The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Around the track at the Park Square Coliseum, Champion and Fournier drove at full speed when their machines went airborne off a tight turn.87 Both Frenchmen crashed hard into unforgiving wooden seats and spectators and were knocked out cold.88 A horse-drawn ambulance took them to Massachusetts General Hospital.

  “I wake up and see that I am in a hospital,”89 Albert later reminisced. “I lie still for a while and then look around me. In the next cot, I see my friend Fournier. He looked at me and I see him wink.

  “‘Henri,’ I say. ‘Where am I?’

  “‘In Boston,’ says Henri.

  “‘Boston,’ I say. ‘Where is Boston?’”

  Champion was treated for a broken arm and walked out of Massachusetts General Hospital wearing a plaster cast.90 He was still wearing the cast on January 4, 1901, when he pedaled in his white silk jersey behind a motorcycle around the same small track in a fast one-mile motorpace demonstration during a race program. He blitzed the mile in 1 minute and 37 seconds—approaching 40 mph—to break Harry Elkes’s national record.91 The audience gave Champion a rousing ovation.

  Champion’s arm healed in time for him to make up for lost time in the 1901 season. From May to September, he entered forty motorpace races on the outdoor velodrome Eastern Seaboard pro circuit, from Boston, Providence, and New York west to Pittsburgh and south to Newark, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Atlanta.92 He competed three times a week for fourteen weeks, most often in middle distances of ten miles to twenty-five miles, against one to three opponents. They pedaled behind motor-tandems. Because engines misbehaved, Champion’s team traveled with an extra motor-tandem. All racing accoutrement were packed in wooden cases with Entertainer painted in large black letters on the sides so that baggage handlers would rush them, in the tradition that the show must go on, straightaway to the destinations indicated by their tags.93

  He won twenty-nine races.94 Each win paid $250, which would have generated prize money totaling $7,250. He also earned approximately another $1,000 from other races, paying $150 to place and $50 to show. His contract with the Waltham Manufacturing Company was for $25 a week, covering the off-season of eight months, or thirty-two weeks, for about another $800. A rough estimate of his winnings and salary came to $9,050 ($256,000 in 2014). Compared with major league baseball hall of famer Cy Young, earning a salary of $3,500 ($99,000 in 2014) pitching for the Boston Americans and leading the American league in wins that year, Champion was one of America’s best-paid athletes.95

  Champion’s travel expenses were likely offset by his share of the gate. As pro cycling had evolved after the mid-1890s, promoters offered marquee cyclists a portion of receipts, usually up to 40 percent, to ensure they would compete in their programs, encourage audiences to watch, and induce the press to write previews and then cover the events. Owners of major league baseball teams considered five thousand fans seated in their ballpark a profitable day; Charles River Park was selling tickets of twenty-five cents to $1.50 each to ten thousand or more spectators. After every race, the promoters—local businessmen who organized and advertised their events—doled out the prize money. The era was unfettered by taxes. Dollar bills were longer and wider than today; $250 in ones and fives, with a twenty on top, rolled up to the size of a fist.

  The biggest earner in sports was the cyclist Major Taylor. An African-American from Indianapolis, Taylor was a pure sprinter, capable of churning his legs in one sharp acceleration after another to decimate opponents in their surge to the finish line. He had made history as the first athlete to cross the color line in professional sports when he won the 1899 world pro sprint championship in Montreal—a decade before Jack Johnson won the heavyweight boxing title. In 1901, a Paris promoter lured Taylor with a $10,000 appearance fee ($283,000 in 2014) to compete in short races over six weeks in Paris with forays to London, Berlin, and Brussels.96 Taylor beat all of Europe’s national champions and pulled in $1,000 a race. That year his income topped $25,000 ($707,000) from appearance fees, victories, and product endorsements.

  On August 7, Champion faced Taylor in Charles River Park for a five-mile match behind motor-tandems. Both men had been born the same year, and they stood eye to eye and had similar builds of taut, light muscles. Their duel filled the stadium and cheap seats and packed the infield to standing room only with more than twelve thousand spectators. Champion and Taylor had a few laps to build speed behind their pacing machines for a flying start. At the crack of the start gun, Champion set a swift first mile in 1:29-4/5, a combative 45 mph.97 Taylor, however, quit after the first mile. It was a hollow victory for Champion, although he broke the US record held by Jimmy Michael.

  Faster motors on tandems kept audiences leaping to their feet and cheering. Upping the speed also boosted the dangers. On September 4, Johnny Nelson battled in a fifteen-miler against Jimmy Michael in Madison Square Garden. In the third mile, the engine of Nelson’s Orient motor-tandem broke down as he was flying into a banked turn. The motor-tandem of Michael banged into Nelson from behind, throwing Nelson under the machine.98 Its chain, slathered in oil and churning like a buzz saw, ripped his left leg calf muscle to the bone.99 Nelson’s pacers and Michael’s pacers crashed into Nelson. His wound showered blood onto the pile of men. Michael swerved away, unscathed. Nelson was taken by horse-drawn ambulance to Bellevue Hospital. His leg developed gangrene, prompting doctors to amputate the infected leg above the knee in an attempt to save him.100 Four days after his accident, he died.101

  The garden’s management of James Kennedy and Patrick T. Powers barred motor-tandems from the track and ordered them replaced with “singles,” or one-seat motorcycles.

  Neither Johnny Nelson’s surviving brother, Joe Nelson, nor Champion, Harry Elkes, or any other pace followers voiced any intention to quit. They refused even to wear a helmet like football players because, so the rationale went, matadors in the bullring never wear breastplates.102

  Champion’s other Orient teammate Elkes, one of the tallest pros in the game, had been struggling to regain his form after a hard fall on Memorial Day. Lanky Elkes had crashed on the boards of the new open-air Revere Beach velodrome, which replaced the now-closed Waltham Bicycle Park oval a few miles to the south. Revere Beach’s track was eight laps to the mile with forty-degree banks on the turns. His fractured left collarbone left him without full use of his arm.103

  Nevertheless, Elkes managed to round himself into form by the end of the season to face the steadily-improving Bobby Walthour of Atlanta in a twenty-five-mile motorpace contest in Charles River Park for the motorpacing national championship. Walthour had come up from the Southern circuit with a skein of victories. Almost six feet tall, he had haystack-blond hair, blue eyes, and an outgoing personality that drew hordes of fans.

  Frank “King” Gately on a motorcycle drove pace for Elkes as he put the challenger Walthour away and thus claimed a third national motorpace championship. Yet Elkes conceded that his falls were taking a toll. He began talking about retiring from the sport,104 possibly going to college to study medicine after spending so much time in hospitals.105

  At last Champion had saved enough winnings to send for Elise. He arranged her ship’s passage to Boston and scouted for a residence in Cambridge. In November, she arrived.106 It was a measure of her commitment to him. Elise and Albert moved into a three-story Victorian house at 63 Highland Avenue,107 on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue from his boarding house on Cottage Street. She had to cope with a different language, an unfamiliar currency, and all manner of American customs. However, she and Albert were living together, although in the eyes of the Catholic Church, as unmarried Catholics, they were living in sin.

  Having come off a successful season, Champion could devote time to showing her around Boston. They would have time together before he had to go back to his itinerant schedule in the spring.

  Elise immigrated around the time Charles Herman Metz was pondering what to do about escalating interference from General Electric president Coffin and M. P. Clo
ugh of Lynn Gas and Electric Company. Metz’s investors kept buying more stock in the Waltham Manufacturing Company and forcing their ideas on him to build electric cars.108

  With sales of steam-powered autos in a downward spiral and Thomas Edison pledging the resources of his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to invent a breakthrough nickel-iron battery, the prospects for electrics looked bright. But Metz was committed to internal-combustion engines. He considered that the dazzling increase in the supply of gasoline from recently discovered East Texas oil fields since 1901 would meet unlimited future demand. Metz had to decide what he should do.

  December brought the annual six-day in Madison Square Garden. The 1901 edition, December 7 to 14, was directed by William A. Brady’s understudies—James C. Kennedy, the bespectacled and wiry retired cyclist turned promoter, and rotund Patrick T. Powers, former manager of the New York Giants baseball team,109 predecessor to the San Francisco Giants, and the founding president the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues,110 composed of all minor-league teams. Between baseball and cycling, Powers continually operated sports enterprises.

  The sixes caught the eye of newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer. He was transforming publishing from his office in the tallest skyscraper in New York, the Pulitzer Building. Born in Hungary,111 Pulitzer had learned English as a common laborer in St. Louis and turned to a career there in journalism, writing for a German-language paper, which over time he purchased. He moved to New York, the portal for migrants pouring into America by the shiploads. Pulitzer saw class conflict as an unpleasant truth and bought the World to tell about the plight of the poor.112 He made headlines bigger, enlarged typefaces, and used drawings and photos to get his message across even to illiterates.113 Pulitzer paid attention to sports for their mass following. He created the sports section,114 a force behind the World ballooning to the largest circulation of New York’s fifteen dailies. The World promoted the December six-day and announced an exclusive. Jimmy Michael would report on it—or at least the World would publish Jimmy’s byline, a privilege reserved for star journalists. The World ran a photo of him posing with a Jack Russell terrier named Trixy.115

  James C. Kennedy and Patrick T. Powers hired Michael and Champion to give daily motorpace demonstrations that would entertain audiences and provide the six-day contestants a deserved break. Champion was to drive an Orient Motorcycle for Michael to pace behind in matinees. They would have the track to themselves while one rider from each of the thirteen two-rider teams pedaled at a casual pace along the inside apron, out of the way but still rolling under the six-day rules of round the clock riding.

  Whatever grudge Champion harbored for Michael’s false accusations about their mutual trainer Choppy Warburton, he had acquiesced to a détente. He and Michael would each be paid $200 a day, plus expenses, for pace exhibitions of two to five miles. Champion talked Kennedy and Powers into letting him drive a one-mile motorcycle demonstration on the final afternoon to test how fast he could make his new 2-1/4 hp Orient Motorcycle zoom around the track.

  Pacing Michael also afforded Champion the opportunity to hone his cornering technique. Some pacemakers entered the banking high and wide and dropped down for gravity to give them a boost in speed while others went into the turn close to the edge and then swept up higher before dropping down. Such a series of swerves increased the risk of a crash or losing the pacing cyclist. Champion learned that the most direct way to take the banked turns was to enter and leave at the same angle.

  Day after day, ten thousand men and women bought tickets and crammed into the garden, yelling for favorites.116 The team of Bobby Walthour and Archie MacEachern of Toronto took turns charging around the wooden bowl, reeling off hundreds of miles daily to lead the other teams. On the final afternoon, Saturday, December 14, Champion drove a one-mile exhibition, ten laps. The six-day riders took a breather—one from each team soft-pedaled around the apron on the inside perimeter. In the crowd was Champion’s agent, Victor Breyer, from Paris to report for La Vie au Grand Air.117

  Champion flattened over his machine and zipped through the half mile at 40 mph, leaning over so far on the banking that everyone in the garden stood up and cheered.

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Breyer,118 standing with an anonymous scribe from the World. “Champion will kill himself! He is going too fast for such a track.”

  The words escaped Breyer’s mouth as Albert was rounding the high, steep curve on turn three. His motorcycle shot up the bank and crashed into box seat number 13, shattering the wooden railing into matchsticks.119 He fell off his machine and plunged down the smooth boards.

  “Champion lay stunned, and an ambulance was summoned,” the World reported.120 “The cyclist, however, finally sprang to his feet, shook himself, and amid the deafening cheers of the crowd, limped off to his quarters. He sustained a compound dislocation of two fingers of his right hand and sprained his right side from shoulder to foot.”

  Champion was bundled into a horse-drawn ambulance for emergency treatment at Bellevue Hospital, but he was able to make it back to the garden and witness the ten o’clock finish.

  “The excitement of the surging crowd was strained almost to the bursting point,” observed the World.121 “Men stood on chairs and railings and mounted on each other’s shoulders.”122

  At the end of 142 hours and a new record of 2,555 miles,123 far enough to take the riders from the garden to Phoenix, Arizona, the pack in vibrant silk jerseys rocketed like a meteorite. Bobby Walthour bent almost double over the handlebars and heaved to the front for the final 176-yard lap. A former Atlanta bicycle courier accustomed to traffic pressing from behind while he sped to make deliveries, Walthour whooshed to victory. A swarm of humanity quickly engulfed around him and his partner Archie MacEachern, shouldered them, and carried them to the judge’s stand so the winners could claim the $1,500 first prize ($42,400 in 2014).124

  Champion, his broken fingers immobilized in a splint, recognized the qualities under pressure that made Walthour a world-class athlete.

  In early 1902, Metz asked GE president Charles Coffin and M. P. Clough of Lynn Gas and Electric Company to buy him out of the Waltham Manufacturing Company, which they did.125 Metz severed his ties with the company he had founded and moved to New York to serve as technical editor of Cycling and Automobile Trade Journal.126

  The Waltham Manufacturing Company hired a new director and introduced Orient Motorcycles equipped with engines of its own manufacture with 2 hp, 3 hp, and 4 hp. Orients introduced the two-cylinder engine, called V-Twin for the v-shape created by the orientation of the two cylinders in the crankcase.127

  Champion remained under contract with the Waltham Manufacturing Company, which supplied him with Orient bicycles, motorcycles, and Dunlop tires. Motorcycle sales would become more important as bicycle sales took a nosedive.

  Albert joined the Madison Square Garden syndicate of James C. Kennedy and Patrick T. Powers for race contracts.128 That put him in a select stable of pros along with Elkes and an amiable Englishman named Tommy Hall. Kennedy told Champion that Hall, five feet tall with wide, expressive eyes,129 was a better cyclist and instructed Champion to drive the pace motorcycle for Hall. However, Champion was too proud. His broken fingers and body bruises had healed, and he was ready for another racing season. He liked driving pace when it suited him, to practice driving fast, unrestrained on oval tracks from the nuisance of police arresting him for speeding on public roads, but he was not about to drive pace for Hall when he had come to America to race. He had an idea how to outfox Kennedy and upstage Hall.

  In February 1902, Albert took Elise to live in a French community in Brooklyn while he decamped to Washington, DC to train130 in the milder Southern climate around the outdoor board oval, the Coliseum on Capitol Hill131 at Fourteenth and East Capitol Streets in northeast Washington. On the track, he could see through bare branches of oak and maple trees the brilliant white Capitol dome towering like a snow-capped mountain.

  He rented a room i
n a boarding house near the Coliseum and stayed in the nation’s capital in March and April. Albert and Elise, separated even though she came to America to be with him, could keep in touch with letters and, now, perhaps the occasional long-distance telephone call.

  Determined to prove himself to James C. Kennedy, he exercised with dedication at the Coliseum. Sometimes he would pedal down Capitol Hill and into the Maryland countryside, with its brick roads and some sharp hills, to improve leg power. By the time he and Elise reunited in May, Albert was ready to fly.

  During the corporate restructuring in Waltham, Elkes had shipped out again to France with contracts for races in Paris on Clément Gladiators. Elkes returned in late May 1902 to Boston, accompanied by seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Basil De Guichard.132 That spring at the Parc des Princes outdoor cement vélodrome, De Guichard had showed bright prospects by setting a long-distance world record in a motorcycle race. He drove 875 miles in seventy-three hours on a 1-1/4 hp Clément stock motorcycle, averaging 12 mph, including all stops for gasoline and rest.133

  De Guichard had blue eyes and brown hair,134 the cherub cheeks of adolescence, a low forehead, and a square jaw. His calm disposition and suave manner made it easy to make friends with strangers. He also was fluent in English. De Guichard had been born in Denver to English parents.135 The family returned to England when he was a child, then moved to Paris, where he grew up and received his education.136 Like many youths, he took up cycling, which drew him to work at Clément Cycles. He would have heard stories from Adolph Clément, Pierre Tournier, and laborers who had watched Champion’s arc from unicyclist to bike racer, French cycling vedette, and American star.

  Upon meeting Champion, De Guichard was ready to report that Clément was making heftier motorcycles in his Levallois-Perret plant for motorpacing competitions with bigger De Dion-Bouton engines for ever-faster speeds around the Parc des Princes cement oval, about two-thirds of a mile around. Thirty thousand spectators on a regular basis filled the stadium and bleacher seats to yell above the thunderous engines and urge the motor-pacers. There seemed no limit to how fast the pacing cyclists could go.