On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  What was outrageous and “unforgivable” in Johnson’s boxing wasn’t simply that he so decisively beat his white opponents but that he publicly humiliated them, as a way of demonstrating his smiling, seemingly cordial, contempt for their white constituents. Like Ali, except more astonishing than Ali since Johnson had no predecessors,5 Johnson transformed formerly capable, formidable opponents into stumbling yokels. Like Ali, Johnson believed in allowing his opponents to wear themselves out in the effort of throwing useless punches. And, like Ali, Johnson understood that boxing is theater. Geoffrey Ward describes the 1909 (mis)match between Johnson and the white middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel in Colma, California:

  For eleven rounds the bout went more or less the way the Burns fight had gone. Johnson towered over his opponent, picking off his punches, smiling and chatting with ringsiders, landing just often and just hard enough to cause Ketchel’s mouth and nose to bleed but to do no more serious damage. Several times Johnson simply lifted the smaller man into the air, feet dangling like an oversized doll, and put him down just where he liked. One ringsider called it a “struggle between a demon and a gritty little dwarf.”

  After a reckless attempt to knock Johnson out, the fight ended brutally for Ketchel with four of his teeth strewn across the ring, or, in variants of the account, embedded in Johnson’s glove, and the hostile crowd silent. After Johnson’s equally decisive defeat of the former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries in 1910, Jeffries was unexpectedly generous in conceding to a reporter, “I could never have whipped Johnson at my best. I couldn’t have reached him in a thousand years.” More often, white reactions to Johnson’s victories were bitter, vicious, hysterical. After Jeffries’s defeat, as word of Jack Johnson’s victory spread, riots began to break out across the United States. “No event since emancipation forty-five years earlier had meant so much to Negro America as Johnson’s victory,” Geoffrey Ward notes, “and no event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later.” In all, as many as twenty-six people were killed and hundreds more hurt in the rioting, most of them black. In the jubilant wake of this new victory of Jack Johnson’s, there would be countless casualties.

  Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is as much a portrait of the boxer’s turbulent time as it is of Johnson himself, in the way of such exemplary recent boxing biographies as David Remnick’s King of the World (1998), which deals with the early, ascending years of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, Roger Kahn’s A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ’20s (1999), and The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000) by Nick Tosches, a brilliantly sustained blues piece in prose perfectly matched with its intransigent subject. (Of heavyweight champions, Liston remains the “taboo” figure: the doomed black man unassimilable by any racial, cultural, or religious collective. Even the nature of Liston’s death by heroin overdose—suicide? murder?—remains a mystery.) Ward, author of numerous historical studies including A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (1989) and a frequent collaborator with the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns on such American subjects as the Civil War, baseball, jazz, Mark Twain, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, among others, is both lucky in his biographical subject (Jack Johnson’s life even outside the ring reads like a picaresque dime novel) and judicious in his presentation (Johnson’s recollections of his life, like those of countless observers, are to be taken with more than a grain of salt). Quite reasonably, Ward focuses upon the phenomenon of Jack Johnson primarily in terms of race, though it might be argued, from a purist boxing standpoint, that Johnson’s racial background had no more to do with the elegance and precision of his ring style than any other biographical fact about him.

  “Unforgivable blackness” is in reference to a quote from W. E. B. Du Bois in his publication The Crisis (1914) with which Ward begins his biography:

  Boxing has fallen into disfavor…The reason is clear: Jack Johnson…has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness and great good nature. He did not “knock” his opponent senseless…Neither he nor his race invented prize fighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black. Of course some pretend to object to Johnson’s character. But we have yet to hear, in the case of White America, that marital troubles have disqualified prize fighters or ball players or even statesmen. It comes down, then, after all to this unforgivable blackness. [p. viii]

  (It isn’t clear to which fight Du Bois is alluding since Johnson’s major fights in 1913-14 took place in Paris and Buenos Aires and it’s unlikely that Du Bois saw these fights or even, judging by the broad terms with which he described Johnson’s fighting style, that Du Bois ever saw Johnson fight.) Geoffrey Ward notes that, researching the biography, he had no Jack Johnson “papers” to consult apart from such self-mythologizing autobiographies as Johnson’s In the Ring and Out, and that much of his book is based upon contemporaneous newspaper accounts heavily saturated with “racist contempt.” In order to “recapture something of the atmosphere of the world in which [Johnson] always insisted on remaining his own man,” Ward resists the “anachronistic term ‘African American’” in favor of the one that whites of Johnson’s generation used grudgingly and blacks most hoped to see in print: “Negro.”

  Arthur John Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, on March 31, 1878, both his parents former slaves. Of the Johnsons’ nine children, only four would live to maturity. The third child and first son, Jack was the immediate focus of his family’s attention even as, in time, he would seem to have been the focus of attention in virtually every situation, every setting, every gathering in which he was to find himself through most of his life: as naturally charismatic, physically striking and insouciant as Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali decades later. Like Ali, Jack Johnson was a “cheerful fabulist”—an “inexhaustible tender of his own legend, a teller of tall tales in the frontier tradition of his native state”—as well as a gifted athlete who seems to have seized upon boxing as much as an opportunity to draw attention to himself as a means of making seemingly “easy” money. Unlike Ali, whose I.Q. was once registered as an astonishing 78, and who is said to have been able to read but a small fraction of the voluminous praise and censure heaped on him over the years, Johnson seems to have been an unusually intelligent, articulate, and, to a degree, cultured individual whose emergence out of the Jim Crow South of his era is nothing short of extraordinary.6 It was Johnson’s claim that having been born in the bustling port city of Galveston with its “more relaxed view of racial separation” than that of inland towns and cities of the South accounted for his sense of himself as an individual, and not a member of a racial minority. Long before he became the first Negro heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson knew himself heroic and would have heartily endorsed his biographer’s claim that he “embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing—no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female—could keep him for long from whatever he wanted.”

  Yet everywhere in the United States, in the North no less than the South, opportunities for Negro athletes were in fact shrinking. The modest advances that had been made in the late 1800s were being taken back by the passage of Jim Crow laws that allowed white professional baseball players, for instance, to force their black competitors off the field and white jockeys to void licenses held by black jockeys. Even the League of American Wheelmen, Ward wryly notes, banned black bicyclists from their ranks. Boxing remained open to Negroes, but only if they fought other Negroes and didn’t aspire to title fights (and the larger purses that came with title fights). In 1895, the prominent newspaperman Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, warned readers: “We are in the midst of a growing menace. The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.”

  Yet Jack Johnson began successfully fighting white boxer
s in San Francisco in the early 1900s and seems to have been from the first a strikingly original, elegant, and elusive counterpuncher given to shrewd theorizing: “By gradually wearing down a fighter, by letting him tire himself out, by hitting him with my left as he came to quarters with me, then by clinching or executing my uppercut, I found that I lasted longer and would not carry any marks out of the ring.” Except for carrying a few marks out of the ring, this is a variant of the famous “rope-a-dope” strategy with which Muhammad Ali rewon his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974, one of the most astonishing title fights in ring history. It isn’t surprising that Jack Johnson’s early hero was the counterpuncher Jim Corbett whose ring style appeared “scientific” in contrast to the stiffly upright, crudely aggressive heavyweights of his time, all forward-lunging offense and no defense, lumbering strongmen looking for a place to land roundhouse punches. (As in 1926, in the first of their celebrated title fights, Gene Tunney would confound the brawling aggressor Jack Dempsey with a similar “scientific” strategy, landing blows even as he retreated, gliding “like a great skater on ice” to win every round of the ten-round fight on points and take Dempsey’s title from him.)7 In the first film footage showing Jack Johnson in the ring, a scratchy fragment from the silent film of Johnson’s title fight with Tommy Burns in 1908, we see a tall, unexpectedly graceful heavyweight with a chiseled upper body, slender waist and legs; Johnson’s head is smooth-shaved and his features might be described as “sensitive.” In the most widely published photographs of Johnson he as much resembles a dancer as a heavyweight boxer. (At six feet, weighing a little more than two hundred pounds, Johnson would be a “small heavyweight” by contemporary standards. Physical size and strength increased dramatically in the division after 1962, when super-sized Sonny Liston won the title from the much smaller Floyd Patterson in arguably the most excruciatingly one-sided title fight in heavyweight boxing history.) Two years later in his title defense against the much larger ex-champion Jim Jeffries, Johnson would perform with equal skill (despite the distracting presence of his old hero “Gentleman” Jim Corbett striding about at ringside screaming racist insults at him). Only in the last major fight of his career, against the six-feet-six, two-hundred-thirty-pound White Hope giant Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, did Johnson’s counterpunching style fail him: in the famous, or infamous photograph of Jack Johnson lying on his back, Johnson has lifted a gloved hand to shield his eyes from the blinding Caribbean sun, and would afterward claim that he’d thrown the fight.8

  As heavyweight champion Johnson enjoyed a degree of celebrity unknown to any Negro in previous American history, basking in media attention that kept his handsome, smiling image continuously before the public. Like Muhammad Ali, whose handsome, smiling image would be recognized in parts of the world in which the image of the President of the United States wasn’t recognized, Johnson became an icon of his race: “the greatest colored man that ever lived.”9 When not training for an upcoming fight (in gyms and training camps to which the admiring public was invited) he embarked upon theatrical tours across the country. He shadow-boxed, he sparred, he performed in vaudeville and burlesque routines. Here was the very archetype of the “sport”—the dread “flash nigger” made flesh—in ankle-length fur coats, expensive racing cars painted bright colors, tailor-made suits, with rubies, emeralds, diamonds displayed on his elegant person, and the dazzling gold-capped smile for which he was known. (Naturally, Johnson’s women were decked in jewels as well. Some of these jewels, Johnson only lent to women for an evening on the town; others were given as gifts to his wives. Etta, the suicidal first wife, was ensconced in a luxury hotel in London during one of Johnson’s tours of English provincial music halls and provided with a chauffeur-driven $18,000 royal blue limousine with $2,500 worth of interior fittings, which seemed only to increase the unhappy woman’s wish to kill herself.) It was common practice for Johnson to invite (male) journalists to observe him bathing nude and to allow them to touch his muscled body; his training camps were virtual open houses for the boxer’s self-display, which seemed never to flag. As a New York Herald reporter observed:

  …after the camp is escaped by the visitors Johnson discards his smile, forgets his wit and enters upon a tirade against the forces that command him to get into condition. The champion…is a different man when he is not showing off to the crowds, the followers, the curious, the hero worshippers who create an atmosphere which when absent almost seems to leave the negro much in the same condition as a lamp would be if the oil was taken therefrom. Johnson lives on applause. Without it he fades away to nothingness.

  Like Muhammad Ali who compulsively boasted of being “the greatest”—“the prettiest”—Johnson would seem to have been the very essence of male narcissism; like Ali, who would refuse to be drafted into the U.S. Army in the mid-1960s to fight in Vietnam—“Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” was Ali’s improvised, brilliant rejoinder—Jack Johnson incurred the wrath of the majority of his fellow citizens by declaring in an interview given in London in 1911, “Fight for America? Well, I should say not. What has America ever done for me or for my race? [In England] I am treated like a human being.” Both men would be hounded by righteous white prosecutors, fined and sentenced to federal prison. (Ali’s conviction would be overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971. Johnson served his full prison sentence.) Yet the parallel between Ali and Johnson breaks down when one considers their respective attitudes toward their profession, for Ali in his prime was a fanatically disciplined and dedicated boxer whose performances in the ring never failed to transcend the pettiness of his public persona, while Johnson appears not to have finally cared very much about boxing except as a means of celebrity and money-making. Johnson had a notorious penchant for making “deals” (in contrast to “fixing” fights), even when he was heavyweight champion. (The most tempting of deals for the better boxer is simply to carry his opponent through a preplanned number of rounds before knocking him out, for the benefit of gamblers and/or filmmakers, who paid more for more film footage in Johnson’s day.) Once he’d achieved a modicum of success, Johnson ceased training seriously for upcoming fights and, sad to say, he managed to avoid leading Negro contenders just as, when Jack Johnson had been the leading contender for the title, the long-reigning Tommy Burns had managed to avoid him.

  Geoffrey Ward has divided Unforgivable Blackness into two near-equal books: “The Rise” and “The Fall.” Ironically, Johnson’s “fall” begins in the immediate aftermath of his greatest victory, against Jeffries; it would seem to be inevitable that an individual so driven, for whom self-display is a kind of narcotic, should begin to self-destruct almost immediately after achieving his greatest success. Ward provides a dispiriting catalogue of increasingly pathological behavior on Johnson’s part after 1910: heavy drinking, suicidal depression, compulsive gambling and womanizing, violence against his wife Etta, lawsuits, feuds, scandals played out in the media. Only two weeks after the luridly publicized suicide of Etta, Johnson appeared in public in Chicago with a very attractive, very blond eighteen-year-old, an act equivalent to tossing a lighted match into a gasoline drum. (Johnson was thirty-four.) Everywhere Johnson went in the next several years, but especially in the Chicago epicenter, a blaze of notoriety attended him; no other boxer except, in our time, the luckless Mike Tyson, has been demonized by the press so relentlessly. Though Johnson understood that boxing per se has nothing to do with race, only with the performances of often idiosyncratic individuals, he seemed not to wish to understand how, even as he used the press as a kind of magnifying mirror, the press was using, and exhausting, him.

  The Negro pariah, increasingly under attack from both Caucasians and Negroes, somehow managed to escape being assassinated, lynched, or even injured at the hands of white racists, but he could not escape the toxic fallout of public notoriety. In 1913, his enemies literally conspired to trump up criminal charges against him for having allegedly violated the Mann Act (also k
nown as the White Slave Traffic Act of 1909 that barred the “transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes”). Though the law was intended to apply to traffickers in prostitution, not individuals involved in extramarital romances, the Chicago district attorney’s office vigorously pursued a criminal case against Johnson based upon the biased and unreliable testimony of a white call girl who’d once been a companion of his:

  To corroborate and amplify Belle’s version of events, federal agents quietly fanned out across the country, interviewing prostitutes, chauffeurs, waiters, bellhops, Pullman porters, ex-managers, former sparring partners, looking for something—anything—that could be used to bolster their case that the champion had broken federal law…

  Despite paying out bribes to individuals who might have influenced the outcome of his trial, Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Though he and his second wife, Lucille—the young blond woman whose presence in Johnson’s life had provoked scandal—fled the country and lived abroad for several years, eventually, deep in debt, Johnson returned to the United States to (unsuccessfully) defend his title against the “Pottawatomie Giant” Jess Willard, a lumbering heavyweight with no evident gift for boxing except his size and a reach of eighty-four inches, and to serve his prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas, where, true to charismatic form, Johnson made friends not only among his fellow prisoners but among the prison administration, including the white warden who treated his celebrity prisoner with unexpected generosity. Johnson may have been on the downward spiral, an ex-champion in his early forties with no prospects of a title fight from the new champion Dempsey (who had overwhelmed the clumsy Pottawatomie Giant in a fight so bloody it would have been stopped within the first minute of the first round of a contemporary boxing match), yet his leave-taking from Leavenworth was newsworthy: