Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  “Our money was low and the boxing business was at a point which offered me few engagements,” Johnson remembered. “Consequently we were compelled to live modestly and to guard our savings which were going down rapidly.” They evidently went down so rapidly that Clara decided to leave Johnson again, taking with her what little cash he happened to have on hand.

  Johnson was devastated, and this time he had no idea where she had gone. He began to drink heavily, scoured Chicago, then took a train to Pittsburgh, believing she might have gone there, but found no trace. He borrowed heavily from friends, gambled away most of their money, and then decided to try New York. He was about to board the train “penniless,” he recalled, when Frank Sutton, a black hotel keeper and onetime sparring partner who would remain an important friend throughout Johnson’s career, insisted he borrow at least a dollar. “Of this dollar,” Johnson recalled,” I gave the train porter fifty cents; I bought two cigars with another quarter and the remaining quarter I tossed to a newsboy when I arrived in New York.” That was how a sport was supposed to behave, even in extremis.

  He found a room in a cheap boardinghouse, searched the streets for Clara for a time, then finally “gave up the quest” and cast around for bouts to keep himself going. In late January, when he took a pickup fight in Topeka, Kansas, against a white novice from Philadelphia named Bob Kerns, he didn’t even bother to dress for his entrance, climbing into the ring wearing a black sweater and shabby trousers over his tights instead of one of his now celebrated robes. He seemed almost to doze while waiting on his stool for the bell to ring, but when it did, he knocked Kerns unconscious in less than a minute.*

  A little over three weeks later, on February 23, 1906, the title for which Johnson had long since earned the right to fight would change hands again. W. W. Naughton conceded that Marvin Hart had a legitimate claim to the championship after beating Jack Root, but added that he remained “on probation” with the public nonetheless: “He will have to show us that he can whip all creation. He has not acquired the title by licking somebody who licked everybody else and he isn’t in a position to talk of hard-earned laurels or tell challengers to get a reputation. He must skirmish around and get one himself.”

  Hart’s first title skirmish had done little to enhance his reputation: at Butte, Montana, the previous January 16, a completely unknown sometime miner named Pat Callahan knocked him down in the first round before Hart could put him out in the second. The clamor for a real test of Hart’s skills grew, but he turned down bids for bouts with former champion Bob Fitzsimmons, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, and Fireman Jim Flynn in favor of a fight arranged by Tom McCarey at the Pacific Athletic Club in Los Angeles against Noah Brusso, a squat light heavyweight from Canada who fought under the Scottish-sounding name of Tommy Burns.

  Hart was sure he could beat Burns. He was taller and heavier and had a longer reach than the challenger, who had lost to all three of the name fighters he’d faced: Mike Schreck, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, and Jack “Twin” Sullivan. Most of the boxing world agreed. If Hart didn’t knock Burns out early, George Siler warned, “his championship stock will fall below par.”

  Neither the new champion nor his challenger was notably popular with the boxing public, and Jack Curley, now handling Hart’s business affairs, thought he might boost receipts if he could talk Jim Jeffries into being on hand again as referee. With Jeffries’ friend and former manager Billy Delaney, Curley called on the ex-champion at his farm. They were received warmly enough and seated themselves on the front porch while Mrs. Jeffries brought them glasses of cold milk.

  The visitors admired the view, and Jeffries mused that he wished he had the money to buy the fields next door so he could plant more alfalfa.

  Delaney said he knew a way for him to earn that kind of money fast. “How?”

  “By coming out of retirement and fighting Jack Johnson.”

  At that, Curley recalled, “Jeffries got up from his chair, walked into the house without a word or a look for either of us, and slammed the door behind him.”

  In the end, Jeffries did agree to officiate, and his great bulk made Tommy Burns seem even smaller than he was when he entered the ring—he stood just five foot seven and weighed twenty pounds less than Hart. But, like Jack Johnson, Burns was a master of ring psychology and what sportwriters then called “mouth-fighting,” verbal abuse and relentless taunting meant to anger and frustrate the opposition. Hart may have been bigger and stronger and had a more impressive record—thirty-six fights, eighteen won by knock-out—but he also had a quick temper and no sense of humor whatsoever. To upset him, Burns entered the ring with what he himself remembered as a “ridiculous” amount of tape on his hands and settled onto his stool.

  Hart demanded they be retaped.

  “Why Mr. Hart,” Burns said, peering up at the agitated titleholder. “I didn’t think that a big champion like you would mind a little man like me wearing a little tape.”

  Hart, anger rising, continued to insist. Burns continued to refuse. The argument went back and forth until Hart shouted that he would not fight unless Burns gave in. At that, Burns jumped up, shoved Hart, and shouted back, “Get out of my corner, you cheese champion!”

  Hart called Burns “a little rat” and took a swing at him. Jim Jeffries had to interpose himself until the bell rang.

  The furious champion spent eighteen of the next twenty rounds mindlessly rushing at Burns, who sidestepped, hit him as he went by, and kept up what Burns remembered as “a well-rehearsed line of chatter” calculated to keep Hart angry and out of control. When it was over, Burns was the easy winner. With characteristic grace, Marvin Hart claimed he’d been cheated. Burns was “a hugger and a wrestler,” not a boxer. Hart had been the victim of a conspiracy. Everybody had been in on it: Burns, Jeffries, even his own manager, Tommy Ryan.

  Burns didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he declared:

  I will defend my title as heavyweight champion of the world against all comers, none barred. By this I mean black, Mexican, Indian or any other nationality without regard to color, size or nativity. I propose to be the champion of the world, not the white or the Canadian or the American or any other limited degree of champion.

  Jack Johnson’s prospects for a title fight seemed to improve with Burns’ pledge to defend his title against all comers regardless of color, but only briefly. Burns eventually added an important caveat: he would fight Jack Johnson, he said, but before he did he planned to “give the white boys a chance.”

  First he demolished two second-raters on one night in San Diego. Then he knocked out Fireman Jim Flynn in the fifteenth round in Los Angeles. But in some quarters his claim to the title still remained suspect, and Philadelphia Jack O’Brien maintained through a convoluted line of reasoning that he, not Burns, was the real heavyweight champion because he had once beaten Burns and had won his light heavyweight title from Bob Fitzsimmons—who had once been heavyweight champion himself. Tom McCarey arranged for Burns to fight O’Brien in Los Angeles, with Jim Jeffries again acting as referee. It was a hard-fought, twenty-round battle, and when it was over, Jeffries declared it a draw. The question of legitimacy still hadn’t been settled, and many fans remained hopeful Jeffries himself might yet return to the ring.

  Meanwhile, Jack Johnson was still unable to find willing white opponents. On April 26, back at the Pythian Skating Rink in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where his victory by disqualification over Sandy Ferguson had nearly caused a riot the previous summer, Johnson found himself matched with another local favorite, a young black fighter from Canada who had made Boston his home. Sam Langford was born in Nova Scotia in 1883, came to America to escape his father’s beatings at the age of twelve, and was panhandling in Boston in 1902 when Joe Woodman, a pharmacist and sometime promoter, hired him to sweep out his gym and act as a sparring partner for the fighters who came in to train. Langford soon outfought most of them. He stood just five foot seven and weighed no more than 130 pounds at the beginning of his caree
r, but he had a massive torso, unusually long arms, and the knockout power of a far bigger boxer in both hands.*

  By the time Langford faced Johnson, he had already had at least fifty-eight fights, beaten the great Joe Gans, and held his own with Jack Blackburn, Joe Jeannette, and Joe Walcott. But he had been fighting for only three years and was five years younger than Johnson and more than thirty pounds lighter. The fifteen-round fight was predictably one-sided. “I gave Langford an awful lacing,” Johnson remembered.

  In the 6th round I put Sam to the mat for the count twice, the 1st time with a right to the heart, the 2nd with a right uppercut to the chin. Both times Langford struggled to his feet and stalled to the end of the round. After the 6th round it ceased to be a contest. Langford merely stalled it out, clinching & holding on at every opportunity. I did all the forcing. One great feature of that fight was Langford’s ability to take punishment. It was a wonder that he could stand the beating which I gave him. I didn’t try very hard for I did not have to as was very evident to the spectators. I left the ring without a mark while Langford’s face looked as if he had been through a war.

  Those at ringside differed as to the details. Some remembered Langford’s being knocked down in the eighth, as well as the second and sixth. Johnson’s manager for the fight, a Boston promoter named Alec A. McLean, claimed his man had been the victim of a bad count; Langford had actually been on the canvas for sixteen seconds. Others suggested that the bout had gone the distance only because Johnson had been asked to carry the local hero.

  Sam Langford would pursue Johnson for the next decade, loudly demanding a rematch, and Joe Woodman spread the rumor that his fighter had been jobbed in Chelsea, that he had actually knocked the far bigger Johnson down for a count of nine in the second round. No contemporary witness reported any such knockdown, and Langford himself would later admit he’d been thoroughly beaten. “The first time we met in Chelsea, Jack whipped me,” he said, “and I’m the little boy who should know who got the licking.”

  But, wrote the boxing historian Nat Fleischer, “Woodman’s startling fiction tale took a grip on the public fancy, and the majority of sports writers, without searching out the facts, backed up the Woodman dope. This legend gained strength until it came to be adopted as gospel and its constant circulation annoyed Jack Johnson more than anything else ever printed about his career.”*

  To compound the confusion, Johnson and Langford fought again on the stage of the Hub Theater in Boston just two days later in what was supposed to be a three-round exhibition to raise funds for the victims of the earthquake that had recently done to San Francisco something like what the great hurricane had done to Johnson’s hometown six years earlier. On August 22, 1924, Langford gave a reporter for the Halifax Herald an especially vivid account of this second contest:

  Just before the bout began, they halted things while somebody gave Jack a watch and chain and a little speech which said the present was from admiring friends. I knew it wasn’t. Jack bought that watch and chain himself, according to what I heard, and he was just sort of showing off what a popular fellow he was….

  That made me mad. I was mad, too, because Jack had given out a statement that day saying he was just taking it easy with me in Chelsea. So when they called “time” for the first round I ran into Johnson and clinched and said, “This ain’t going to be an exhibition tonight, it’s going to be a fight. Let’s go.”

  I broke loose from the clinch and then tore into Johnson, both fists flying. Jack tried to hold me back but I rushed him all around the ring, punching like a wild man. And then Jack, knowing that I meant what I said, started to fight.

  There wasn’t any ring on the stage of the theater. It was just a stage, no ropes, nothing. We battled from one side to the other, back to the curtains, forward to the footlights, fighting like two tigers. I was out to knock Johnson cold, if I could, and he was trying to finish me. We punched, wrestled, mauled, hauled and did everything but knock down the building.

  Before the first round was over we had upset the water buckets and our chairs, knocked over the referee and timekeeper, broken about ten electric bulbs in the footlights and twice, in the cyclonic stuff we were doing, almost fell into the orchestra pit.

  Somewhere in the middle of the second round I drove one home to Johnson’s face. I jumped at him to land a follow-up. He backed up and as he did I just threw myself at him. He grabbed me going [back], the two of us bumped into the scenery and a second later the scenery tumbled down on us. Some of it landed square on top of our heads. The canvas split and the scenery lay on our shoulders, with our heads sticking out. We shoved it down over our bodies, jumped away as it landed on the floor, and went on fighting….

  The house was in an uproar. It continued so all through the third round…. Along about the middle of the round Johnson got me in a clinch and tried to lift me off my feet. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted to throw me out among the customers or not. But I thought maybe the customers liked him better and I caught him and tried to drop him out with the spectators. But Jack was too strong. So we went ahead slugging, wrestling, mauling, butting until somebody called time. And that ended what started as an exhibition and turned into the wildest nine minutes of fighting I ever was mixed up in during 23 years of war.

  The Boston Post’s account written that evening was a good deal more terse: Langford had looked much the worse for wear when he entered the ring, it said, and Johnson had been especially careful not to reopen a cut above his opponent’s eye.

  Whatever the truth about his two contests with Sam Langford, Jack Johnson, who was happy enough to fight other black boxers over and over again, was never willing to climb back into the ring with him.

  Johnson had a new manager now, Sam Fitzpatrick, a big, shambling ex-fighter from Australia who had come to California in the 1880s and quickly moved to the business side of boxing, training Peter Jackson and Kid McCoy and shepherding George “Kid” Lavigne to the lightweight championship.* Fitzpatrick’s considerable bulk, soft speech, and personal habits—he could most often be found at the bar of the elegant Hoffmann House on Broadway in Manhattan—disguised a shrewd managerial mind. When a rumor reached him that Jeffries might be persuaded to return to the ring for just one more fight, he announced that Johnson would gladly meet any or all of the leading white heavyweights—Burns, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, Sam Berger, or Al Kaufmann—on a winner-takes-all basis, provided that Jeffries would agree to fight him once he’d knocked them all out of contention. The Police Gazette hailed Johnson for the courage implicit in this offer and expressed bewilderment as to “why Jeffries has taken so much trouble to dodge a meeting with Johnson…. [He] has a fine record, but it is not a terrifying one by any means…. Like [Joe] Gans, he has probably been compelled to hide his real punching power a bit in order to get contests.” Al Kaufmann’s manager turned Johnson down flat. White heavyweights fled so fast from his fighter, Fitzpatrick said, that “there isn’t even wind resistance.” Representatives of the other contenders did not even bother to respond. They were, said one sportswriter, “the yellowest pack of pigeon-livered mutts that ever disgraced the pages of pugilistic history.”

  After eleven years in the fight game, Johnson seemed perilously close to being back where he’d started, taking part in poorly attended bouts with familiar black rivals that amounted to little more than exhibitions, and facing second- and third-raters, both black and white, for small purses in unimportant towns. Something had to change. Johnson had long wanted to try his luck overseas, where black fighters were still a rarity and good white fighters might be less likely to duck him. Fitzpatrick finally agreed and consulted a sometime associate, Alec McLean—a onetime bicycle racer who had been Sandy Ferguson’s manager, had managed Johnson in his battle with Sam Langford, and was now without a meal ticket. The two men were sure Johnson could “easily beat any fighter on the other side of the water,” McLean recalled, and decided to use their connections to get him a couple of fights in Australia. They we
re sure he could beat Bill Quinn, the Australian heavyweight champion, and perhaps leverage possession of that title into a match with Burns. McLean wrote to the editor of the Australian sporting paper The Referee, who helped arrange for the National Sporting Club of Sydney to provide two round-trip boat tickets from San Francisco to Sydney.

  On the day after Christmas 1907, Johnson and McLean boarded the American steamer Sonoma at San Francisco. They carried with them a precious canister of film showing the recent bout between Tommy Burns and Philadelphia Jack O’Brien in Los Angeles. Fight films were still a novelty overseas, and McLean planned to help finance the trip by exhibiting them.

  The sporting editor of the Milwaukee Free Press bade Johnson a patronizing bon voyage:

  Po’ Artemis Johnsing, who was handed a lemon when nature clothed him in his swarthy complexion, has folded up his coat and stolen away to the antipodes…. Johnson has tried every means within reason to coax some of the American heavies into the corral, but has always been followed by the same jinx. His color is his misfortune. Johnson now realizes that he is black without piping himself in the looking glass. But the world is rather a large concern, and the stick of black chalk knows how to take advantage of transportation facilities. He will go across and see how they look upon dark meat over in one of King Edward’s lands.

  * Which “wife” this was remains a mystery. According to Johnson’s 1927 autobiography, Mary Austin had left him in September of 1902. He would not meet Clara Kerr, the next “wife” whose name we know, until he visited Philadelphia several weeks after this interview was published. He may well have been living with still another woman in Bakersfield.