But Johnson did not see himself on the front lines. General Sherman was right about war, he told an American reporter he met outside the American Express office in Rue Scribe. He wanted no part of it. “The only thing left for me is to pose as the statue of Hard Luck,” he said with a sigh. “But all the sculptors are at the front.”
The next day, he got one of his cars out of storage and set out for Boulogne with Lucille and Gus. They could hear the thump of German guns as they drove, and the roads were choked with French troops and military vehicles. Trying to get around them, he drove over an embankment and had to ask for help to get on his way again. Waiting at the pier at Boulogne, he watched English and Scottish troops come ashore singing, “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”
The Johnsons made it across the channel and settled into another London flat.
The champion was in real trouble now. His money was running out. War kept him off the Continent and preoccupied the British.* He couldn’t go home. He made plans to sail to Buenos Aires and try his luck in South America. “I’ve been told it’s a good place for a spade,” he told a friend. Then a telegram arrived: his old friend Jack Curley was coming to England with a proposition for him.
One day that summer, Curley and Harry Frazee had lunched together at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan. Curley hadn’t really been able to afford it. “Times were slack with me,” he remembered. “I was practically broke. I was getting meager returns from two or three obscure fighters … but I needed more than that.” He was thousands of dollars in debt, in fact, and had hoped to borrow the money from his former partner. But Frazee, who had moved from small-time vaudeville to big-time Broadway since he and Curley had sent Jim Jeffries around the country before the battle at Reno, was also low on cash. His partner, L. Lawrence Weber, could provide the money. But Frazee had another idea.
“Why don’t you get somebody to beat the nigger?”
“I’ve got somebody,” Curley said. “Or at least I know somebody, Jess Willard.”
Why Willard?
“Because Johnson is ready to be taken,” he answered, “and Willard, big, strong and punch-proof, is the man to do it.”
If the current crop of white hopes was “an awful herd of harmless elephants,” as the sportswriter William A. Phelon insisted it was, Jess Willard was the biggest bull in the herd. The “Pottawatomie Giant” stood six feet six and a half inches tall, weighed 230 pounds when in fighting trim, and had a fingertip-to-fingertip reach of eighty-four inches. “God made me a giant,” he once told a friend. “I never received an education, never had any money. I knew that I was a big fellow and powerful strong. I just sat down and figured that a man as big as me ought to be able to cash in on the road to boxing.”
Born in 1881 on a farm in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, he left school early rather than allow the teacher to whip him, broke horses for a living, then traded them. He ran a livery stable in the little town of Emmett, married his childhood sweetheart (with whom he eventually had four children), then moved to Elk City, Oklahoma. There, he went into business selling mules and driving freight wagons, only to have his partners swindle him out of his savings. In 1911, bitter, broke, and distrustful, he thought he’d try the ring. He was twenty-nine years old the first time he laced on a glove as a professional—and he promptly lost on a disqualification to an otherwise unremembered tank-town fighter named Louis Fink. His wife said he’d been beaten up so badly he’d barely been recognizable when he came home. But Willard got paid and decided to stick with it. “I never liked [boxing],” he remembered. “I hated it as I never hated a thing previously, but there was money in it. I needed the money and decided to go after it.”
He won his next seven fights, including a three-round knockout of Fink, and briefly attracted the attention of the veteran manager Billy McCarney, who matched him with another western newcomer, Joe Cox. Cox came for him with such fervor that Willard grabbed the referee and hid behind him, then jumped out of the ring altogether in the fourth. “I quit the big dog on the spot,” McCarney recalled.
But another manager soon took him on: Tom Jones, a sharp-tongued onetime barber from Illinois who had already shepherded Ad Wolgast to the lightweight title and Billy Papke to the middleweight championship. Jones accepted no excuses from his fighters, but even with his ceaseless exhortations to bear down, the big Kansan remained an inconsistent performer. He did better than insiders expected in no-decision bouts with Arthur Pelkey and Luther McCarty, but looked so lethargic losing to Gunboat Smith that some writers suggested he should quit the ring. “I never really knew how to fight,” Willard later admitted. “I never could do anything to the other fellow in the way of damage. I simply couldn’t do it. Harming the other fellow seemed to be cruel, and so long as the other fellow didn’t harm me much I didn’t see any reason why I should hurt him.” But if the other fellow did hurt him, he also said, “I got real mad and just swung on them.”
In August of 1913, he was matched in San Francisco with a big, fearsome-looking victim of pituitary gigantism from Wyoming named John “Bull” Young. In the eleventh round, Willard landed a right uppercut. Young went over backward, his head slamming into the canvas. He suffered a concussion and died the next day of a cerebral hemorrhage. Willard, Jones, the fight’s promoter, Tom McCarey, and several others were arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
The case was later dropped, but Willard was unnerved. His next opponent was George “Boer” Rodel, a handsome South African. He had been brought to America by James J. Johnston, a Briton who billed him as a hero of the Boer War Siege of Ladysmith until a cynical sportswriter did the math and pointed out that Rodel had been twelve years old at the time. Rodel was a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Willard and had already lost to Jim Coffey and Gunboat Smith. If his import was to continue to sell tickets in America, Johnston needed to do something dramatic. He visited Willard in his dressing room moments before the fight was scheduled to begin. “Jess,” he said, “here’s something I think you ought to know for your own good. My Boer has got a weak heart. A doctor told him a really good punch might kill him. You do what you like about it.” Willard turned pale. For ten pacific rounds he kept his powerful right hand safely at his side and used his long left to keep the smaller man from doing him any harm. “His behavior in the fight was a model of tenderness,” John Lardner wrote. “He might have been Rodel’s mother.” Later, when Willard figured out that Johnston had tricked him, he took pleasure in twice knocking the Boer senseless.*
Willard won more fights than he lost after that, but he was neither fast nor aggressive nor popular. When he and Carl Morris lumbered through ten no-decision rounds at Madison Square Garden, the Los Angeles Times headlined its story GEE: WHAT A ROTTEN FIGHT. Willard showed initiative only once, the Times added, when he attempted “an annihilating right hand swing and nearly fell out into Twenty-third Street when he missed by a couple of yards.”
By the summer of 1914, Willard’s career seemed to have stalled, and he was considering changing his line of work again. Still, Curley knew, Johnson himself had said he’d like to fight him, “just to show Tom Jones he can’t pick a champion.” Willard was big, he was strong, and, most important, he was white.
Curley went to work right away. He went around Tom Jones and wired Willard in Los Angeles directly, saying only that he wanted to talk. Willard agreed to meet him halfway across the continent in Kansas City. There, they sat together on a baggage truck on the railroad platform while Curley made his pitch.
“Jess,” he said, “I want to put you into a ring with Johnson. If you string along with me, I’ll do it.”
Willard was happy to string along. He’d always wanted to fight Johnson, he said. “I’m sure if I get the chance I’ll beat him. And I’ll never forget you for giving it to me.”
Curley took Willard back to New York with him. Together they got Tom Jones’ agreement. Then Curley set out for England to see Jack Johnson.
He found the champion walking his
dog on the sidewalk outside his rented flat in St. Mary’s Mansions, Paddington.
Johnson greeted Curley warmly. They’d known each other for sixteen years, ever since the battle royal in Springfield, Illinois, that first brought the future champion to the attention of boxing insiders in Chicago. “We had been close friends and had met in previously mutually satisfactory business deals,” Johnson wrote later. “At one time in my life, when I was in serious trouble [after Etta Johnson’s suicide and during the Lucille Cameron crisis], “he had stood loyally by me. As a result of this, I had the utmost confidence in him.”
“Come on up,” Johnson said, “we’ve waited dinner for you. And I know you’ll like it because it’s a real American dinner—chicken, corn, biscuits I mixed myself and everything.” Upstairs, Curley chatted with Lucille while Johnson put on his apron and bustled around the kitchen. At dinner, according to Curley, Johnson at first said he had no wish ever to return to the United States. But “[a] moment later, his eager questions about friends and scenes back home belied his declaration that he did not ever want to go back. I told him as much as I could in reply to the innumerable questions.” Then Johnson brought the conversation around to the possibility of a fight against the newest white hope whose name he pretended not to be able to pronounce. “And who is this WeeLARD you want me to fight?”
“Don’t pull that Parisian accent on me you mug—plain American ‘Willard,’” Curley said. “He’s a big mule-skinner from Kansas. He’s six-feet-seven-inches tall, weighs 260 pounds, has dynamite in either hand, and can’t be hurt.” The champion chuckled. Other guests arrived. The fight talk ended. But, Curley remembered, “I knew I had landed Johnson.”
After dinner, the champion had his car brought around and offered to show Curley the town. It was late. The promoter begged off, so the champion drove him back to his hotel, instead. On the way, he pulled over beneath a streetlight and handed Curley a sheaf of telegrams to look through. “They were from fight managers and promoters in New York,” Curley recalled, “some of them men I had reason to think were friends of mine—that is, until I saw the messages they had sent to Johnson in an effort to get him to refuse to sign with me.”
“I don’t pay any attention to that stuff,” Johnson said, starting up the car again. “I’m ready to go along with you, Jack.”
How far he was willing to go along with Jack Curley would later become the subject of bitter contention between them—and still stirs controversy among boxing historians. The basic outline of the deal they worked out together over the next few days was clear enough: Johnson was to get the thirty thousand dollars plus the training expenses his pride demanded—the same sum Tommy Burns had received to risk his title against Johnson in Sydney—for a forty-five-round title contest with Willard in Mexico at a site as close as possible to the U.S. border, so American fans could get there. And he was to get one third of the foreign-film rights, as well (there were no U.S. rights, since a new federal law forbade the shipment of such films across state lines).
But, according to Johnson, there was more to their negotiations than that. “Curley was a cunning fellow,” he wrote. One evening, Johnson began sadly to list the wrongs he believed had been done him.
Curley cut him off. “Don’t you know if you weren’t champion you would not have all this trouble?”
Johnson agreed. White America could never forgive him so long as he held the title. But what could he do about it?
Again, according to Johnson, Curley had a ready answer. If Johnson would lie down to Willard and give up his championship, he could have a sizable off-the-record payment, in addition to which Curley promised to use his personal connections to see to it that he was allowed to go home again without fear of prison. “He frankly told me that if I lost the fight to Willard,” Johnson wrote, “I could return to the United States without being molested [by the government]. These hints were inducements, of course, but the greatest inducement of all was the opportunity it offered me to see my mother, for all who know me and who have read about me know that whatever other failings I may have had, the love I had for my mother was so deep and sincere that I would have done anything to end the separation between us…. After that … conversation … I did not care anymore for the title of world’s champion than a child does for the stick from which the lollypop has vanished.”
It is impossible now to know precisely what arrangement Jack Curley and Jack Johnson may have made with each other in London. Johnson did want to go home, and really was eager to see his mother, but he was not naïve. It’s hard to imagine he could ever really have believed Curley was capable of arranging such a deal with the federal government—or that Curley, even at his most expansive, could have pretended to have the power to pull it off. (When Johnson later charged the promoter with having double-crossed him, Curley shot back, “Did he think I was mayor of the United States?”) Neither Jack Johnson nor Jack Curley was above a little mutually beneficial pre-arrangement, but despite all Johnson said about his fight with Willard in later years, there is no evidence that he ever did anything but try his best against Jess Willard once the two men climbed into the ring.
Curley apparently did promise to do his best to persuade the government to go easy on the champion, and there is documentary evidence that he followed through on that pledge. He may have further impressed the champion with talk of a potential ace in the hole: Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was an old friend and former client; Curley had handled Bryan’s lecture tour one season and had even persuaded him to attend a prize fight, which the pious prairie orator admitted he’d enjoyed.
In any case, the promoter sailed home to get things organized, while Johnson and Lucille sailed for South America and waited for further word from their friend, Jack Curley. Curley and Frazee scheduled the fight for March 6, 1915, at the race track at Juárez. A big cattlemen’s convention was to take place then just across the border at El Paso and the promoters hoped to attract plenty of American ticket buyers. But Mexico was in chaos. Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who controlled most of the northern part of the country, was delighted at the prospect of a heavyweight title contest in his region, especially when Curley offered him a cut of the proceeds. But to get there from South America, Johnson would have to land on the Caribbean coast at either Tampico or Veracruz, then travel overland to Juárez. Both ports were in the hands of General Venustiano Carranza, who wished to do nothing to strengthen Villa’s hand or to antagonize Washington. Carranza let it be known that if Johnson set foot in his territory, he would arrest him and turn him over to the Americans.
Meanwhile, Johnson and his party sailed north from Montevideo aboard the British steamer Highland Harris. Johnson ate four meals a day, the captain remembered, and filled the long hours at sea playing shuffleboard and shooting at sharks. They spent several days at Barbados, where Johnson earned a few dollars showing the film of his fight with Frank Moran and sparring at the Electric Theater with a Trinidadian so frightened he kept running into the wings. Then he chartered a boat for Cuba, arriving on February 15. From there, he was expected to sail for Tampico aboard the steamer Morro Castle. Two days later, on February 17, Jack Curley sent two trusted emissaries to call upon federal officials in Chicago with instructions to see what they could do to make Johnson’s homecoming after the fight as easy as possible. Robert Cantwell, a former federal agent who had briefly been employed by Johnson as a private investigator during the months leading up to his Mann Act trial, asked to see U.S. Attorney Charles Clyne. At the same time, Ed Smith of the Chicago American, got an appointment with federal agent L. C. Wheeler. Smith was Johnson’s closest friend among sportswriters—he had written friendly pieces about him after Reno and refereed the fight at Las Vegas with Jim Flynn; his wife was supposed to have accompanied Etta Johnson to New Mexico on the evening she killed herself.
Both men told the same story. Johnson was “about broke” and eager to come home, provided “matters could be adjusted satisfactorily with the government”�
��by which he meant if he were allowed to pay a substantial fine and not have to serve any time. It was also “well-known in sporting circles,” they said, that the upcoming fight was “a frame up,” “that it has already been decided as to who is to win and for this agreement on Johnson’s part to permit Willard to win he will be paid a considerable [sum] of money other than the stipulated percentage of the gate receipts.”
Clyne was opposed to what Agent Wheeler called any kind of “dicker”: he told Cantwell no such agreement could be made in advance. But Hinton G. Clabaugh, now superintendent of the Justice Department office in Chicago, took a different view. He proposed he be allowed to go to Juárez personally to try to talk Johnson into surrendering once the fight was over. Cantwell was “close to the sporting and the underworld,” while he had “the utmost confidence” in Ed Smith. With the help of these two men, he said, “I believe somehow I can on one pretext or another get Johnson back on American soil and into custody.”
His boss, A. Bruce Bielaski, would have none of it. “I personally would be very much opposed to entering into agreement with this defendant”; Jack Johnson should be treated like any other fugitive. Curley’s connections had not moved the Justice Department. Nor did his supposed closeness to the secretary of state turn out to mean anything: instead of showing sympathy for the fugitive, Bryan personally interested himself in finding a way to seize Johnson from the ship that was to take him from Cuba to Mexico, and he would later wire Havana to make sure Johnson was refused a new passport.
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