The Great White Hopes (28 page)

The next morning the exploits of the hastily rechristened ‘Boer Rodel’ formed the main story in Bob Edgren’s influential column. Adhering to the proud traditions of the press, other writers freely purloined Edgren’s copy and by the end of the week Rodel was being hailed as a fitting contender for the world’s championship. To keep his fighter in the public eye, Johnston ordered Rodel to parade up and down Broadway in an army greatcoat.

Then, after providing his charge with a couple of set-ups in Art Nelson and Tim Logan, Johnston had to kill the goose that lay the golden egg by actually matching the South African against some reasonable opponents. The manager did not want to do this, but there was no money in matching his prospect with any more pork-and-beaners. To make matters worse, several sports writers had worked out that ‘Boer Rodel’ would only have been 12 years old when the South African war had ended, a trifle young to be a sharpshooter.

To deflect the growing tide of resentment among the writers, in 1913 Johnston hastily matched Rodel against the hard-punching Irishman Jim Coffey, managed by Billy Gibson. Coffey did the Boer’s cause no good by knocking him out in nine rounds. Johnston was not going to give up yet. For his next fight he put Rodel in with the leading White Hope, Gunboat Smith.

Even hardened fight fans regarded this as overmatching to the highest, or lowest, degree. It was plain that the master of ceremonies shared their views. Having introduced both fighters, he added that the bout would take place over ten rounds. He then glanced at the apprehensive Rodel and added caustically, ‘Or less!’

As it happened Rodel put up a brave show. He even managed to break his opponent’s nose. Despite all his enraged efforts, Smith was unable to put the dogged South African away and had to be content with the almost unanimous decisions of the newspapers at the end of their no-decision bout. After the bloody battle, the
Milwaukee Free Press
of 12 April 1913 congratulated the South African on his courage. ‘Rodel, a big, awkward fellow, came back after he had been knocked down ten times and in the last three rounds outgamed, outgeneraled and outfought the leader of the white hopes.’

Only one newspaper declared that Rodel had easily defeated Gunboat Smith. This was one in which the sports writer had not turned up at the arena, preferring to spend an evening of passion with his girlfriend. Blinded by lust, the hack had even believed Jimmy Johnston when the manager telephoned him after the bout to swear that Rodel had given the Gunboat a merciless beating over ten rounds. With his mind on other things, the hack had scribbled his report of the fight based on Johnston’s version. This was the solitary cutting that the handler used when trying to book more fights for Rodel with promoters.

Johnston might have been able to get his heavyweight bouts, but Rodel could not make the most of the opportunities presented. In a return bout with Smith he was knocked out in three rounds. He won only one more fight in 1913, and that was against an unknown on a foul. Over the next few months the fearless Johnston put the South African in with such big punchers as Fireman Jim Flynn, Jack Geyser and the up-and-coming former ranch hand Jess Willard. Most of these bouts were no-decision affairs, but Rodel was adjudged to have come off second best in the majority of them.

Only against the gigantic Jess Willard was Jimmy Johnston able to display his true managerial skills. This was Rodel’s first bout with the gigantic Kansan heavyweight. Willard was going through a bad time. In a recent fight with Bull Young, he had hit his opponent so hard that the other fighter had died.

Johnston, as callous as ever, did his best to take advantage of Willard’s distress. He managed to convince the credulous giant that Rodel had a faulty heart. If Willard should hit the South African too hard, declared the manager, Rodel might suffer the same fate as the unfortunate Bull Young. Willard accepted the story. On the night of the fight he treated his opponent with such reverent care that Rodel not only lasted the ten-round, no-decision bout, but was also declared the winner by a number of sports writers in attendance.

The preamble to the bout was too good a story to be kept a secret. The way in which Willard had been duped became common knowledge in New York, and the angry giant demanded a rematch. Rodel, ignoring the rumours that his manager had tricked Willard, believed that he had won the first fight on merit and that he could do so again. He was mistaken. In a return match Willard flattened him in six one-sided rounds.

Rodel had a few more fights and even managed to beat those two professional losers Fred McKay and Sailor White, but he knew that his brief time in the sun was over. He was knocked down so many times that he began to be known as the Diving Venus, after a wellknown aquatic stage performer. He retired from the ring in 1914, at the age of 25. Jimmy Johnston started looking for a White Hope more worthy of his efforts.

For a few weeks he thought he had found one in ‘Agile’ Andre Anderson from Chicago, whose real name was Fred Roesenilern. The heavyweight’s career did not get off to a good start when, in his first important contest, he was knocked out in five rounds in Lexington, Kentucky by the much lighter Jack Dillon. However, Anderson was barely out of his teens and New York fight followers did not much care what happened in Kentucky. Johnston had the tall youth brought to New York and ran his eye over him in the gym. The manager liked what he saw and gave the Chicago fighter a spot on a promotion he was organising.

The selected opponent was the doughty black fighter Battling Jim Johnson. Johnson was coming to the end of his career and suffered badly from arthritis in his shoulders. Jimmy Johnston paid a visit to the black fighter’s dressing room and found him huddled in a blanket, praying out loud that his shoulders would not seize up during the contest.

This was all that the manager-cum-promoter needed. Always in search of an edge for his fighters, he tiptoed away with Johnson’s second and bribed the latter to throw ice-cold water liberally from a bucket over Battling Jim Johnson’s upper body between rounds.

The hireling did as he was told. At the end of each round, when the perspiring Johnson returned to his corner he was greeted by a tub of iced water being thrown over him enthusiastically by his traitorous handler, who then refused to towel the black heavyweight down. Johnson protested long and loud at this cavalier treatment. On one occasion after the bell, he even remained sullenly in the middle of the ring and had to be ordered back by the referee to face his freezing deluge.

Even so, the experienced Johnson was able to drop Anderson three times in the first five rounds. Then the inter-round water treatment began to take effect. Johnson, suffering agonies, found it increasingly difficult to lift his arms. By the ninth round, tormented beyond endurance and with his gloves dangling at waist level, he was finding it almost impossible to defend himself. With Johnston screaming dementedly at him from his corner, Anderson moved forward and knocked his opponent out with a roundhouse right.

It was a triumph of managerial chicanery, but one Johnston found it almost impossible to repeat. Anderson’s next opponents were almost distressingly fit and well, without a hint of sciatica among them, a fact made abundantly clear when the young Chicago heavyweight was knocked out by Fred Fulton and Charley Weinert.

Anderson was given one last chance to redeem himself when he was matched against an unknown heavyweight from the Midwest called Jack Dempsey. Dempsey was starving and giving away 3 stone in weight to his much taller opponent. However, he had a friend. A young reporter called Gene Fowler had seen Dempsey fight in the sticks and had given the young heavyweight a letter of introduction to a friend of his, the famous New York sports writer Damon Runyon.

Fowler had asked Runyon to help Dempsey get started on the New York fight scene. Against Anderson this was not going to be easy. Briefly the writer considered bribery, but said to a friend, ‘We can put handcuffs on Anderson, but that’ll cost too much money.’ Instead, Runyon decided in advance to cast his newspaper’s decision in favour of the newcomer.

For a while it looked as if this would prove difficult. For the first few minutes Anderson raised Jimmy Johnston’s hopes when he smashed Dempsey twice to the canvas. This turned out to be a big mistake. Dempsey got to his feet, weathered the storm and finished the fight strongly. All the same, most onlookers thought that Anderson had done enough to win the unofficial decision. But Runyon swung the weight of his newspaper, the
New York American,
behind Dempsey, and naturally that counted for much more than the unbiased opinions of a few hundred genuine fans.

Dempsey had one more fight in the capital, sustained a couple of broken ribs but linked up with a new manager in Doc Kearns who, three years later, was to steer Dempsey to the world title. Anderson was less fortunate. The newspaper attribution of a loss to the unknown Dempsey dented his confidence and caused Johnston to lose interest in his White Hope. After the loss to Dempsey, Anderson lost four contests on first-round knockouts and won only four more fights over the next five years.

It was getting hard to see the wood for the trees. So many huge lummoxes were claiming to be White Hopes, or else to have been White Hopes, that it became difficult to sort them all out. To have been one of the contenders for Jack Johnson’s title was always worth newspaper space in a subsequent career, and many made use of this fact.

A typical example was the Californian Edgar Kennedy, a film comedian later to become famous for his ‘slow burn’, in which he reacted almost in slow motion to an on-screen insult. Kennedy claimed to have been a White Hope, who had won the Pacific Coast championship in 1912, and to have gone the distance with the up-and-coming Jack Dempsey. There is no record of Dempsey ever meeting an Edgar Kennedy, but admittedly this was during a period when the young heavyweight would ride the rods into town, go to the nearest saloon and challenge any man in the house to fight for a few dollars or a collection to be taken after the bout.

The story went that Kennedy turned up in Hollywood on the Mack Sennett studio lot in 1913, when he was 23, and when asked what he could do said he could lick anyone on the lot. This proved to be the case and Kennedy got a job from fight fan Sennett. The actor’s claims to have been a White Hope emanated from the studio publicity department, as did the erroneous claims that Edgar was the brother of true White Hope Tom Kennedy.

A more genuine claimant was Australian heavyweight Colin Bell. He came to Great Britain in 1914, supposedly the winner of over thirty contests and never having been knocked out. Actually, a year earlier he had been stopped twice inside the distance back home by Sam McVey, but McVey was so ferocious and such a scourge of white fighters that a loss to him hardly counted. Soon after his arrival in England, Bell lost on a foul to Petty Officer Nutty Curran. Again this was largely dismissed by the boxing public. If you fought Nutty, either he would foul you early on or he went so crazy that he railroaded you into fouling him, if only to get out of the ring as quickly as possible.

Eleven days later, on 4 May 1914, Colin Bell went in with the outstanding black American Joe Jeanette. It was taken as a sign of Jeanette’s confidence that only two nights earlier he had knocked out Kid Jackson in seven rounds in Paris. Everyone expected the Australian to go under early in the fight. Instead he fought doggedly and went the distance, and there were even cries of dissent when the American was given the decision after twenty rounds.

Bell’s display was so good that in June 1914 he was matched with Bombardier Billy Wells at Olympia. Wells was making one of his almost annual comebacks, this time after being stopped in the first round a few fights before by the Frenchman Georges Carpentier. The tournament was the first to be promoted by the flamboyant, well-known showman C.B. Cochran.

True to his theatrical roots Cochran made a great show of the production, with no expense spared and a well-oiled publicity machine set in motion beforehand. He gained acres of newspaper publicity when he announced that the master of ceremonies for the evening would be a parish priest wearing full canonicals. Bell was boosted as the greatest heavyweight ever to emerge from the colonies. It all worked, because on the night 10,000 seats were sold at prices ranging from five shillings to five guineas.

Bell showed no sign that he was fit to be in the ring with even a faded White Hope like Billy Wells. The Australian was knocked out in two rounds. Spectators wondered out loud how a man who could push Joe Jeanette all the way could have crumbled so quickly before the Bombardier. The answer came some time later from hints dropped by an indiscreet Joe Jeanette. The black fighter let it be known to friends that he had been paid to make Bell look as good as possible in their contest, to build up interest in a Wells–Bell bout. Whether the bribe came from C.B. Cochran or Wells’s connections was not made clear.

The man who did best out of the bout between Bell and Wells was not C.B. Cochran, who soon followed Hugh D. McIntosh into a disillusioned exit from boxing promotion, but a Liverpool comic called Harry Wheldon. For years afterwards he toured the halls in a sketch called White Hope. Wheldon appeared as a gormless heavyweight, together with a stooge acting as his manager, challenging ‘any lady . . . any lady . . .?’ in the hall to a contest. Should any virago show any signs of accepting the challenge, Wheldon would cower behind his manager and implore him, ‘Tell ’em what I did to Colin Bell!’ Then he would add in a stage whisper, ‘But don’t tell ’em what Colin Bell did to me!’

Something of a laughing stock in Britain, Bell decided to abandon ferocious European heavyweights and snide comics and, like so many others, try his luck in North America. He did little better there, being on the receiving end in no-decision bouts with Porky Flynn and Battling Levinsky in New York and Gunboat Smith in Montreal. Bell then abandoned his ring career and returned to Australia, presumably in the fervent hope that Harry Wheldon was not contemplating a world tour.