The Great White Hopes (8 page)

Kaufmann was reluctant to take on Johnson, and talked selfrighteously of drawing the colour line. He said that his parents did not like the idea of his taking on a black fighter. In one interview he claimed that he would much rather box the white former Olympic heavyweight champion Sam Berger. Kaufmann also criticised Johnson for the manner of his display against Tony Ross.

In the event the San Francisco fighter hardly laid a glove on the untrained and patently out-of-condition Johnson. By the eighth round Kaufmann was out on his feet. For the last three rounds the champion literally held the big man up, refusing to let him go down. At the final bell, Johnson half-carried the exhausted Kaufmann back to his corner and gently deposited him on his stool.

The
San Francisco Call,
which had touted Kaufmann as a probable winner before the bout, had no doubt about the victor. Its headlines the morning after the fight screamed:

Kaufmann Like a Babe in the Grip of Johnson
The Black Champion Plays with the Blacksmith
Johnson Declares Opponent Is Game.

Kaufmann went on fighting for another five or six years, mostly in no-decision bouts. After the Jack Johnson experience his confidence was ruined. He was knocked out by fellow White Hopes Fireman Jim Flynn and Luther McCarty and won only two more fights. A year after his attempt to dethrone the champion, Kaufmann was magnanimously employed by Johnson as a sparring partner
.

4

THE HOBO

I
n 1909, Jack Johnson was having no trouble outclassing his opponents in the ring, but he needed a credible and charismatic opponent to start making real money from his championship title. While he waited for a young hopeful to be allowed out of the gymnasium on his own by his manager, he was approached by an unlikely challenger, but one who actually seemed capable of bringing suckers in through the turnstiles.

So precious were prospective White Hopes that managers were not above stealing them from one another. In fact, most managers were not above any nefarious act. One of the first fighters to be treated like a parcel in transit was the doughty middleweight Stanley Ketchel. Joe Coffman stole Ketchel from any or all of half a dozen barflies who had considered themselves to be custodians of the middleweight’s future. Willus Britt stole Ketchel from Coffman, and Wilson Mizner was about to steal Ketchel from Britt, only the latter died first. This must have disappointed Mizner, who had a larcenous soul and would almost certainly rather have procured Ketchel by chicanery than just inheriting him.

It must be admitted that Ketchel was worth the bother. A hard, handsome, relentless, big-punching fighter of Polish/American descent, he is still rated by some experts as one of the best middleweights of all time. Born Stanislaus Kiecal in 1886 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was only 12 he discovered the body of his murdered father in a hayloft. Only a short time afterwards Ketchel’s mother was also murdered. The boy ran away from what was left of his home and headed west, hoping to become a cowboy. He rode the rods, panhandled, stole, did odd jobs and lived and fought in hobo shanty towns. He grew up fast and as a teenager ended up in the mining town of Butte, Montana. Here he visited a drinking joint called the Copper Queen, got into a dispute with the bouncer, beat him up and was given the dispossessed man’s job by the owner.

One night, a local lightweight boxer drinking in the joint was impressed by the manner in which Ketchel knocked out a troublemaker. He took the willing youth to a local gymnasium and instructed Ketchel in the basic points of boxing. Once the bewildered youngster could get his head around the fact that there could be rules for fighting, he took to the noble art with alacrity.

He had a chance to display his new-found skills when a showman called Texas John Halliday visited Butte, bringing with him his fighter, Jack Tracey. Halliday offered ten dollars to anyone who could go four rounds with his man. Ketchel was one of the first to respond.

Before an enthusiastic crowd of miners he knocked Tracey flat. This disappointed Halliday greatly. It was his habit to stand behind curtains on the dimly lit stage with a small sandbag in his hand; whenever one of Tracey’s opponents hove into view, Halliday would shade the odds in favour of his man by bringing the sandbag down viciously on the head of the challenger, leaving Tracey to claim yet another knockout victory. However, on this occasion, Tracey did not even complete the full circuit to bring Ketchel within reach of the flailing bag of sand. He ran into one of the first punches the local man threw and lost all interest in the proceedings.

Later, one of Ketchel’s publicity men tried to embellish the story by claiming that his man had actually swung Tracey round when they reached the curtain, so that the booth fighter took the impact of Halliday’s sandbag instead. It is unlikely. At this stage of his burgeoning career Ketchel required little assistance.

His showing against Tracey was enough to make Ketchel embrace professional fighting with alacrity. He became very popular at halls all over Montana and gave his career a tremendous boost by going the distance in a four-round, no-decision contest with Tommy Ryan, the middleweight champion of the world, who was on a whistle-stop tour of the sticks to cash in on his title.

Ketchel’s sterling performance against the champion was the cause of a heated public dispute between Ryan and his manager Jack Curley. Ryan pointed out between gritted teeth that the object of such tours was for audiences to see him toying lazily with local no-hopers, not trying to cope with unleashed wildcats. Curley responded that he had not expected to come across such a two-fisted terror so far from any centre of civilisation.

Ketchel took the hint. If he wanted to progress in the ring, he would have to base himself in one of the bigger cities. He decided to try his luck in Sacramento. By now he could have afforded to buy a train ticket, but old habits die hard and he dodged the railroad guards and risked his life by riding the rods to the West Coast.

His reputation preceded him, and he found a gaggle of would-be managers jostling for the privilege of signing him up. Ketchel had already had a manager or two, but out of sight, out of mind. As Doc Kearns, later one of the great boxing managers and a man who was just setting out in the game himself at the time, said, ‘It was an era in which a fighter could have half a dozen managers in the course of a year. He hit town, dug himself up a manager who kept him eating until he fought, then took off for new precincts.’

In Ketchel’s case, the lucky man was a San Francisco photographer called O’Connor. O’Connor latched on to Ketchel, gave him the ring name of the ‘Fighting Hobo’ and promptly matched the 21-year-old against Joe Thomas, generally regarded as the best middleweight since the retirement of Tommy Ryan. Ketchel and Thomas fought a blistering draw at Colma, a fight town south of San Francisco, one of the few which allowed bouts to go a distance of forty-five rounds. Ketchel at once demanded a rematch and asked for the loser’s end of the purse to be advanced to him, so that he could bet it on himself to knock Thomas out.

His confidence was justified. Billy Roche, who refereed the contest, said of the return match in the
New York Times,
‘Never in my forty-five years’ ring experience did I see so fiercely fought and so cyclonic a contest as that which ended with Ketchel knocking out Thomas in the thirty-second round.’

By now the only boxer with a claim to equal Ketchel’s to the vacant world middleweight title was Jack ‘Twin’ Sullivan. When Ketchel challenged him, Jack said that the Fighting Hobo would have to beat his brother Mike first. This breach of fistic etiquette annoyed Ketchel, who told a reporter waspishly that the twin’s action reminded him of that of a Civil War patriot who had sent all his relations to the front line to be killed while he stayed at home and prayed for victory.

When they met, Ketchel showed his displeasure by knocking Mike out in the first round. He then defeated Jack Sullivan and claimed the world championship. This aroused the ire of another claimant, Billy Papke, and he and Ketchel fought four times, each bout bloodier than the one before. Ketchel won the first contest, lost the second, then took the third and fourth. The loss was due mainly to the fact that when at the start of the bout Ketchel trustingly extended his glove for the customary handshake, Papke hauled off and hit the Fighting Hobo with a left and a following right, practically closing Ketchel’s eyes. Dazed, Ketchel fought on to the twelfth round, when the referee, former heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries, stopped the fight. When they met for their third and fourth encounters, Ketchel was ready for Papke. There were no pre-match handshakes.

Ketchel’s transparent ability to learn from his mistakes and the fact that he was now undisputed middleweight champion, attracted the attention of Willus Britt. Willus was the brother and manager of Jimmy Britt, a formidable lightweight of the time. Jimmy was supposed to be tough, but he was a milksop compared with his brother. On one occasion, when Jimmy was taking a beating in the ring and had been floored, Willus, from the safety of the ringside, hurled abuse at his brother for not fighting back, quivering with self-righteousness and screaming, ‘Get up, you unnatural son of a bitch! Have you no regard for my feelings?’ It was Britt who was supposed to have devised the so-called Californian Native Son decision, whereby any Californian boxing on home soil automatically got the decision if he was still alive at the end of the contest.

Britt’s major flaw as a manager was that he was extremely superstitious. Before making any major decision he took out a battered pack of playing cards and dealt them according to a selftaught course of fortune-telling. He had to see how the cards would fall before committing himself to any course of action. He would never reveal the system behind his routine, so not even his closest associates ever knew what the cards were telling the manager, or whether he was ignoring their message if it meant that he might lose a buck or two.

O’Connor was so paranoid, with some justification as it turned out, about having Ketchel stolen from him that he would lock his charge in his hotel room at night. This was an almost ridiculously simple challenge for an operator of Britt’s class. He absconded with the middleweight one evening by the simple measure of tiptoeing up the hotel’s fire escape and bringing the credulous fighter down with him. Some reports had it that the fighter was clad only in a dressing gown as he fled into the night with his persuasive new handler.

One of the incentives that the fast-talking Britt had used to seduce Ketchel away from O’Connor and justify the 40 per cent of the fighter’s purse that he demanded was the promise that he would arrange a series of New York fights for him. He was as good as his word. However, he also decided that Ketchel needed a change of image. Britt was too fastidious to want to be the manager of a hobo fighter. He decided to go upmarket. At first he thought of passing off his hopeful as a virginal college student fighting his way to an education, but taking into account the young boxer’s amiably battered face and limited vocabulary, he decided to drop that idea.

Instead, on the train in he made the amenable Ketchel change into a facsimile of a cowboy’s garb, including spurs and a ten-gallon hat. Thus attired, the docile but embarrassed champion was taken from newspaper to newspaper and introduced from the ring at a dozen different clubs and smokers.

The resultant publicity worked. In March 1909, Ketchel was matched with light-heavyweight champion Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, and they had their celebrated ten-round, no-decision bout, with the final bell saving O’Brien when the count had reached eight.

His effort against the heavier O’Brien made Ketchel a major attraction, which was just what Britt had been hoping for. There was comparatively little money to be made among the lighter weights. The big dollars lay with the big men. It was something Britt had been mulling over ever since the quest for a White Hope had started. But Britt had his own plans. While other managers were finding giants and trying to turn them into fighters, Britt had found himself a fighter and would turn him into a small giant. Carefully he revealed his plan to the fascinated fighter. Ketchel would put on a few pounds and challenge Jack Johnson for the heavyweight title.

Ketchel, who was in fighting mainly because he liked hurting people but was never averse to making more money, was quick to see the merits in his manager’s plan. There was, however, one major flaw, which he pointed out with some trepidation. There was no way in a thousand years that he would be able to beat the huge and multitalented Johnson.

Patiently Britt agreed with his protégé, although he was a little hurt that Ketchel should think that he had not covered that contingency. Of course, they would have to bring Johnson into the reckoning and persuade him to go easy with the middleweight. It should not be too difficult. In his previous fights in 1909, with McLaglen, O’Brien, Ross and Kaufmann, the champion had shown a marked disinclination to go into training. Against a feared and experienced adversary like Ketchel he would have to give up his roistering and get into condition, something he loathed.

On the other hand, if he could be persuaded that the wraps were on and that the fierce Ketchel would present no threat, then Johnson could continue with his hedonistic way of life, turn up for the title defence and go lazily through the motions, much as he had done against McLaglen and the others.

All that remained was to persuade Johnson, and Britt was a past master at the art. Years later, in a newspaper article George Little, Johnson’s manager, described the behind-the-scenes negotiations leading up to the contest. Willus Britt got in touch with the champion and pointed out that an ever-increasing aspect of a fighter’s purse was the motion-picture rights. If Johnson and Ketchel were to spar amicably for the duration of the bout, he pointed out correctly, the resultant film of the twenty-round bout would fill theatres all over the world and bring in a lot of money for both fighters. Johnson needed little persuasion to go along with the scam.