The Great White Hopes (19 page)

All these moves and countermoves were followed avidly by a boxing-mad public. The wily politician Theodore Roosevelt, who always had his finger on the general pulse, capitalised on this interest by disinterring a phrase from the old prize-ring when, in 1912, he announced his intention of seeking his party’s nomination as candidate for the presidency. ‘I have’, he said proudly, ‘thrown my hat into the ring!’

Back in the real ring, O’Rourke’s tournament achieved its ambition in establishing the winner as an up-and-coming heavyweight, and when Palzer went on to knock out another White Hope, Tom Kennedy, and stopped trial horse Al Kaufmann in the fifth round, some followers of the ring actually began to concede that perhaps Palzer was the best young white heavyweight around. Shrewdly, at this stage O’Rourke would only let his protégé box in New York, where the Frawley Law decreed that fights should last no longer than ten rounds and that no points decision could be rendered at the end of a bout. This meant that unless Palzer should be knocked out, officially he could not lose.

The heavyweight, like most of his peers, was also picking up some loose change on the vaudeville circuit. The
Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin
of 2 April 1912 announced, ‘Al Palzer, the New York heavyweight, who has challenged the present champion, Jack Johnson, will be seen at the Star next week as an added attraction with the Jardin de Paris Girls and Abe Leavitt, the “live-wire” comedian. Palzer will box six rounds with his sparring partners and local aspirants at every performance.’

His bandwagon gathered momentum in 1912, when the English heavyweight champion Bombardier Billy Wells visited the USA for several fights. With some trepidation, Tom O’Rourke accepted a contest with Wells on behalf of his charge. Palzer had been marking time, like most current heavyweights, by knocking out Sailor White, but had then been forced to take time off to have an operation on his damaged nose.

The bout with Palzer was intended to gain Wells an international reputation. Palzer was the heavier of the two by several stone but both men were comparative novices. Palzer was engaging in his eleventh professional bout, while Wells was having his tenth, although he had boxed as an amateur and in the Army.

Their Madison Square Garden contest, while it lasted, was spectacular. Wells started by outboxing the Iowan with his famous straight left. Towards the end of the round Wells dropped his opponent heavily, but Palzer regained his feet, shook his head and was fighting back at the bell. The second round was a repetition of the first, with Palzer plodding forward gamely while Wells boxed his head off. In the third and final round things changed. Palzer had worked out the Englishman’s style, or had had it worked out for him by his cornermen. He ducked under Wells’s left lead and hit the Bombardier hard in the stomach. Wells floundered miserably on the canvas, like a landed fish, and did not regain his feet in time.

The result did far more for Palzer than winning the dubious White Hope tournament had done. While Wells disconsolately returned to England after one more fight, Palzer was suddenly in great demand, his white heavyweight championship taking on a fresh international lustre.

Even so, it was not always easy for Palzer to draw the crowds. On one occasion, when he was matched with Charlie Miller, the sale of tickets was so disappointing that Jimmy Johnston, who was promoting the bout, decided to take extreme measures. The Secretary of State at the time was William Jennings Bryan, a charismatic public speaker. With his tongue in his cheek, Johnston sent a telegram to Bryan, offering him $300 to deliver from the ring a lecture on a subject of his choice before the Palzer–Miller bout.

Jennings, who recognised a fellow self-publicist when he saw one, treated the offer solemnly and declined with thanks. That was all that Johnston had been waiting for. He sent copies of both telegrams to all the local newspapers. The resultant publicity started the tickets moving freely again. All, as one of Johnston’s competitors said with reluctant admiration, for the cost of a dollar telegram.

Unfortunately, Palzer let his opportunities slip. Increasingly homesick and disappointed by the percentages of the purses being passed on to him by O’Rourke, the heavyweight fell out with his manager. He went off in a huff and refused to train, turning down a number of offers for good-money bouts against meaningful opponents. In an interview with the
Police Gazette
, Palzer enumerated some of his grievances: ‘I have only sixty dollars to my name, yet I’ve won many thousands of dollars in the boxing game . . . On the road I have been getting a few hundred dollars now and then, while O’Rourke has been keeping big money each week. He’s tried to get me to drink wine and go out with the fly set . . . but I refused, as I never drink anything stronger than tea or coffee and I want to be fit all the time. I don’t believe that O’Rourke is on the square with me and I’m going to break away from him. He made me sign some kind of contract once, but he never let me have a copy of it. He won’t let me fight anybody unless he can get the lion’s share of the coin, and I am tired of it all.’

The garrulous O’Rourke retorted in a scandalised fashion, accusing his White Hope of extreme disloyalty, claiming that the heavyweight was ungrateful and untruthful and pointing out that the boxer was attached to his manager by a cast-iron contract. The big man sulkily stayed out of the ring for more than four months before engaging in a minor six-round, no-decision contest with trial horse and former Jack Johnson opponent Tony Ross in Philadelphia.

Reluctantly, Palzer then allowed himself to be reconciled with his manager, and at last signed to defend his white heavyweight championship against another promising White Hope, the former cowboy Luther McCarty, but his heart was no longer in boxing. Even though Jack Johnson was busy living the high life and touring with his lucrative vaudeville act, and had not entered the ring since his contest against Jeffries in 1910, the search for a White Hope continued to dominate the headlines.

James W. Coffroth, one of the leading promoters, admitted that only a white heavyweight challenger would draw the crowds against Jack Johnson. In an interview in the French publication
La Boxe
in 1911, he admitted that it would be impossible in the USA to match Johnson against one of his black challengers like Sam Langford or Joe Jeanette. ‘It would be a great fight, the two negroes would not miss the opportunity to inflict the necessary and sufficient hiding that we would be entitled to expect from them. But the problem is that in America, they would not stand a chance of success. Why? For the only reason that the Blacks are hated in America. A fight that would put two of them face to face would not attract big crowds.’

So would-be white challengers rolled off the assembly lines almost with the regularity of Henry Ford’s new Model Ts, although with less durability. Tom Kennedy was one of them. Because, unlike most boxers of the era, he had fought as an amateur, he was regarded as almost effeminate by some of his peers and given the quite erroneous title of the Millionaire Boxer. Managed by Dan McKetrick, a sports writer, he secured some creditable wins but lost a considerable amount of face when he was defeated by Bombardier Billy Wells in the latter’s second fight on his visit to the USA.

Kennedy plodded on. He fought a particularly good ten-round, no-decision bout with a red-headed ex-sailor called Frank Moran. The two big men became close friends. When the globetrotting Moran was scheduled to sail to Europe for a series of contests, the former adversaries celebrated heartily together the night before, and a rather drunken Kennedy dutifully stumbled on board the liner to see his friend off. He fell asleep, and when he woke up the vessel was many miles out to sea. Not at all put out, Moran invited his fellow heavyweight to join him for an indefinite holiday. He promised the purser to pay the other man’s fare retrospectively from his European purses, until Kennedy could line up his own fights overseas.

The sporting world was then surprised by the announcement that another White Hope had appeared on the scene. George Hackenschmidt, the Russian Lion, well into his thirties and the former heavyweight wrestling champion of the world, let it be known that he was going into training to re-emerge as a boxer in order to challenge Jack Johnson. An Estonian, Hackenschmidt was an enormously strong man, capable of pressing a weight of 20 stone over his head.

Journalists who witnessed his early training sessions wondered, however, if perhaps he was still concentrating too much on the development of strength at the expense of speed when the Russian carried a 5-hundredweight sack of cement on his shoulders, with a heavyweight sparring partner perched on top of the sack.

Nevertheless, the wrestler’s attempt at transmogrification into a boxer secured plenty of publicity, until an Australian reporter revealed that Hackenschmidt had pulled exactly the same stunt a few years before, at another quiet time in his professional career.

It had happened on a tour of Australasia in 1907. Hackenschmidt had tried to launch a similar publicity campaign then, claiming that he was going into training for a boxing match with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Gunner Moir, the British heavyweight fighter, who was a member of the wrestler’s troupe, claimed that he had given the Russian boxing lessons and that his pupil showed great promise.

Unfortunately, Sydney reporters with a keen eye for a story had persuaded the grand old man of Australian boxing, Larry Foley, to visit the gymnasium in which the wrestler was training and spar a few rounds with him. Foley was credited with introducing modern boxing methods to Australia.

Although he had been 60 years old at the time, Foley had had no trouble with the lumbering and inept Hackenschmidt. Leaving the ring, Foley had told the reporters curtly that any third-rate heavyweight boxer would dispose of the Russian Lion with ease. Hackenschmidt thereupon announced with dignity that he was taking Foley’s advice and sticking to wrestling.

When the American newspapers realised that, five years later, the Russian was merely resurrecting his 1907 ploy in order to bring the crowds back to his vaudeville act, they dropped him abruptly from the register of White Hopes.

There were plenty of giants willing to take his place. Managers continued to find and boost new prospects. Six-feet-four-inchestall Fred Fulton was rated for a time. Big and strong, he was championed enthusiastically by his manager Jack Reddy. The handler gave newspapers a list of his heavyweight’s abilities, which, he claimed, eminently suited him for the title of the best of the White Hopes.

These characteristics included: ‘He is as fast on his feet as a lightweight. He can outbox any heavyweight. He has a straight left that no heavyweight of the present time can block. If necessary he can dance around any heavyweight in the business for hours. He has a knockout punch in either hand. He has never had a black eye or bloody nose. He is of Scotch–Irish parentage. He has never chewed, smoked or drank. He is positively sure no man in the world can beat him.’

Fulton rattled off a string of victories, many of them by knockouts, defeating Al Kaufmann, Arthur Pelkey, Jim Flynn and Gunboat Smith, but a knockout loss to Al Palzer set him back. He lost two torrid bouts with the newly savage Carl Morris. In each one Morris displayed his full repertoire of dirty tricks. The quick-tempered Fulton replied in kind with such energy that on both occasions he managed to get himself disqualified first. After their first bout, the referee said that he could have ruled Morris out at least twenty times if only he had not ejected Fulton from the ring first.

Eventually, in 1917, after the White Hope campaign was over, Fulton lost face when he was outsmarted in a gymnasium spar by Australian middleweight Les Darcy. Darcy was going through a bad patch himself, having smuggled himself out of Australia during the First World War, contrary to regulations, to pursue his boxing career in the USA while many of his peers were fighting and dying. Nevertheless, he was a fine boxer. A reporter from the
Globe,
who witnessed his gym humiliation of the huge Fulton, wrote, ‘The result was a revelation. Despite his recent inactivity Darcy gave the slowmoving Minnesota White Hope a boxing lesson which was abruptly terminated by Fulton pulling off his gloves after two rounds.’

Some of the new White Hopes managed to attract backers of great prestige. When the Englishman from Helsingham in Cumberland, Tom Cowler, crossed the Atlantic, coincidentally just before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he managed to get a fight in Canada, where he was seen on a theatrical tour by no less an authority than James J. Corbett. The former world champion declared that the young man was a heavyweight of great promise. Corbett even gave the Englishman tips on his ring performances. ‘The fellow has something these other alleged heavyweights didn’t have,’ the old heavyweight champion told the
Beloit Daily News
of 23 July 1915. ‘He’s got the best left jab I ever saw or felt and I have seen and felt, also dodged, quite a few.’

In Great Britain, Cowler had defeated some fair second-rate heavyweights like Iron Hague and Ben Taylor. He started off well enough in the USA, holding his own in no-decision contests against Gunboat Smith, Porky Flynn and Bill Brennan, but he lost to Battling Levinsky and was knocked out by Jack Dillon and, in the first round, by Fred Fulton. In 1916, less than two years after he had arrived in the States, Cowler announced his retirement. The
Washington Post
of 13 February 1916 said of the Cumbrian, ‘His physicians have advised him to retire, as he is said to be in poor health and his condition such that further bouts might prove dangerous.’

Jim Corbett, his erstwhile mentor, concurred, publicly washing his hands of the Englishman. ‘There’s a lad who possessed all the physical make-up of a champion,’ he said bitterly. ‘I took a fancy to him because I admired his style and I liked the way he punched. He had everything that a good fighter should have. He was clever, he was fearless, but he couldn’t think.’

Cowler continued to fight sporadically, but, as an Englishman active in New York while his fellow countrymen were engaged in a war, he encountered a great deal of hostility. This was evidenced in the
Des Moines Register
of 15 January 1917. Describing Cowler’s fight with the former sailor Gunboat Smith in Rochester, the ringside reporter wrote of Smith’s manager Jim Buckley’s actions at the start of the fight, ‘At the opening of the round Buckley stood up straight with his face pressed against the ropes and yelled to the Gunner as follows: “Fight him hard, Gunner! Remember that you were there when your country wanted you, right there on Uncle Sam’s battleship. Remember that you didn’t run away at the first sight of danger!’