Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  As the whistle sounded, Taylor saw Dunlop storm off. The train lurched forward, anger all around it.

  In a scene eerily similar to the previous fall, Taylor sat in the swaying belly of an eastward train agonizing over what could have been had he been granted the same treatment as his rivals. Journalists would soon announce the name of the 1898 NCA champion to the nation. And it wouldn’t be Taylor’s.

  Taylor brooded. Amid the rocking and clanging, he found a quiet section of the train and sat alone, staring out as the first wave of fall leaves dropped to the ground. As always, nestled in his lap sat the Scriptures. As he thumbed through the pages, perhaps ruminating on the calming message in the words of John, he thought about all the opportunities lost. He surely grasped for hope in verse 14:27, in which all earthly troubles seem smaller, more manageable:

  Peace I leave with you;

  my peace I give you.

  I do not give to you as the world gives.

  Do not let your heart be troubled

  and do not be afraid. I am with you.

  He finally drew into Worcester. As he emerged from the train, his sense of calm was replaced by a surge of energy, an undercurrent that needed attending. Though some sportswriters and prominent race handicappers considered him to be the unofficial American champion, Taylor felt incomplete, as if he had much to prove.

  Upon his arrival home, he retrieved a letter someone had slid into his mailbox. It was a formal notice of his suspension from the rebel organization for abandoning the Missouri races. Any chance of reinstatement seemed improbable and would only be considered after payment of a lofty $400 fine. He tossed it aside apathetically. What’s more, he would learn that Brady’s mighty group, wanting to cash in on Sunday racing, was at the vanguard of the rebel movement.

  He had only one avenue to go down. Taylor contacted Chairman Mott and applied for reinstatement into the League of American Wheelmen. If accepted, this would mean access to manufacturer’s contracts. He prayed for the opportunity to prove to a nation of confused racing fans exactly who the fastest man really was. After careful review, Chairman Mott accepted his application for reinstatement. Taylor’s prayer, in the form of a lucrative offer from a well-heeled manufacturer, would soon be answered.

  Crisp fall leaves crackled across Philadelphia’s Woodside Park Track. At the end of the previous season when Taylor had faced strikingly similar challenges, he retreated to Worcester to ponder his future as a professional bike racer. But for a few bone-chilling days in mid-November 1898, with most sports fans hunkered indoors for the coming winter, he decided to channel his anger on the track.

  Because professional bike racing had broken into two separate entities, similar to the American and National leagues in baseball, the winner of the American Sprint Championship was blurred. A few riders put forth claims as the victor, including Bald and Taylor. Everyone had an opinion. One of the most interesting ones came from a gentlemanly, midlevel rider named Howard Freemen. “I am in a good position to comment on the relative amount of speed possessed by Eddie Bald and Major Taylor,” he said after having had a unique view to the rear of Taylor throughout the year. “During the season, he has been blessed with almost superhuman speed . . . all the boys willingly acknowledge him to be the fastest rider on the track and also a splendid fellow personally, but on account of his color, they cannot stand to see him win over them. If it were possible to make him white,” Freeman continued, “all of the boys would gladly assist in the job.”

  The official LAW record lists Tom Butler, a man who stayed with the league, as the 1898 winner. In accepting the trophy Butler must have felt unfulfilled; he was sixty points behind Taylor going into the final races right before the breakup.

  So Taylor took up one of the many offers that had begun piling up in Brady’s office following his victory over Midget Michaels. “There’s no sense crying over spilt milk,” he said of the Cape Girardeau incident. Harry Sager and the Waltham Manufacturing Company, manufacturer of the popular Orient bicycle, offered to pay him $500 for each world record he set. He was also offered $10,000, a princely sum in those pre–income tax days, if he spun off the mile in less than one minute, thirty seconds. The current record for the one-mile was an impossible 1:32 3/5 set by Frenchman Edward Taylore, another Brady recruit who added an e to his last name to distinguish himself from Major Taylor.

  Compared to the large animated summer crowds, Woodside Park Track had a frigid fall feel to it. Taylor didn’t care. With several official clockers waiting at the line and a glaze of ice forming on the edge of the track, he proceeded to obliterate nearly every world record of note. The first to crumble to the weight of Taylor’s fury was the quarter mile in an astonishing 22 2/5, followed by the half (45 1/5), three-quarters (1:08 2/5), one kilometer (:57 3/5), and two-mile record (3:13 2/5). On fire, Taylor was cashing in on the other end. He then lined up for the record everybody strived for—the one-mile flying start.

  Five hundred diehard fans wrapped in winter garb fanned out around the track apron, blowing hot air into their palms. Taylor strapped himself in. Even with the November gales piercing through his cloth cap and blue silks, Taylor broke from the line at a bruising pace. At the half-mile marker, so used to having other riders ringing around him like a school of piranhas, Taylor, looking to both sides, felt a startling realization set in. For the first time in his career, he was alone. With no one to elbow, pocket, or choke him, he felt emancipated, energized, empowered. He was bubbling over.

  His torrid pace continued as he bolted around the final turn, his blazing tempo suggesting to everyone that he was on a special ride. With seven furlongs behind him, the mile marker looming up ahead, he cried out for more speed to his pacemen. Their teeth “chattering” from the cold, they couldn’t respond. With the rest of the world seemingly tootling along in slow motion, Taylor took matters into his own hands. He ducked his head and rocketed past his pacemen.

  Crossing the line, he and his bicycle turned into a black and blue streak.

  The crowd, having just witnessed history, murmured among themselves and peered over to the clockers’ stand. His ribs heaving in and out, Taylor also glanced over. The clockers clicked their fingers down on their stopwatches. The hands told the story: 1:31 4/5. The scant Philly crowd had just witnessed the fastest speed ever achieved by human power. The five hundred fans erupted in enthusiastic applause, sounding more like thousands. Taylor smiled.

  If, after his first race at Madison Square Garden and then the Michaels’s match race, there were fans who still didn’t know who Major Taylor was, they surely did now. Newspapers worldwide trumpeted the news. Congratulatory telegrams poured in from every corner of the nation. His exploits, in fact, reached well beyond bike-racing fans. He had not only beaten the fastest man, he had also shaved more than three-and-a-half seconds off the world-record speed of the celebrated horse Salvator, an especially noteworthy accomplishment at the time. “It is a curious fact that last week, when the horse was monarch in New York,” wrote a turf writer for the Evening Democrat, “its silent steel-framed contemporary, the wheel, was monarch in Philadelphia, and succeeded in establishing some records for time that throw all past performances of trotters and runners into total eclipse. “Indeed,” he continued, “the surprising exhibitions of Major Taylor, the crack colored bicyclist, at Philadelphia, have opened the eyes of wheelmen as well as of horsemen.”

  Now the fastest man in America, the former horse tender collected his money, hung up his racing togs for the season, and celebrated.

  From their homes, many of Taylor’s competitors read the news and winced. For the first time, those who had impeded his progress couldn’t do a thing about it. Setting a plethora of world records without the possibility of interference was, for Taylor, supreme retribution. “With it,” he beamed, “came the sublime thrill that was beyond the power of words to express.” Given a clean trip around the track, remarked Brady, who was eager to have him back with the NCA, “he is simply the fastest man on
the track”

  Motivated by his year-end Philadelphia fireworks display, Taylor set his goal for the 1899 racing season. As was his style, he set it high. He wanted to go where no African American had gone before. In August, for the first time in several years, the World Championships would be in North America. With so many forces arrayed against him, even the thought of winning cycling’s ultimate prize seemed a long shot. But as the weight of the depression softened during the waning days of 1898, it was abundantly clear that Major Taylor was no ordinary man.

  Chapter 11

  THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

  For perhaps the first time in his life, William Brady, an exceedingly public man, did something important without much fanfare. After returning from a whirlwind tour of racetracks up and down the West Coast and joined by only a handful of his closest friends, he quietly slipped into New York’s St. Thomas Catholic Church and married Grace George, the actress-comedian he had courted at the six-day bike race.

  Despite minor squabbling during the season—the usual manager-athlete wrangling over who pays what expenses—Brady’s contributions to Taylor’s career had proved momentous. He sponsored and fought for his inclusion in races. “A real man,” he often said, “should be known as a fighting man.” By sticking up for him at every opportunity and providing the best trainers, chefs, and pacemen, he had helped propel Taylor to worldwide fame. But more than anything, Brady believed in him when Taylor’s world seemed to cave in around him. Despite their polar opposite personalities and lifestyles, Taylor, reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “had a soft spot for Brady, the man with many irons in the fire.” During the summer of 1899, while the racing lords fought for overall control of the sport, the two men would part ways. Later, when the stakes were even higher, their paths would cross again.

  That following winter Taylor donned his finest business suits and began a whirlwind tour of the nation’s bicycle trade shows. Leveraging his stack of world records, he signed a lucrative contract with the Sager Company, which called for him to embark on a nationwide marketing blitz of its chainless gear set. Ads that claimed Major Taylor, the Great Colored Rider, Rides a Chainless ran nationwide. Excluding his undisclosed arrangement with Stearns Bicycles during the second half of the six-day race, the contract with Sager was almost certainly the first time a black man sponsored an athletic product.

  In New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and various other cities, hard-core racing fans and casual riders alike flocked to browse the latest gear and meet the world’s fastest man. Being an ideal role model for his race, blacks in attendance looked up to Taylor. “Every colored man and woman is proud of Major Taylor, the champion bicyclist,” remarked one journalist.

  In rare moments of racial harmony, whites who may have otherwise expected a black man to fetch their luggage or step to the side hovered around his booth to shake his hand and shoot the breeze. Taylor—whose booth was usually the first one visitors saw as they entered the various trade shows—handed out pamphlets and willingly entertained audiences in his usual unassuming manner.

  Standing alongside the bike on which he had set the one-mile world record, he described the speed qualities of his Sager-equipped machine and spun tales of his racing exploits, just as Zimmerman had done for him years before. “He demonstrated he can talk wheel as well as he rides one,” wrote one Philly paper. He was the center of attention everywhere he went and crowds responded; the Taylor-sponsored Sager-equipped bicycles were among the best sellers, putting to rest the much-questioned viability of using a black man to sell athletic products. “You cannot imagine,” Harry Sager would say of his decision to sign Taylor, “how much good it has done me.” With the winning combination of talent, dogged determination, and understatement, Taylor had knocked down previously impenetrable fortresses, blazing a trail for others to follow. While in Chicago, Taylor stumbled upon his old friend and mentor Birdie Munger. By 1899, the bicycle shows had taken on a new look. Many of the same men who made bicycles showed up at the shows with strange-looking contraptions called horseless carriages, or automobiles. Even before his Worcester Bicycle Manufacturing Company fell to the industry’s consolidation wave, Munger had been working on a new type of automobile wheel and tire. His presence at the Chicago show suggested he was there pitching his new wheel to a rapidly changing world.

  For Taylor, now without a manager, Munger’s presence both calmed and reassured him. The two men lingered into the small hours of the night reminiscing about their Indiana days. Before turning in for the night, Munger agreed to assist Taylor with some of his affairs that summer. With his instinctive understanding of the sport, he cobbled together an ambitious plan for the 1899 racing season. They both agreed it was time to go all out, to shoot for the World Championships in Montreal. But they had their differences on strategy. Knowing Taylor’s nerve-racking tendency to hover back of the field and then thread his way along the pole down the stretch, sometimes agitating his rivals, Munger strongly suggested that he tone down his aggressive racing style. But Taylor thrived on a certain amount of danger. For better or worse, that would be one command Taylor never obeyed.

  With the security of his Sager contract and peace of mind knowing Munger would lend his support whenever he could that year, Taylor was so motivated he had trouble containing his excitement. “I do not get half enough sleep,” he would tell the Boston Globe, “for I think all the time about . . . those Montreal races.”

  After completing his road show, Taylor swapped his business suits for his racing togs. In preparation for the 1899 racing season, Munger and a noted trainer named Bert Hazard drew up a brutal training regime involving weight lifting, running, boxing, and, when weather permitted, cycling.

  Across town, the rebel riders in the outlaw organization kept a keen eye on the daily happenings within the LAW. From the moment Taylor appeared on the nation’s tracks that summer, word spread within racing circles that his body was finely tuned and his mind bent on world domination. His five-foot-seven-inch frame that had been a jockey-like 118 pounds in 1895 was now filled out to 160 pounds of rock-hard thighs, striated calves and arms, washboard abdominals, and well-defined, v-shaped back muscles. His new look added another imposing element for his competitors to ponder. Reporters and fans praised his appearance and looked forward to seeing him race. The rebels, having worked hard to get rid of him, wanted nothing to do with him.

  In a preemptive strike designed to ease their concerns over a possible return of their black nemesis, riders in the competing league inserted a new rule into their union bylaws. They minced no words: Blacks were barred. But before the ink had time to dry, the press pounced, claiming cowardice and prejudice. Keenly aware of the obvious target of the new rule, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter called the directive “the most unsportsmanlike move on record.”

  The split-up caused some interesting banter. With Gardiner, Cooper, Kiser, MacFarland, and Bald in the competing league and Taylor, McDuffee, McCarthy, and Tom, Frank, and Nat Butler leading the LAW, fans and sportswriters argued over which league was superior. The NCA clearly boasted more riders and had two previous champions in Bald and Cooper, but the LAW probably had the best riders for each of the three main disciplines—short, mid, and long distance. There was even talk of a world series of sorts at year’s end to settle the matter.

  One of the welcome effects of the separation was that the competitive forces caused an increase in the daily purse at some races. To entice riders to switch allegiances, the LAW offered purses as high as $1,000. Elite riders, Taylor included, could also command as much as 50 percent of the gate receipts at certain events, an amount that could rival the purse.

  Taylor’s painstaking attention to conditioning paid dividends immediately. After signing a lucrative contract with Stearns Bicycles in Syracuse with Munger’s aid, he tore through the early season, winning a high percentage of races and lining his pockets in town after town: $875 at Charles River Track on Memorial Day, $1,000 a few weeks later in Boston and
Westborough, hundreds in St. Louis in early July. But with success came geographic realignment. Race handicappers slid him back to the scratch position. He would never again be among the limitmen.

  He continued to draw crowds: ten thousand in Boston on May 27, fifteen thousand on June 18. Even in the sleepy town of Janesville, Wisconsin, teams of horses lined both sides of the streets for half a mile on opening day. But if anyone believed Taylor would escape prejudice with some of his rivals gone to another league, they were mistaken. While not as frequent as in previous seasons, the elbowing, pocketing, and intimidation continued. It didn’t always involve outright physical contact. Sometimes suggestive “stare downs” were enough to sap his morale. While Bald, MacFarland, and Gardiner, who reportedly received aid from other riders when they rode against him, could no longer incite trouble, others stood ready to step in their shoes. The three famous Butler brothers were masters at teamwork and used it against Taylor at every opportunity. And he had Barney Oldfield to contend with, a future winner of the Indianapolis 500. Oldfield would become known for his desire to “restore the supremacy of the white race.”

  Taylor struggled to find shelter from the racial storm even in, of all places, the bucolic surroundings of Ottumwa, Iowa. A major railroad hub in the 1890s, Ottumwa was no place to hold a convention of Sunday school superintendents. Known as the headquarters of sin between Chicago and Denver, this raucous Wild West–like town had many times the number of gambling dens and saloons—called “blind tigers”—as it did churches. Once liquored up at their favorite watering hole, visitors sought inspiration at myriad houses of prostitution stretching from one end of town to the other. Given all the choices, these adventurers had difficulty making up their minds. Eventually middle-class visitors slipped into 303, a deceptive upstairs establishment on the northwest corner of town. The flusher ones and those needing discretion snuck in the back door of Auroras, a gothic red brick building on East Main Street. Those who didn’t care one way or the other drifted into “The Road to Hell” on South Market Street, otherwise known as “Battle Row.” Here, notorious owner Stormy Jordan, who famously spilled whiskey on his sidewalk to attract patrons, stood under his Stetson ready and willing to take anyone’s money. Whenever someone tried reforming the bustling town—say an evangelist or the temperance folks—the “house of sin” owners simply grabbed their hammers and nails, charged down to the houses of worship, and pounded in new pews, effectively silencing their critics for a few more years.