Unforgivable Blackness
Page 7
After the usual gym training, Carter put on the gloves with Johnson for a four-round workout. In the third round of the affair, Johnson hit the boss a bit harder than a sparring partner is supposed to sock his paymaster and Carter got mad.
“Trying to show me up, eh?”
Carter did his best to knock Johnson stiff, but instead of showing the tall colored fellow up, he was shown up himself, and if it were not for Promoter Coffroth, who stopped the bout when Carter was groggy and all in, the big card might have been a flop. Coming home on the boat that evening, the sports talked more about Johnson than they did about Carter. They were sure that a new, big man who could fight had arrived.
Johnson was fired, he recalled, but he was delighted to see his name in the papers the next morning. “That was the first time that the name of Jack Johnson appeared in print,” he remembered. “I must say that it’s often been there since.”*
He did his best to keep it there, but nothing he accomplished during the next few months was especially newsworthy: a rematch with Hank Griffin in Oakland that ended in a draw, another draw in Chicago with his old employer Frank Childs, and five wins (four by knockout) over little-known fighters in New England, Texas, and California.
Then, in the spring, Johnson and Frank Carillo wrote a letter to Tom McCarey, matchmaker for the Century Athletic Club in Los Angeles, pleading for an opportunity to show what he could do. It couldn’t have been better timed. McCarey was just thirty-one, a slender, dapper, elegantly mustached man-about-town who had spent the past year struggling to turn boxing in Los Angeles from an underground activity confined to men’s smokers and the backrooms of saloons into a big-time business.† It wasn’t easy. The best white fighters preferred to fight in San Francisco, which was home to three times as many potential ticket buyers as Los Angeles. McCarey featured black fighters so often—Hank Griffin headlined three of the first five boxing shows he put on in the big wooden structure on Fifth Street called Hazard’s Pavilion—that his critics would eventually accuse him of running his organization as a “nigger club.”‡
Jim Jeffries lived in Los Angeles, but even he could not be persuaded to defend his title there. The champion had a handsome younger brother, Jack, however, who had heavyweight dreams of his own.§ If McCarey could find the right kind of opponent, Jack Jeffries was willing to fight in front of a hometown crowd—and to bring his older brother with him to the Pavilion as part of his entourage.
Jack Johnson seemed to be the right kind of opponent. He was an out-of-towner and black; white Angelenos could be counted on to turn out to see their hometown favorite beat him. He would not be a walkover. On the other hand, he had been defeated by Griffin, whom Jim Jeffries had knocked out at the dawn of his career and had subsequently beaten badly in a four-round exhibition,* so it seemed safe for the Jeffries camp to assume he would not present too great a challenge to their rising star.
McCarey’s friends at the Los Angeles Times did all they could to help him boost the gate. The paper’s prefight story on May 16, 1902, was headlined WHITE MEN FIGHT BLACKS TONIGHT:†
Tonight at Hazard’s Pavilion there will be held what promises to be about the best fistic tournament in the sporting history of Los Angeles. Jack Jeffries, brother and sparring partner of the world’s heavyweight champion, will box twenty rounds with Jack Johnson, a big negro who has beaten several second-raters and is rated by many as a comer….
If there is a favorite, the white man is it. He certainly has a host of well wishers here, and his would be a popular victory. Jeffries whipped Billy Stift and fought a creditable draw with Jack Steizner, who is regarded one of the hardest nuts in his class. Jack is a stiff puncher, pretty handy with his lower extremities, and clever on the defensive. His ability to stand work and take hard ones on the jaw and body are really unknown, although there is not a whit of doubt regarding his gameness. Jack has had the benefit of continued instruction and coaching from the champion, and this has shown in his work the past few days. He has trained faithfully at his home on the East Side, and is in the pink of physical condition. Jack will weigh close to 185 pounds.
Mistah Johnsing is one of those Africans who look too black to have the heart of a fighter, but he has not yet shown the white feather.
The younger Jeffries was “a fine-looking young fellow,” the Times continued, “with a figure like a Greek god,” while Johnson was “a long, lean, bullet-headed, flat-chested ‘coon.’”
Johnson remained unconcerned—and he showed that he already knew how to make an entrance. In an era when fighters generally confined their ring wear to sober black, he turned up for his bout with Jack Jeffries in pink.
The great crowd which filled every nook and cranny of the Pavilion gasped with admiration and astonishment when the pinkies came up through the ropes. It wasn’t an ordinary, inoffensive kind of pink. It was one of these screaming, caterwauling, belligerent pinks.
Mistah Johnsing himself was seemingly unconscious of this riot that encased his legs. Mistah Johnsing sat back in his corner half asleep and yawning like a big cat.
The jeers and curses that had greeted Johnson and his garish attire turned to cheers as Jack Jeffries approached the ring, accompanied by his brother in slacks and a gray sleeveless undershirt. “It was the champion who brought the enormous crowd of people,” said the Times. “It was to see ‘de champ’ that little boys climbed out over the rafters of Hazard’s Pavilion. It was because James J. Jeffries was living, breathing and, ah, perhaps smiling … inside those walls, that a big crowd gathered in the streets outside and listened to the yells of the favored audience.” The crowd wouldn’t let the main event get started until their hero had climbed twice into the ring to acknowledge their applause.
Johnson didn’t mind. This was his moment. Just before the bell rang, Tom McCarey remembered, Johnson leaned down and handed him an envelope, asking him not to open it until he told him to do so.
For four rounds Johnson toyed with Jeffries [McCarey said]. His boxing was marvelous; his footwork superb. During the fighting he would reach over [Jeffries’] shoulders in the clinches and wink at me. “Where [did] you get that slick tie, Uncle Tom?” he’d ask, and then he’d shed Jeffries’ punches like so many snowflakes.
Between rounds, the anxious champion clambered up and down to sponge and towel his increasingly battered kid brother. McCarey continued:
As they left their corners for the start of the fifth, Johnson hunched his shoulders and whaled away at Jeffries. He shouted to me, “Uncle Tom, you may now read that little note I gave you this afternoon.” I did and on it was written: “I’ll stop Jeffries within fifty seconds after the fifth starts.” And when I looked up Jeffries was being counted out.
The champion winced and looked away. A grinning Johnson lifted his victim from the canvas, turned him over to his seconds, even grabbed a towel and helped fan him back to consciousness. When Jim Jeffries stepped into the ring to help, Johnson murmured, “I can lick you, too.”
The champion ignored him. But Johnson had made an impression. “Gee,” Jeffries was overheard saying as he helped his still-dazed brother toward his dressing room, “that was a thump.”
The Times headlines the next morning continued to condescend:
PINK FURIES BLAZE AWAY
BOLD MISTAH JOHNSINGH’S PAJAMAS CRUEL
TOO MUCH COLOR FOR “BROTHER JACK.”
FEAST OF FUN AND FLOW OF TEARS AT PRIZE FIGHT—
“DE CHAMP” SAD.
But Johnson had made some big news. Tom McCarey now saw him as a draw and began to look for worthier opponents. Meanwhile, Johnson beat Klondike at Memphis for a second time, held Billy Stift to a second draw in Chicago, drew twice more with Hank Griffin, and won a decision over the turbulent “Mexican Pete” Everett in Victor, Colorado.*
According to Johnson’s 1927 autobiography, Mary Austin was still with him in Colorado, but an “invisible something” had continued to gnaw at them since their first time together in the mountains, and when he
returned to California this time she was not with him. “Mary was a splendid woman,” Johnson remembered, “and I recall my life with her as one of the happy periods of my existence.”
McCarey signed him to face Frank Childs at Hazard’s Pavilion on October 21, 1902. Childs, whom the Los Angeles Times tastefully described as “a big, gobby coon,” was favored 2 to 1 on fight night, but Johnson was delighted for the opportunity to get back at him for having turned him out into the rainy Chicago night three years earlier. Childs pursued him for ten rounds, trying to corner him as he once had in the gym, but, as the Times reported, Johnson just moved out of the way and peppered him with lefts and rights.
Johnson was punching him and they were grinning at each other and having a little heart to heart talk back and forth.
When it came to the eleventh round, Childs was spitting blood and looking out of one eye for the chance that never came. The other eye was closed for the evening behind a sadly-dropping curtain of bunged-up black.
His seconds fell upon him with towels when the round ended and one could see that they were imploring him to do something, but he only shook his head sadly.
Johnson was now simply too much for the older man; Childs survived one more round, then had his cornermen throw in the towel, claiming an injury to his elbow that a subsequent medical examination failed to find. (Childs’ share of the purse was given to charity.)
Eleven days later, Johnson moved further up the ladder, making his San Francisco debut against another white contender, George Gardner, who was now being brought along by Johnson’s old acquaintance Jack Curley. Gardner had been scheduled to fight Joe Choynski, but the veteran’s skills had now so eroded that Curley was accused of having signed him simply as a way to make his fighter look good. “Candor compels me to admit that there was something to this claim,” Curley would later write, and Johnson was a lastminute substitution.
He turned out to be smoother and faster than his opponent, but he had been ill for several days beforehand and couldn’t seem to follow up his advantages.* The biggest applause came in the fourteenth round, when Gardner slipped and fell and Johnson gave him a hand up. “I still hate to think of that fight,” Curley wrote. “It was, to put it as bluntly as I can, terrible…. Gardner didn’t even remotely resemble the Gardner who had beaten Carter, Walcott and [Jack] Root. Johnson always schemed to let the other fellow make the fight and George simply couldn’t.”
Frank Carillo, working in Johnson’s corner between rounds, had bet heavily on the outcome, and halfway through the fight, when it was by no means clear Johnson would win, he flashed his revolver in his fighter’s face and warned that he would shoot him if he didn’t make a greater effort to come out on top. He also made sure that the referee saw his weapon, in hopes he would remember it when the time came to render a decision.*
Curley continued:
[Johnson and Gardner] tugged and hauled and loafed through round after round as the disgusted spectators, hooting and cursing, made their exit, so that we were almost alone when the referee, at the end of twenty rounds, awarded the decision to Johnson. Some conception of the nature of the fight may be gained from the fact that both Gardner and Johnson and all connected with them had to leave town the next day. I believe that if we hadn’t, the vigilantes would have sprung into existence again and hanged us.
Johnson wasn’t always completely successful in the ring, but he had already begun to display three qualities that would characterize his career: personal courage, masterful boxing, and a refusal to let anyone else do his thinking for him.
In two decades as contender and champion, Jack Johnson would never once enter the ring against a white opponent in front of a crowd that was anything but overwhelmingly hostile, and as the years passed and his fame and notoriety grew, the curses and racial taunts he’d been hearing since he faced Jim Scanlon back in Galveston would sometimes be supplemented by threats to murder him. Johnson would later admit he’d sometimes been affected by what he called this “pressure,” but he refused ever to show his concern.The more the crowd jeered him, the more he grinned and taunted his opponent and joked with the reporters at ringside as if he hadn’t a care in the world.*
Johnson saw himself as an entertainer as well as an athlete, wanted to play a part and put on a show, not merely club his opponent into submission. Bravado was part of it. But more important was his faith in himself—in his charm, his quick wit, above all in the boxing skills he had come to see as insurmountable.
They were certainly formidable. A boxer’s first task, as the writer Stanley Crouch has suggested, is “to turn his opponent into an assistant in his own ass-whipping.” No one ever did that better than Jack Johnson. He was an artist in the ring: smooth, laid-back, tricky. He saw no need ever to take chances—“A lot of fellows when they knock a man down rush in to finish him up,” he wrote, “whereas it is just after a fellow is knocked down that he makes his most desperate fight”—and he never wanted to give any crowd the satisfaction of seeing him hurt if he could help it. He preferred to pick off his opponent’s punches with his gloves or smother him with his encircling arms, wait for the other man to make a mistake, then counterpunch.
“It’s not how hard you hit that other fella,” he once told a friend. “It’s how tired he gets tryin’ to hit you.” “By gradually wearing down a fighter,” he explained elsewhere, “by letting him tire himself out, by hitting him with my left as he came to close 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.” His style was elegant, refined, distinctive, savored by connoisseurs of the art and science of the sport but not calculated to appeal to those fans who had paid to see a brawl.
When Johnson’s early hero Jim Corbett counterpunched his way to the heavyweight title, writers praised him as “scientific,” “the cleverest man in boxing.” Similar skills, when displayed by Johnson, were said by some of the same writers to prove him “lazy,” “shiftless”; they were evidence of the “yellow streak” that all Negroes were supposed to possess.
Johnson never saw himself as merely a defensive fighter. “I was always attacking,” he told a reporter. “My attack was to counter the leads I forced.” And many of those who faced him most often agreed. “Johnson was a fellow that used to stand flat-footed and wait for you to come in,” one battered sparring partner remembered. “And when you came in, he’d rip the head off you with uppercuts, cut you all to pieces.” “Johnson makes you do all the work,” recalled another man he beat three times. “You have to lead and when you drive your left out he gets away from it and uses that slash of his…. When he slashes out with that uppercut—good night.”
“It was his easy-going manner in the ring that fooled many,” Tad Dorgan wrote. “He smiled and kidded in the clinches and many thought he was careless, but all the time he held his opponent safe, knew every move the other made, and was at all times the boss.”
Johnson insisted on being the boss in his corner as well as in the ring. The seconds who crouched there between rounds were present mostly to offer encouragement and make their man as comfortable as possible, waving towels and sponging him with water to cool him down. When they offered tactical advice, Johnson paid little attention, as Frank Carillo had learned to his fury. Since he was doing the fighting, Johnson never saw any reason why he shouldn’t do the thinking, too. That white managers and white sportswriters alike would find especially hard to tolerate.
Johnson had not relished his manager’s having menaced him with a gun during his bout with George Gardner, but Carillo was back in his corner at Hazard’s Pavilion a little over a month later. His opponent this time was Fred Russell, a big white slugger with a reputation for fouling opponents when he couldn’t beat them any other way. Russell had prepared for the Johnson fight at Jim Jeffries’ farm. Jack Jeffries himself was his trainer. The champion’s camp was clearly looking for revenge on the black man who had derailed the younger Jeffries’ career.
Johnson collapsed to the canvas, rolling over and over, “holding his hands clasped frantically to his hurt.” Most of the crowd had wanted to see the black fighter defeated, but not this way. Angry ticket holders rushed toward the ring. Police officers climbed up to protect Russell. A drunk made it through the ropes, intent on shaking Johnson’s hand and apologizing for the white man’s bad behavior, only to be hurled back into the seats at ringside.
Johnson was awarded the fight—and the lion’s share of the purse—on a foul. Within hours, several Bakersfield shopkeepers got a warrant for Johnson’s arrest, claiming he’d failed to pay his bills. That was very likely true; Johnson’s accounts were rarely up to date. But, as the Bakersfield Daily Californian explained, there was almost surely more to it than that: “It is said that Jack has made himself somewhat obnoxious to various persons … who made the charge, claiming that he is living in the forbidden district and beating bills.”