. For his introductory bout in the big time, Carl Morris was put in cruelly over his head. He was matched with the veteran Fireman Jim Flynn in a ten-round, no-decision contest in a top-of-the-bill fight at Madison Square Garden. Between 1910 and 1917, the Frawley Law was in operation in New York. It allowed only so-called ‘exhibition’ bouts over ten rounds, with no decisions being rendered.

If Morris had done well in the eyes of ringside reporters, with a scalp like Flynn’s on his belt he would have been fast-tracked into a championship match. But the naive Morris was nowhere near ready for an experienced and fearless, if limited, fighter like Flynn, who knew every trick in the game and had invented a few of his own.

Flynn, born Andrew Chiariglione, in Hoboken, had turned professional in 1901 and had already fought and lost to Jack Johnson, Tommy Burns and Sam Langford. On his way to the ring, where Flynn was waiting, Langford had poked his head round the door of the white man’s dressing room. One of Flynn’s seconds, a man called Russell, was chopping up a dozen oranges into segments. Langford asked him what was going on.

‘The Fireman likes to suck on oranges between rounds,’ replied the second brusquely.

Langford shook his head. ‘He won’t be needing all that fruit,’ he said presciently, before heading for the ring, where he knocked Flynn out in the first round.

All the same Flynn was tough and experienced. At 5ft 9in he was short for a heavyweight, but had developed into a swinging, gutsy, dirty, very brave second-rate fighter, far too good for the novice Morris.

Morris’s backer, the oilman Frank Ufer, was well aware of this and tried to bribe Flynn ‘to go into the tank’. Flynn agreed, once he had bartered the price up to $7,500, to throw the fight. Unfortunately rumours of the impending transaction reached the ears of the fearless sports writer of the
New York Morning Telegraph,
Bat Masterson, a former frontier-town gunslinger of the Old West. In his column of 10 September 1911, Masterson caustically wrote, ‘There have been a good many cooked-up affairs pulled off in the prize-ring, as everybody knows, but hardly one quite as daring or that smells so much like a polecat as the one between Flynn and Morris.’ Masterson then bullied Fireman Jim into admitting his role in the fix-up and gave the confession the leading spot in his next column.