The Great White Hopes (31 page)

There were 16,000 spectators at the racecourse, including many women, cabinet ministers and provincial governors, as well as many American tourists. One odd sight was a detachment of uniformed Cuban cavalry soldiers seated on their horses in perfect formation throughout the fight. The 32-year-old Willard entered the ring in a long robe with a ten-gallon sombrero on his head.

Jack Johnson had won the title on a cloudless day outside Sydney on Boxing Day 1908. He was to lose it on an equally beautiful day outside Havana, 6 years and 3 months later. Johnson may have been 37 years old but he made the running from the start. In the earlier rounds he outboxed his much larger opponent and on one occasion in the seventh round even rushed him into the ropes and scored with heavy right-hand punches.

By the fifteenth round Willard was beginning to get on top. As usual he fought methodically behind his telegraph pole of a left hand, seldom getting involved in exchanges of punches. The
New York Times
reporter at ringside wrote approvingly, ‘Willard played a game in the ring that was declared necessary to beat Johnson, namely, to make the latter act as aggressor.’ After twenty rounds Johnson was showing signs of exhaustion. By the twenty-fifth he sent a message from his corner to his wife Lucille, telling her to leave the stadium.

In the twenty-sixth round Willard landed a fierce right to his opponent’s jaw, knocking him to the canvas. Johnson rolled over, lay on his back and raised an arm to shield his eyes from the rays of the sun as he was counted out.

The
Anaconda-Montana
of 6 April 1915 reported the closing moments of the fight. ‘Jess rushed in again, forcing the Negro into Willard’s corner, where the finish came. Johnson was slow in guarding and his strong, youthful opponent hooked a swinging left to the body. The fading champion’s legs quivered and again the towering giant feinted for the body. Johnson dropped his guard and Willard won the title with a quick hard swing to the exact point of the jaw.’

Johnson’s seconds helped their man to his feet and supported him back to his corner. Johnson sat there for almost five minutes before he seemed to have recovered enough to stand up again. Some excited spectators tried to invade the ring, but they were beaten back with the flats of machetes wielded by rural guards.

The wisdom of Willard’s backers in holding out for a forty-fiveround distance for the championship was exemplified when the
Philadelphia Tribune
interviewed referee Jack Welsh immediately after the bout. He agreed that he would have declared Johnson the winner on points after the twentieth round. ‘I think that Johnson put up one of the most masterful battles that I have ever witnessed,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t have lost in the shorter route.’ Johnson accepted his defeat gracefully at the time, saying, ‘Willard was too much for me. I just didn’t have it.’

There was little sympathy for the fallen champion. The
Philadelphia Tribune
of 10 April 1915 summed up the feelings of many whites when it said of Johnson, ‘He has done the African people in all parts of the universe more injury since Reno, 4 July 1910, than any other living man.’ The
New York Times
of 6 April 1915 congratulated Jess Willard, the new champion, for having restored fistic white supremacy.

13

THE CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS DEPART

W
ith big Jess Willard enthroned as Heavyweight Champion of the World, the search for a White Hope could be abandoned. The participants in the crusade mostly went on to other things.

A year after the Cuban fight, Jack Johnson caused something of a stir when he claimed to have been bribed to lose to Willard by Jack Curley, the promoter. The former champion said he had been offered $50,000 and a promise that he would be allowed back without penalty into the USA. Curley denied the charge hotly.

Opinion was divided as to the validity of Johnson’s claim. Many said that he had been old and fat at the Cuba Oriental Racecourse and had been defeated on merit by a bigger, younger and stronger opponent. On the other hand, an expert of the calibre of Ted Kid Lewis, the English future Welterweight Champion of the World, had trained with Johnson in Havana and always said that a Johnson fighting flat out would have beaten Willard.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Johnson returned to Europe and had a few desultory fights around the world. In Spain in 1916, he engaged in a bout that was bizarre even by his standards. He went into the ring against Arthur Cravan, an extremely minor English poet who for a time had been editor of an avant-garde Parisian magazine called
Maintenant
. Cravan had fled from France upon the outbreak of war and dared not return to Great Britain in case he should be called up to serve in the armed forces.

Like much of the human flotsam drifting around war-torn Europe, Cravan ended up in Spain. Here, in 1916, he met an equally penniless Jack Johnson. In a desperate effort to raise money the two men agreed to fight one another, Cravan claiming to be a leading British heavyweight, although he had never before entered a boxing ring. In an effort to gain fistic credibility he was billed, quite erroneously, as the nephew of Oscar Wilde.

A large crowd turned out in Barcelona to see a visibly shaking Cravan knocked out in the first round without throwing a punch. The crowd rioted, demanding its money back. Fires were started in the stadium and Johnson had to be locked up in a local police station overnight for his own protection. Cravan, an altogether wilier character, had had the foresight to demand his purse in advance and used it to purchase a steamship ticket to the safety of the USA. The poet was on the high seas before Jack Johnson had even been released from his cell.

The former champion hung on disconsolately in Barcelona, going through his savings. He pestered influential American visitors, begging them to help him return home. In 1918 he encountered Fiorello La Guardia, a future crusading mayor of New York City, in a Barcelona barber shop. La Guardia was a wartime officer in the US Army Air Service, present in Spain on a military mission. In his autobiography
The Making of an Insurgent,
La Guardia recounted how Johnson begged to be allowed to join his country’s army. He followed up their meeting with a pathetic letter in which he said, ‘There’s no position you could get for me that I would consider too rough or too dangerous. I am willing to fight and die for my own country.’ La Guardia did what he could but was told that Johnson was too much of a diplomatic hot potato for his request to be entertained.

Finally, in 1920, Johnson returned wearily to the USA and surrendered to the federal authorities. He was sentenced to a year and a day in Leavenworth Penitentiary, where he helped out with the boxing programme. Upon his release he attempted a ring comeback, and indeed he only finally retired from boxing at the age of 50.

For the rest of his life he toured with theatrical shows, gave lectures and worked in a flea circus. He met up once more with Jess Willard. This was in Los Angeles in 1944. The two men sat side by side in a sideshow booth where, for the price of a 25-cent ticket,spectators could ask them about their controversial title fight in Havana. Two years later, Jack Johnson died in a car crash.

The White Hopes went down various paths. The very first to fight Johnson after he had won the championship had been the Briton Victor McLaglen. After he retired from the ring, boxing continued to be good to him. Some time after his retirement, at a loose end, he was hanging around the National Sporting Club, a meeting place for wealthy and influential patrons of the noble art. Here he happened to bump into I.B. Davidson, a film producer who was looking for a brawny, tough-looking character to play a prizefighter called Alf Truscott in a 1920 silent costume melodrama entitled
The Call of the Road
. McLaglen, with his battered features, certainly looked the part and was never one to turn down a challenge. To his surprise, not only did he enjoy making films, he was actually rather good at it.

He was cast as an action hero in a number of British films and was then recruited by Hollywood, where he became a considerable hit in silent movies. His career in talkies was given a boost when he won an Oscar as Gypo Nolan, an informer betraying a comrade for the price of the boat fare to America, in the 1935 film
The Informer,
set in Ireland. McLaglen’s life had been so varied and interesting that it was probably inevitable that, unlike more cosseted actors, more than once he would appear to re-enact episodes from it. In
Klondike Annie
(1936), for example, he supported Mae West by playing a hard man engaged in the Alaskan gold rush, which must have brought back memories of his own prospecting days in the mining camps of Ontario. Similarly, in
The Lost Patrol
(1934), he commanded a group of soldiers besieged by tribesmen in the desert, an echo of his own infantry-fighting days in Mesopotamia.

Victor McLaglen spent more than 30 years acting steadily in Hollywood, ending his days as a blustering character actor, often in westerns directed by his old friend and mentor John Ford. After he had become a wealthy man he did not forget his hard times as a down-and-out. It became his practice from time to time to tour Skid Row in Los Angeles, round up a gang of drunks and throw a party for them, often lasting several days, at the lofty Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Another of the early White Hopes had been Jack O’Brien. In his retirement, the Philadelphia Irishman was often sought out by other fighters eager to learn his tricks of the trade. In 1924, when O’Brien was 45, he was hired by François Descamps to show Georges Carpentier, who was about to fight Gene Tunney for the light-heavyweight title, how to counter his prospective opponent’s antisocial ploy of jabbing his thumb into the other fighter’s eye.

The veteran was only too pleased to pass on his knowledge of the more nefarious aspects of the fight game. Unfortunately for the Frenchman, O’Brien’s demonstrated counter consisted of smashing his fist into Carpentier’s Adam’s apple. The blow knocked the pride of France down, and it was days before he could speak above a whisper. O’Brien then embarked upon a lucrative career in passing on his ring knowledge as a New York boxing coach. He specialised in giving gentle, well-paid workouts to middle-aged businessmen who wanted to boast that they had been in with a former world champion.

James J. Jeffries, who had engaged with Johnson in the ‘Fight of the Century’ in Reno, went through a bad period after losing to the black champion. For a time he started drinking heavily and roistering. He came close to death in an automobile accident when a car driven by racing champion Barney Oldfield in which he was a passenger went off the road at high speed. This seemed to give Jeffries pause for thought, because soon afterwards he went back to his ranch and its peaceful alfalfa. Later he lost a great deal of his fortune in the stock-market crash. At the age of 50, bald and fat, he was forced to tour giving sparring exhibitions with an old opponent, Tom Sharkey.

In 1932, he converted a barn on his property into a fight hall and became a fairly successful boxing and wrestling promoter, putting on bouts much patronised by Hollywood stars in the stadium known as Jeff’s Barn. He died in 1953, at the age of 77.

The First World War brought a hiatus to the careers of many European White Hopes. Georges Carpentier became a hero, flying a small aircraft on scouting missions at low levels over the German lines. He was twice wounded and decorated, winning both the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur. Between 1915 and 1918, he fought in the ring only three times. After the war he resumed his ring career and won the Light Heavyweight Championship of the World, although there were suspicions that the champion, Battling Levinsky, had gone down rather quickly in order to boost his opponent’s American record. Carpentier’s judgement, when earlier he had refused to fight Jack Johnson – namely, that he was too small to go in with the really top-class heavyweights – was proved accurate when he fought Jack Dempsey for the World Heavyweight Championship in 1921. The Frenchman fought bravely but was knocked out in four rounds in the world’s first million-dollar gate. Fittingly, Carpentier retired from competitive boxing in 1926, by then a wealthy man.

Other fighters did not survive the war as successfully as Carpentier. Iron Hague, the first English White Hope, joined the Army and was badly gassed in the trenches at Ypres in 1915. As a result he remained in poor health for the rest of his life. After the war he worked in the Mexborough steelworks, dying penniless in 1951. Shortly before his death he commented sadly, ‘I have never asked for anything in my life, but things are a little hard sometimes.’ The only possessions of value that he left were the boxing gloves with which he fought Sam Langford, with several dried spots of Langford’s blood on them.

George Mitchell, who had challenged Carpentier to a private bout in Paris, became a lieutenant in the Black Watch and was killed in France by a grenade. John Hopley, the rugby international touted briefly as an amateur White Hope, won a DSO in action and was then put in charge of physical training at Sandhurst, where world flyweight champion Jimmy Wilde was one of his noncommissioned officers.

Bombardier Billy Wells also became a forces’ physical-training instructor and boxed on for a time after the war, losing his British title. He then worked as a small-part actor in British films and was the muscular athlete who beat the gong before the credit titles in Rank films. For all his fame Wells had never earned really big ring purses, and he ended his working life as a security guard at a film studio.

The careers of some of the American White Hopes had unusual endings. Tom Kennedy, the so-called ‘Millionaire Boxer’, who lost to Wells, made enough money to retire from the ring and open a bar in New York. One night he witnessed a gangland killing in his saloon and was warned not to give evidence when the case came to trial. Never slow to take a hint, Kennedy fled to the West Coast, where he picked up work as a personal trainer to Douglas Fairbanks Senior, the leading movie action star of his day.

Impressed by his instructor’s physique and tough appearance, Fairbanks urged him to enter motion pictures and gave him a few introductions. Kennedy secured work as an extra, and a few walk-on parts, and slowly emerged as one of the film capital’s most dependable character actors, embarking upon thirty years of portraying dumb cops or the menacing henchmen of crooks. Never a star, one of his most memorable and typical roles was as a confused officer on board a ship chasing the Marx Brothers around a deck in
Monkey Business.