Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  But weekday races, usually reserved only for preliminary heats, rarely drew the same large crowds.

  For Breyer and Coquelle, breaking decades of deeply entrenched tradition was not something they cared to tackle. Rather than trying to change the sporting habits of millions of European purists, surely, they reasoned, it would be easier to get one man to change his ways. For some time they had been trying to do just that. Their obsession with Taylor started in ’96 after his victory over Eddie Bald at the Garden. It picked up speed during his ill-fated season of ’97 and multiplied when he beat Jimmy Michaels at Manhattan Beach Track in ’98. Toward the end of the 1899 World Championship, the overseas offers had begun appearing in newspapers nationwide. TAYLOR, shouted one headline, REFUSES $15,000 OFFER FROM FRANCE.

  The numbers changed often, but the reports kept coming, although some people were skeptical of the validity of the offers. To mollify the skeptics, a consortium of French cycle makers and track owners hired Mark Braun, a Chicago-based representative of Le Velo, to corroborate the reports.

  Hardly a week passed without another headline in another European paper claiming TAYLOR’S COMING or TAYLOR’S NOT COMING. The rampant speculation invariably caused confusion. Taylor was occasionally asked for comment on some overseas voyage he was supposedly going on, of which he knew nothing. For differing reasons, Taylor had batted all offers away. First, much of his career had been spent riding in the shadow of his mentor Arthur Zimmerman; he mentioned him constantly. Like Zimmie, he was determined to assert his right to race against, and beat, America’s elite stable of riders before venturing overseas. “Unless it be as Champion of America,” he had told a reporter in 1898, “I shall never race on the other side.”

  Second, the World Championships, which he would not have missed for the life of him, were in nearby Montreal in the middle of the 1899 racing season. Finally, his close sister Gertrude, who temporarily lived in his home, fell ill with tuberculosis. Having recently lost his mother, Taylor wanted to stay stateside to take care of her whenever he could. Gertrude was delighted to stay there instead of in the sterile confinement of a hospital. But she was so ill, she was only strong enough to leave the comforts of a special room that Taylor set aside for her just once. Sadly, Gertrude lost her battle with the disease in the spring of 1900 and was buried near her mother at the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

  In the winter of 1900–1901, with those issues behind him, a seemingly impenetrable wall still stood between him and the Old World. It concerned, as the French like to say, his raison d’être. And it appeared in nearly every paper in the world at one time or another: MAJOR TAYLOR WON’T RIDE ON SUNDAY.

  These headlines were often followed by counterheadlines, perhaps planted as feelers by Breyer, Coquelle, or Brady, suggesting that Taylor was softening his stance against Sunday racing. A lot of people believed them; even Birdie Munger hustled down to the Boston Globe to express his shock at Taylor’s supposed change of heart. When Taylor saw these headlines, he wasted no time putting the rumors to rest. “I stand today just where I stood a year ago, and hope to stand a year hence,” he growled, “I am irrevocably opposed to Sunday racing.”

  The Frenchmen, both eternal optimists, had never come up against such a deeply entrenched objection. Taylor wasn’t the only, or even the first, rider who came out against Sunday racing, but most had a price at which they could be persuaded. Like others before him, Breyer kept thinking that by upping the ante, Taylor would eventually crack under the weight of his expanding wallet. No cyclists, save perhaps Zimmerman and Michaels, had ever received offers as large as those Taylor was discarding.

  But having grown up penniless on a small farm, the offers were exceedingly difficult to walk away from. Taylor agonized over each and every decision. Several papers headlined his anguish: TAYLOR’S CONSCIENCE STILL TROUBLES HIM. “I have given up France,” he announced during a long interview. “I shall not race on Sunday and I will not do so as my inner self would not be satisfied. Although there is a fortune over there for me, I would not desecrate the Sabbath. It looks as though racing for me is out of the question in this country.” But even the Boston Globe, which had always been fair in its coverage of Taylor, bet that he would eventually acquiesce. “The above is all right,” wrote one of its race reporters, “but a long shot would be pretty safe that the dusky whirlwind will choke or drown that inner self and look for French gold.”

  With the nation’s most catastrophic economic downturn still fresh in their minds, many people reading these headlines couldn’t believe anyone, especially a black man, would turn down what amounted to some thirty times the average American’s income for an entire year’s labor. Some thought he was foolish. Others stood firmly behind him, including a Boston reverend who wanted Taylor to be “immortalized in Carrarra marble.”

  One Christian reader was so impressed with Taylor’s stance, he told him so in a long heartfelt letter that was published in several papers. Taylor was so inspired by the letter, he responded with a long letter of his own that appeared in newspapers large and small. “I am pleased indeed to know,” read a small portion of his epistle, “that there are still a few Christians left who possess the courage of their conviction, and who are not afraid to come out on the side of truth and stand up for what is right.” But the allure of the almighty dollar had tested him, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. “I am laboring under the greatest temptation of my life, and I pray each day for God to give me more grace and more faith to stand up for what I know to be right.” If he didn’t get his way, Taylor told another reporter, he would go to Europe on his own and ride when he pleased.

  Nearly every day, Taylor rolled into town to pick up another cablegram. Nearly every night, he poured over another offer from another overseas promoter. All of them called for Sunday racing.

  All of them were turned down.

  Eventually, nearly all the top wheelmen, horsemen, and boxers found their way under the bright lights. For Taylor, with his growing international celebrity, it seemed long overdue. While waiting to see if Breyer and Coquelle would break from their long-held traditions, Taylor decided to have some fun. One of the most popular forms of entertainment at the time was vaudeville. So Taylor, a good pianist, singer, mandolinist, and all-around natural entertainer, teamed up with Charles “Mile a Minute” Murphy for several weeks of racing theatrics. Murphy had gained worldwide fame in 1899 when, in a death-defying act, he rode his bike at the ungodly speed of sixty miles per hour behind, of all things, a locomotive. Matching up the two cycling celebs on stage seemed natural.

  Over the years, a few high-profile athletes had met with enormous financial success in vaudeville while others had flopped. Hoping to add to his considerable wealth, Eddie Bald had formed his own vaudeville company called A Twig of Laurel and then planned a national tour. The national tour, however, barely made it out of his home state of New York. He had worked hard at it, though, dutifully rehearsing his lines, eventually getting to the point of committing them to memory. But at his first big production without using notes, the show, which had gained national attention, took an awkward turn. When Bald reached the point of breathing words of love and telling the heroine how fast he would ride for her sweet sake, “a solitary and silent figure,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle “loomed up in the gloom of the auditorium in the middle aisle.” It was none other than showman Billy Brady.

  Bald’s once-promising career in vaudeville apparently ended the moment the “stage-struck” wheelman spotted Brady in the crowd. “I collapsed,” he told an Eagle reporter as he tried to explain why his lines departed from his memory, laughter-induced tears of embarrassment dripping down his cheeks.

  But other athletes made fortunes in vaudeville, the most prominent being Jim Corbett, the heavyweight boxing champion with whom Brady had traversed the Wild West.

  Now it was time to set Taylor off on his debut. Perhaps wanting to avoid an Eddie Bald–like embarrassment, they decided on a simpler act, and one that
avoided Sunday performances. The mandolin stayed at home and bike trainers were ordered instead. Theatergoers didn’t seem to mind. At theaters in Pittsfield, Springfield, Hartford, Worcester, Rochester, and others, wedged between various other acts, Taylor and Murphy plopped two oversized home trainers down side by side on the stage and spun like mad until the first man completed five miles. Next to their machines hung colorful flags and large dials that kept the crowd abreast of each man’s progress. Though brief, the cycling tandem was a success. Everywhere they went, full houses paying top dollar fixed their eyes on the dials and shrieked themselves hoarse.

  For Taylor, the vaudeville act fit perfectly. With it, he was able to stay in decent shape in the dead of winter, further line his pockets, meet some of his fans, and have a rip-roaring good time.

  He would need it; the coming months would be among the most intense of his life.

  The thoughts of everyone in racing narrowed down to one topic: Major Taylor and Edmond Jacquelin had to meet in a match race. Taylor had defeated everyone America had thrown at him, had set many track records and several world speed records. Jacquelin had beaten everyone Europe had to offer, had also set track records, and had won the Triple Crown.

  Across the pond, track writers continued pleading for a definitive match race. Long multipage dissertations comparing the strengths of the two titans were set to fly off newsstands. The only problem, of course, was that there was no contract. Having waited years, racing fans were getting frustrated with the stalled negotiations. So were Breyer and Coquelle. While they had landed nearly every other top rider, they hadn’t been able to bring home the mother lode.

  A few days before the close of the nineteenth century, Breyer threw up his hands, boarded a ship, and steamed back to France growling to himself. Coquelle, a few years older and a bit more patient, lingered. In a last-ditch attempt before he too set sail, Coquelle hustled off to Boston. There, Taylor and Murphy were lighting up another sold-out crowd at Keith’s Theater. Coquelle sat back and watched Taylor with one eye, the frenzied crowd with the other. He knew he had to lure this natural entertainer over to the Old World.

  After the show, he cornered Taylor and asked him to engage in further negotiations. Taylor consented. The duo moved to Taylor’s home, where Taylor’s father showed Coquelle portraits of Booker T. Washington and Teddy Roosevelt in his Rough Rider pose. In his living room, Taylor’s fingers rolled across his piano while Coquelle and Gilbert Taylor bantered back and forth.

  “How do you like America?” Gilbert asked.

  “Oh wonderful, magnificent,” beamed Coquelle.

  “Is Paris as beautiful?” Gilbert queried.

  “Oh, much better,” Coquelle boasted. “Major will be able to tell you all about it later on because I hope very much to be able to take him over to France.”

  Eventually the piano went quiet. Taylor drew up a stool and negotiated. Coquelle threw out a figure of $10,000, with prospects for much more. Clearly, he hadn’t been paying attention; again the offer included Sunday racing. Taylor looked up, fixing his gaze on a photo of his deceased mother, Saphronia, with whom he had made his pact to never race on Sunday. “I believe in the saying that ‘a mother’s prayer will last forever,’” he would say, “and I honestly believe it is my mother’s prayers that are standing by me now.”

  The room filled with an uneasy silence. They all stared at one another for a long, drawn-out moment. Coquelle broke the silence, once again explaining that fewer fans attended weekday races in Europe. There was simply not enough money in it, certainly not enough to support the cost of an athlete like Taylor. If Taylor insisted on no Sunday racing, Breyer said, all he could offer was a comparatively scant $3,000.

  Taylor didn’t have to do a lot of math. Knowing he could make a healthy income riding in America, he refused. Where was the incentive? The room turned electric. Clearly, coming to Taylor’s home and chitchatting with his father wasn’t working. Reacting in a manner typical of someone used to having things go his way, Coquelle got visibly angry. He then played the Jacquelin card, telling Taylor, with sharp overtones, that he was cutting off all negotiations with him. He was, Coquelle told Taylor, going to devote all his energies toward managing his French legend.

  Taylor wouldn’t budge. “All sorts of people have come to me—learned, clever men—and have tried to argue with me that riding on Sunday is not wrong,” he would later tell a reporter. “But it was of no use. I listened respectfully to what they had to say, but when a man fears God, he has no other fear, and fears nobody else.”

  They broke without reaching an agreement.

  Somewhere along the line, William Brady reportedly stepped into the middle of the stalemate. The price eventually went up: $5,000, plus purses, a share of some gate receipts, $2,000 from Iver Johnson, and no Sunday racing*. To protect the interest of the NCA and other American track owners, an ironclad clause was added: Taylor had to return in time to race in every meet on the American grand circuit.

  By then, European newsrooms had fallen into a state of near hysteria. Since Taylor hadn’t even arrived yet, they sought the next best thing. The minute European riders tramped down their ships’ gangplanks after returning from racing at Madison Square Garden, they were grilled by reporters. Their inquiries centered around one topic: Major Taylor. What’s he like? Is he as fast as everyone says he is?

  Coquelle, mortified at the prospect of crossing the Atlantic without the prize, swallowed hard. As darkness fell over the city of Worcester on January 2, 1901, the men stood up, raised their chins, and shook hands. The deal was sealed. Coquelle exhaled.

  The long-awaited European invasion awaited only its chief actor. The May 16 International Match Race, widely touted as the greatest ever, was on.

  Taylor may have been a box office and press wonder in America, but in the prestigious cycling meccas of Europe, his pending visit may have been the most heavily marketed and highly anticipated arrival of a sports figure in its history. Coquelle immediately cabled Breyer in Paris. Breyer leaped for joy, then fired up the presses, setting off months’ worth of extraordinary media coverage. Papers all over the world sang with the news. A giddy Worcester Telegram cycling editor, who seemed to have the inside scope on how often Taylor visited the men’s room, was the first to break the headline news in America: TAYLOR ON CONTRACT! GREAT SPRINTER IS TO RIDE ALL EUROPE.

  Thirty-six-hundred nautical miles to the east, the winds blew. Looking supremely confident, Edmond Jacquelin, who had been training indoors at a hippovelodrome, settled into one of his luxuriously furnished Parisian apartments. While handling his gigantic Mastiff, his servant handed him the news. “Let him come,” he would say. “He will not triumph so easily as he thinks. I will lead him on a hard trip.” Someone asked him what name he planned to give to his new dog, said to be the size of a donkey. His aristocratic face arched up in a wide grin as he answered. “Major,” he blurted, before ordering his dog to heel.

  After collecting his $1,800 advance payment in early March, Taylor geared up for the long voyage on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Wanting the best trainer and one who could break away for several months, Taylor sought a top-notch black man named William Buckner. Well-known and highly skilled, Buckner had experience with several top riders, including Charlie Miller, a friend of Brady’s and the winner of a six-day race, and the Colburn brothers, a famous quintet from St. Louis. While black trainers were widely accepted and used by several top white riders, strangely, this was a first for Taylor. With all the difficulties he had faced booking hotel rooms and getting restaurant meals, Taylor apparently preferred using white trainers in whose name hotels could be booked and meals ordered. But now that he was going overseas where he expected fewer racial difficulties, Buckner would be a good fit.

  Having recently returned from France and having leased the Manhattan Beach Track for the entire year, Brady stayed in New York to manage the national circuit races. On March 4, Taylor said his good-byes at the New York pier before boarding the
ship he would spend part of the next decade on. Knowing she wasn’t going to see him for several months, Daisy gave her fiancé a protracted hug. “As the champion’s fiancée,” wrote an emotional French society writer, “a charming mulatto saw with apprehension the departure of her fiancé for the modern Babylon.”

  Pushing off from the New York pier, the 650-foot luxury vessel steamed into the Atlantic, swishing over the very waters in which it—as the first ship to go down in the First World War—would eventually meet its doom.

  The accommodations on board the Kaiser Wilhelm des Grosse were nothing short of breathtaking—so much so it caused controversy back home. On the first day of the six-day voyage, Taylor strolled through the world’s largest moving object in awe. In his quest to outdo his British rivals at the Cunard and White Star line, the German Kaiser had spared no expense on the der Grosse, creating the fastest ship on water, the first to install a wireless system, and the first to employ four giant steam funnels on the outside. On the inside, Taylor looked up at the high ceilings and ornate wood carvings prevalent throughout the first-class section of the ship. As he moved through the six-hundred-person, titanic-like first-class dining area, people either chatted about him in private or recognized him as the ship’s “most universally admired passenger,” despite the presence of world champion boxer and friend Kid McCoy (aka “The Real McCoy”). In his stateroom, a colorful surprise awaited him, compliments of “his New York cycling friends.” It was a large floral arrangement in the shape of a racing wheel.