Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  As time passed, few thought Taylor would survive. Some fans even “laughed and chaffed” at him as he circled the track. One particularly belligerent man who, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, “looked as though he had been up all night,” had to be hauled outside and silenced by the police.

  To keep crowd interest high, riders would occasionally compete in impromptu sprints. Fans repaid them by tossing money, called primes, at the winner. Over six days, a successful rider could add significantly to his overall earnings. No one seemed to understand the importance of entertaining the crowd better than Taylor, the only pure sprinter in the peloton. To please the speed-hungry crowd, he talked anyone who would listen into joining him in high-speed sprints. In so doing, fans and reporters began taking notice of him. “The star of the race thus far,” wrote one journalist, “is Major Taylor.”

  But by day three, fatigue set in. Taylor drifted back to ninth place and the sprints became less frequent. Even his usually smooth form began sagging. To compensate, he got creative, fastening a pillow to his handlebars that he used to rest his chest on. Seeing this, the other riders joined in. Soon, nearly everyone circled the track with their chests buried into soft pillows, bringing chuckles from the stands.

  By the end of day three, Taylor had logged nine hundred miles, but found himself one hundred miles behind front-runner Teddy Hale. While the more seasoned riders like Hale only slept for an hour or two a day, Taylor slept one hour for every eight hours of riding. At that rate, he stood little chance of an overall win. But he pushed on. Munger drifted in and out of the building, telling old racing stories and pitching the benefits of the Birdie Special to reporters. When he wasn’t there, he left matters up to trainer Rob Ellingham. Ellingham tended to Taylor, acting as chief motivator, nurse, psychologist, and all-important chef.

  One day blended into the next. With his total miles surpassing the one thousand mark, Taylor struggled to take in as many calories as he was using. During his short breaks, he’d sit down to a whopping feast: two fried chickens, four and a half pounds of red meat, pots of beef tea, and bushels of vegetables, all topped off with endless jars of milk. Yet he still rode away craving more food. But he was by no means the only glutton in the peloton. The food intake during a typical six-day race was nothing short of astonishing: twelve sides of beef out of which were carved five hundred steaks, four hundred chickens, six hundred pounds of lamb chops, ten boiled hams, fifty pounds of bacon, three hundred dozen eggs, and fifty pounds of butter. In the cereal line, fifty pounds of rice, twenty pounds of oatmeal, six dozen boxes of cornflakes, and two hundred pounds of sugarcane. And to wash it all down, seven hundred quarts of milk, twenty-five pounds of tea, and to keep riders awake, seventy-five pounds of coffee.

  These ample spreads did not always sit well. On one occasion following a particularly fervent gorging session, Taylor doubled over on his bike, his stomach so seized by cramps he could barely move. Suffering similar fates, others couldn’t take it any longer. Attrition began thinning the field. By the end of day four, the original band of twenty-seven had been whittled down to fifteen ragged riders.

  At that point, Taylor and a Canadian named Pierce were in a close battle for sixth place. Exhausted, the two men made a few halfhearted attempts at sprints. Sprinting against distance riders, Taylor nearly always won—“It’s just too easy,” someone heard him say. On one occasion, their wooziness caused them to lock handlebars. Taylor, whose arms and legs were by then like jelly, wobbled uncontrollably until finally losing control of his wheel, his bike bounding along the track, body tumbling head over heels for twenty feet. Ellingham ran over, scraped him off the floor, and carried him over to the infield. There amid his repeated cries to quit the race, he wrapped him in liniments, gave him a few words of encouragement, and nudged him back on the track.

  By the end of day five, Taylor had logged 1608 miles, 153 behind leader Teddy Hale, but just three miles behind Pierce who was in sixth place.

  Surprisingly, given the era, the crowd was connecting with Taylor. Besides his lively sprints, he entertained them by whistling loudly or swooping high up the steep bank and chatting with them as he rode passed. His victory over Bald, his pleasant demeanor, and his capacity to endure combined to make him a crowd favorite. “The wonder of the race is Major Taylor,” announced the New York Times.

  By day six, the word was already out. The crowds gathered en masse.

  Even in the morning, despite ticket prices doubling to a dollar, six thousand fans had gathered. By six o’clock a massive evening crowd arrived. As they had the previous night, horse and man were backed up as far as the eye could see. Carriages of all types choked Madison Avenue. An extra force of police had difficulty keeping the avenue entrance clear. Ticket sellers were overwhelmed. The center of the track by seven o’clock was so thick with bodies, it was almost impossible to navigate. The rail by the track sagged under the weight of lines of shouting men and women twenty deep. Behind them, hundreds stood on tiptoe in a vain attempt to see the riders. By eight o’clock, every seat was sold, but because Brady and Kennedy, in those days before strict fire codes, were known to overbook, the crowd kept pouring in. Cots were set up along the upper railing for added seating. When attendants finally started turning away thousands of people at the ticket window, fights broke out and the police had to swoop in to simmer down the crowd.

  On the inside, the ventilation system stood no chance against row after row of cigar-puffing fans, their smoke filling the auditorium and saturating the riders’ eyes and lungs. On the track, the lack of sleep was sucking whatever life remained out of the riders. They were becoming “peevish and fretful,” and the wear on their nerves and muscles was causing some riders to have terrible fits. Being the youngest and most inexperienced rider in the group, Taylor, in bike racing parlance, was among those cracking. During one break, he broke down in tears inside his tent, pleading with Ellingham to let him quit. “You fellows want me to stay here until my leg drops off so you can sell it to the doctor,” he grumbled incoherently.

  On another occasion he dismounted his bike, leaned it against a fence, walked across the track, sat down on a low rail, yawned, and fell asleep. Seeing this, a few fans stood up and tried cheering him back to life. Soon hundreds, then thousands joined in. “I cannot go on with safety,” he mumbled near a reporter, “for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand.” His face, according to a few reports, became “thin and emaciated,” and “his naturally large lips became larger still with the condition of his face.” Spectators thought he was finished.

  Taylor wasn’t the only rider losing his bearings. J. S. Rice, twenty-seven miles behind front-runner Hale, also became delirious, claiming that someone was throwing things at him. “He said he didn’t care about bricks and stones,” wrote one sportswriter, “but he objected to iron pillars being thrown at him.”

  Into this scene waltzed Teddy Roosevelt’s men. As New York’s police commissioner, he was responsible for leading a team of police surgeons into the Garden to check the pulse, temperature, and overall well-being of the riders. Human rights groups had been complaining about the race being inhumane. Knowing they were fighting an uphill battle against the immense popularity of the race, they sent in police surgeons as a temporary compromise. Brady, with his rawhide-tough upbringing, sneered at them. “It was nonsense,” he later wrote, before lightheartedly telling the story of one six-dayer who was so damaged “he died, prematurely burned-out I suppose, just a month shy of ninety-one.”

  Inhumane or not, he and Kennedy stopped the race at ten o’clock, two hours before the scheduled witching hour. When they did, only four men remained on the track: winner Hale, sixth-placed Pierce, a rider named Maddox, and a thin, black teenager who was still trying to eke out a few sprints for an appreciative crowd.

  Outside, horse-drawn floral wagons clopped up. An army of men hauled in loads of floral tributes, which were tossed at the riders as they circled the track. Their tonsils all but im
periled, the crowd stayed until they left the building. Hale, mobbed by overzealous well-wishers, needed a police escort to make it to his hotel across the street.

  In the infield, someone uncorked a bottle of champagne. It was flat. Everyone went home.

  They had witnessed one of the most remarkable demonstrations of human endurance ever displayed. Hale had traveled 1,910 miles, besting the previous record by 310 miles. Taylor was eighth with 1,732 miles. He too had shattered all previous six-day records. Given his age, fans were impressed with his fortitude. In this erstwhile unknown underdog, some saw themselves: alive but suffering, suffering yet enduring.

  But it was a curious way to start a sprinting career. Taylor had survived an event that, because of its excessively taxing nature, would soon be forced to change. Though it didn’t fit his racing style, the event fit the era. This was, after all, 1890s America. And it was, wrote author Ted Harper, “Six days of Madness.”

  On the morning of December 14, 1896, Brady, Powers, and Kennedy woke up in awfully good moods: $37,000 in net gate receipts and a similar number in concessions surely had something to do with their collective jolly. Waiting for them in the corridors of Hotel Bartholdi stood scores of haggard-looking men. The six-dayers, accompanied by their trainers and handlers, were looking to collect their shares of the purse. At noon, they were escorted into a reception room where they saw Kennedy and Powers standing behind a podium. Splayed out on a table sat rolls and rolls of gold. From his rostrum Kennedy congratulated the riders for their incredible fortitude, then called them forward one by one. Powers distributed the proper allocation of shining, double eagles.

  In no physical or mental condition for an extended celebration, most riders accepted their money, then bolted for the door. But reporters stood near the exits, drilling them with questions while surveying their overall condition, which they reported on in illustrative detail.

  Because the race only came to New York once or twice a year, the newsroom boys were going to have fun with this one. Winner Hale, who had slept twice as many hours the previous night as he had during the entire six-day race, could barely speak, his vocal cords lost somewhere in the Garden’s haze. In true fighting-Irish style, he desperately tried pushing out a few words, but nothing came out, so he just bowed to the crowd and then walked away, red-faced. A few others ambled toward the table in a peculiar waddling gait, painful saddle sores rendering them nearly immobile. Even more riders were heavily bandaged or had surly scars on their faces and bodies, injuries obtained from countless high-speed spills. Rice, the second-place finisher, looked and felt empty. Though he had just consumed three whole chickens, several bowls of oatmeal, a loaf of bread, and a pot of beef tea, he couldn’t satisfy his hunger. “I still feel half-starved,” he said, somehow stringing together a few words. One top-ten rider who had to be carried across the street after the race asked Brady and company if they would please mail his winnings to him.

  With trainer Ellingham watching, Taylor pressed forth on “swelled” knees, collecting $325 with little comment: $200 for his five-lap, half-mile win which took less than a minute, $125 for placing eighth in the six-day race that took 17,320 laps and 8640 minutes. Though this was equal to an entire year’s wages in a factory, he would never again have to work so hard for so little.

  The jolliness radiating from the promotional trio didn’t end with presentations to the eleven scheduled prizewinners. Several riders who weren’t supposed to receive anything were given $75 in gold. They expressed their gratitude to the magnanimous promoters. They “worked hard and had earned it,” bellowed Kennedy in what must have been the understatement of the century, the smoke from his cigar further gagging the riders.

  With that, the meeting adjourned, everyone scattering in different directions: the promoters to the bank, some riders straight to bed, and others—the more flush riders—to a Turkish bath or a local parlor for a deep massage, New York–style.

  Taylor wasn’t able to leave so easily. There were promoters, manufacturers, photographers, and newsmen who wanted a piece of him. Though Hale had won the six-day proper and had received extensive coverage, sprinters were coveted by reporters because they competed more often. They were the men of the hour. “The highlight of the event was flashed in the bicycle world in the form of a veritable black diamond,” The Referee said of Taylor, “he was all at once enthralled as the popular hero.”

  They had their subject. Their new hero, for the first time a black man, had come upon them. Major Taylor’s seminal hour had begun.

  In their desire to know everything, they would ask the obvious, the curious, and the absurd. Just how exhausted was he during the six-day race? Exactly how much did he eat? Did he plan to enter another six-day race? When? Where? One man seemed hell-bent on knowing how many times he had gone to the men’s room during the race.

  Taylor looked a little drawn in the face and sounded hoarse, remarked one writer, as he bounced from one reporter to the next.

  “I feel very well, considering . . .” Taylor responded, perhaps holding himself in reserve for what would be years of reporters’ inquisitions.

  “Where are you going now?” asked a Brooklyn Eagle reporter.

  “I am headed at once to Munger’s home in Middletown to recover.”

  As Brady had assumed, Taylor was going to be all right. Save for a little stiffness in the knees, commented a surprised New York Times reporter, “Major Taylor was none the worse for his ride . . .”

  Perhaps trying to one-up his counterparts, another writer claimed Taylor had succumbed to exhaustion and died from the race. Back in Indiana, Taylor’s parents had to read that report in horror.

  Within weeks of his first pro race, the news coverage already exceeded all previous years combined. That kind of coverage of a black man was unheard of. Some historians credit the great runner Jesse Owens with being the first black to be lionized by the American press, but four decades before, Taylor had somehow crashed through generations of racial barriers. “Men and women who normally did not care for blacks had cheered him on at the top of their lungs,” wrote one reporter. “His game riding won for him many friends among people ordinarily opposed to the colored race.”

  In the coming months, the first of many nicknames would begin appearing. Sobriquets like Black Cyclone, Ebony Streak, Black Whirlwind, Ebony Flyer, Colored Cyclone, Worcester Whirlwind all found their way into the nation’s papers. One journalist dreamed up the ultimate nickname, The Black Zimmerman—a superb but lofty claim for a young man with so many obstacles ahead of him.

  The extraordinary coverage of Taylor would mirror that of the sport. Every major paper, many small ones, and several cycling-specific publications covered the sport at great length. The New York Times, Boston Daily Globe, Brooklyn Eagle, and Washington Post, among others, covered it nearly every day, including during winter, in special sections called News of the Wheelmen. Bearings, a twice-a-month cycling periodical, often spanned several hundred pages. Some papers had separate writers covering the cycling beat, but because the languages and sometimes the tracks were so similar, others doubled as turf writers covering horse racing, a sport that was also popular at the time.

  Following behind the reporters came mustachioed photographers standing behind their cumbersome tripods, fingers pressed firmly against the flash lever, smoke puffing all around. Out came the earliest photographs of a man who would soon become among the most photographed sports figure in the world. The first known photo, a very grainy production, exposed his smooth baby face and his still-thin and short frame, around five-foot five inches and 125 to 140 pounds. One of the photos taken early in 1897 showing Taylor alongside several white riders was striking more for what it lacked than what it contained. In it were no signs of a meek black man cowering to the superiority of his white masters. Taylor blended in seamlessly as he had with Daniel Southard, his white boyhood playmate. Apparently it was all perfectly normal to him—he and his friends preparing to go out for another spin, neither whit
e nor black, just young men sharing the same goals, the same dreams, all of them created equal. When blacks were expected to doff their caps and step aside for superior white men, Taylor, in his photos and his words, appeared neither conceited nor humbled, only modest and quietly self-assured.

  While writers typed and photographers clicked, manufacturers scratched their heads: Would a black man using their bicycles be good for business, or turn potential customers away? Believing they knew the answer, many manufacturers refused to come within a stone’s throw of a black athlete. Others agonized over the issue. This was no small matter for athlete or manufacturer. Bike makers and tire, chain, and component companies hadn’t batted an eye in their decision to pay Teddy Hale more than $4,000 for using their products during his six-day victory. But he, of course, wasn’t black. It’s likely no black athlete had ever been paid to endorse a product.

  That is, perhaps, until Major Taylor entered Madison Square Garden. Taylor never revealed the financial arrangement between himself and Munger. Perhaps Munger paid Taylor’s expenses in exchange for using the Birdie Special and the free publicity that Munger received from it. This seems likely considering Munger’s dwindling reserves following Colonel Pope’s decision to cut prices and consolidate the industry. For half the race, Taylor rode a Birdie Special. But for the second half of the race, he had switched over to a Stearns bicycle. Though he never revealed his agreement with Stearns, it is unlikely that he would have switched away from Munger without monetary compensation, making the six-day race possibly the first instance of a black professional athlete being paid to endorse a product.