Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  Australia stood on its feet and let out a deafening roar, the crowd’s decibel level growing exponentially with every turn of the riders’ wheels. Lawson, who had surely never felt such intensity coming from a crowd, stood on his pedals, extracting every last erg of his power. He and Taylor were feeding off the crowd and the crowd fed off of them.

  Lawson, back bent, bobbing-head down, eyes set, rode in front hugging the pole, the track surface droning up through him and whirling past. Taylor’s front tire was shadowing Lawson’s rear tire so closely it appeared as if they were one.

  As though he had it blueprinted down to the millisecond, right as the bell rang to signal the final turn, Taylor pounded down on his pedals, steered out to the center of the track, and scorched around Lawson. His tongue burrowing deeper into his mouth, Lawson looked to his side and saw the familiar silhouette of Taylor’s dark form sweeping by him in a blind terror. Having seen this play too many times before, Lawson seethed in his saddle. From the sidelines, in his deep baritone voice, MacFarland barked commands to Lawson, his words vanishing in the thunder.

  Unable to take it any longer, Daisy squeezed her eyes shut.

  What happened next would rock the cycling world for months to come. Lawson powered up alongside Taylor by the aquarium corner, gripped hard on his handlebars, and steered his machine aggressively toward the middle of the track—right into Taylor’s pathway. There was no time to react. Lawson’s rear wheel crashed into Taylor’s front wheel, setting off an ugly scene. There was the blur of a helmet-less black body and a riderless bicycle catapulting through thin air at forty miles per hour followed by the crashing thud of man meeting earth and the screeching sound of metal wheels, handlebars, and pedals sliding across the track. Taylor’s helpless form somersaulted uncontrollably across the track for fifteen yards before coming to a dead stop, the wheels of his bicycle whirling silently in the still air. His world twisted upside down, all light and color warped. Then everything went dark, still, and silent.

  Major Taylor lay unconscious on the track floor. The grim realization shook through the throng. In an instant, horrified fans, track officials, and trainers threw their drinks to the ground, poured out of the grandstand, and ran helter-skelter onto the track, screaming “The Major’s down! The Major’s down!” Daisy, a look of sheer horror on her face, dashed through the mob, her skirt whipping in the wind.

  Horrified, trainer Sid Melville trudged out to the track, dragging his bad leg with him. Racing officials joined him. “That’s the most treacherous thing I have ever seen,” one of them said. “Lawson will go out for life for this.” “It looked like murder,” one man wrote. All around Taylor’s lifeless form pandemonium ensued. Wheelmen, doctors, and racing officials dashed everywhere, scurrying for bandages, ice, liniments, and a stretcher.

  The Ambulance Brigade hovered nearby.

  Up in the press box, reporters banged out their stories in shock. Coming from the crowd, claimed one reporter, there were “yells, hoots, groans, and threats of dismemberment.” Perhaps fearing for his safety, Lawson disappeared into the night. Out on the track, the current of people converging around Taylor hoisted his limp body up off the track, then lowered it down onto the infield grass.

  The shocked fans watched him being carried off the track presumably on a stretcher. Somewhere along the way, Taylor came to, his cataleptic state replaced with painful spasmodic squirming. Some of the flesh from his legs, buttocks, shoulders, arms, and forehead had been ripped away, exposing bone and giving him the appearance of a burn victim. His purple and white shirt and racing shorts as well as parts of his body became a crimson streak, as gouts of blood spewed forth.

  Outside, a lone steward entered “no race” up on the tote board. A dour procession of racegoers marched out of the grandstand. The Ambulance Brigade eventually hauled the suffering hero to the hospital. Doctors hovered over his bleeding head and body, stitching and bandaging away.

  Back in the States, a race reporter penned an ominous article. “Major Taylor’s injury in Australia is likely to deprive the track of another great cyclist . . . it is the first bad fall Taylor has ever had. And,” he wrote, before finishing his remarkably prophetic piece, “the first severe accident usually affects the nerve of the cyclist.”

  In the aftermath of the heavily publicized match race, Iver Lawson was a wanted man. To escape a proverbial hanging at the hands of angered Melbournians, Lawson jumped a train and rolled six hundred miles southwest to the relative safety of Adelaide, where he was popular. Floyd MacFarland joined him. With Taylor out of the way, the two men won everything in sight, including six races in a row, pocketing thousands in prize money. Back in Melbourne, fan letters poured into the papers lambasting Lawson, demanding his permanent suspension, and questioning MacFarland’s role in the affair.

  At the track, racing officials, trainers, and several riders examined the scar marks and the blood and flesh extending over fifteen yards of track.

  The League of Victorian Wheelmen held an emergency meeting at the Port Phillip Hotel in Melbourne. They called in twenty witnesses for testimony. Eventually, Floyd MacFarland showed up, kicking and screaming. After what someone described as a mealy mouthed recitation, he became the only person to claim Taylor had pushed Lawson and was therefore responsible for his own predicament. No one bought his story. “What rubbish the public is asked to follow,” wrote one witness.

  In the interim, radiograms—a form of x-ray technology that was still in its infancy—were apparently taken of Taylor. They came back cloudy, indistinct.

  After a thorough review, the chairman of the League of Victorian Wheelmen summoned Lawson to appear before the panel. Down in Adelaide while preparing for a race, Lawson watched a steward enter “scratch” next to his number 65 on the tote board. Soon afterward, the track owner hauled him off the track and escorted him to the train station. Lawson hopped on the Melbourne Express, sweating bullets the whole way.

  A great deal was riding on the verdict. A long suspension would mean missing the World Championships scheduled for August in London, at which he was considered one of the favorites. There was also the upcoming $5,000 Sydney Thousand, the main reason for his twelve-thousand-mile journey to Australia.

  After a heated civil war between Northern and Southern Australian racing leagues, Chairman Callaghan sat Lawson down and threw the book at him: he was suspended from racing anywhere in the world for one year. Lawson stooped over in his chair and pleaded for mercy. “All things considered,” wrote one reporter, “Lawson may consider himself lucky . . . he is not wanted in Australia.” If it happens again, he continued, “a sentence of life will be about fit for the occasion.” McIntosh escorted Lawson to the pier and watched him go. To an American reporter upon his return, Lawson, a man for whom words seemed to be an albatross, muttered something about it being Taylor’s own fault he was thrown.

  In Adelaide, MacFarland read the news and barked his dissent to every reporter he could find. “And this is what they call justice,” he growled.

  Days passed. Taylor’s shoulders, thighs, and forearms were still so badly lacerated, he was having difficulty moving. An ugly row of stitches crisscrossed his forehead. Standing was painful, but with the flesh of his buttocks torn off, sitting was even more agonizing. He was, according to one report, “taking meals off the mantelpiece.” “Taylor’s injuries are even more serious then we at first thought,” confessed one man. Taylor’s doctor, a Dr. MacGillicuddy, recognizing the national significance of his patient, had several of the best physicians from around Australia speeding in on trains to further examine him for possible broken bones or internal injuries. “He will carry the sears in his buttocks and arms for life,” one of them said.

  Track owners from Adelaide, where Taylor was scheduled to appear next, hopped a train to pay him a visit. They found him reclining on a Victorian settee in his room with Daisy and his doctor nursing his injuries. He was so heavily bandaged, Daisy, who was six months pregnant, struggled getting cloth
es over the angry welts on his body. After first expressing their sympathy for his plight, the track owners reminded him how much attendance had fallen because of his absence. When one of them put a guilt trip on him, pleading with him to race, injured or not, Taylor’s doctor expressed outrage at the suggestion.

  Days slipped by. The track owners showed up again. When they continued to press the issue—attendance was cut in half, they emphasized—Daisy became enraged, chasing them out of the room.

  Hours became days; days, a week. The pressure to race continued to pour in from all quarters—racing officials, reporters, track owners, and expectant fans. Taylor was becoming uncharacteristically edgy. He emerged from his bed, stabbing angrily at the ground with his crutches and moaning. Daisy grew concerned.

  February turned into March.

  Physically, Major Taylor eventually made a full recovery that antipodean summer. He even won some races, including a few against MacFarland. But they were merely pyrrhic victories. Mentally and emotionally, he returned to the track a changed man. His cool demeanor and sense of equanimity that had heightened his fame the world over began slipping out of his control. In the past, he had let negative judges' decisions and requests from aggressive track owners roll over him with few words and little emotion.

  Now he began snapping back. On one occasion he surprised a reporter at the South Australian Hotel by thumping him on his knee with his hand while simultaneously stamping his feet on the ground. “Some of your officials,” he hollered, “have all along entertained a disgusting prejudice against me.” The track owners, he howled to another writer, “have regarded me as a revenue machine and nothing more.”

  To him, it was as if everyone expected him to show up with a smile on his face and work his magic every day without fail. “I am a not a petrol machine,” he had told a reporter. “I am flesh and blood like the rest of you.”

  As March became April, his anger turned into paranoia. He scratched out of some races because he was afraid of being “dealt with.” When he did race, he often visited the stewards to warn them of potential foul play. “Keep your eyes open,” he said fearfully, “keep your eyes open.” He scratched out of one race in Adelaide because he claimed “the entire field was going after [him] with a vengeance.” “I am frightened to race,” he confided to another reporter. “After what happened at various times, it is no wonder that Taylor is scared,” the reporter responded.

  Even the race handicappers, who had a difficult and thankless job, bothered him. They continued placing him so far away from the limitmen, he often stood little chance of winning. When he uncharacteristically complained to one of them, the handicapper told him flat out “we just can’t have the same man winning all the time.”

  Large crowds continued to show up—including thirty-two thousand one day at the Sydney Thousand—but the flattery no longer had the same meaning to him. The frantic yells, the bobbing heads, the waving handkerchiefs all looked and felt the same. The whole world surrounded, idolized, and worshipped him, yet he felt disillusioned.

  Australians had apparently seen enough of Floyd MacFarland. Following a few losses to Taylor, he backed out of a heavily advertised match race at the last moment and without explanation, infuriating nearly thirty thousand waiting spectators. “Rather than submit to a licking by Major Taylor,” lamented one reporter, “he has taken the rather undignified course of backing out of the match altogether.” And Hugh McIntosh had had it with him. Like Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in Major League Baseball, McIntosh had been hired to stamp out corruption in Australian racing. It was a job the one-time amateur-boxer-turned-sports-muckracker took very seriously. “While the giants were still winded after their ride,” Smith’s Weekly once wrote of his treatment of a few crooked riders, “he would lay them out one at a time.”

  When MacFarland once again became the chief architect of chicanery against Taylor in the all-important $5,000 Sydney Thousand, McIntosh alertly disqualified the man MacFarland helped win. Losing a fortune as a result, MacFarland rushed toward him with vengeance in his eyes. A showdown of the big Macs seemed imminent.

  “I’ll kill you, you bastard,” hissed MacFarland, his voice carrying out over the din of thirty-two thousand spectators.

  McIntosh, who was intimidated by no man, seethed. His eyebrows rose as if powered by hydraulics, his eyes grew larger, and his tongue slid between his teeth as though he was about to bite down hard.

  No one moved.

  “Keep your fist to yourself, MacFarland,” he snorted in a deep guttural tone that backed MacFarland off. “You can’t fight any better then you ride.”

  For perhaps the first time in his life, MacFarland, retreating from a lock-kneed, gunslinger pose, backed down. McIntosh saw him to the Sydney pier, shoved him on the mail steamer Sonoma, then booted him across the Pacific with a three-year suspension. Weeks later, MacFarland got off in New York, ran to the New York Times, and began blurting out every adjective in his vocabulary. “It was injustice!” he barked.

  Of the five American cyclists in Australia that year, three were sent packing with long suspensions: Lawson and Downing, one year; MacFarland, three years. Their departures, while a welcome reprieve, did not end Taylor’s frustrations. Several Australian riders were also slapped with long sanctions, including a one-year suspension to a rider named Cameroon. “If these are carried out much further,” one sportswriter wrote, “nearly all riders will be disbarred.” * Taylor felt MacFarland’s tentacles stretching all the way across the Pacific like an elongated octopus, even after he was long gone. “It was a strange revelation for me,” he remembered, “to note how MacFarland’s victorious campaign of propaganda had taken root among the Australian riders . . .”

  In May, Taylor left South Australia for good. “I will never race in South Australia again,” he growled as he boarded a train for Sydney.

  For a brief moment in early May, a small ray of light shined through the clouds. At her urging, Major rushed Daisy to a hospital in Sydney. “Mrs. Taylor,” he said, “had been awaiting certain interesting developments.” The Taylors had been discussing the name of their first child for some time. Since Major was the world’s fastest man and Daisy was also athletic, they seemed to be the ideal pedigree for another world champion cyclist. Wanting a fast-sounding name that would, as Taylor wrote, “start him on his fast career to championship fame and glory,” they settled on the original first name of Major. And, in honor of their favorite city, they selected Sydney for a middle name.

  Consequently, their well-laid plans—foreseeing a new lad who would dominate future rivals on bicycle tracks—predated his grand entrance into the world. “Of course,” boasted Major, “he was going to be a champion bicycle rider.” When, on May 11, 1904, in the bustling city of Sydney, Australia, Major heard the first cry of a little baby coming from Daisy’s hospital room, he rushed in and asked the doctor just how great a rider the little one was likely going to be.

  “Is the baby perfectly developed?” he asked nervously.

  The doctor, sensing his expectations of a boy, paused before speaking. “This child can never be the great sprinter that you are,” he said hesitantly.

  Major gulped. “Why, doctor, why?”

  “Because,” he said, “it’s a girl!”

  Boy or girl, Major was thrilled. “This wonderful little stranger,” he wrote, “would make me the proud recipient of the greatest prize of all . . .”

  Instead of Major, they christened her Rita Sydney Taylor. Eventually the name Rita was dropped. Everyone referred to her by her middle name of Sydney.

  She would live for more than a century.

  On June 6 Major, Daisy, and Don Walker watched in silence as Captain Houdlette steered the S.S. Sierra away from the Sydney pier. For the Taylors, it would be their last sight of Australia. Hugh McIntosh, along with members of his syndicate and a smattering of dignitaries, waved good-bye and wondered if they were seeing the last of the exotic black man from America.

  Beginn
ing with Arthur Zimmerman’s visits, Australia had developed into a major player in the sport of professional bike racing. Despite a long and storied history in the sport dating back more than 130 years, those two years in which Major Taylor took center stage are still remembered with great reverence. “1904,” wrote one Australian author nine decades after Taylor’s visit, “was the single most amazing season of cycle racing in the history of Australia.”

  Having bought a small menagerie of cockatoos, parrots, and an exuberant wallaby, Major bided his time playing with them and his new baby during the long cruise home. But there was a restlessness about him that surely caused him to roll around in bed and stare at the ceiling. He tried putting on a brave face, but the roughhousing on the racetracks that year, especially his fall at the hands of Lawson, had scared him and made it hard for him to sleep.

  Back in Australia, several writers felt his anguish and expressed remorse at the harsh treatment he had endured. “It is all such a disgrace,” one of them wrote after he set sail. “Major Taylor is one of the most genuine athletes that strode for victory in any country . . . there is not a shadow of a doubt that he has not had fair play in Australia.”

  The S.S. Sierra splashed across the Pacific, enduring hurricane force winds for nearly thirty hours. The grand reception and high-energy bantering with the ship’s purser from the royal honeymoon of one year ago was replaced with solemn musing over his future. Major was falling into a dangerous emotional slipstream. Things that used to give him pleasure no longer had the same importance. His life, as he looked back, had lacked balance. He couldn’t recall the day when his life hadn’t been framed by a picture of him on the leather saddle of a bicycle, tearing around one track or another.