The Great White Hopes (25 page)

There was an aftermath. During the bout, Sam Langford had been puzzled by his opponent’s apparent durability. Time after time Langford had toppled Lang with vicious blows, only to see the Australian doggedly get to his feet again. Langford was sure that he had struck Lang as hard as any man he had fought, seemingly to little effect. When he got back to his dressing room, he recounted years later, he split the gloves open with a knife. He discovered that the padding had been stuffed with the fur of a rabbit, to render it ineffective as a striking weapon and give the Australian an extra advantage. To all intents and purposes Langford might have been hitting his opponent with pillows.

Langford took the offending gloves to the promoter’s office and threw them on the desk. ‘Oh, Mr. McIntosh,’ he said sadly, ‘you are a wicked man.’

It was a bad night for the wealthy occupants of the ringside seats as well. As they left the arena, gangs of masked thugs were lying in wait to rob them.

Lang received such a bad press for his inept showing against Sam Langford that he was no longer considered a White Hope. McIntosh, disillusioned with his man’s showing, drifted out of boxing, preferring to put on theatrical productions. Lang returned to Australia. Unfortunately, it was at a time when decent American fighters, sensing good purses and easy pickings, were visiting the continent on a regular basis. The black American Sam McVey knocked Lang out in two rounds in Sydney, while Tom ‘Bearcat’ McMahon dispatched the Australian in five rounds. In 1913, Dave Smith, who was little more than a middleweight, took the Australian title from Lang and the latter gave up boxing in favour of keeping a hotel.

10

FRENCH CONNECTIONS

B
oxing was late coming to France, but by 1913
la boxe
was one of the country’s most popular sports. This was mainly due to the efforts of the precocious Georges Carpentier and his manager François Descamps. Since Descamps had started coaching the 13-year-old and three years later had steered him to the French lightweight title, the handsome and hard-punching Carpentier had become the sporting idol of his country. Before the end of his career he would go on to win the welterweight, middleweight, lightheavyweight and heavyweight championships of France and to become the light-heavyweight champion of the world.

On his way up, Carpentier did not have it all his own way. As a 17-year-old he was thrashed by two tough American middleweights in Frank Klaus and Billy Papke. Unfortunately, Papke could not hang around for a return match, though he did also fight fellow American Willie Lewis while he was in Paris. At the weigh-in for that fight, someone in the crowd milling around the scales mentioned that Stanley Ketchel was the world’s middleweight champion. This was a sore point with Papke, who considered himself to hold the title. Believing that the remark had been made by Lewis’s manager, Dan McKetrick, Papke took a swing at him. The
Milwaukee Free Press
took up the story: ‘The act caused a small riot . . . and Papke would have been badly mauled if he had not taken it on the run.’

The fine black heavyweight Joe Jeanette also defeated the Frenchman. Carpentier’s manager, Descamps, was shrewd enough after this to employ Jeanette to take a hand in the training of his protégé. As a result, by 1913, Carpentier was considered capable of beating any European heavyweight and was being groomed for a shot at the world light-heavyweight title, with a tilt at the heavyweight championship to follow.

There were three major boxing halls in Paris alone, each one paying much higher purses to the right fighters than any in England or the USA. This led to a major migration of foreign boxers into the country. In addition, unlike the USA and England, there was no discernible colour bar in France. Jack Johnson himself made his home in exile there for a time, while Sam McVey was so popular in Paris that he settled there, and as a sign of his acclimatisation announced that from then, in homage to his adopted nation, he was to be billed as Sam McVea. In the three years he stayed in the capital he made so much money that he was able to stroll along the boulevards dressed in a frock coat, top hat and striped trousers as his daily attire. He lost only one of more than thirty fights in Europe, and this was in a thriller with his old adversary Joe Jeanette. McVey knocked his opponent down at least twenty times, but in the process shipped so much punishment that he had to retire in the forty-ninth round.

Joe Jeanette arrived in Paris with his manager, the shrewd Dan McKetrick, ex-editor of the
New York World,
and opened a boxing school in the French capital before undertaking a number of fights there. In 1909, his fight with the sturdy Canadian White Hope Sandy Ferguson caused a sensation, especially in the thirteenth round, when both heavyweights landed their best shots simultaneously and each went tumbling to the canvas. They beat the count and the black boxer went on to win on points. Their first bout was so popular that the two men met in France on three other occasions before they went home for a summer holiday.

France was undergoing a sporting renaissance, particularly in the air. In 1908, the Michelin brothers, André and Edouard, created the Michelin Grand Prix, with an award of 20,000 francs for any aviator who could achieve a flying distance of at least 20 kilometres. The prize was won by Wilbur Wright, the famous pioneer, with a distance of 125 kilometres. The competition became an annual one, with each year’s winner asked to fly at least twice as far as the previous winner.

France also had its own early version of kick-boxing, which did not catch on in Great Britain. In an article in
C.B. Fry’s Magazine of Sports and Out-of-Door Life
in 1905, an English visitor to a French School of Arms in Paris wrote reassuringly, ‘The kick which the Frenchman introduces so nimbly into his sparring matches does not in the least constitute a reason for writing him down as an ass . . . They are not bred of an uncontrollable desire to turn his back on his opponent. They are matters of rule.’

Some American big men who were a little past their best also settled for a while in France, claiming to be White Hopes in transit. The wily Kid McCoy, inventor of the corkscrew punch and onetime disputed claimant to the world light-heavyweight title, was 39 and had recently been declared bankrupt when he turned up. The USA had become a little too hot for him when his bout with former heavyweight champ James J. Corbett was declared to be fixed, practically ending boxing in New York for a while.

Despite his advancing years, McCoy was still good enough to outpoint PO Nutty Curran in Nice. His victory was watched by a local resident, the poet, playwright and Nobel Prize-winner for Literature Maurice Maeterlinck, a boxing enthusiast. He took the American under his wing. The two men became friends and companions. McCoy taught the writer how to box, in preparation for a charity exhibition bout between Maeterlinck and Georges Carpentier. For his part, the American fighter learned French and tried to read his host’s books. The sardonic, witty and totally unscrupulous McCoy had always attracted the interest of writers. In 1904, when he was training for a fight with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, he had been visited at his training camp by the humorous novelist P.G. Wodehouse. The usually gentle and retiring Wodehouse had even volunteered to box a round with McCoy, but the fighter’s then wife (he was married six times) arrived and bore off her husband, a fact for which Wodehouse was to express his gratitude in later years.

French interest in Carpentier as a White Hope grew when he was matched against Bombardier Wells in Nice on 1 June 1913. The bout was scheduled as part of the Ghent Exhibition and was billed as being for the European Heavyweight Championship, although Carpentier weighed less than 12 stone. Wells was 3in taller and more than a stone heavier than his younger opponent. There was a certain amount of feeling between the two men. Four years earlier, when Carpentier as a welterweight had been preparing for a fight at Leigh on Sea in Great Britain, he had sparred with Wells and had resented it when the much bigger man had not pulled his punches.

The Ghent fight seemed an odd one for Descamps to agree to. Wells’s defeats by Americans had almost ruled him out as a White Hope, yet he appeared to be much too big and strong for his opponent. The French manager, however, thought that a decisive victory over the British heavyweight champion would cement Carpentier’s claim to being the best in Europe.

Descamps told the 19-year-old Carpentier to stay close to Wells from the off. Carpentier did his best to snuggle up to the big man, but he was knocked down heavily in the first round and seemed fortunate to survive to the bell. Acting on his corner’s instructions, the Frenchman alternately clinched and ran in the second and third rounds. By the fourth round he was all right again, while Wells’s confidence was beginning to trickle away at the sight of his adversary apparently none the worse for wear. Then Carpentier moved in and knocked out the passively resigned Wells with a right to the head and a left to the body.

Back home in Great Britain, many fans refused to believe that their champion could have run out of steam again. The National Sporting Club rematched the pair for a purse of £3,000 and sidestakes of £300. The hall was crowded, with onlookers anticipating a decisive win for the English fighter on his home turf. Wells did his best to psych out his opponent. He kept Carpentier waiting for five minutes in the ring, and then caused a further delay by complaining about the bandages on the hands of the French fighter.

When the fight finally got under way, this time Wells lasted only 73 seconds. The French fighter sallied towards his apparently transfixed opponent, battered him around the ring and knocked him out with a one-two to the body. As the heavyweight lay wretchedly prone on the canvas, the brilliant Welsh featherweight Jim Driscoll broke all the club rules by racing to the ringside and berating Wells furiously, calling him a spineless coward. The Welshman was ordered away from the ring, but some distinguished members of the club had also joined in and were by now hissing, ‘Fake!’ The
New York Times
of 9 December reported, ‘Wells finally rose, and attempted to make a speech, but his voice was not audible above the excited hubbub, and anyway the spectators were in no mood to listen to explanations from their fallen hero.’

Wells never recovered from these two defeats, but the victories fast-tracked Carpentier into the leading ranks of the White Hopes. Descamps, who was never averse to taking a gamble if the potential rewards seemed high enough, challenged Gunboat Smith to come to Europe to defend the White Heavyweight Championship of the World against the young Frenchman.

The lean and rangy Smith had been making steady progress since leaving the US Navy. He had gained valuable experience early on by acting as a doughty sparring partner for Jack Johnson when the champion had been preparing for his title defence against Stanley Ketchel. Johnson’s system of counterpunching had proved too much for the inexperienced Smith, but the ex-sailor had persevered and had secured a great deal of favourable newspaper publicity when, during a sparring session, he had staggered the champion with a potent right-hand punch. After this incident Smith went on to build an impressive record as a hard-punching and resourceful heavyweight contender. He defeated such big names as Frank Moran, Fireman Jim Flynn and Jess Willard, before going on to cause a significant upset by outpointing Sam Langford over twelve rounds in Boston. There were some, however, who thought that Langford, who was still hoping for a title shot, boxed gently with his white opponent in order to persuade Jack Johnson that he would be easy meat.

When Smith defeated Al Pelkey, still shell-shocked by the ring death of his opponent Luther McCarty, he also won the White Heavyweight Championship, for what it was worth. In Europe, with Carpentier emerging fast after his defeats of Wells, it was worth quite a lot. A number of European promoters submitted offers to stage a match between the two men for Smith’s unofficial championship.

To Descamps’s disappointment the bout did not take place in France. A British promoter, Dick Burge, a former British lightweight champion now promoting at the Ring in the East End of London, secured the contest with the offer of a large purse and hired Olympia as the venue.

A huge crowd met Smith at Paddington station. The American fighter trained at Harrow, where the atmosphere in the camp was light hearted. One visitor saw Smith’s trainer, one-time leading black heavyweight Bob Armstrong, encouraging a goat to charge at his fighter. One night Smith attended a tournament in London. Not impressed by the attitude of one British fighter who showed no appetite for conflict, the American heavyweight remarked scornfully that if the bout had taken place back home the offending boxer would have been shot so full of holes that he would not be able to swim for a year.

It was a sign of the influence still being cast over the scene by Jack Johnson in exile, and the respect extended to him even by the leading White Hopes, that, when Gunboat Smith was asked off the record when he was going to fight the black champion, the white heavyweight paused reflectively and then said curtly, ‘Johnson will wait, and the longer the better.’

When asked for his plan of campaign against Carpentier, Smith said, ‘I have never seen that French guy but when I meet him at Olympia, I shall bring a right hand punch over from my hip, and if I land he will think Olympia has fallen in.’ When asked for his intentions should he lose, the pragmatic Smith answered grimly, ‘Fight again! And after that, more fighting, for that is how I live.’

The contest, held on 16 July 1914 before a sell-out crowd, was exciting and controversial. Early on Smith was floored and saved by the bell, but he came back into the fight and, with his extra weight and strength, was beginning to back Carpentier up. In the sixth round, Carpentier missed with a powerful right hand, overbalanced and tumbled to the ground. At the same time Smith threw a counterpunch. The Frenchman was on his knees and in the act of rising. Smith’s punch grazed the top of Carpentier’s head.

The impact was minimal and the blow was obviously unintentional, but technically it was a foul. Descamps was too experienced to let such a golden opportunity for victory pass him by. The manager tumbled into the ring, screaming ‘Foul!’ and protectively cuddling the head of his bewildered and embarrassed heavyweight. The referee, Eugene Corri, at once disqualified Smith for striking his opponent while he was down. Later he wrote sternly in his autobiography, ‘It was no use discussing whether Smith intended to foul him or regretted having fouled him. The fact remains that he contravened the rules of the Ring by hitting his opponent when he was down.’