Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  Three thousand miles to the west at one of his shops in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, three thousand customers had backed up onto the streets to see the latest models, despite dreadful weather. He had spared no expense, decking out the shop with popular Taylor posters, American flags, colorful flowers, and even an orchestra to keep the throng entertained. Despite a general downturn in bicycle sales, his models with Major Taylor emblems on the head-tube continued selling well, even as far away as Japan. Previously skeptical of using professional racers to promote his bikes, Johnson had become a Taylor convert. “I am absolutely convinced,” he had told Cycle Age, “that his riding of our wheel was a most profitable advertising investment.”

  Taylor’s remarkable physical condition and the vastly improved weather made for a lethal combination. In every man-to-man match race in which he competed, he came up victorious. It was almost as if he was toying with his rivals. It wasn’t on purpose; some victories just came easily to him. Since the World Championships, held in Rome that year, took place on a Sunday, Taylor refused to compete. But just in case anybody had doubts, two separate match races were scheduled against Thor Ellegaard, the new winner. A few days later, exulted Le Auto-Velo, “Taylor literally annihilated” the freshly crowned world champion. Watching soberly from the sidelines, Jacquelin refused a match-race challenge from Taylor, saying he couldn’t possibly get in good enough condition to defeat him.

  When the Kaiser Wilhelm steamed west for New York that June, he was still the most acclaimed athlete in the world. His name was indelibly stamped in the minds of sports fans all across the continent. “He was looked upon as an idol,” beamed Breyer, “and when he took departure for his native shores, it was with universal regret.” The popularity of bike racing reached new heights in France and much of Europe because of his visits. “The pastime,” proclaimed Breyer, “took on a new lease on life.” And since Henri Desgrange first discussed the Tour de France at that same time, Taylor’s revival of the sport in France may have helped sow the seeds of the grand tour in his mind. At the very least, Desgrange, track director at Parc des Princes, had considerably more money with which to launch the immensely popular race. Before Taylor embarked, Desgrange offered him a large sum—potentially as high as $20,000—to race at another track he managed in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Taylor turned him down.

  Months later, the first Tour de France was unveiled. The total purse: 20,000 francs.

  Daisy greeted Taylor at a pier in New York on a June day in 1902. Being athletic and a lover of sports, she was elated to see her new superstar husband, and looked forward to accompanying him to the American races that summer. She may not have known exactly what she was getting herself into. The remaining season would again be racially charged and tumultuous. This time, Taylor saw it coming in advance. Wanting to avoid the same pressures as the previous season, he hesitated to sign a contract with the NCA. Batchelder had tried every inducement he could think of to sign him before he whirled off to Europe, including sending a representative to Grand Central Station with a pen and contract in hand. Taylor, in effect, freelanced that summer, accepting whatever offers he wished from individual track owners.

  There was little chance of winning the 1902 Sprint Championships because Frank Kramer already had a thirty-point lead in the standings when Taylor joined the circuit. In addition, Batchelder had changed the rules to allow four men in the finals instead of two, a rule some believed was directed specifically at him, referring to it as the “Taylor rule.’”

  The bitterness displayed by his American rivals may have reached a climax that summer. Taylor’s tires mysteriously went flat right before or during races and his rivals knocked him around often. But when given half a chance, he kept winning a high percentage of his races. The press continued to bark dissent. Following a series of races in Baltimore, New Jersey, New York, and Boston, where he was repeatedly pocketed, elbowed, and knocked around the tracks, a letter sent to the editor of The Sun openly expressed one reader’s disgust. “Is there no way to prevent such detestable tricks as are repeatedly put up by some riders who would secretly rejoice if they could upset Taylor and cripple him for life?” Such riding, the letter continued, “is unworthy of decent, self-respecting and sport-loving people, and makes a white man blush with shame to know that a colored man is today . . . the banner man for clean sport and gentlemanly conduct.”

  Despite the callous treatment, or perhaps because of it, crowds continued to adore him. When he popped up at a race in Ottawa, he was embraced by a delegation of Canadian officials, reporters, and sporting celebrities as soon as he stepped off his train. Having lost his bike in transit, he rewarded their flattery by winning handily on an ill-fitted, borrowed bicycle. When Taylor was overseas, attendance had dropped in North America. “However,” proclaimed the Colored American Magazine, “as soon as it was announced that Major Taylor would ride, standing room was almost at a premium.”

  Taylor’s plight received a lot of press that summer. The tone of the reporters had to open the eyes of commissioners in other sports. “Whether the skin color should be white or black, he is entitled to what he is worth,” wrote one journalist, “and to defeat him the winner should be able to prove himself the better man, which should hold true in cycling, prize-fighting, wrestling, baseball, or any other sport.”

  On a summer day, Major and Daisy rolled into Revere Beach Track in Boston. Daisy sat alone in a front row seat, watching with glee as Taylor rode away from the trio of Kramer, Lawson, and MacFarland, winning the half-mile race by more than two lengths. “With anything like a fair show,” claimed one observer, “or an equal chance and the honest observation of the rules of bike racing, Major Taylor would be Champion of America again.” Afterward, Floyd MacFarland, one of Taylor’s chief rivals that summer, rolled up alongside him, waving his fist and barking out a string of obscenities intertwined with a fountain of racial slurs followed by outright physical threats. Taylor quickly retreated to his locker room, grabbing a two-by-four on his way just in case. MacFarland’s rage moved over to the judges’ stand where he complained that Taylor had fouled him. As Taylor was nowhere near him, the judges told him to watch his tongue and then shooed him away. MacFarland gathered the peloton together, huddling with them in the middle of the track.

  In her seat along the finish line, Daisy bent her ear toward the group, then looked on in horror as the three-horses-of-the-apocalypse stormed toward the locker room where Taylor waited. A pang of panic rippled through the grandstand. Sensing trouble, Taylor peered out from the locker room door and saw them sprinting toward him. Outnumbered and physically threatened, Taylor latched tightly onto the two-by-four, reared back, and unleashed a vicious swing at them as they invaded his locker room.

  He missed.

  There was a brief moment of disbelief. The gang lunged after him, but Taylor, who ran as fast as he rode, dropped the lumber to the ground, scampered out of the room at lightning speed, and dove into an adjacent locker room where his trainer stood. They barricaded themselves inside and waited for the police to arrive. Outside the door, there was kicking and pounding and huffing and puffing and renewed threats of violence. Out on the track, Daisy shivered alone in her seat. Just then the police, who were never far from sporting events at the time, arrived to pacify them with a few persuasive whacks of their billy clubs. Taylor, who had all his weight pressed up against the door, slid to the ground and exhaled.

  Racism was the main cause of Taylor’s troubles, but a track writer for the New York Daily News picked up on another major source of strife among his rivals. “When it is considered that he divides his winnings with no man, nor teams up with anyone, as the others do, the reason for his unpopularity by circuit riders is quickly detected.”

  No blood was shed that afternoon. But that incident, combined with others throughout the year, shook Taylor, sapped his spirit, and caused him to question his future as a professional cyclist in America. Taylor’s gentle disposition and pacifist nature didn’t allow him
to act violently without feelings of guilt. “That was the first time in my racing career,” he remembered with a twinge of remorse, “that I ever lost my head to the extent of planning to fight for my rights at all cost.”

  At the foggy launch of daybreak one late summer Friday, Taylor and Daisy trained out of Worcester on the way to a race in Newark, New Jersey. Assuming there would be food on the train, they left home without eating breakfast, only to learn that there was no dining car on board. Their train paused in Springfield momentarily, but they had only enough time to grab a cup of coffee. When they finally arrived in Newark shortly after noon, they were famished. They hopped off the train and scampered to a restaurant on Broad Street, close to the depot. According to the Boston Daily Globe, they waited at their table for half an hour while waiters “developed nearsightedness,” serving everyone else but walking by them as though they didn’t exist. Taylor kept trying to alert them but they remained “deaf to his summons.”

  Tired of waiting, they left, each with a “forgiving smile,” jumping on a trolley car to another restaurant on Market Street. This time, a waiter asked them to get out immediately or face being thrown out. Taylor stood there, speechless.

  As time passed, their hunger grew and their frustration deepened. Again, they hopped a streetcar and whirled off to a different section of town. At a third restaurant they were again rudely turned away, this time by the manager. Taylor was beside himself with rage. His eyebrows squinted down over his eyes, his face reddened, and his teeth ground together. When Daisy was by his side he had a lower tolerance for putting up with racism. He dropped his head in sorrow, his features disappearing under the shade of his black top hat.

  Disgusted, hungry, and enraged, he latched on to Daisy’s hand, sprinted off to the rail station and bought two tickets for the next train out of Jersey.

  Back at the track, people began asking the question, Where’s Major Taylor?

  Somewhere along the line, Fred Voight, manager of the Vailsburg Track, received word of their sordid odyssey. He hustled to the rail station in hopes of staving off their early departure. He found them there fuming. A long, animated conversation took place with Voight pleading with them to stay while expressing sympathy for their plight. At first, Taylor would have none of it. Voight then explained to him that the grandstand was already swelling with fans waiting to see him compete against a large field, including local hero Frank Kramer. He continued pleading his case, telling Taylor of the extensive marketing he had already done, including lithographic displays in windows throughout the city. With race time just hours away, Taylor reluctantly agreed to join the peloton, empty stomach and all.

  But the damage had already been done.

  When he appeared on the Vailsburg Track, which was becoming the epicenter of American racing, announcer Fred Burns barked out his name through the megaphone. The crowd roared its approval. As he cinched in at the line, Taylor didn’t even hear it. His mind was clouded. All he could think about were the indignities his new bride had just experienced. Daisy squeezed into a seat that Voight had set aside for her. Sitting with her fingers crossed, she could not have known that this would be one of his last circuit races on American soil. The pistol cracked and Kramer tore across the track at a relentless pace. Taylor plodded forward reservedly, quickly drifting out of reach. He looked forward and saw Kramer cannonballing down the homestretch in the presence of his hometown crowd. His heart not in it, Taylor was but a shell of his usual self. For the first time in recent memory, he limped across the line out of reach. Daisy slumped in her seat. The crowd stampeded past her, vaulted down onto the track, tossed their soon-to-be 1902 American sprint champion on their shoulders, placed a wreath of flowers around him, and whooped. Their shouts could be heard for blocks around, drowning out sounds from passing vehicles and trolley cars. In the firehouse opposite the track, bells clanged, whistles blew, and firemen leaped for joy. In a rare display of exuberance, the normally opaque Kramer lobbed flowers back at the crowd, smiling and blushing like a schoolboy.

  For a brief moment, Taylor watched the revelers. Then he gathered his belongings, gently cinched the tips of his fingers into Daisy’s hand, and walked out of the velodrome in silence.

  After six turbulent years of professional racing on American soil, getting bounced around by the “whetted knives” of one competitor after another, dealing with threats of violence, refused meals and hotel rooms in town after town, Taylor had reached the end of his rope. “I was satisfied,” he wrote with an edge to his words, “I could never regain my American Championship title . . . with the entire field of riders combined against me.” With a gleeful tone, an Atlanta Constitution reporter made a prediction that would largely hold true for nearly a century. “His will be the last black face probably ever seen in the professional cycling ranks in America.”

  He was only halfway through his racing career, but for Taylor, the long national nightmare was over. After boarding a train for home, he and Daisy sat down in the dining car and devoured their first real meal of the day. Neither of them could think of anything to say. The whistle sounded and the train ground forward, wending its way out of New Jersey, through Connecticut, and into Massachusetts. Daisy and Major gazed out the window, hearing the plaintive sound of wind and rain buffeting the train as it clattered under the cover of darkness. Both of them felt empty.

  Chapter 19

  ROYAL HONEYMOON

  In the fall of 1902, the pall hanging over 4 Hobson Avenue was interrupted by an intriguing overseas cablegram. Taylor read it curiously. Standing at a telegraph office on the other side of the world was a thickset man, built low, with short black hair, laughing blue eyes, a tanned face, and a close-clipped Ronald Colman moustache. The twenty-six-year-old Australian awaiting Taylor’s response was Hugh D. McIntosh, soon to be known among sports fans as “Huge Deal” McIntosh.

  An acquaintance of Brady’s, the flamboyant, fast-talking McIntosh had his nose in everything. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he owned the Tivoli theaters, oversaw many notable plays, and managed prizefights, including the racially charged fight between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns. “Never before and never since, anywhere in the world,” wrote one sportswriter, “had one man poked his prodigy fingers into so many pies.”

  Possessing a volcanic personality, McIntosh also held the defects of his qualities. He swore like a longshoreman, kept no opinion in moderation, and had a habit of underscoring his adjectives in conversation. He also had a mind so full of wild visionary thoughts no one knew what to expect next. He was, said one observer “a distinctive blend of charlatan, genius, dreamer, and bandit.” Before the big money and the Bellevue Hill mansion that followed, McIntosh grew up in Broken Hill, a barren, fly-infested region when Australia was young and imagination and cheek got you further than education and class. He ran away from home when he was nine, lived in an iron-roof shack, picked ore in the stifling heat, ate food covered with red dust, and considered a shower with clean water a luxury. “It was the nearest approach to hell on earth I’ve ever known,” he remembered.

  Discontent, McIntosh moved about the colony working as a penniless farm laborer, boxer, tarboy, stagehand, chorus boy, and waiter. He got his first real break when he sold pies at Melbourne racetracks, eventually married the baker’s widow, turned the bakery into a catering chain, then completed the circle by taking control of some of the same tracks where he once sold pies.

  Like Brady, McIntosh had fallen madly in love with the fast-paced sport of bike racing. In 1900 and 1901, he dabbled with competitive bike racing but quickly learned he was a better boxer, manager, and entrepreneur. “I began as a rider,” he later admitted, “but if there ever was a case of misapplied strength, it was me on a bicycle.” Instead, he became assistant secretary of the League of Wheelmen of New South Wales in 1902, then president of the Australian Cycling Council, giving him tsar-like control of bike racing throughout Australasia.

  Acting as a partner representing a syndicate of
Australian track owners and businessmen called the Summer Nights Amusement, McIntosh cabled offers to Taylor. The attractive proposals tugged at him. He surely recalled Zimmerman’s stories of his glory days racing on Australian tracks in front of crowds so large they perched atop overflowing grandstands to see him. And the time Zimmie was invited to demonstrate bike riding in the ballroom of the Victorian Palace by the Australian Premier. This, combined with the realization that his days of getting a fair shake on American tracks had all but faded, made him receptive to the idea. Australia, like Europe, was a hotbed for bike racing. With the backing of enterprising men like McIntosh, it also boasted the largest purses in the world.

  Numbers were bandied back and forth. Taylor, by now a shrewd negotiator, surely mentioned something about how far away and expensive Australia was. Weeks passed and still no agreement was reached. Knowing the leverage he had, Taylor was simply playing hardball. But he was dealing with a man who was an absolute bulldog in form and personality. “McIntosh was not adverse to a good stoush,” proclaimed the Melbourne Punch, “and positively bristled with energy and nervous force.” McIntosh kept upping the ante, but Taylor kept hesitating.

  But when McIntosh offered a guarantee of £1,500 (somewhere between $5,000 and $7,500) plus a share of gate receipts, plus purses—some as high as $5,000—and no Sunday racing, Taylor’s eyes opened wider. Still, he wasn’t there just yet. On October 1, 1902, wanting to avoid burnout, Taylor cabled McIntosh: £1500 Okay, Number of Races too Many. Wasting little time, McIntosh agreed to lessen the number of required races to no more than three per week. Pleased, Taylor finally cabled back his approval. McIntosh wired a $2,500 down payment. The Referee—a newspaper McIntosh would one day own—spread the news to what they thought would be an ecstatic public: MAJOR TAYLOR IS COMING! ALL DOUBTS AS TO THE COMING OF MAJOR TAYLOR, THE WONDERFUL BLACK RIDER, ARE NOW AT REST!