The Great White Hopes (9 page)

Britt and Ketchel encountered trouble as soon as the middleweight champion started training. On the one hand, Ketchel wanted to get into shape, but he also had to put on as much weight as possible in order to look like a credible challenger. This meant hanging around the training camp eating and drinking, although Ketchel still continued with his pre-fight practice of spending hours soaking his hands in a bucket of salt brine in order to harden his fists.

Just before he went in with Johnson, Ketchel had a tune-up in a return fight with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. This time Ketchel won on a third-round knockout, although years later the loser claimed that he had been paid to lie down in order to increase the publicity for the Johnson–Ketchel fight.

Ketchel’s attempt to pad himself up and gain height in an attempt to look like a genuine heavyweight contender caused some hilarity among the fight fraternity at the weigh-in for the title bout. Jack O’Brien, now recovered from his two defeats at Ketchel’s hands, was heard to jeer from a safe distance, ‘Look at Ketchel, high-heel boots, padded shoulders, high-brim hat.’ The weights on the weighing machine were doctored by the promoter to show that Johnson weighed 13½ stone while Ketchel was declared to be 12½ stone.

Johnson had his own problems in the run-up to the fight. He stayed with Belle Schreiber at a San Francisco hotel. The spurned Hattie McClay, Johnson’s former mistress, booked into the same hotel. She took to lying in wait for Johnson and Schreiber and then leaping out to hurl drunken abuse at the pair. Once, in order to avoid the termagant, Johnson declared in his autobiography, he had to descend from his hotel room by a rope. There were even reports that finally, in order to keep the peace, the champion was sleeping with both women on alternate nights.

There was a great hope among members of the white establishment that Johnson would be defeated this time. The champion, who would not step off the sidewalk to let a white man pass, was building up his own store of folklore. Blacks felt that even if some of the stories were not true, they should have been. A favourite in the currency of gossip was that on one occasion in the Deep South the world champion had been stopped for speeding by a bullying local police chief. The officer had fined Jack Johnson fifty dollars on the spot. The black champion had handed over a hundred-dollar bill and revved up his engine. ‘Ain’t you waiting for your change?’ demanded the police chief. ‘Nope,’ answered Johnson, waving a hand dismissively and speeding off in a cloud of dust. ‘I aim to be coming back this way in an hour!’

Ketchel should have had no chance against a man 3 stone heavier and much taller, yet the fight was a sell-out, so great was the public desire to see a white fighter defeat the champion. Followers of boxing figured that the dynamic middleweight at least had a puncher’s chance against any opponent. James Butler, a leading British boxing journalist, publicised the views of Duke Mullins, an Australian who had once helped train Jack Johnson. Mullins believed that Ketchel could pull off a surprise. ‘He’s just a human buzz-saw,’ the impressed Mullins told the journalist.

The causes of what happened in the Johnson–Ketchel fight have been the subject of conjecture for over ninety years. The actual bout is easy to summarise. For eleven rounds at Colma, California, it was one of the most boring big fights for years, even by Johnson’s recent standards. The champion played with his smaller opponent, while Ketchel showed no signs of his normally aggressive style. To emphasise the choreographed aspect of the fight, early on Johnson inadvertently hit Ketchel a little too hard. The challenger swayed dazedly and would have gone down if Johnson had not held him up. ‘Where are you going, Stanley,’ chided the champion. ‘You and me ain’t finished yet.’

Then, in the twelfth round, the previously comatose Ketchel suddenly hauled off and knocked the heavyweight champion down. The blow caused a sensation, not least with Johnson who had been placidly abiding by the script. Taking his time, the now-enraged black fighter got up and, as Ketchel came forward again, he hit the middleweight vindictively with a tremendous right hand, knocking the smaller man out. A San Francisco newspaper described this final round: ‘Ketchel, suddenly rushing in, sent his right to the jaw. It struck the champion on the jaw and the big Negro fell upon his back and seemed to have injured himself. Ketchel rushed right at him, but the tricky champion was waiting for him. He swung a hard right to the jaw and quick as a flash shot a left to the body. As Ketchel fell backward Johnson sent in another right to the face and the white man went to the canvas as if shot, where he lay prone with blood gushing from his mouth.’

The point at issue was whether Willus Britt was in on the act, or whether the foolhardy lunge had been Ketchel’s unprompted brainchild. It is difficult to imagine any dastardly deed being planned without Britt being an eager participant, yet Ketchel’s record was littered with examples of independent addle-headed thinking and inept execution.

In a newspaper interview conducted in his dressing room immediately after the fight, Ketchel, who had left several of his teeth embedded in his opponent’s glove, stressed his opinion that the difference in size had been the main contributory factor in his loss. He stated his intention of remedying that matter and then, demanding a return fight, he said, ‘Tell Johnson the point is thirty pounds. When I make it I’m coming back and it will be a different story.’

At this point Wilson Mizner started to play a prominent part in the Ketchel story. He was one of the most unusual participants in the whole White Hope saga. Brawler, gambler, con man, wit and future Broadway playwright, the 6ft-2in, 15-stone Mizner followed his star with a vengeance. As a man who believed in advancement by stealth if not downright chicanery, his motto was ‘Never try to get rich in the daytime.’ Two of his uncles were generals and another was a governor, while his father had been a diplomat. The family had been dismayed when their 17-yearold scion had run away from home to become first a second to an unsuccessful fighter called Kid Savage and then a barker for a travelling medicine show.

Doc Kearns, then a mere youth but already a connoisseur of duplicity, first encountered him in the mining towns of the Klondike. At the time Mizner was a weigher in a saloon. He operated the scales upon which prospectors deposited their gold dust in exchange for gambling money. The sharp-eyed Kearns noticed that beneath the scales was an uncommonly fine carpet for a spit-and-sawdust saloon, and that it had a particularly thick nap. Settling down to enjoy the situation, Kearns watched appreciatively as, every so often, Mizner would ‘accidentally’ jog the scales, sending a faint shower of gold dust to the ground, where it was obscured in the nap of the carpet.

Determining to learn from a master, Kearns secured a part-time post as a messenger boy for the cheery and expansive Mizner. One of his duties was to retrieve the gold dust from the carpet after the saloon had closed each night. Mizner recognised in the youth a kindred spirit and took Kearns under his wing, counselling him sagely, ‘If you make a mistake, make it in favour of the house.’

It was Mizner who introduced Kearns to the handling of fighters. At the time, among other activities Mizner managed a team of boxers and a fighting bear, putting on tournaments for the miners. To begin with, Kearns had fighting ambitions himself, but he gave them up when his ingenuity was not matched by his physical strength. He did, however, secure the admiration of Mizner when the manager discovered that Kearns was increasing his hitting power by clutching two iron bars in his fists inside the gloves. Unfortunately, unless Kearns could connect within the first couple of rounds, the bars made his arms so weary that his fists would start to drop, exposing his jaw to the other fighter’s swings.

Mizner was more than just a motormouth. He had fought exhibition bouts with some of the leading heavyweights touring the mining camps, securing the sobriquet of the gentleman sparring partner. He was also perfectly content to back up his witty insults with action. He had appeared at least twice in New York courtrooms for starting bar brawls. A gem of information that he was perfectly prepared to pass on to others was, ‘Always hit a man with a bottle – a ketchup bottle preferred, for when it breaks he thinks he’s bleeding to death.’

A typically vainglorious story often told by Mizner, although no one ever corroborated it, was that on one occasion, in a San Francisco waterside saloon, he and the fighter Mysterious Billy Smith became involved in a punch-up with half a dozen longshoremen. There were several theories as to how Smith came by his nickname. The most likely is that when newspaper reports began to reach New York of the exploits of the California fighter, journalists speculated as to the background of the hitherto unknown boxer, hence his title. Doc Kearns, as usual, was more prosaic. ‘If you fought Smith, it was always a mystery what he would do to you next rub his laces across your eyes, butt you or hit you in the balls!’

In the saloon brawl, according to Mizner, at first all went well and their opponents went down like skittles. Then Mizner came up against one brawny dock worker who seemed impervious to his best punches. No matter how hard Mizner hit him the other man remained obdurately on his feet. Mizner was just beginning to wonder whether it might be the better part of valour to turn and run when Billy Smith glanced up briefly from the man he was pummelling to shout, ‘Leave him, Wilson. I knocked that one out five minutes ago!’ It transpired that Mizner’s hapless adversary had become wedged on his feet between two pieces of furniture.

In his happy-go-lucky fashion, Mizner made and lost several fortunes in the goldfields. As his admirer Kearns said, ‘He seldom had much for long, but when he had it he was a high roller.’ In the end the rough justice of frontier life got too much for him, especially after he had been tarred and feathered by the riled citizenry of one town and carried out of it on a fence rail before being deposited in the mud.

Disillusioned, Mizner returned to the clubs and saloons of New York in which he always felt most at home. It was here that he first met Stanley Ketchel. Willus Britt had just taken over as the manager of the middleweight and had brought him to the East Coast in an effort to secure the match with Jack Johnson.

Britt realised that while there was little that he did not know about the criminal fraternity of California, here in New York he would be a mere babe in a concrete wood. He needed urgently a mentor who would steer him to the right sort of evil contacts in the Atlantic Seaboard underworld of prizefighting and show him the right people to fix. Almost everyone he asked told him that there was only one jovial and unprincipled denizen of the Great White Way capable of meeting the manager’s lawless needs, and that was Wilson Mizner. Mizner knew both whom to cajole and whom to bribe.

He also had an eye for talent. When Jimmy Britt, Willus’s fighting brother, declared that he was homesick in New York and wanted to return to the West Coast, Mizner promptly solved the problem by hiring a child singer called Groucho Marx, later to achieve Hollywood fame with his manic brothers, to soothe the lightweight with frequent renditions of popular songs.

Accordingly, Britt took Mizner on board as a minor consultant. Trusting no one, throughout their relationship he maintained a close and suspicious watch on his new colleague, remembering how he himself had purloined the middleweight from O’Connor. Mizner tolerated Britt’s lack of trust because he had struck up a close affinity with Ketchel, a roisterer after his own heart. As he later wrote of the fighter, ‘I think of him as a laugh, a pair of shoulders, and a great heart.’

Their partnership got off to an unsteady start when at their first encounter in a hotel room Mizner threw his hat onto the bed, arousing the superstitious Ketchel’s wrath. After that they got on well. Mizner would join Ketchel on his regular jaunts to brothels and would match him drink for drink in the saloons. When Ketchel got too fighting drunk, Mizner could sometimes calm the boxer by reciting Kipling’s poem ‘If’ to him.

At the time Mizner was in the process of recovering from an almighty bender, even by his own opulent standards. He had recently been divorced from the aptly named ‘forty million dollar widow’, Mrs Charles T. Yerkes, and Mizner had spent his settlement from the lady in considerable haste in case she changed her mind and took legal steps to retrieve the money. Among his other transgressions, the temporary Mrs Mizner had objected to the fact that her husband had turned a whole wing of her magnificent Fifth Avenue mansion into a training camp for fighters. Now her estranged spouse was broke again and in need of a meal ticket. Enter Stanley Ketchel.

In the end, whatever the ruse Mizner may have had in mind to steal Ketchel away from his manager, it proved unnecessary. Soon after the Jack Johnson fight, Willus Britt died, it was said, of a heart attack brought on by Ketchel’s double-cross against Johnson, which had come so close to succeeding. It was certainly true that for weeks after the bout Britt had kept Ketchel’s two missing teeth in his waistcoat pocket and was in the habit of displaying them lugubriously in saloons, lamenting the fortune he had lost when his fighter had walked into Johnson’s haymaker.

In 1910, Wilson Mizner took over as Ketchel’s manager, although to most denizens of the fistic world he was always regarded more as a glorified hanger-on than a guide. Still, it made a change from his most recent occupation of self-employed confidence trickster. Not that he lacked ability in that direction. The novelist Djuna Barnes said with awe that Mizner was so attuned to trickery that from a busy street he could hear a ten-dollar bill falling onto a thick carpet ten storeys up.

He soon wondered whether he had made a mistake by entering the fight game. Ketchel had always been a reluctant trainer, preferring to spend his time disposing of the money he was earning from his purses. Britt had been tough enough and nasty enough to insist that the fighter get into condition before his bouts, but Mizner was too similar in temperament to Ketchel to have the same influence. He was only 33, to Ketchel’s 24. He began to suspect that he was being too lenient when on the first day of one training session Ketchel reeled happily into the camp accompanied by four willing young ladies.