The Klu Klux Klan lingered there as well. For a teetotaling, God-fearing black man, it could not have been a desired destination.
But to many people’s dismay, Major Taylor happened through that not-so-sleepy town on July 26, 1899, snuffing out all hope his rivals had of running away with the field.
Once there, he cleaned house in two races, took second in another, and set a track speed record. Soon afterward, a fuming local writer let Taylor have it. “Taylor is a queer specimen. He is supremely arrogant and egotistical and does not readily make friends. He imagines he is the whole performance.” The unnamed writer’s diatribe went on to mention how Taylor was “marble hearted,” how the crowd “did not like him,” and how he “arrogantly” swung around his rivals to win.
It turns out the editor was also co-owner of the Ottumwa Track. He was incensed that Taylor hadn’t told him of his entry sooner; having Taylor’s name on the race card well enough in advance would have allowed them time to paper the town with advertisements. His star power, combined with a heavy marketing blitz, could mean the difference between crowds of a few thousand to as many as ten to twenty-five thousand.
Taylor’s out-of-nowhere appearance in Ottumwa apparently caught everyone by surprise, including himself; he was supposed to be in Chicago trying to lower the world speed records with Munger, only to have the attempts postponed right before the Ottumwa meets. Like Savannah, Georgia, Taylor found the town and his rivals cold and inhospitable—“something on the order of that lawn-party and the skunk business,” he remembered with a quiver. But after his unwelcome victories, he felt a little better. “I guess I spoiled their little party,” he said, partially vindicated.
As the day rolled on, the hospitality didn’t improve. When dusk fell over the Midwestern settlement, titillating the nightlife to come out of hiding, Taylor clopped off to the closest inn to eat and bed down for the evening. But like many times before, he was turned away by the proprietor because of his color. He kept searching—reportedly causing a rouse among innkeepers—but to no avail.
His was a bittersweet existence, one minute enjoying adulation from thousands of cheering fans, the next, on the streets, hungry, disrespected, and alone. In the darkness, the world’s fastest man lay under the moonlit sky tired and hungry, eagerly awaiting the next train headed for safer ground. With a sinking feeling, he soon parted Ottumwa, never to return, even to collect his prize money. For that seedy job, he sent Frank Gateley, a friend and part-time rider who occasionally traveled with him. Upon returning home, Taylor hustled to the bank, deposited his $350 winnings, then surely washed his hands.
From “Little Chicago,” as Ottumwa was called, Taylor’s train clattered into the real Chicago for his first race in the Windy City since the Black National Championship in 1895. Chicago was a cycling hotbed, and Taylor wanted to show the fervent local racing fans how far he had advanced in the intervening years. Before a raucous crowd in the feature event, the one-mile open, Taylor crossed the line seemingly well ahead of the rest of the field. But the presiding steward called it a dead heat between him and a local rider named Jimmie Bowler, a man who would later play a role of paramount importance in Taylor’s life.
Sportswriters were stunned by the ruling. Convinced of his victory and not too thrilled with the idea of sharing the winning purse, Taylor challenged Bowler to a rematch—winner takes all. But Bowler, overjoyed for having stayed anywhere near the Black Whirlwind, refused, irritating the crowd. For Taylor, it was just another day. “I have never received the benefit of a close decision,” he vented as his train rumbled east.
For Major Taylor, every meal, training session, and waking moment was geared toward his number one goal: winning the World Championships. The title of world champion then, as today, wasn’t about money. It was about prestige, notoriety, and national pride. To Taylor it meant even more: no native-born African American had ever won a world championship in any sport. More than anything, he wanted to prove to other blacks that, with hard work and an unyielding will to win, they could achieve anything they set their minds to.
July faded and D-day, August 10–12, drew closer. The papers were full of speculation about whether the outlaw riders from the NCA would be allowed to compete in the World Championships. To plead for their inclusion, NCA president A. G. Batchelder traveled tirelessly to and from New York and Montreal. Without the rebel riders, especially three-time champion Eddie Bald, Batchelder warned that the event would lack credibility. And the fans, he said, would shy away. Not everyone agreed. “Most of the outlaw men are has-beens,” wrote the Montreal Daily Star, “and there isn’t a one of them that Major Taylor could not give five seconds to in a mile and best him out.”
While cycling’s internal wars carried on in the press, many wondered out loud about the status of Eddie Bald, the NCA’s star rider. For whatever reason, since the sport had split into two separate leagues, Bald’s lightning sprint lacked the zeal that had earned him the nickname Cannon Ball. Known as a lover of the “fleshpots,” perhaps he simply wanted to enjoy more playtime, drifting into that familiar slipstream inhabited by other superstar athletes. Several reports had him haunting the prestigious Eastern horse tracks, hobnobbing with famous jockey Tod Sloan, another man avowedly bent on carnal pleasures. Maybe, as others speculated, it was simply being careful what to wish for as you might just get it. After rejecting Taylor for years, he had partially succeeded in ridding him from direct competition. But with Taylor now in another league, perhaps the absence of those intense, black-versus-white, nose-to-nose finishes had sapped excitement from his game. Some believed that Bald was well aware of Taylor’s extraordinary condition that season and simply wanted nothing to do with facing him on the sport’s largest stage.
In either case, Bald was never the same dominating rider after Taylor’s departure. Days before the World Championships, without even telling his trainer Doc Morrow, the Cannon Ball, one of America’s greatest cyclists ever, was nowhere to be found.
In preparation for the event scheduled for August 10–12 at Queens Park Track, Montreal went into overdrive. In its mission to create North America’s most modern track and host one of the greatest bike races ever held, an army of workers had been doing yeomen’s work for seven months. They added concession stands, seats, press boxes, electric lights, and bookmaking facilities. Ashinger Company, a noted track builder, installed a new wood track. In what may have been a first at a Canadian sporting event, Bell Telephone Company erected a large tent abutting the track and stocked it with rotary phones, a novel idea for those able to scrape together four cents for an outgoing call.
Keeping a close eye on the progress, Montreal’s mayor, himself an ardent racing fan, deemed opening day a civic holiday and called for merchants to shutter their doors. Lord Minto, the governor-general of Canada, gave patronage to the race and stressed the enormous social weight of the affair. Race headquarters, the Windsor Hotel, as well as every other hotel in town, sold out in advance. Private families stood poised to help with any overflow. Gold and silversmiths had already cast shiny medals and trophies. Chartered trains were en route from every direction. Down at the Waltham, Massachusetts, rail station, more than one hundred riders from the NCA were packed and ready to board a special train. The city was abuzz in race talk.
Meanwhile, skeptical reporters crawled around race headquarters waiting for news on the rebel NCA riders. Would they even be allowed to race? If not, what would become of the event?
Just when everything seemed in perfect order, Britain’s Lord Henry Sturmey, the reigning king of the International Cycling Union (now the UCI), a giant of a man in stature and disposition, pounded his gavel. The outlaw riders from the NCA, he decreed at the eleventh hour, were not welcome in Montreal. With that, the air went out of the organizers’ sails. Many thought the event was destined to flop. Back in Waltham the rebel riders received the unfortunate telegram, unpacked their bags, and hollered out every expletive they knew.
Having invested signific
ant time and money, track owners, racing officials, and civic leaders gathered for a solemn sweating session behind closed doors inside the Windsor Hotel. As they paced inside room 21 slurping coffee and trying to figure out how to exit the scene gracefully, a lone man named H. B. Donnelly, secretary of the Canadian Wheelmen, strutted outside on the newly surfaced track. “Give us Major Taylor,” he told a reporter, his voice jaunty and self-assured, “and we can run the meet without any other American professionals. I consider him the best attraction we can secure, and with him as an American representative, I do not fear.”
No one else knew what to think.
Amid all the doubt of that important moment, one thing now seemed clear: a great deal rested on the drawing power of a certain twenty-year-old black man perusing his Bible on a slow train rattling their way.
Taylor’s train pulled into Montreal three days before festivities opened. His first time on foreign soil, he had no idea how he would be received. It did not take long to find out. The minute the train doors swung open and he stepped onto Montreal’s sun-baked soil, he found himself wandering into fans and reporters. “He is a very pleasing looking boy, especially when he smiles,” boasted one of those reporters, “with looks as soft and as smooth as velvet.” They tailed him to the track, where more than ever before, Taylor would learn the art of balancing his time between training and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the press.
At Queens Park large white tents lined the perimeter of the track. Inside them stood over one hundred of the best riders from all over the world. Many had been congregating there for weeks. In the days before Taylor’s arrival, hundreds of fans gathered to watch the riders glide through their training sessions. When Taylor arrived on the spanking new track for his workouts, fans began migrating en masse, the number jumping to around five thousand. They hung over the rails, showering him with applause as he hunkered over his bike and ripped across the track.
Opening day came and nervous racing officials braced themselves. Soon people rolled in from all directions. Swarms of business leaders, obeying the mayor’s declaration of a civic holiday, shuttered their doors and scampered to the track. Scores of special bicycle excursion trains from the United States and Canada rolled in. Ships weighed down with racegoers steamed in from Quebec and Toronto.
The race organizers, peering on as fans continued to stream in, took a deep breath. Over the next few days, their early apprehension over the enthusiasm and number of fans vanished. All told, at a championship meet without any of the elite riders from the NCA, Taylor’s star power helped pull in over forty-five thousand fans*, the largest paying crowds in Montreal sports history to date, at times overwhelming track personnel. There was simply no greater draw in all of sports.
Outside the track the lines of people trying to buy tickets—and those who already had tickets and were just trying to get inside—were backed up as far as the eye could see. More than five thousand angry fans, many of whom had traveled long distances, were eventually turned away.
On the inside, every seat was booked. Every inch of aisle space was clogged with bodies. Racing officials escorted the overflow underneath the stands, their chins level with the surface of the track, heads peeking out through the fence slats, making them look as one newsman wrote, “like a row of prisoners before the bar of the Recorders Court.” One solemn figure sidled up on top of the roof overhanging the grandstand and dangled over the edge, scaring the wits out of everyone below. Bank accounts got slimmer as thousands were wagered on the race at special “deal tables,” apparently legal in Canada.
Reporters from all over the world lingered in the press section conducting interviews and hammering out every detail of race preparations. There were so many scribes from so many countries an “official press organizer” from Mexico was employed to organize the chaos.
When Taylor emerged onto the track for the opening event, the half-mile race, the band played the American national anthem, sending an emotional wave of patriotism through him. What began as a field of more than one hundred riders had, through a series of preliminary heats, been whittled down to six of the world’s best.
At the starting line, Taylor stretched his leg over his bike frame, then cinched his feet into his toe straps. He looked down the row of elite international riders and focused in on his greatest rivals, Nat Butler and Charles McCarthy. His main goal was winning the one-mile race, but if given a clean break for the finish line, Taylor believed he stood a good chance of wearing a half-mile World Championship medal as well. A loud crackle sounded, sending the peloton into a wild burst of speed. The grimacing cyclists bore down on their machines jockeying for position while the crowd rose and let out a deafening roar. Nat Butler immediately muscled Taylor to the outside, leaving a wide berth for McCarthy to blaze through. Right on cue, McCarthy came from the back to take over the lead, Taylor second with Nat Butler close behind. As they had done many times in the past, the two men had successfully wedged Taylor into a pocket. Having been pocketed throughout his career, Taylor knew exactly what to do. He remained calm and eased up a tick on his pedals. This surprised both McCarthy and Butler, causing them to ease up and look back at him. Just as they craned their necks backward, Taylor pounced. Before the riders had a chance to react, Taylor had found a minute hole and shot through it, taking the lead. McCarthy scowled, then dropped his head lower onto his machine. He stomped down on his pedals, retaking the lead. A seesaw battle followed.
Motivated by the animated crowd, Taylor gracefully yet mercilessly powered his machine past McCarthy. Racing pell-mell behind, the rest of the field dropped into the distance, becoming mere spectators. Looking forward down the stretch, Taylor saw nothing between him and the finish line. A thought surely kicked around in his mind: Within seconds I may become the half-mile World Champion.
But in his peripheral view, he saw a tall form gunning alongside him. He shifted in his saddle and glanced to his side; it was McCarthy rapidly gaining ground on him. He hadn’t shaken him. Releasing the nervous force that had been coiled up in him all season, Taylor locked his eyes on the tape and powered forward with a potent push. McCarthy was right there. The two men felt the therapeutic rush of crushing speed as they exchanged leads, then rolled over the line together.
Convinced of Taylor’s victory, the vast throng leaped and whooped, the grandstand trembling beneath them. Taylor, who was also certain that he had won, circled the track basking in the glory of the moment. Taylor wheeled over to the winner’s circle and dismounted his bike. He looked toward the stewards’ stand where a team of men huddled together. There was an awful delay.
In 1898, one year before the Montreal World Championship, W. C. Petrie, an enterprising racing fan from St. Louis, invented and patented a device that snapped photos of horses—next to a clock—as they left the gate and as they crossed the finish line. For whatever reason, this ingenious idea of a “photo finish,” designed to aid race judges, would not see widespread use in horse or bike racing for many years.
Meanwhile, all eyes glared out on Montreal’s Queens Park Track. A lone judge sauntered over to the tote board to enter the winner.
The winner of the half-mile World Championship was American Charles McCarthy.
Taylor’s charcoal face turned pale.
Like air being released from a tire, a sibilant whir greeted the stewards’ decision. A man near the finish line hollered, “Taylor! Taylor! Give the colored man a chance.” A woman next to him joined in, followed by a third. Soon the entire grandstand, convinced of Taylor’s victory, screamed his name. Even the mayor and the governor-general, who sat in president boxes straight out from the finish line, protested. Five minutes of relentless hissing and screaming passed. The racing officials, aging before everyone’s eyes, huddled together again. The crowd suddenly grew unruly, lobbing names and hurling epithets at the judges.
Someone suggested that all those who were against the decision should stand up. With that, every single man, woman, and child, black
and white, rose in unison. After thirty minutes of continued howling from the grandstand, William Inglis, the presiding judge, finally broke from their meeting and walked indifferently toward the race announcer. Behind a long black megaphone, the announcer, his voice catching in his throat, barked out the final ruling. The original verdict stood. McCarthy was the half-mile world champion.
What happened next was nothing short of sheer mayhem. Spilling down from the grandstand came popcorn, soda cans and bottles, race programs, cigars—anything that wasn’t nailed down was sent aloft. The track resembled the center of a cyclone with everything swirling and raging and roaring while a mass of humanity shrugged and shrieked and anathematized. Officials struggled to get a grip on the irate crowd. Large teams of Mounted Canadian Police galloped onto the scene, trying to quell the boisterous mob. A gaggle of secret servicemen enveloped the mayor, governor-general, and a host of other suited luminaries. The crowd raged on. Deeply concerned about the raucous scene unfolding before him, Taylor rolled over to the stewards’ stand, expressed his disbelief, then asked if that was their honest decision. After they said yes—that their decision was indeed final—Taylor walked over to the press stand and spoke. “Well, all right,” he said calmly, his arms folded, “if that is your verdict, gentlemen, I shall have to abide by it.” With that, the crowd simmered. Taylor pulled himself together and limped back to his dressing room. In the press section, reporters were unanimous in their incredulity. “There was only one mistake and it is extremely difficult to account for,” cried the Montreal Gazette, “that was why Major Taylor was deprived of a race that he won.”
Major Taylor Page 20