The Great White Hopes

by Graeme Kent

  To the end the Canadian fired off indignant letters to the press in an attempt to correct the impression that Johnson had outclassed him during their Sydney bout. He died a pauper in 1955.

  The massive and cheerful former Olympic wrestling champion Con O’Kelly opened a gymnasium in his adopted home of Hull. For years he could be heard exhorting his young charges, ‘Come on, lads, learn and train hard! It’s good for the soul!’ In the 1930s he accompanied his son, Con Junior, also a heavyweight and a former Olympic wrestler, on a tour of the USA. Con Junior had a reasonably successful career and then abandoned the fight game to become a priest, to the enormous pride of his father.

  O’Kelly’s fellow countryman Jim Coffey, the Roscommon Giant, saved enough money from his bouts to be able to return to his beloved Ireland, where he purchased a farm and lived out his life in contentment. His 1959 Associated Press obituary stated accurately enough, ‘Jim Coffey, an amiable giant whose skill in the ring never matched his courage and determination, was one of the prize-ring figures who came close to the top but never made it.’

  The South African Lodewikus van Vuuren, better known as George ‘Boer’ Rodel, was not as fortunate. He remained in New York after retiring from the ring, where the best work he could obtain was as a longshoreman. Perhaps even this was preferable to being paraded up and down a roadway in an old army greatcoat as a war hero by the scheming and unscrupulous Jimmy Johnston. Rodel died in 1955, at the age of 67.

  Gunboat Smith, another former White Heavyweight titleholder, went on too long and lost his last two fights on first-round knockouts. One of these summary defeats was to Harry Greb, known as the ‘Human Windmill’. Greb gained an unfair advantage at the opening bell by promptly sticking his thumb into the Gunboat’s eye, and while his opponent was temporarily blinded he brought over a crushing right hand to finish the bout and Smith’s boxing career. The big man then became a top-class referee.

  One bout at which he officiated was between his former opponent, Harry Greb, and Tiger Flowers for the world middleweight title. When both fighters came out to receive their pre-match instructions from Smith in the centre of the ring, Greb said cheerfully to the referee, ‘Hello, Gunboat, old pal!’ Smith, remembering the illegal thumbing incident, growled, ‘Where do you get that “old pal” stuff?’

  Greb returned to his corner in a chastened mood, fully expecting to get the worst of any forthcoming decisions. At the end of the bout the two judges voted for Flowers. Gunboat Smith decided in favour of the man who had almost blinded him.

  Tom Cowler, who had so impressed James J. Corbett when the latter saw him fight on one of his theatrical tours of Canada, never recovered from a beating by Jack ‘the Giant-Killer’ Dillon, who gave the Cumbrian 6 inches in height and almost 3 stone in weight and finished him off in two rounds. Cowler returned to England after the war, had a few more contests and died at the age of 59.

  Jim Flynn, ‘the Pueblo Fireman’, who fearlessly fought them all, from Johnson to Dempsey, over an incredible 27-year period from 1903 until 1930, drove a cab in Phoenix when he gave up the ring. He would never be drawn on accusations that a destitute and desperate Jack Dempsey had gone into the tank in their first encounter in 1917, when Flynn had surprisingly won in the first round. After his retirement the Fireman suffered problems with his eyesight and died a poor man, at the age of 55, in 1935.

  George Hackenschmidt retired from the wrestling ring, became a naturalised French citizen and lived to a great age. He wrote books on philosophy and became a guru on healthy living. In his eighties he was still working out with weights and running 7 miles several times a week.

  Jess Willard, the White Hope who finally defeated Jack Johnson, did not have an easy time of it as champion. Not long after winning the title he was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons when he went to see the escapologist Harry Houdini perform at the Orpheum Theatre. When invited to come down onto the stage to represent the audience as an observer, the heavyweight champion sullenly refused to do so. This led to an altercation between the two men. It ended with Houdini, relishing the publicity he knew would ensue, shouting prophetically to the giant from the stage, ‘Remember this, I will be Harry Houdini when you are not the heavyweight champion of the world.’

  Willard fled the theatre. Houdini’s agent started telephoning the newspapers. The next morning the headline of the Los Angeles Times read, ‘2000 Hiss J. Willard. Champion Driven From Theatre by Hoots and Calls’.

  Willard made money touring with circuses and Wild West shows and in 1916 fought ten rounds with Frank Moran at Madison Square Garden in New York. The one unusual feature of this exercise in tedium was that it was the only World Heavyweight Championship bout in which no official decision was rendered. Willard received the newspaper verdicts, but Grantland Rice summed up the feelings of most present when he wrote that if the Willard–Moran bout was supposed to be brutal, ‘then dancing should be stopped on account of its innate cruelty and savagery. There are times when even an expert cannot tell which of the two sports is under way.’

  Willard was an unpopular champion. Not only did he refuse to join the armed forces at a time of war, but he would not even box exhibitions for the troops. In 1919, he defended his title for Tex Rickard, making a comeback as a promoter. In their bout at Toledo, Ohio, the champion was slaughtered by Jack Dempsey, the best fighter around. Willard was floored seven times in the first round by the savage challenger, but lasted until the interval after the third round, when he retired. After the bout, clad in his baggy street clothes, alone and forsaken by his backers, Willard emerged from his dressing room into the almost empty stadium. Still semi-conscious and half-blind, he felt his way along the wooden fence, looking for a way out. He was discovered by reporter Charles MacArthur, later a Broadway playwright. Tenderly McArthur guided Willard to a taxi and took him back to his hotel.

  The ex-heavyweight champion made a comeback four years later and was knocked out in eight rounds by South American Luis Firpo, who was then being groomed for a tilt at Dempsey’s championship. Later Willard abandoned ranching and went into real estate, earning extra cash by refereeing fixed all-in wrestling matches. He died in 1968 at the age of 86.

  Many of the promoters and managers involved in the White Hope campaign remained unscathed in boxing for many years, but Hugh D. McIntosh, who had promoted the Jack Johnson–Tommy Burns bout in 1908, was not one of them. The Australian became disillusioned with the politics of boxing. In 1913 he gave up his lease on the Rushcutters Bay stadium. For a time he became a theatrical impresario and then opened a chain of milk bars in Britain. Eventually everything went wrong and he died in straitened circumstances.

  Tex Rickard linked up with the new star, Jack Dempsey, and went on to become the leading promoter of his day, taking over Madison Square Garden. He survived a messy and highly publicised court case, being found not guilty of a charge of the rape of a 15-year-old girl. He died in 1929, at the age of 58, following an operation for appendicitis.

  A character witness at Rickard’s trial had been Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, the millionaire banker who had backed Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. He remained on the periphery of boxing. At the age of 41, in 1917, he joined the Marine Corps and persuaded the authorities to include boxing in the basic training programme. He remained in the Marine Reserves, and, a decade after O’Brien’s fight with Johnson, Major Biddle enjoyed his finest hour before the Willard–Dempsey title match when he led a squad of Marines in an enthusiastic display of arms drill in the ring before the main bout. Biddle and his Marines’ heavy boots caused so much damage to the floor that the canvas had to be replaced before the bout could get under way.

  Later, Biddle used his connections to obtain a post teaching unarmed combat to FBI agents. He also published a book on the subject, entitled Do or Die. Soldiers who had actually fought for their lives in the trenches said that the manual was virtually useless.

  He became the subject of a stage show and a subsequent 1967 Walt Disney film, The
Happiest Millionaire, in which he was portrayed by Fred MacMurray as a bumbling, well-meaning but ineffectual head of a wealthy household.

  Jimmy Johnston kept on wheeling and dealing, but he never found his heavyweight hope. Instead, he managed a slew of champions at lighter weights, including middleweight Harry Greb, welterweight Ted Kid Lewis, and Johnny Dundee at featherweight. Perhaps his greatest moment came when he capitalised on the enthusiasm for boxing in Chinatown and persuaded an Irish fighter called Patrick Mulligan to have a pudding-basin haircut, dye his skin yellow and fight as Ah Chung, the lightweight champion of China.

  Wilson Mizner remained an enthusiastic ringside spectator, but managed no more fighters, finding none who could give him the same charge that wild Stan Ketchel had done. He filled the gaps between his major activities of gambling and drinking by being a card sharp on transatlantic liners, collaborating in the writing of several successful Broadway plays, engaging in a major real-estate scam in Florida and supplying dialogue to order for Hollywood gangster movies.

  Jack Curley made little money from organising the Johnson–Willard championship bout in Cuba, and when Rickard took over the reins of New York boxing promotion he drifted out of the game and back into professional wrestling. He scored a minor victory over Rickard when he succeeded in a legal injunction to prevent the Texan putting on wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden, because these would compete with Curley’s own New York promotions. He upset other competitors by ingratiating himself with the wealthy philanthropist Mrs William Randolph Hearst, co-staging charity tournaments with her to provide pasteurised milk for poor children, and securing the backing of her influential husband’s newspapers. In time, Curley was eased out of the wrestling scene by younger, and even more ruthless, competitors. He died in 1937, a wealthy man, on his Long Island estate.

  Billy McCarney, who had managed Luther McCarty and had turned down the opportunity to handle Jack Johnson as soon as the champion started asking for loans, continued in boxing for many years. As late as the 1930s he was still wheeling and dealing. At an age when most men would have been enjoying retirement, he was observed trying to steal future world champion Max Schmeling from his rightful German manager, probably just to keep his hand in.

  Gabby Dumb Dan Morgan remained a part of the boxing scene until he was in his eighties, outliving his White Hope Battling Levinsky by many years. In the Second World War he discovered his niche, touring military camps, sometimes in tandem with Jack Johnson, giving talks on the history of the fight game to enlisted men. He had a low opinion of modern heavyweights compared with the giants of the White Hope era. His view was shared by Johnson. On one occasion the old manager asked the ageing ex-champion why he did not abandon his flea circus to train and manage a modern heavyweight. Johnson shook his head in disgust. ‘These fleas can think better than the heavyweights around today,’ he snorted. Dan Morgan died in 1955, at the age of 82. Until his last years he was still being employed by promoters to ballyhoo their shows.

  Tom O’Rourke had promoted the very first White Hope tournaments in 1911 and had managed the winner, Al Palzer. He died at the age of 84 on 19 June 1936, in the dressing room of Max Schmeling just before the German’s first bout with Joe Louis. O’Rourke had been visiting Schmeling, when he simply collapsed and died. His body remained shrouded in blankets on the rubbing table in the dressing room while the phlegmatic Schmeling went out to defeat Louis. Immediately before his death, O’Rouke had sued the New York Boxing Commission for depriving him of his judge’s licence on the grounds that he was too old.

  Jack London, the writer whose racist diatribe after the Burns–Johnson fight had helped to start the whole White Hope campaign, died at the age of 40, probably by his own hand. He had become the highest-paid writer in the world and had lost all interest in both boxing and the class struggle.

  But it was the boxers who truly epitomised the White Hope campaign. Their heyday was a short one and when it was over most of them were discarded and ignored. Many of them went back to labouring, mining, vagrancy or whatever else they had been doing before they had been plucked from obscurity to strut before the screaming crowds. Only a few of them managed to hang on to their ring earnings.

  Yet even the least-educated and most self-absorbed former White Hopes knew that for a brief hour they had been involved in a crazy, often sordid, but absorbing period of boxing history. The feelings of them all were summed up by the very first White Hope to enter the ring with champion Jack Johnson, back in 1909. Victor McLaglen’s finest hour came many years after he had left the fight game behind him, when, at the age of 49, he had been presented with the Best Actor Oscar at the 1935 Hollywood ceremonies.

  The award was to prove a professional lifeline to the former soldier of fortune, but he never regarded it very highly. ‘Acting never appealed to me, and I was dabbling in it solely as a means of making money,’ he observed. The bishop’s son had better things to remember. Towards the end of his long and rather incredible life, he once went on record as saying rather wistfully, ‘The only thing which ever thrilled me was boxing.’

  EPILOGUE

  The reign of Jack Johnson left one significant legacy to the sporting world. For more than twenty years after he lost his title no black fighter was allowed to compete for the World Heavyweight Championship, until Joe Louis won the crown on 22 June 1937.

  There had been black world champions at the lighter weights before the advent of Jack Johnson and there were to be many more after he had left the fistic scene. But for over two decades no black athlete was allowed to fight for boxing’s supreme prize – the heavyweight title.

  There were certainly black contenders worthy of a championship bout – George Godfrey, Harry Wills and Larry Gaines among them – but they were all frozen out by the promoters running the sport. Gaines was an outstanding Canadian heavyweight who actually beat two future world champions, Max Schmeling and Primo Carnera, before they won their titles. For a short time in Paris he was managed by a young would-be writer called Ernest Hemingway. Gaines became so embittered by his ostracism that he called his biography The Impossible Dream, writing, ‘Like every man who ever laced on gloves, I dreamed of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. But, for me, it was always the impossible dream, the unreachable star. The politics of the day were against it. The bar was up.’

  Few white men wanted another Jack Johnson to claim equality in or out of the ring. Tex Rickard, who was to become the world’s leading promoter between 1919 and 1929, set his face against employing black heavyweights. The riots after the Johnson–James J. Jeffries bout, which he had promoted in 1910, had convinced him that he wanted no further part in mixed-race matches.

  Jess Willard, the successful White Hope who had dethroned Jack Johnson, lost his title in three rounds to the dynamic former hobo Jack Dempsey in 1919. The day after he had won the championship Dempsey made it plain that he, too, would observe a colour bar. The New York Times of 5 July 1919 stated, ‘Jack Dempsey announced today that he would draw the colour line. He will pay no attention to Negro challengers, but will defend his title against any white heavyweights as the occasion demands.’

  Some years after boxing had been legalised in New York State in 1920, the Boxing Commission insisted that Jack Dempsey should defend his title against the black Harry Wills. Promoter Rickard at first stalled, and then he refused, threatening to take his moneyspinning operations out of the state. To make his point, in 1926 he matched Dempsey against the white challenger Gene Tunney in Philadelphia.

  Those black heavyweights who followed in Johnson’s footsteps either had to ‘throw’ fights to white opponents or were forced to revert to the same poorly paid chitlin’-circuit matches against one another, which had characterised the careers of Sam Langford, Sam McVey and the other great black fighters of Jack Johnson’s era.

  The situation was no better in Great Britain. The National Sporting Club, which effectively controlled big-time boxing in the country, had been mortified when Joh
nson had reneged on his promise to fight Sam Langford at the club. His portrait was taken down from the wall and Johnson himself was refused admittance to the club when he later revisited London.

  Even more important from the point of view of British and Commonwealth black heavyweights, the NSC refused to let them fight for British titles, which the club controlled through its system of Lonsdale belts, at any weights. ‘Peggy’ Bettinson, who ran the club, declared, ‘We have no prejudice against the fighting Negro, but we would not run the risk of having to suffer another Jack Johnson.’

  In 1929, when the British Boxing Board of Control took over the administration of boxing in Great Britain, it retained the colour bar, its secretary stating, ‘It is only right that a small country such as ours should have championships restricted to boxers of white parents – otherwise we might be faced with a situation where all our British titles are held by coloured Empire fighters.’ Black boxers from the Commonwealth were allowed to fight only for British Empire titles.

  In France, too, in 1922, there was a furore when a black Senegalese boxer called Louis Phal, who fought under the name of Battling Siki, knocked out the national hero Georges Carpentier in six rounds in Paris. An effort was made to save Carpentier’s world light-heavyweight title for the whites by disqualifying Siki for alleged rough fighting, but this caused such an uproar that the result was rescinded and the black fighter was allowed to keep his newly won championship.