The Great White Hopes (6 page)

He also bought his mother a fine house in Chicago and started to indulge his passion for fast and expensive motor cars. He dressed expensively and carried a gold-topped cane. A proud and defiant man, Johnson refused to conform to the white public’s picture of the self-effacing manner in which a black man should conduct himself.

His attitude during the ring exhibitions he was fighting in this period also infuriated many white spectators, especially his habit of condescending to his opponents and talking back to ringsiders. Nevertheless, his physique and boxing ability were generally admired. The
New York Times
of 26 December 1908 said, ‘Not since the days of James J. Corbett has the prize ring seen so perfect a looking boxer as Johnson. Long and lithe and graceful, he is as true as an arrow in placing his blows.’

Older fight followers were reminded of a former heavyweight champion, the rambunctious John L. Sullivan, who had been a considerably riotous liver and womaniser. But John L. had been white and his activities had been regarded with a tolerant eye. Jack Johnson was black and showing every sign of not knowing his place. It was a hard concept for the public to deal with. Other leading black heavyweight fighters of the time, like Sam Langford, Joe Jeanette and Sam McVey, were generally considered ‘good niggers’, humble in public and content to batter one another half to death for minuscule purses, leaving white fighters unscathed to be brought along gently by their managers. Johnson wanted to be treated as an equal.

Equality cost, and Johnson soon found himself in need of fresh fights to fund his lifestyle. By now the White Hope campaign was just getting under way, and there were big bucks to be made by entering the ring with some of the first batch. The champion knew that none of them stood any chance against him. He celebrated the fact by buying a new fast car – a 690 Thompson Flyer which he crashed at least once – and spent much time at the racetracks and in saloons and brothels. Even as a wealthy champion, however, it was later reported in one of Johnson’s court cases that because of the colour of his skin the heavyweight was still denied admittance to the Everleigh Club, a luxurious house of ill repute.

Later, when he was on trial on a trumped-up charge of transporting a prostitute across state lines, witnesses gave detailed descriptions of the black champion’s efforts to gatecrash the highclass brothel. The club was run by two sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, who had invested $35,000, inherited from their father, in a fifty-room mansion, which they transformed into a house of pleasure furnished with impeccable taste. The sisters served cordon bleu meals at fifty dollars a head, while the services of the decorous, well-mannered girls started at fifty dollars.

The Everleigh Club survived for eleven years, mainly because the sisters paid protection money to two corrupt Chicago politicians, ‘Bathhouse’ John Coughlin and ‘Hinky Dink’ Mike Kenna. So powerful were these ward leaders that not even Jack Johnson could break the club’s colour bar, and he was forced to retreat from the door. Johnson did, however, score one minor victory over the club. He managed to entice away Belle Schreiber, one of the working girls there, and make her his mistress. He was aided in this endeavour by his then manager, George Little, a white saloon keeper and failed politician. The champion also appointed another white hanger-on, Sig Hart, to assist Little.

Of course, it had never been easy to be a black professional athlete in the USA. In 1885, one of the first professional black baseball teams had been forced to call itself the Cuban Giants in order to be able to play in towns where black participants would not be welcome. It was just about all right to be an exotic Cuban at a time when black athletes could not find work. Many attempts were made to form black baseball leagues between 1887 and 1919. Almost all of them failed.

This is the climate in which Johnson had to live, and, because he refused to conform to the image of a ‘good nigger’, the demand for a white heavyweight to beat him intensified once he had humiliated Victor McLaglen in his first bout as champion. In 1909, the young hopefuls were still being extracted by managers from factories and farms, the Army and the Navy and anywhere else offering the prospect of a 6ft, 14½-stone, preferably naive prospect willing to be tutored in the fistic arts and not too clever at reckoning his share of the purse money. So at first, his challenges were mostly established white fighters.

This was true of the second of Johnson’s opponents, a real glutton for punishment who helped promote the fight himself. His real name was Joseph Francis Aloysius O’Hagen, but he fought for seventeen years and through 181 bouts as Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Unlike Victor McLaglen, who had been little more than an enthusiastic novice, Johnson’s second adversary was a professional to his fingertips. In 1901 he had visited Great Britain, where he won eighteen fights in a year, hardly breaking into a sweat. During this tour he was rather taken with being introduced by one English master of ceremonies as ‘Philadelphia’ Jack O’Brien, and he retained that nomenclature for the rest of his career. He was a resourceful, streetwise character and a skilled boxer, with a good left jab and a florid turn of phrase, both of which made him popular with reporters. Once, when asked what he thought of the great and much-avoided black fighter Sam Langford, O’Brien replied seriously, ‘When he appeared on the scene of combat you knew you were cooked.’

In 1906, O’Brien became one of the few professional boxers to appear in newspapers other than on the sports or crime pages. He achieved a brief notoriety on a stopover in New York City when, because of his avocation, he was refused admission to a succession of good hotels. With his huge shoulders and a nose spread magnificently over his face it would have been difficult to mistake O’Brien for a librarian, and boxers were
personae non gratae
in respectable company. The
New York American
commented drily on the matter in an editorial, which with some hyperbole referred to the champion as ‘the most eminent professor of the squared circle in the United States’, and went on to sneer, ‘yet when, with his valet and business manager and the rest of the staff necessary to the comfort and dignity of a champion heavyweight, he drove from hotel to hotel on Fifth Avenue, he was politely, but firmly, asked to seek some other spot, or, in the language of his associates in his own profession, “to skidoo”’.

By the time Johnson won the heavyweight title, O’Brien’s career was coming to an end. He had plenty to look back on. He had won the world light-heavyweight title by knocking out Bob Fitzsimmons. The title fight had been in the nature of a grudge match, as in an earlier no-decision bout, Fitzsimmons was convinced, only the intervention of the police had saved his opponent from a knockout. ‘I had it on him when I boxed him in Philadelphia until he yelped for help from the police and the bluecoats came to his assistance,’ claimed the Cornish fighter sourly.

O’Brien paid little attention to his light-heavyweight title, preferring to look for good-money bouts among the big fighters. He had even fought twice for the heavyweight championship, in Los Angeles in 1906 and 1907, drawing with and then losing to Tommy Burns, a heavyweight as diminutive, shrewd and cunning as the experienced O’Brien himself.

Those bouts with Burns displayed O’Brien’s sense of realism in spades. The first fight, refereed by retired champion James J. Jeffries, started with mutual tantrums when O’Brien objected to a curious trusslike belt being worn by Burns to protect, he claimed, an old injury. O’Brien objected hotly, declaring that the belt was just another example of Burns’s gamesmanship and was an added source of protection for the champion. The challenger then tried to tear the belt from Burns’s waist. In turn Burns tried to hoist down O’Brien’s shorts. The dignified James J. Jeffries, who had been looking on in amazement, stepped forward and ordered Burns back to his dressing room to get rid of the support.

The actual fight was an anticlimax. It ended in a tame and apparently overrehearsed draw. The next day, a sheepish Jeffries, fed up with the whole tawdry affair, disclosed that he had been approached beforehand by both contestants to announce the verdict of a draw if the action had seemed at all close. Later, O’Brien, who had a tendency for garrulity, admitted, ‘The promoter, (Bill) McCarey, had figured it out that, if we fought a spirited draw, he could bill the return match during fiesta week and make a small fortune by charging top prices.’ To call the ensuing bout spirited would be an exaggeration, but the controversy gave the encounter far more publicity than the lack of action in the ring had merited. A return match was set up for six months later.

The second fight caused a sensation before it had even started. Burns walked to the centre of the ring and shouted self-righteously to the crowd, ‘Gentlemen, I declare that all bets that have been made up to now are off! I agreed to lose to O’Brien but now we are both in the ring I want to tell you that I am here to win!’

There was such a sensation that when the startled O’Brien tried to speak he was howled down. The fight went the full twenty rounds’ distance and was not much better than their first arid encounter had been. The reporter for the
Milwaukee Free Press
covering the fight wrote: ‘The affair grew monotonous. It was either a clinch with Burns . . . or else O’Brien circled the ring with Burns standing in the center looking at him and the crowd hooting. In the last round Burns stood quite still several times and begged O’Brien to come and fight him.’ Burns emerged a clear winner to retain his title. No weights were announced before the bout, but it was believed that both men scaled below the 12½ stone light-heavyweight limit. This meant that technically the Canadian was now also the world champion at the class immediately below heavyweight, but he never bothered to claim the championship.

Afterwards, an embittered O’Brien put his side of the sordid story to anyone who could be bothered to listen to him. Apparently he had run into Burns in a cigar store soon after their first bout. According to the challenger, Burns had tried to persuade him to take a dive in the eleventh round of their next bout. Virtuously, O’Brien had refused the offer. Ever adaptable, Burns had then offered to lie down himself if he was paid enough.

The second offer was of much more significance, as O’Brien pointed out self-righteously. ‘This interested me, purely from a business point of view, of course. I could see that there was plenty to be made as heavyweight champion, so I agreed to pay Burns $3,500 to lose. He agreed, knowing that I would ease up in training.’ O’Brien paused, almost at a loss for words at the enormity of Burns’s chicanery. ‘He then ratted when we got into the ring,’ he concluded, obviously shocked by the extent to which depravity could exist in the human soul.

However, approaching the Johnson bout, O’Brien had reason to believe that he was on a lucky streak. In New York in March 1909, as a warm-up for his bout with Johnson, O’Brien went in with the fearsome Stanley Ketchel, one of the greatest middleweights of all time, in what was billed as a ten-round, no-decision contest, in which a contestant could only lose if he were knocked out. For nine rounds of their contest O’Brien jabbed Ketchel silly. Then, towards the end of the final round, the swinging Ketchel finally caught up with his tormentor. Describing the sensation after he had been struck, O’Brien said: ‘It just seemed as if all the lights went out.’ As he fell, his head struck the edge of the resin box, which his second, Kid McCoy, had inadvertently left in the ring. ‘It did not help my condition any,’ said O’Brien with atypical understatement.

However, as the referee’s count reached eight, with O’Brien draped helplessly over the ropes like a heap of washing tossed over a line, the bell went to end the bout. Most reporters present agreed that O’Brien had done enough in the early rounds to get their unofficial decisions, and Ketchel was left ruing the fact that he had not caught up with his elusive opponent two or three seconds earlier.

On the other hand, O’Brien, now approaching the veteran stage, decided that he was on a roll. To many, after fourteen years in the ring, he might have appeared a ‘shot’ fighter, but he still had enough of a reputation to draw in the crowds, given the right opponent. He was also extremely short of money. The only way for a big man to earn a decent purse in 1909 was to go in with Jack Johnson.

O’Brien decided to ignore the disparity in size and give it a go. ‘Following the Ketchel bout, I returned to Philadelphia, where I did a little promoting, bringing heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in for a six-rounder,’ he said.

It was not quite as simple as O’Brien made it sound. Johnson had no objection to going in with a much lighter man and one who notoriously had no great punch, and the fact that at 30, and after many hard fights, his prospective opponent was coming to the end of his career did no harm either. Even so, the champion was aware of his bargaining power. He knew that he had the whip hand in any project concerning his title.

First he insisted on the bout being a no-decision contest, knowing that even at his best O’Brien would never have had a chance of knocking him out. Then Johnson demanded a guarantee of $5,000, an exorbitant sum for six three-minute rounds with no likelihood of the title changing hands. O’Brien bit the bullet and agreed. At this point Johnson really started to turn the screw. Knowing that O’Brien had gone on record as disliking blacks in general and the champion in particular, he insisted on O’Brien making the long journey to a sleazy saloon in the black district of Pittsburgh to sign the contracts. O’Brien swallowed his pride, submitted to being patronised by the champion, and dourly made the two-way trip.

The challenger then went into training for the bout; supremely confident, Johnson did not put himself out to the same extent.

O’Brien was aided in his preparation by one of Philadelphia’s more eccentric sporting patrons. Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle was a banking millionaire who loved boxing and boxers. He was noted for causing chaos among those members of the noble art who were foolish enough to let him near them. ‘He was in Jack O’Brien’s corner with me once,’ reminisced manager Billy McCarney wonderingly. ‘He kept getting his foot stuck in the water bucket.’