Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  Ellingham worked Taylor hard, watching daily as he racked up mile after mile on local roads and tracks. Some journalists, probably unfamiliar with the harsh nature of the sport, thought Munger’s training routine bordered on abuse. “The training was rather rough but it has had an effect that is beneficial to the lad right now,” wrote the Sunday Herald shortly after his initiation into the professional ranks. “Munger used to abuse the boy, some would call it abuse, but at the same time he was kindly to him and managed to make out of the lad a great rider.”

  On November 26, 1896, Thanksgiving Day, Taylor rolled his Birdie Special onto the hardened streets of Jamaica, Long Island. For him, the twenty-five-mile Tatum Handicap was merely a tune-up race, his last chance to put some competitive miles on his legs before the big international showdown at the Garden. One of the Vanderbilts was there; so was Pat Powers, probably wondering what Brady had gotten them into. A field of twenty-seven amateur riders lined up at what was then the heart of New York’s commercial district. In recognition of his success in the amateur ranks, Taylor was placed on scratch by the always attentive race handicappers. A writer for the Brooklyn Eagle wasn’t too enamored with the handicappers’ decision. “Those men who were in the supposedly fast bunch,” he wrote skeptically, “were Frank Munz, Fred Rich, and Major Taylor, the darkey rider who is entered in the big race in Madison Square Garden . . .”

  The New York Times inked a few words about Taylor riding “a fine race,” then moved on to the two amateurs they seemed to think were more “promising.” Just out for a training spin and perhaps not wanting to draw the attention of the professional handicappers, Taylor finished behind thirteen riders, including John Rud of Newark, the overall winner.

  At 1:30 that crisp fall afternoon, the curtain on Taylor’s amateur career fell. The Tatum Handicap was not only his last amateur race, but apparently his last road race. It had been an eventful childhood for the atypical black boy from Indiana, one that saw him atop a bicycle at age eight and now, a decade later, ended with him atop a bicycle. Yet his life story was only just beginning. The Jim Crow era had been, and would continue to be, filled with struggles and intrigue. Fortunately, he hadn’t had to go it alone. He had been helped by a handful of special men: his confidant Birdie Munger, his mentor Arthur Zimmerman, his athletic director Edward Wilder, and now William Brady, the fighting showman from the West. These caring men meant everything to him. Because, like most riders in the biking world at that time, he had no place else to go, no one else to lean on, nothing else he cherished. For Major Taylor, there were no train tracks leading back to Indy.

  PART II

  Chapter 7

  SIX DAYS OF MADNESS

  For years, Munger had been nurturing Taylor under his paternal wings. He had taken him into his home, trained him on seedy, old racetracks, raising him up through the amateur ranks through a dilatory and careful development. It wasn’t until the six-day race at Madison Square Garden under the glaring eyes of the sporting public, however, that Munger finally set him free.

  With Arthur Zimmerman spending much of his time overseas, the nation eagerly sought a new hero. In the winter of 1896, America was in the third year of the most disastrous financial crisis in its history. The panic of 1893, which began around the time of Taylor’s first race, had washed over American life like a hurricane. In some towns nearly 25 percent of the population had lost their careers, their investments, their farms. Violent strikes and riots wracked the nation and the middle class began whispering fearfully of “carnivals of revenge.” A country that had grown supremely confident from its industrial success during the Gilded Age—when everyone was a potential Carnegie and success was celebrated as never before—was disheartened by rampant indigence. The strongest of citizens, including prominent bankers—more than five hundred banks had gone under—and Wall Street executives were overcome by feelings of hopelessness and trepidation. Their fears were not lost on politicians: Republican candidate William McKinley won the presidency with a simple promise to provide a “full dinner pail” for the unemployed.

  Present-day writings often refer to the era as “the Gay Nineties,” highlighting the extravagances of the Morgans, Belmonts, and Vanderbilts. In reality, eleven million of America’s twelve million families lived below the poverty line, earning on average just $345 a year. The average income for blacks was considerably less.

  Unlike the Great Depression, when more government programs were available to aid the impoverished, Americans were largely left to fend for themselves. Few areas, especially train depots, were without beggars. Some were content with finding their next meal; others too proud for handouts begged for jobs so they could fend for themselves; still others sought just enough money to afford temporary relief.

  Relief came in many forms. In search of hope and encouragement, people filled churches to capacity. Entertainment venues like Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, The Magic Lantern Theatre, Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, and ragtime music led by Scott Joplin also helped people cope. Though motion pictures were in their infancy, people were spellbound by them. From New Jersey to San Francisco, they scraped together twenty-five cents, turned a crank, and peered into Edison’s kinetoscopes to watch Bicycle Trick Riders and Brady’s six-minute production of a Corbett fight—the first big moneymaker the movie industry ever produced.

  Americans also sought relief in sports. But with radio and television decades away, the only access people had to sports heroes either came from reading newspapers or magazines, seeing them on billboards, or attending live events. Americans eagerly awaited the morning paper for word on their sports hero or for any news of the big stars coming to their town, their moods ebbing and flowing with the successes or failures of their chosen idol. Live sporting events, the preferred medium, often provided the first opportunity for rural farmers to meet urbanites as they passed through the gates of the era’s most popular sports: baseball, horse racing, boxing, tennis, and wrestling. But cycling arguably led the way. In 1896, the year of Taylor’s professional debut, all facets of cycling were wildly popular: leisure riding, road races, outdoor track races, lantern parades, and the overflowing bicycle manufacturers’ conventions.

  In winter, no sporting event drew fans like the six-day bike races. As its name implies, the riders had six days—between Monday morning at 12:01 and Saturday evening at 11:59—to ride as many miles as possible. Around and around the steeply banked track they pedaled day and night, sometimes resting for only one or two hours a day. The rules were straightforward: after the final tally at the end of the sixth night, victory belonged to the man who had pedaled the greatest distance. The early version of the race was as brutal a sporting event as man had ever devised. But if a rider survived and won, the total winnings—$5,000 to $10,000 in the 1890s, $75,000 in the 1920s—was nearly enough to set up a man for life. Writers from most newspapers in America and Europe covered the race extensively. With one stroke of their pens, cyclists could gain unprecedented international exposure, instantly raising them from obscurity and poverty to fame.

  In December 1896, cycling’s broad-based popularity, Americans’ need to escape, and the ruggedness of the era merged, greatly enhancing the spectacle of the race. The event, the stage, and the audience were set. It awaited only the lead actor, the new hero.

  At that extraordinary moment at the dawn of the “separate but equal” era, Major Taylor, the eighteen-year-old, largely unknown black man, walked past the Garden’s Roman colonnades for the first time. That grand entrance off Madison Avenue, gleaming with lavender marble, must have been quite a sight for his pastoral eyes. It was the second of four buildings that have used the name Madison Square Garden and undoubtedly the grandest. No ordinary edifice, this was an indoor oasis so stunning the New York Herald considered it not just a building “but a state of mind.”

  After the first Garden, owned by William Vanderbilt, was torn down in 1890, its new owners, J. P. Morgan and a brilliant young architect named Stanford White, had ere
cted a grand monument to the city’s predepression taste and wealth. Extending 200 feet on one side and 485 feet on the opposite side, the building was an imposing structure of yellow brick and white Pompeian terra-cotta. On its roof was a popular observation deck that offered visitors a bird’s-eye view of the city.

  As grand as the building was on the outside, it was on the inside where Taylor would have been most awestruck; pale red walls enfolded an auditorium 200 feet by 350 feet, the largest then in existence, with seats for eight thousand people and floor space for several thousand more, all laid out beneath an eighty-foot-high ceiling.

  And then there were the wine rooms, far and away the most popular, located in odd corners of the building. This is where enormous sums were wagered on races, and, as Brady recalled, people went “to get gloriously fried.” Perhaps nobody more than he. “I must have been one of the best customers in the history of the old Madison Square Garden.”

  But Morgan and White, perhaps caught up in the excesses of the era, had spent too freely. By the mid-’90s, just a few years after its completion, they were having trouble meeting expenses. So Brady, Kennedy, and Powers were able to lease the building for years at a time at a substantial discount.

  If, by finishing fourteenth in his last amateur race, Taylor wanted to come in under the radar of the professional race handicappers, it had worked. Early Saturday night, December 5, before the start of the six-day event, Taylor had signed on to the half-mile open handicap to touch off his career. He went largely unnoticed. While a few handicappers had vaguely heard his name, none had any reason to believe that he was anything more than an also-ran. He was, wrote one of the few reporters to recognize his name, nothing but “a Dark Horse.” A Kansas City sportswriter referred to him as “a little ink-stained fellow.” Their minds had been preoccupied by weightier American names like Eddie “Cannon” Bald, two-time sprint champion of America; his closest pursuer, Tom Cooper; famed world-traveler, Nat Butler; and the thick-legged powerhouse, Arthur Gardiner, among others. In recognition of his green-as-grass status, the race handicappers positioned Taylor as limitman, with a thirty-five-yard advantage to the above scratchmen.

  While he warmed up, and over the next six days, a melting pot of people would pour in by the tens of thousands, including the Vanderbilts and the Belmonts—Oliver and his new wife, Alva.

  When the spectators entered, they moved through a long lobby entrance lined with polished yellow Sienna marble. They were greeted by the lively sounds of Bayne’s Sixty-ninth Regiment Band as they emerged into the arena. New York’s society folk were escorted to their red carpet suites. The commoners looked down from an upper level promenade that extended around the circuit of the arena. A catwalk arched over the ten-lap to the mile track where another thousand fans looked down on the riders. Hanging from the center of the track, a large electronic scoreboard allowed fans to track each rider’s progress.

  The night before the six-day race, the riders competing in the half-mile handicap entered the track individually to the deafening roar of the crowd. They glanced up at the throng, strapped themselves into their toe clips, and waited on the tape, their trainers holding them up. Brady’s friend, a comely actress named Anna Held, squeezed the trigger, raising the curtain on Major Taylor’s professional career.

  At the sound of the pistol, Taylor’s anxiety was quickly replaced with a massive forward push. He put his head down and stormed around the first lap of the track, his thirty-five-yard head start neither widening nor narrowing. After the second of five laps, some riders who had not yet closed the gap began to take notice of him. Others held their ground, figuring the new kid would eventually crack.

  Eddie Bald, who’d probably never heard of Taylor but had a reputation to uphold, was the first rider to react to him. The man whose face appeared on cigarette packages nationwide and whose trading card was exchanged more than any other wasn’t about to let “a runaway African,” as one reporter called Taylor, beat him. Showing why he had earned the nickname “Cannon,” Bald picked his way through the maze of riders, passing Cooper, Gardiner, and Butler. The champion of America was on a tear.

  At the beginning of the third lap, as the handicappers had expected, Taylor’s thirty-five-yard gap began dwindling; thirty yards, then twenty-five. The confident home crowd cheered New York’s Bald on, waiting for him to overtake Taylor as he had everyone else that year. Smoothly, fluidly, Taylor rolled on, dipping and swerving around the steep wooden track. From their private booth, Brady and Kennedy could study Taylor’s every move. They could see the grace of his cadence, the absence of wasted energy, the celerity of motion not unlike an eagle in flight.

  From behind, Bald continued a relentless pursuit toward the speeding black man who looked like nothing more than a kid fresh out of high school. The rest of the field slid away, littered all over the track behind them. It was coming down to a two-horse race—the experienced Bald and neophyte Taylor. Pedaling with all that was in him, Taylor was alone on the lead, banking into the first turn of what he thought was the final lap. The half-mile race required five laps around the track. At the beginning of the fifth, suddenly, unexplainably, something happened. Out of nowhere, his right arm rose in a closed fist as though he was shaking it in triumph. There was a full lap left, yet he was celebrating as though he had won. Everything Munger had taught him about studying each track and staying calm had seemingly been lost. His lead was evaporating. Bald was closing. The crowd was shouting.

  Perhaps he didn’t know the track’s length. Perhaps he had miscounted. Or the thunderous New York crowd, the web of international reporters, the grandeur of the garden, all combined to unnerve him. For a split second at the most significant juncture of his young life, Taylor wavered. The crowd, noticing his mistake, screamed themselves hoarse.

  With less than three-quarters of a lap to go, finally realizing what was happening, Taylor dropped his head and lunged forward again. But under great pressure, his usual poise began unraveling. What had been a perfect matrimony between man and bicycle was now merely Taylor and his Birdie Special, struggling to regain their harmony. Craning his neck back, Taylor saw Bald charging at him. Looking ahead while ripping along at over forty miles per hour, Bald could see Taylor’s form crumble. He shot forward drawing even closer: twenty-yards, fifteen-yards. He was eating away at Taylor’s lead in chunks.

  Bald stood up on his machine and pounced on his pedals, his legs straining, his long frame lunging to within yards of him.

  Taylor was coming to the homestretch of his first professional race, eyes wide open, legs burning. Behind him were some of the greatest cyclists in the country. All around him, Madison Square Garden’s plush interior thronged with thousands of howling fans. Above him, a catwalk of fans, their hands reaching out toward him. Ahead of him, an empty undulating wooden track and the glistening white tape of the finish line. And hot on his tail, the two-time champion of America.

  The two men looked forward and saw the tape rushing at them. Just then, Taylor looked down at the track floor and saw nothing but his front wheel flying over the tape.

  Ten days removed from his eighteenth birthday in his first professional race, Taylor had crossed the finish line ahead of America’s sprint champion. All that remained of the crowd’s vocal cords shrieked themselves out as he circled the track triumphantly. He grinned ear to ear as admirers tossed bouquets at his feet with the band wailing “Way down Dixie!” Stunned, Bald poked his head out from the infield, his mouth gaped open. Neither he nor anyone else could believe what had just happened!

  With five fast turns around the Garden track, Major Taylor had thrust himself into America’s sporting scene with tremendous force. In the press stands located in the center of the track, puzzled reporters leaped for their typewriters and began banging away. Cables and telegrams went out. A clump of managers, manufacturers, and promoters, including several from Europe, looked on quizzically from their booths—surely no one more so than William Brady.

  Throughout t
he arena, fans who did not already have one shelled out fifteen cents for a race program and began thumbing through its pages. They mingled among themselves, asking the question: Who is this young, black man?

  Munger’s slow cultivation of Taylor came to an abrupt halt one day after the half-mile race. Given Taylor’s proclivity for shorter distances and the fact that he had never raced more than seventy-five miles, perhaps he should have taken his $200 purse and gone home. But for whatever reason, perhaps for the extensive media exposure, Munger signed him on to the six-day race. The total purse, $7,500, had attracted twenty-eight top long-distance riders, including several Europeans who made the long journey overseas. The race always began with the era’s sports or entertainment stars firing off the pistol. In the early 1900s stars like Jack Dempsey, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, Bing Crosby, and Mary Pickford did the honors. In the 1890s, it was actresses Anna Held and Lillian Russell, and President McKinley, among others. When Taylor took to the line, he looked up and saw Eddie Bald, the sprint champion he had just beaten, chewing on a toothpick and glaring down at him, pistol in hand. Given the heated battles these two men would have in the future, some later wondered if Bald had considered pointing down instead of up.

  With the crack of Bald’s pistol, around and around the twenty-eight riders went. Taylor stayed near the lead for the first few hours, but some of the more experienced riders were simply holding back in reserve. As the morning ticked on, the crowd began to thin. Some made the Garden their home for the entire week, cheering on the riders in the evening when the big crowds were there, then falling asleep in their seats in the early morning hours. After six hours of continuous riding, Taylor was holding up well, in second place, only a few miles behind Britain’s Eddie Hale.