The Great White Hopes (21 page)

Hoping that you will help me to be right with the public, and thanking you in advance, I am sincerely yours,

Sandy

Of his last twelve bouts Ferguson lost ten, drew one and won only one. His penultimate fight, against Battling Levinsky over twelve rounds in Boston, was a stinker. Driven to distraction by Levinsky’s nullifying tactics, Ferguson bit his opponent so hard on the shoulder that Levinsky had to have stitches inserted in the wound after he had won on points. Ferguson was suspended for life. The ban was later reduced to one of six months. It was immaterial. After one more losing fight Ferguson retired. In 1919 he was shot and killed in a barroom brawl. He was 40 years old.

The trouble with all the leading White Hopes up to 1913 was that, with the exception of Luther McCarty, none of them could string together enough successes to be considered a legitimate challenger for Jack Johnson. They kept defeating one another. Bombardier Wells defeated Tom Kennedy but lost to Al Palzer and Gunboat Smith. Palzer beat Wells, Kennedy and Fulton, but was knocked out by Luther McCarty. Porky Flynn knocked out Fred McKay and was decked in turn by Stanley Ketchel and Fred Fulton. Andre Anderson defeated Al Palzer and Boer Rodel but lost to Tom Cowler and Homer Smith. Carl Morris beat Fred Fulton and Battling Levinsky and was beaten in turn by Luther McCarty, Jim Flynn and Gunboat Smith. Smith defeated Billy Wells and lost to Tony Ross and Jack Geyer. Jim Coffey defeated Jim Flynn and Al Reich and was knocked out in the first round by Soldier Kearns. Gunboat Smith defeated Frank Moran, Carl Morris and Arthur Pelkey but lost to Jim Coffey and the extremely faded Tony Ross.

So the carousel went round for three or four years, with no White Hope stepping up as the logical leading contender. In the meantime the public was eager for a title fight.

In 1912, after two years out of the ring, during which he had been living high on the hog, Jack Johnson suddenly agreed to defend his title again. He was to meet everyone’s opponent, Fireman Jim Flynn. The attention on the up-and-coming White Hopes wavered as fight fans wondered what the veteran could do.

In the three years that had elapsed since his one-round knockout at the hands of Sam Langford, Flynn had been trudging round the fight circuit, from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, New York, Toronto and Denver, among other venues, as usual refusing to meet no one in the process. Since his manhandling by Langford, Flynn had notched up another twenty contests. He had won eleven of them and lost only one, a second knockout at the hands of Langford. All the rest had been no-decision bouts. His most recent notable contest was a ruthless demolition of the novice Carl Morris in 1911.

Jack Curley promoted the Johnson–Flynn bout to get in on the White Hope quest. The problem was that the parsimonious Curley was trying to launch a White Hope championship challenge without a real White Hope. Fireman Jim Flynn came cheap. A lifetime of fighting for peanuts had dulled his acquisitive instinct. He was prepared to go in with Johnson for a second time in return for a pittance. This meant that Curley could afford to meet Johnson’s financial demands and put on the fight.

As a safeguard to ensure Flynn’s cooperation, Curley also became his manager. As a result, the promoter thought he saw a lucrative chance to avoid the long drawn-out process of finding and training his own white heavyweight. Flynn came ready-made, if slightly chipped at the edges. Johnson was only too ready to have an easy fight, and signed up with surprisingly little fuss.

Strangely enough, fight reporters did not rise to the bait. Few of the newspapers heralding the contest referred to Flynn as a White Hope. Perhaps he was too familiar and battle-scarred to justify the epithet. Or perhaps it was just too obvious that he had no chance. Concomitant with being a White Hope came the assumption that the hopeful had to have a faint chance of victory against Johnson.

Flynn did his best to talk up the fight, but no one was paying much attention. At a press conference before the fight the Fireman went through the motions, saying that he was boxing for the honour of whites and that he had given promoter Curley permission to shoot him if he failed to defeat the champion. Johnson also did what he could to promote the bout, but as he admitted years later in his memoirs, it was difficult to find anything complimentary to say about the extremely limited challenger. ‘If he had any championship timber in him,’ wrote Johnson in lordly fashion in his autobiography, ‘I was as eager to find it out as any.’

Curley did his best to publicise the match. Frantically he tried to make Flynn appear to have at least some sort of chance. The promoter was an ingenious man. During the lead-up to the second Gotch–Hackenschmidt wrestling match, which Curley was promoting, the Russian Lion had injured his knee so badly that he could not do any roadwork. In order to fool reporters Curley scoured the streets of Chicago until he found a 21-stone lookalike for the wrestler, and made him go for training runs through dimly lit streets at night.

Flynn, a realist at 33 years old, did so little training for his big chance that his trainer, former middleweight champion Tommy Ryan, abandoned him in disgust, because his charge was overweight and was doing nothing about it except bullying a few untalented sparring partners.

Johnson knew as well as anyone that he would be able to stroll through the fight for the mere $30,000 he had been guaranteed in his title defence. The champion’s main problem lay in dealing with the hate mail which descended upon him in shoals as he was going through his perfunctory preparations for the bout. One message, purporting to come from the Ku Klux Klan, informed Johnson that, if he did not lie down in the ring to his challenger, he would be lynched.

Apart from the revolver that was fired into the air during the first round, about the only exciting thing that happened during the fight was announcer Tommy Cannon’s vain hope, expressed in the introductions, that as the occasion was being graced by the presence of several hundred ladies, the gentlemen present would moderate their language.

Flynn’s game plan, which would explain his neglect of training, was to try to break as many rules as possible in an effort to disconcert the unbothered champion. For nine rounds he tried to butt Johnson into submission, ignoring the plaintive pleas and warnings of the referee. Unfortunately, Flynn was considerably shorter than his opponent and had to leap off the ground with both feet in order to reach the champion’s chin, allowing Johnson to take evasive action. Eventually tiring of this tactic, Johnson knocked the Fireman down with a right uppercut. A police captain hovering outside the ring stumbled in through the ropes to stop the fight. Flynn had lasted two rounds longer in his 1907 fight with Johnson.

So poorly was Flynn regarded by fight fans that less than 5,000 people turned up at an arena intended for 17,000. Receipts for the tournament amounted to $35,000. Once Johnson and his opponent had been paid off, Jack Curley was left with a significant loss.

A week after the Flynn fight, Johnson opened the Café de Champion, a Chicago nightclub festooned with portraits of the champion. Its sheer flamboyance further annoyed his detractors. There was a great scandal when, one night in their bedroom over the café, Johnson’s wife took a revolver belonging to her husband and fatally shot herself.

Johnson continued to be his own man, stating simply, ‘I am not a slave . . . I have the right to choose who my mate shall be without the dictate of any man.’ It was all too much for the white establishment, and the authorities closed in on the champion.

Johnson had been much seen in the company of his white secretary Lucille Cameron. He was arrested, after Cameron’s affronted mother laid evidence against Johnson, and charged under the newly instituted Mann White Slavery Act of taking her across the state line ‘for immoral purposes’. The Act stated that any man who crossed a state line with a woman not his wife and had sex with her was committing a criminal offence. Johnson and Cameron had occasionally travelled together from Pittsburgh to Chicago.

In November 1912, Johnson was first brought before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a former bicycle racer and the proprietor of a roller-skating rink before he took up law as a profession. Later he became the Commissioner of Baseball in the USA. Landis presided over the federal grand jury, which charged Johnson in a second trial with violating the Mann Act with Belle Schreiber, one of the champion’s former mistresses. The Johnson trial was a useful means of obtaining publicity for the judge. Eventually the champion was allowed out on bail.

Johnson married Lucille Cameron but could not shake off the hounds baying at his heels because of his affair with Schreiber. Evidence given at the court hearing in May 1913, before Judge George Carpenter, dealt mainly with the white women in his life. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Released on bail, Johnson fled the country with his wife, and was not to return to the USA for seven years.

The year in which Johnson fled to Europe, 1913, was a busy time in the USA. Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as president; the outstanding Native American athlete Jim Thorpe was stripped of the gold medals he had won at the 1912 Olympics because several years before he had earned a few dollars playing semi-professional baseball; the Brooklyn Dodgers opened their new state-of-the-art stadium at Ebbets Field; while an unknown English comedian called Charlie Chaplin joined the famed Keystone film studio. The fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was celebrated with a grand parade of the now-aged veterans of both armies. Citizens were taking to the roads in ever-increasing numbers: almost half a million automobiles were produced in the USA in 1913. A grimmer statistic in a nation still divided by race was that 211 lynchings, almost all of them of black men, took place in the same year.

Johnson might have gone, but he still held the title, and there was no let-up in the search for a White Hope to challenge him. And because the feared champion was safely on the other side of the Atlantic, managers could issue empty challenges to him to their hearts’ content, building up huge gates for the elimination contests in which the white heavyweights took part.

Writing in the
Ring
in 1930, Billy McCarney, one of the leading managers of the time, described the widespread interest in the search for a white challenger. ‘It was back in the period between 1910 and 1915 that every overgrown small town lad who thought he had any ability was signed by big and small time managers, placed in the hands of trainers, with the dethroning of Jack Johnson as the chief objective.’

The Flynn bout had shown that the public would not pay to see Jack Johnson in action against any old plug-ugly. The crowds wanted to see the champion in with an unsullied and attractive white newcomer who would be in with a chance against the black man.

As it happened, there was one on the horizon.

8

THE COWBOY FROM DRIFTWOOD CREEK

B
y 1913, Al Palzer and Luther McCarty had emerged from the pack as the two most likely prospects among the first White Hopes.

The organisation of boxing in the USA was still haphazard. In many areas, like New York State, public bouts were still banned. Wily promoters got round this by forming private clubs, at which bouts were allowed. These were very popular, especially if the showmen could persuade their members that they were watching embryonic White Hopes in action. For those big men who could actually run up a winning streak of bouts, there were large purses to be fought for.

Luther McCarty had started work in the family snake-oil business as a huckster, helping his father, the 21-stone self-styled White Eagle, touring the small towns of Nebraska to sell his cure-all potions by performing Native American dances to draw the crowds.

It was an era of travelling salesmen in rural areas, peddling bottled nostrums that were claimed to be cure-alls. One of the most notorious was Dr B.J. Kendall’s addictive blackberry medicine for stomach ailments. It consisted of 122-proof whiskey reinforced with opium.

These tent shows were often the only forms of entertainment to visit the remoter areas. Nebraska was a hard state. In the first decade of the twentieth century some of the original rancher settlers were still fighting the incoming, would-be farmers, who were spreading across the western part of the area to take advantage of new irrigation schemes and fresh, hardy crop strains.

Young Luther McCarty’s main job in the travelling family business was to look after the snakes used in the act while his burly sister Hazel performed what was claimed to be a genuine Native American snake dance. McCarty had taken a few boxing lessons at the Young Men’s Christian Association gymnasium, but Hazel was considered the better fistic prospect of the two. Later she earned a living in vaudeville, billed as the world’s champion woman bag-puncher.

When he was 15, Luther McCarty ran away from home with some relief and took to the road leading out of Nebraska. This led eventually to the high seas, and for several years the well-built youth shipped out as a deckhand, sailing round Cape Horn in the process. Tiring of this he returned to dry land and worked briefly as an ironworker on high bridges. He gave this up when he fell and broke a leg. When he had recovered he returned to Nebraska and in 1910 took up his life as a cowboy once more. He was still only 18.

In order to supplement his income McCarty had several professional fights in Nebraska during this period. His first bout took place at Swift Cloud, where the young heavyweight received eighteen dollars for his winning effort. But the young tyro did not have things all his own way. Boxing in Sidney against Harry Hollinger, a local tannery worker, McCarty walked into a wild right hand and was knocked out. When he recovered, the local newspaper, the
News,
reported him as saying to the winner, ‘You made a dub of me, Harry, but I’m going to stick to this game and show up some of you fellows before I am through.’

Soon after this, McCarty left home again. This time he abandoned a young wife, Rhoda, and Cornelia Alberta, his infant daughter. For a while, in 1911, he boxed around the Midwest under the name of Walker Monahan, perhaps to avoid discovery by his abandoned spouse.