JOHNSON-JEFFRIES: PRELUDE TO ARMAGEDDON by Pat Putnam

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Johnson–Jeffries (Part 1): Prelude to Armageddon
by Pat Putnam from Sweet Science

RENO, NEVADA, Monday, July 4, 1910 – (The Associated Press) – John Arthur Johnson, a Texas Negro, the son of an American slave, tonight is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

James J. Jeffries of California, winner of twenty-two championship fights, the man who never was brought to his knees before by a blow, tonight passed into history as a broken idol. He met utter defeat at the hands of the new Black champion.

While Jeffries was not actually counted out, he was saved from this crowning shame only by his friends pleading with Johnson not to hit the fallen man again, and the towel was brought (sic) into the ring from his corner. At the end of the fifteenth round, Tex Rickard raised the Black arm, and the great crowd filed out, glum and silent.

Jeffries was dragged to his corner, bleeding from nose and mouth and a dozen cuts on the face. He had a Black closed eye and swollen features, and he held his head in his hands, dazed and incoherent. Johnson walked out of the ring without a mark on his body except for a slight cut to his lip.

…The great Jeffries was like a log. The reviled Johnson was like a Black panther, beautiful in his alertness and defensive tactics.

…After the third round, Johnson treated his opponent almost as a joke.

…The fifteenth round started with a clinch. Johnson then tore loose and sent Jeffries down with a lightening-like left and right blows to the jaw. Jeffries fell halfway through the ropes.

…Those under him saw he had lost his sense of surroundings and that the faces at the ringside were a blur to him. His time had come. He was feeling what he had caused others to feel in the days of his youth and power.

…Johnson stood poised over his adversary, ready with a left hook if Jeffries regained his feet.

…Jim Corbett, who stood in Jeffries’ corner all during this fight, telling Johnson what a fool he was and how he was in for the beating of his life, now ran forward with outstretch arms, crying: “Oh, don’t, Jack; don’t hit him.”

New York Times



NEW YORK, Tuesday July 5 – (Special Correspondent) – Racial riots swept the United States last night from the Atlantic to the Pacific after Jeffries’ crushing defeat by Johnson in Reno, Nevada. The following are the results up to the present---
Nineteen persons were killed.

251 were seriously injured.

Five thousand cases of disorderly conduct were dealt with by the police courts in various cities this morning in consequences of the rioting.

The goals (jails) in numerous cities were crowded with prisoners, in consequence of the bitter feeling against the Negroes manifested when it became known that a Black man had hammered a white man almost into insensibility and won the heavyweight championship of the world.

Most of the casualties were Negroes who were hunted down by white mobs, mostly because of boasts by the Blacks that they had finally demonstrated their superiority over the whites.

Two Negroes were shot dead at La Providence, Louisiana, after walking down the principal street of the town and announcing that a Negro could thrash a white man if he liked.

A Negro was fatally stabbed at Keystone, West Virginia for boasting in a drinking resort (saloon) that Jeffries had met his deserts and that his punishment by Johnson was a foretaste of that punishment which Negroes intended meting out to white men if the latter tried to assert their superiority in the future.

A nine-year-old white child was shot by Negroes who were riding in a motor car at Washington, the Federal capital. A white man cut a Negro man’s throat in a tram car (trolley) at Houston, Texas. A Negro was shot dead in New York City.

Other Negroes were killed in Cincinnati, Omaha, Little Rock and other cities.

London Daily Express



Less than a handful of fights, as little as two perhaps, or three, ever generated as much racial and religious rancor, before and after the actual shootout, as Jack Johnson’s Independence Day public mugging of beloved and balding old Jim Jeffries. Johnson’s previous fight with Tommy Burns, in which he won the heavyweight championship, was merely a warm?up, fistic foreplay so to speak, to the widespread hysteria that now engulfed the new and old champions. Their 1910 showdown was for the racial and religious jackpot – the Great White Hope versus the Big Black Menace; a matching of Protestant virtue against uncivilized savagery; racist but God-fearing white America versus darkest Africa. In one corner stood Jeffries, security officer for the brave old world of the WASP; in the other there was Johnson, the feared and hated representative of the unwashed and unwanted schismatic Catholics, heretic Jews and heathen Blacks.

According to Randy Roberts in his book Papa Jack, a good 14 months before that pair would fight, the *Chicago Tribune carried a photo of a tiny blond girl, cuddly and curly, pointing at a towering Jeffries: the photo’s caption begged: "Please, Mr. Jeffries, are you going to fight Mr. Johnson?" Her clarion call was crystalline: humanity needed, indeed demanded, the return of Jeffries, the retired and undefeated former champion, to slay the Dark Dragon. But Jeffries, porcine and in poor condition after six years of nonviolence and high living, did not immediately come charging out of the hay barn to pick up the white man's heavy impost.

Hardly had Johnson taken the title from Tommy Burns, on Dec. 26, 1908, before the search began for a Great White Hope. The scathing pen of Jack London, a devout racist, gave the campaign momentum; his passionate rhetoric, churned out at 10 cents a word, fertilized freshly sown racial hysteria.

One of America's leading reporters and novelists, London had been sent to Australia by the New York Herald to cover the Johnson-Burns championship fight. What London witnessed disgusted him: a Black man easily defeating a white man for the greatest prize in sports. "This was no fight," London wrote in his anguish. "No Armenian massacre could compare to the hopeless slaughter that took place in Sydney Stadium. The fight, if it could be called a fight, was like that between a pygmy and a colossus."

(There is no evidence that London ever ran his massacre theory past any Armenians. It is sad that a man with so much talent and obvious intellect could make such an out-of-whack statement. From the 16th century through the Great War, much of the world’s oldest civilization was controlled by the most brutal of its long series of invaders, the Ottoman Turks. In response to nationalistic stirrings within the country in 1894 and 1896, the Turks slaughtered thousands. The most ghastly of massacres took place in April of 1915 when the Turks deported the Armenian population to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamian, where between 600,000 and 1.5 million of them were murdered or died of starvation. Not one of them was able to get up and go home to life in Canada from a fight they cheerfully entered and had been paid $30,000 for the doing.)

Johnson, playing the lead role of the colossus, could have ended the one-sided battle anytime following the third round. Instead, with an anger fueled by a fusillade of racist remarks made by the champion, he had toyed with Burns, cast as the pygmy, taunting him, hurting him, bloodying him, before stopping him in the 14th round. London's account of the fight covered more than two pages of The Herald, but it was his last paragraph, seven short but searing sentences, that stirred the nation to an emotional frenzy.

Wrote the man who penned Call of the Wild: "One thing now remains. Jim Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove the golden smile from Jack Johnson's face. Jeffries, it's up to you! Jeffries, it's up to you! Remember the Maine! Remember the Alamo! God Bless White America!"

When Jeffries first became aware of London's battle cry, during the winter of 1908, he was at home on his alfalfa farm near Burbank, Calif. In the collective mind of his adoring white public, he was still Big Jim, a young and agile 20-something; 210 pounds of solid mass; the strongest man in the world; undefeated and seemingly unbeatable; and, to most, still the heavyweight champion of the world. In reality, he was an old 35; as creaky as an old planked floor; had been retired for 61 months, a lifetime for a professional heavyweight; and had become obese, 305 pounds of well?off and well-fed country farmer, hog fat, happy and losing his hair.

A young newspaper reporter stopped by the farm and said: "What do you think of Jack London's idea?"

"What idea is that?" said Jeffries, obviously puzzled.

The newspaperman was shocked that the former champion had not heard the rallying cry sweeping the country. Jeffries listened quietly as it was explained to him.

Then he grunted and said: "I'm retired."

"But, Jeffries, it's up to you."

“Uh, huh.”

Gaining momentum, the crusaderic call to arms swept the country. Ministers used it in their sermons. It became the hot topic in the halls of Congress. Barbers and bartenders confided to their customers: "Big Jim will kill that uppity Negro." Across the pond in England, a Member of Parliament commented: "It is the duty of Mr. Jeffries to satisfy the enormous curiosity of the public which supports him so magnificently in this noble cause."

Compared to the other heavyweights of his era, Jeffries had been a Goliath among gnomes, 6"2" and a hard 210 pounds. Rex Lardner called him "a muscular giant with arms like oak trees, a body rippling with sinew, a forest of hair on his chest, and legs like the pillars of the Temple of Zeus." OK, so old Rex got carried away at times. Another writer, Lewis Burton, said Jeffries had earned the "awe of his generation." He was Jack Dempsey's first idol; later, Dempsey would adopt the Jeffries crouch. Jeffries was always at least 14 pounds heavier than any challenger and he twice crushed the likes of Bob Fitzsimmons, Gentleman Jim Corbett, and his archest of enemies, Sailor Tom Sharkey. When he stepped away from the ring at the age of 29, he had never lost a fight while amassing a fortune. He quit because he felt that there was no one who stood a chance against him; he was tired, he confided to friends, of beating up smaller men. After he had knocked out Corbett in 1900, Corbett said, "Nobody can ever hurt him, not even with an axe." And Corbett had chopped up Jeffries for the first 20 rounds,

The only thing Jeffries feared was age, that the slowing of his reflexes that would allow a lesser but younger man to wear him down. He did not fear a beating so much as he feared defeat by erosion, so early in 1905 he decided that before he would permit that to happen, he would be back on his California alfalfa farm or standing as the publican in his Los Angeles saloon, even if it meant he had to buy a free drink every once in awhile. (As Larry Holmes helped Eddie Schuyler and me to discover: heavyweight champions are never quick to pick up a bar tab). That decided, he announced that he had fought his last fight and, as it was the fashion in those times, he would organize and referee a tournament to find his successor; the heavyweight championship was like a king's crown, passed by royal selection from one monarch to the next.


After packing it in, Jeffries refereed a contest between Jack Root, a mediocre heavyweight from Chicago, and Marvin Hart, another mediocre heavyweight, from Fern Creek, Kentucky, which is just a hoot and a holler from Hollow Creek. Jeffries declared Root had won by knockout and was, by his declaration, the new champion. Later, Jeffries claimed he had not declared Root anything but the winner, but no one believed him. Seven months after winning the title, Root lost to Burns, the smallest man ever to win the heavyweight title. The 5'7" Canadian, who started life as Noah Brusso, weighed just 168 pounds. Burns may have been small, but he certainly was not dumb. While the biggest purses were in the United States, the Canadian took the championship on a world tour, where he thought he was safe from his foremost challengers, four large and powerful Black fighters led by Johnson, and included Sam Langford, Sam McVey and Joe Jeanette.

(Before winning the title, Johnson fought Langford, the Boston Tar Baby, once; McVey 15 times; and Jeannette 14 times. Up to the time of World War I, to make a relative decent living, Blacks had to fight Blacks. When they were given a fight against a white, they were usually given the outcome before they were given the contract. After he won the title, Johnson fought none of them, even though Langford was his most persistent challenger, Black or white. While having a Black as champion was considered bad enough, the any idea of two Blacks fighting for the title was unthinkable. Normally, a rebellious character that loved tweaking the noses of the white establishment, Johnson went along. An astute businessman, he knew his share of the purse from all?Black title fight would not pay training expenses.)

After taking the title abroad, Burns, a clever boxer as well as a powerful puncher for his size, defeated the champions of England, Ireland and Australia, which gave him universal acceptance as champion. Undeterred by 3,440 miles of ocean, Johnson followed him to England, where the National Sporting Club tried to match the pair. But when Burns demanded the unheard of guarantee of 6,000 pounds ($30,000), the NSC, which had offered him half that amount, told him to whiz off. Burns shrugged and set sail for Australia.

Johnson wanted to continue his pursuit, but did not have the necessary funds. The NSC agreed to cover his expenses to Australia on the condition that should he defeat Burns, he would return to London and make first defense against Langford. “Done,” said Johnson, who had no intention of fighting Langford ever again, in London or any other city.

Fortunately for Johnson, in Sydney, promoter Hugh D. McIntosh had great faith in the drawing power of a Burns-Johnson fight. He paid the champion Burns the 6,000 pounds he had demanded from the National Sport Club in London, and gave the challenger Johnson 1,500 pounds ($7,500). In a large but roofless arena, they fought on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, 1908. Burns was knocked down in the first 20 seconds, went down again before the first round was over. Towering over the champion, who had insulted him at every turn before the fight, Johnson taunted Burns, hit him at will, punished him savagely, and reduced the smaller man to a bloody punching bag. Not until the 14th round did Johnson really try to put away the courageous but outgunned Canadian. Almost out on his feet, Burns managed a snarl as Johnson, his smile parked for the moment, approached for the kill. But the American was too late; the ringside doctor had spoken to the police superintendent, who jumped up and ordered the referee to stop the fight.

"This was no fight," a greatly enraged London wrote as he began the first cry for a White Hope to stand up and recapture the heavyweight championship for the Caucasian race. London was inflamed not only by a Black man winning the most prestigious prize in sport, but because it was obvious to the most innocent of spectators that from the third round on Johnson had deliberately prolonged the beating he was laying on Burns. "What I saw here today," London penned, "cannot be listed as sport." That’s when the American author had his first thought of Jim Jeffries. His pen flew across the paper.

Alerted to London's desperate plea by the young California reporter, the reluctant Jeffries began to read the sports pages more closely, the first bricks in the rebuilding of his mind into believing that his body could fight again. Upon his return to America, Johnson appeared in a string of six-round "no?decision" bouts, exercises that required little or no training. All Johnson had to do was make sure he was not knocked out, an outcome offering small chance.


Johnson never kept his commitment to National Sporting Club, although he did pay back the money the club had advanced him; nor did he ever defend the title against Langford. After winning the title, he fought five contests, one in Canada, four in the United States: two were listed as exhibitions and three as non?decision bouts, two sixes and one 10. He did just enough to keep from getting knocked out, which angered the public even more. He was in a no?win situation: if he merely scored enough points to win, he was lazy; if he battered his man and knocked him out, he was an African brute. He parried the national anger with a gold?toothed impudent smile, which only served to increase the frenzy to find a White Hope

Johnson's sixth defense was made on Oct. 16, 1909 in Colma, California against Stanley Ketchel, the middleweight champion with the reputation of a big punch, which everybody hoped gave him a chance.

A notorious playboy and ladies man, Ketchel was shorter than Johnson, 5’ 9”, but for their fight had beefed up to 171¼ pounds. Small but powerful, they nicknamed him the "Michigan Assassin," and most of white Americans and a small part of Black America was hoping his big right-handed punch would erase Johnson's irksome golden grin.

The whole thing was designed as a double-cross from the beginning. Willus Britt, Ketchel's manager, said they would fight for 25 rounds, then suggested privately to Johnson that he carry the smaller man to the finish in order to provide a full?length movie that would provided an additional source of income. The purse was $40,000, sixty per cent to Johnson, the rest to Ketchel. Johnson never said no to any plan that would put additional dollars in his pocket.

The champion, who had been getting away with doing as little work as possible in his first five fights, quickly agreed. He figured he did not have to train, saving both money and effort. Looking to double-cross the champion, Ketchel trained hard. At 23, the middleweight champion was in his prime, eight years younger than Johnson. He was used to long distance fights; he had gone 32 rounds to win his title two years prior. He and Britt hoped to catch Johnson badly out of condition. As a bonus, manager and fight shared a vision of restoring the title to the white race. By becoming a national hero, Ketchel had explicit visions of having to beat off adoring females with an axe handle. Things went well for the movie until the 12th round. Ketchel chased the big man, a brilliant defensive fighter, who parried his wild punches with ease. Then in the 46th minute of the fight, a Ketchel punch grazed Johnson's jaw. "Now, Stanley," Britt shouted. The cry caught Johnson's attention, and he turned to see who had yelled. Zap! A second Ketchel punch caught him just behind his left ear; a shade lower and he might have been knocked out. As it was, it put him on his back. The crowd went wild. Britt screamed. Ketchel grinned. Johnson cursed. As the champion arose from the floor, he was enraged by Ketchel’s treachery. Thinking his opponent was badly hurt, Ketchel moved in, his famous right hand cocked, ready for the kill. As the smaller man drew near, Johnson caught him with a savage right uppercut under the chin, lifted him from his feet, shattering his teeth, and sent him crashing onto his back. The fallen White Hope never moved as the referee counted him out. He had been hit so hard his front teeth had been broken off at the gums.

Later in his dressing room, Johnson removed two teeth that had been embedded in his glove.

Several witnesses said they had timed the knockout, and that ten minutes passed before Ketchel opened his eyes.Not to be outdone, the promoter, Sunny Jim Collroth, who occasionally brushed shoulders with the truth, claimed it was closer to an hour. A priest was called up from the anxious crowd to administer the last rites, which proved unnecessary when Ketchel opened one eye and asked who hit him. Next to the prone middleweight lay Britt, who had suffered a heart attack. Two weeks later, while walking down the street, Ketchel’s manager dropped dead.

Undaunted, a few hours following the fight, the irrepressible Ketchel took $700 off Johnson shooting craps.

(On Oct. 15, 1910, one Walter A. Dipley shot Ketchel to death with a rifle at Dickerson’s Farm, when Dipley found him with Goldie Smith, Dipley's common?law wife, who was cooking the half-dressed middleweight champion his breakfast. "I’m tired. Take me home to mother,” were Ketchel's last words. Stansilaus Kiecal from Grand Rapids, Michigan was 24 years old.)

Publicly, Johnson continued to flash his gold plated grin, causing white Americans to foam at the mouth. They despised him because he was Black; they hated him even more because he wallowed in their hatred. A growing number of Blacks were not happy with him, either. One Sunday morning, a Black Chicago minister reportedly told his flock: "We detest him because of his brazen, irresponsible affairs with white women."


Told what the minister had said, Johnson grinned and replied: "The man is jealous."

"When Johnson smiles," said Bob Armstrong, one of the champion's sparring partners, "people just get madder at him. And he likes that. He doesn't have to say anything; all he has to do is smile." Later, Armstrong admitted he was not sure if Johnson was smiling to anger the public or because he was proud of the gold caps on his front teeth. No matter the reason, the result was the same.

(In one of his lengthy essays about the Johnson-Jeffries fight for the New York Herald, London used the words smile, smiled or smiling 30 times. Even the newspaper joined the act; the editors entitled London’s piece The Golden Smile.)

Everything Johnson did was front-page news now, the uglier the reports, the greater the play. Photographers and writers hounded him. He once complained to Tad Dorgan, a prominent San Francisco boxing writer: "It's a good thing there is a lock on the door to my bathroom." Still, as he spent money more than he took in, he began to treat the clamor for a Jeffries fight more seriously. From those first six "fights," Johnson made only $26,638, while during the same year, 1909, he ran up bills of more than $80,000. He was low on funds; like the white race, he needed Jeffries.

Johnson had a fondness for blonds. After returning from Australia, he seldom traveled with less than two ladies of the evening from the Everleigh Club on 2131-33 South Dearborn Street in Chicago. A lavishly appointed four?story mansion, The Everleigh Club was celebrated as the most elaborate and expensive all-white brothel in the world, catering only to men of wealth and celebrities with more fame than fortune, and run by Minna and Ada Everleigh, sisters who claimed to be renegades from an aristocratic European family. Music was provided by a $15,000 golden piano, steaks were served on $100 plates of gold, and each of the 44 seductively decorated rooms had it own cascading perfumed fountain. A man of huge appetites, Jackson had his way with all the working girls, but his early favorite was Belle Schreiber, the saucy daughter of a Milwaukee policeman, whose testimony in his Mann Act trial years later would win him a year and a day as a revolving guest (actually 11 months, in Leavenworth, Geneva and Joliet) of the Federal government. Another who caught his attention was Hattie McClay (sometimes referred to incorrectly as McLay), tall, reedy and sexually acrobatic; her real name was Anna Peterson. Then there was Lillian St. Clair, a bouncy little bottle blonde who couldn’t win a debate with a rock. They traveled in style, at times in first class by rail, and other times in one of Johnson's big, fast automobiles – Mercedes Benz, Daimlers, Thompson Fliers, Stutz Bearcats – which he loved and one of which would eventually kill him. His favorite was a red Thompson Flyer. At times, when Johnson did not feel like driving, usually after a series of speeding tickets, the champion and his female entourage were chauffeured by Mervin Jacobowski, a white man, which did little to abate the white community’s acid reflux.

With the money, the fame, the 14-karate smile, and a sculpted iron body that would have inspired Michelangelo, white women flocked after him. After the Ketchel fight, Johnson met Etta Terry Duryea, a sporting lady, but, according to most reports, technically not a lady of the evening. Born in Hempstead, N.Y. and raised in a fashionable section of Brooklyn, Etta had married Charles C. Duryea, an Eastern horseracing patron. While the marriage was of short duration, Etta still attended the races; she and Johnson met at a Coney Island race track. Soon they were living together and she took the name "Mrs. Johnson," although they were not officially married until later, on Jan. 18, 1911.

In his 1927 inventive autobiography, Mes Combats, Johnson claimed he had married Mary Austin, a black girl from his neighborhood in Galveston in 1898, although a 1900 census report shows him living at home with his 4’8” mother, Tiny, and his 5’ 3” father and eight siblings. There is no mention of any wife. Still, Johnson said it was a happy marriage and when he moved to California in 1901, he took “Mrs. Jack Johnson” with him; when he returned a year later, he restored his status as a bachelor.

From this point, you may need a scorecard to keep track of the female players.

Hitting out of the No. 2 spot was Clara Kerr, a Black prostitute he met in North Philadelphia in 1903. After a few months, she took the name of Mrs. Jack Johnson, and they lived happily until she ran off with an old friend of Johnson’s, a horse trainer named William Bryant, and most of the fighter’s money, clothing and jewelry. They reconciled briefly after he had her arrested, but she left him again when he woke up one morning with empty pockets and few prospects for a fight, this time for good. In his autobiography, Johnson said it was the treachery of Austin and Kerr that drove him into the arms of white women. Or, as his anonymous ghost writer put it: “…the heartaches which Mary Austin and Clara Kerr caused me led me to forswear colored women and to determine that my lot henceforth would be cast only with white women.” Like all autobiographies, especially those of athletes and politicians, Johnson’s did not write of how he had lived, but how he wanted people to believe he lived. Actually, he dallied with both white and Black females in legendary numbers, but after Kerr only white women were ever permitted to assume the trappings of Mrs. Jack Johnson, wedded or not.

The first earliest Caucasian of record was Alma “Lola” Toy, a 20-year-old nightclub singer he met in Sydney during a three-month tour in Australia in early 1907. The only other note of record about Alma was that after Johnson left for America, she was awarded a 500 pound libel judgment from the Sunday Times Newspaper Company for an article in a sister publication The Referee. It was upon his return that Johnson began his long-distance trips accompanied by Etta, Belle, Hattie, Lillian, et al, and Lucille Cameron-Falconet, all of them awarded the title of Mrs. Jack Johnson at one time or another, some of them with the blessing of the court and God.

Belle, who went to Chicago to become a secretary, but found work at the Everleigh Club much more lucrative ($750 to $1,200 a week), was Johnson’s first favorite of Johnson’s multiple traveling companions, but she was sent to the bullpen with the arrival of Etta. Later, Johnson would send Belle into exile after she began to rebel after Etta’s death and Lucille’s elevation to leading lady status.

The first to earn her married name the old fashion way was Etta, the tall and willowy quiet one who had about her an incessant sadness. Hers was a noteworthy beauty; reticent and, at times, chilling. In public, she rarely smiled, and her full lips seemed naturally cast in an unhappy moue, but the real key to her inner soul was her haunting blue eyes, which registered a permanent and undisguised dysphoria. After a few years with Johnson, Etta committed suicide, most likely because her husband refused to give up his other playmates, or, perhaps, because she was simply unhinged. On more than one trip, Etta and Belle and Hattie traveled with Johnson. The three women stayed in three separate hotels, a logistical nightmare, which, of all the true working ladies, only the fiery Belle seemed to mind. Etta was never happy with that passion-by-appointment arrangement, but after several clouts to the head, she learned to mask her displeasure.

She ended her melancholy with a .38 pistol in 1912. Three months later, Johnson began going with Cameron-Falconet, who, by some accounts was an 18-year-old prostitute from Milwaukee, or, as Al Stump wrote in his The Rowdy Reign of The Black Avenger, she was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Maryland ‘with virgin and martyr written all over her.’ In any case, strumpet or scholar, Johnson hired her as his stenographer. Enraged that her courtesan/chaste/hooker/student/daughter was going out with a Black, Cameron’s mother filed a kidnapping charge against Jackson. “He has hypnotic powers,” said mom, “and has used them on my little girl. I’d rather see my daughter spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum than see her the plaything of a nigger.” Johnson was arrested for violation of the Mann Act, transporting a female across a state line for unsavory pursuits, but the case fell out when Lillian looked at her bigoted mother and at her unbiased lover, and decided it was a no-brainer; she refused to testify. No long afterward, Jack and Lucy were joined in wedded bliss.

(Two years later, the government went to Plan B, Belle Schreiber, who they found working in a Washington, D.C. brothel. She arrived in court with a great swishing of skirts and an icy glare for Mrs. Lucille Johnson, primly seated front row center. Despite the champion’s continued kindness after tossing her out, Belle was still smoldering over losing her place in the Johnson pecking order. Down on her luck in Pittsburgh, the aging Belle had wired Johnson asking for money. He wired her $200. When she showed up in Chicago, she spent several nights with Johnson showering him with gratitude. “Transported across a state line for sex,” said the government’s lead attorney, using Johnson’s generosity and Bell’s gratitude against the champion. “Guilty,” said the all-white jury. “A $1,000 fine and one year and a day in Joliet,” said the Judge George Carpenter. “If I was white, would you do this?” said Johnson, who then grabbed Lucy and her jewelry; their passports; $70,000 in cash; 20 trunk loads of clothes and ring and theatrical gear; his Mercedes runabout, and took off on a protracted tour of Europe and Latin America.)

as jeffries did not want to fight but when people in church start praying for your comeback- well it speaks for itself.

Of all the sports events that took place in the
United States before World War I, the Johnson-
Jeffries bout drew the most attention worldwide.
Take a look at the newspapers of the time and
you will find the coverage of the bout was
on a massive scale. Of course, the World Series
was a tremendous boon to pro baseball because
of the huge amount of ink devoted to it, but
baseball wasn't popular worldwide.

- Chuck Johnston

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
Johnson–Jeffries (Part 2): Jeff Answers Call of the Wild
by Pat Putnam from Sweet Science

After his victory over Ketchel, Johnson had become a great favorite of vaudeville agents. Touring in early 1910, he was guaranteed $1,500 a week, a headliner’s salary. Asked what he should do, Barney Gerard of the Atlantic Carnival show told him to just be himself; that meant that he was supposed to act the way the white folks expected him to act: dance, shadowbox, sing a bit, and tell amusing stories, but never, never be seen near any of the white women in the show. Money they gave him, respect no. According to Randy Roberts, Frank Calder, a stage manager, recalled Johnson was forced to change clothes in the bitterly cold cellar of the Cleveland Star Theatre and the Indianapolis Empire Theatre. He rebelled in Terre Haute, arguing that it was too cold to take the stage at the Fairland Theatre in only boxing tights. When management turned down his request, Johnson stormed out of town.

Gerard finally fired him, mostly it was believed, to get out of paying the champion $2,500 in back salary. When Johnson threatened the agent’s life and limbs, Gerard reached for his checkbook. Returning to New York, Johnson became embroiled in an argument with another Black, Norman Pinder, whereupon – Pinder later claimed – Johnson knocked him down, kicked him in the ribs, threw a table and chair on him, and then, in afterthought, pulled out a pistol. Talk about overkill. When Johnson was arrested, he told the police he only wished he had hit Pinder harder. Locked up for four hours, Johnson was released on $5,000 bail when Pinder and two witnesses failed to show in court. Surfacing later, Pinder sued Johnson for $20,000.

All of this, of course, made good copy, and furthered fueled the public's lust to see him soundly beaten.

Meanwhile, relaxing back among the fields of alfalfa, Jeffries read the sports pages, and thought about London's call of the wild. He had grown fat, 302 pounds of it, and was growing fatter, but now, rather than his usual lumbering gait, he began to walk at a faster clip. As he watched his diet, he found himself going more and more out to the barn where he kept an ancient scale used for weighing hay. He cut his consumption of bread and potatoes by a third, while increasing his intake of buttermilk and vegetables, especially beets, which he favored, boiled or pickled. While sitting on his porch at night, he continually clenched and opened his massive fists. Secretly, he had a cobbler fashion him a pair of shoes made with weighted soles in the belief that they strengthen his massive legs.

As Bob Lucas wrote in Black Gladiator: “…Jeffries was as much a victim of racial prejudice as Jack was to become. Both men were caught up in primitive passions that swept them along like characters in a Greek tragedy.”

By February of 1909, the retired champion had just about convinced himself he could fight Johnson and win. He kept his decision a secret. He appointed Sam Berger, a San Francisco hatter and sportsman, as his manager. "Sam," he ordered, "make the best deal you can."

Still, Jeffries harbored doubts about his 35?year?old body. After sailing to Europe, he went to Carlsbad in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia), where the mineral baths were "guaranteed to do wonders for man, woman or child." In Carlsbad, were doctors specializing in weight reduction and "making the old feel young," Jeffries took the baths religiously, while submitting to exhaustive medical exams. He was told: "Mr. Jeffries, your body is such it can withstand the strain of losing 75 pounds and still retain its strength and resilience. We feel, however, that the time required (for that) will be not less than one year."

Jeffries bathed in the mineral waters for three months, losing 22 pounds. Bored and body wrinkled, he elected to return home, where he could start serious training. By now, his secret was out. Delighted, Johnson sent him a telegram congratulating him for his bravery and assured him he would do all he could to see the match made. Jeffries made no reply.

Seven months before the fight, a St. Louis boxing writer asked Jeffries if he would talk to Johnson before the fight. "If that fellow comes to see me," said Jeffries, his face a dark cloud, "he will get a cleaning for which he might make a lot of money later on. I don't want to see him. I don't want him sneaking any advertising at my expense. I said I will fight him and that goes, and it won't take me more than five months to get into trim."

There was an unsubstantiated story that Jeffries, a celebrated barroom brawler, and Johnson had met in a saloon while Jeffries was still champion, and that Jeffries had challenged Johnson to a fistfight on the spot. Reportedly Johnson backed down, not for any lack of courage, but because he refused to fight unless he was paid. Neither fighter ever denied or affirmed the story.

All Johnson and Jeffries needed now was a place to fight and a man to promote it. They left it to their business managers to work out the details. The San Francisco hatter Berger negotiated for Jeffries; Johnson's negotiators were George Little and Sig Hart. They called for promoters to submit bids. The bids were scheduled to be opened at the Hotel Albany in New York, but because boxing was illegal in New York, the site was shifted to a German?styled inn, Meyer's Hotel, across the Hudson River in Hoboken, N.J. William Travers Jerome, the NYC district attorney, hastened the parties flight by sending word that he had ordered the police to breakup any boxing meeting. In New York, not only was boxing illegal, but so was even planning to promote a fight in another state.

When the bids were unsealed, Tex Rickard, backed by Minnesota millionaire Thomas F. Cole, who owned gold and silver mines in the United States and Alaska, won with a bid guaranteeing the fighters $101,000 plus two thirds of the movie rights. In addition, he promised each a $10,000 cash bonus when they signed the contract. Of the $101,000, the first offer was for the winner to get 75 per cent; the loser 25 per cent; that was later changed to 60?40. A rumor was circulated that Richard had paid an additional $12,000 to settle one of Jeffries's gambling debts.

Edward R. Moss, sports editor of the *New York Evening Sun won, he would earn $667,750 and Johnson would make $358,250. If Johnson won, which would knock down the worth of the fight films, Moss guessed that Johnson would then make $360,750 and Jeffries $158,000. "A new era is at hand in pugilism," Moss wrote. "These horny?fisted survivals of the Stone Age are...the real moneymakers. Primitive Nature seems to reward her followers handsomely, despite civilization's boasted triumphs."

Moss's estimates with Johnson winning were fairly close. The final live gate in Reno (15,766 folks, mostly white) paid $270,755. Together with their share of that and the movie rights, Jeffries took home $192,066; Johnson earned $145,600.

If ever a man was put on earth to promote this fight, it was Tex Rickard, born, according to legend, in a Missouri farm house next door to Jesse James' mother, was orphaned at ten, and labored as a cowboy, town marshal, gold miner, hustler, oil field worker, saloon keeper, and gambler. "Next to P.T. Barnum," wrote Damon Runyon, "Tex Rickard was the greatest showman who ever lived." Added Paul Gallico: "He knew that next to women, nothing is as stimulating or interesting to men as money, and he used its sparkle as bait...Each of his shows had the aura of gold about it, and the huge guarantees he offered his performers, the prices of the tickets, and the magnitude of it all produced a feeling of excitement that made his productions practically irresistible."

Bob Edgren of the *New York Evening World a cowboy, dark?tanned from exposure to the sun and wind, and had a sharp eye, thin lips, straight?nosed countenance, and was as alert as an eagle,"

When asked if he would referee the fight, Rickard, who had never refereed a fight, replied: "If I am alive on July 4th, I will be the referee. You can state that on good authority."

No advertising brain trust was needed to market this fight, and Rickard, promotional genius that he was, had no qualms about exploiting the race issue. Jeffries became "The Hope of the White Race"; Johnson the "Negroes' Deliverer." It was shameless exploitation of an explosive situation. When the fight site was first announced as San Francisco, an editorialist for The Current Literature palpitating world. England and France, China and Japan, Australia and Hawaii, are even now starting their delegations toward the Golden Gate." In a cartoon in the New York Globe entitled "Relative News Values," Jeffries and "Masta Johnson" loomed large over the figures of Teddy Roosevelt and William H. Taft, while completely dwarfing men such as Charles Evans Hughes, House Speaker Cannon, and William Jennings Bryant. Every public move Johnson and Jeffries made was photographed and recorded, sometimes accurately. Politically, it may have been the most important athletic event in American history.

One of the meaningful side issues was over the selection of the referee. (Johnson, Jeffries and Rickard had already decided that Rickard would be the third man in the ring, but they kept that a secret for the time being). Someone suggested that H.G. Wells, the British novelist and historian, would make an excellent choice, but that idea was quickly abandoned. Then Irving Jefferson Lewis, managing editor of the *New York Morning Telegraph, wired Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, suggesting he be the third man. Doyle was an astute boxing fan and had written many popular tales of the ring. Happy to generate publicity anyway he could get it, Richard said he was all for Doyle. A sensible man, Holmes’ creator would have none of it; he telegraphed his regrets. In his memoirs, Doyle wrote: "I was much inclined to accept this honorable invitation, though my friends pictured me as winding up with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other. However, the distance and my engagements presented a final bar." The ever-enterprising Richard even went so for as to ask President Taft to referee the fight.

Publicity for the fight was hardly underway when Johnson was arrested for speeding (one ticket of the many he collected) at 12th St. and Michigan Ave. in Chicago. Using the outlandish "darky" language reporters made-up for Johnson, The Inter?Ocean champion saying: "Stand back, Mr. White Offisah, and let dem colored peoples hab a look at me." Johnson, in the soft accents of his Houston, Texas birthplace, spoke the standard language of a grade school?educated American, seasoned with patois of the theater, the prison, and the sports world. The linguistic libel created by the media seemed to wash over him.

Gentleman Jim Corbett, the ex?champion, handled the psychological warfare and trained Jeffries. "Take it from me," the San Francisco Irishman was quick to tell newspapermen, "the Black boy has a yellow streak, and Jeffries will bring it out of him when he gets him into the ring." Corbett, of course, did not have to fight Johnson.

In 1982, Jeffries had made $60 a week as Corbett's sparring partner. Corbett was in training for his fight with Bob Fitzsimmons, who would knock him out with his famous solar?plexus punch. After that title fight, Jeffries said he could have beaten them both. He never fought Corbett; but he knocked out Fitzsimmons twice: once in the 11th round to win the title June 9, 1899; again in eight rounds, July 25, 1902, in his second title defense.

The fight dispatches from the two training camps had started out on the sports pages, but they were soon shifted to the front section, where even the folks who had no early interest in the fight were overwhelmed by a steady assault of narrow column after narrow column on the fight, all carried under headlines about "the valiant White Man" and the "sullen Black." Racial rivalry was the thread of every story, and anyone even marginally literate was as defenseless against the flood of words as a movie fan in a tightly packed theater exposed to an unsought but raging cold virus.

A few educated Blacks did what they could to deflate the idea that Rickard's show symbolized a struggle of race against race. The Rev. Reverdy C. Ransom of the Bethel African Methodist Church in New York City said: "No respectable colored minister in the United States is interested in the pugilistic contest between Johnson and Jeffries, from the standpoint of race. We do not think Jack Johnson thinks or has ever thought of holding the championship for the Black race. Johnson is not trying to win the Negro championship, but to hold and defend his title against all comers, regardless of race or color."

(Actually, Johnson won the world “colored” championship with a 20-round decision over Denver Ed Martin in February of 1903, and successfully defended it 17 times.)

In a fashion, Rev. Ransom was correct. It was not his rivals’ color that kept Johnson from fighting a Langford or Jeannette. Taking on either of that dangerous pair would have been much more of a risk than fighting an old Jeffries – but the white fighter looked huge and dangerous, and for all the white public's conscious or subconscious fears of Johnson, Jeffries, himself a giant, appeared to be the prayed?for giant?killer they all sought. It was all about money; Johnson wanted Jeffries as much for his color as much as Jeffries wanted him for the same reason.

Not all Blacks in the U.S. took Ransom's position; many took great satisfaction in the idea of a symbolic champion, just as almost all whites found satisfaction in the same idea but from the opposing view. The Chicago Defender newspaper founded by and for Blacks, and it quickly adopted the theme of racial rivalry implicit in the match between Jeffries and Johnson. The Defender's publisher, Robert Sengstacke Abbott, lived in a mansion, maintained a box at the opera, carried a gold?headed cane, and wore a silk hat, long?tailed coat, striped trousers, and spats. Like his martinis, he believed in keeping his readers well stirred.

Abbott's gift for sensationalism rivaled that of William Randolph Hearst. A few weeks before the fight, the Defender, ran a cartoon of Johnson shaking hands with Jeffries in a ring; the front rows were occupied by men exhibiting a sign that read: "JIM CROW DELEGATES." The referee had the face of Satan, was bearded and dressed like Uncle Sam, and was labeled "Public Sentiment." The referee was saying to Jeffries: "We're with you this time – go ahead." Standing beside Jeffries were three menacing figures labeled "Race Hatred," "Prejudice," and "Negro Persecution." Above the cartoon was the legend: "HE WILL HAVE TO BEAT THEM ALL" and below: "The future welfare of his people forms a part of the stake."

The Defender also carried an article pointing out, because of Johnson's preference for white blonde woman, and the publicity over his affair with Etta, that suddenly there were, in the current sessions of legislatures in Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, New Jersey, Michigan and New York what a great race of people we would be." The Defender was ready to defend Johnson no matter what: for example, when Johnson's dog bit a man, who then sued the champion, the paper labeled it racial persecution.

Another storm broke in California, where Rickard by now was erecting an arena in San Francisco. The reformers rose up to do battle. The moment the fight was announced, they began a campaign to get it stopped. They sent letters and telegrams, held public meetings, were happy to grant private interviews. Gov. James C. Gillett, who dreamed of one day going to Washington, began to feel the heat. Hoping to head off a disaster, he said that so far as he knew it was merely a "sparring contest" and he could find nothing in the state law to forbid it.

Then up to bat stepped one George Rockwell of Cincinnati, claiming he represented a "national organization of businessmen and church people to prevent this outrage." Rockwell ordered one million postcards with Gillett's address and the message: "STOP THE FIGHT. THIS IS THE 20TH CENTURY." Rockwell's attack was as much against professional boxing as it was the color of Johnson's skin.

From old clippings: American reformers wanted the match to be held outside of the United States. After the fight was banned in San Francisco, the zealots turned their collective zeal on Reno and Nevada's Gov. Dickerson. On Sunday, June 26, Rev. L. H. Burwell, the pastor of Reno's Methodist church, delivered a sermon he called "Reno's Disgrace." In Cincinnati, Methodist ministers passed a resolution calling on Dickerson to follow Gillett's exemplary example. The pressure was as intense as it was useless. Dickerson’s tent was anchored into bedrock. Most God-fearing Americans wrote off Reno as a national disgrace. Wrote one columnist for the *Independent magazine: "Reno reproaches the whole country. But we tell Nevada that this is its last time thus to serve the devil...Just as universal condemnation and disgust compelled Mormonism to get a new revelation on Polygamy, so will Nevada be plagued into decency." In Chicago, a Baptist minister named M. P. Boynton became a footnote in boxing history when he suggested: “There should be some way by which our nation could recall the charter of a state that has become a desert and moral menace. Nevada has not right to remain a part of our nation.”

Two powerful forces were at work. First, there was the battle perceived as a struggle for racial supremacy, an emotional newspaper-selling fire storm that brought Black and white journalists quickly into the fray. Jackson Stovall of the Defender wrote: "On the arid plains of the Sage Brush State, the white man and the Negro will settle the mooted question of supremacy." On the other side, Max Balthazar, a white writer for the *Omaha Daily News asked whether "the huge white man, the California grizzly, could beat down the wonderful Black and restore to the Caucasians the crown of elemental greatness as measured by strength of brow, power of heart and lung, and withal, that cunning or keenness that denotes mental as well as physical superiority."

Roberts suggested that white racist reformers wanted part of the answer to Balthazar's question. Just to permit the fight to take place was to admit a sort of equality; it suggested that Blacks had an equal chance to excel in at least one arena of American life. Realizing this, the Black journalist A.G.F. Sims took on the white reformers: "Just because a Negro has an equal chance, that in itself, in their opinion, is enough to constitute a national disgrace." Sims added that he hoped Johnson would win “to make the national disgrace even sweeter.”

The white reformist group looked upon the fight as a no?win situation. Win or lose, if the fight took place Johnson would have achieved a symbolic victory for his race. And if Johnson won, the whites were sure there would be a race war. "If the Black man wins," trumpeted a New York Times misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors." In the South, whites feared a Johnson victory would increase the possibility of physical contact between proud young Blacks and willing white women.

Whites were not alone in predicting violence. Conservative Blacks feared the same. As early as March of 1909 Emmett Jay Scott, Booker T. Washington's personal secretary, wrote J. Frank Wheaton, a successful Black New York attorney, about the need for Johnson to be more humble in public. Scott, and by extension, the political suits in Washington, wanted Johnson to shut up, or, as he put it, to "refrain from anything resembling boastfulness." It was feared that Johnson challenged an order they wished to placate and that his emancipated life style would cause a violent white reaction. E.L. Blackshear, principal of the Black State Normal and Industrial College in Prairie View, Texas and a disciple of Washington, warned that if Johnson defeated Jeffries, "the anti?Negro sentiment will quickly and dangerously collect itself ready to strike back at any undue exhibitions of rejoicing on the part of Negroes."

Like the white reformers, conservative Blacks wanted this fight to go away.

Then there was the other force, the force against change in the old order, which was under full frontal attack. In Mexico, a heroic cataclysm was underway; the following year, Porfirio Diaz, for 45 years the oppressive symbol of order and authority, would be forced to resign. In England, militant suffragettes were challenging the order of sexes. They had smashed windows at the traditional home of the Prime Minister, and chained themselves to the railing at Parliament Square; poured acid into postal boxes; slashed pictures in public art galleries; and, when arrested, went on hunger strikes.

Everywhere, here and in Europe, the old guard fought to hold on to their world of Christian morality and puritanical virtues. In Johnson and boxing they saw the evil manifestation of everything they opposed, feared, and hated. They embraced traditional, rural and puritanical values, and boxing, they argued, was as alien to those cherished virtues as, say, the son of illiterate “immigrants” from somewhere in Africa. Professional boxing was viewed as an immigrant sport that attracted Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and other such undesirable sorts. The closing argument always included that the sport had close ties with saloonkeepers, gangsters and Democratic (Irish Catholic) urban political machines.

To them, the epitome of the evil boxing world was Johnson. He drank, supported white prostitutes, and shook the very social and racial order of rural Anglo?Saxon Protestant America. He was not a fellow they desired as a son-in-law.

John L. Sullivan had been bad enough, but he was at least white, (in the insular view of the hymn-singing Wasps, the downside to Sullivan was that he was a drunk, a womanizer, and an Irish Catholic), but as long as he and his untamed ilk did not try to move in next door to them, they were willing to bask in his glory.

Speaking of inveterate old scoundrels, Rickard loved the furor and the publicity, both in San Francisco, and later in Reno. Merrily, he continued to build the $35,000 yellow?pine San Francisco arena that would hold 25,000 spectators. But Gillett was beginning to cave in. It did not help when he got up one morning to find fifty ministers praying outside his bedroom window for him to stop the fight. Gillett rolled over with his feet in the air when the Washington politicians joined the fray; Congressman William S. Bennett of New York, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wired William R. Wheeler, of the San Francisco Board of Trade, saying that the prospective fight stood in the way of San Francisco's landing the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915.

"Good Lord” said Gov. Gillett after he learned of Bennett's threat. He telephoned U.S. Webb, his state’s Attorney General, from Chicago and told him: "Go to San Francisco and tell Richard to get out of my state. Tell him to take Johnson and Jeffries with him."

“Why?”

“Do it.”

The next day’s headline of The Police Gazette FRAME UP"

"I believe it is a frame?up," Gov. Gillett was quoted as saying, taking the easy route out. "There was no chance to get Jeffries in the ring again, in my opinion, unless he was assured in advance of victory. Johnson has little to lose. He needs money, and if he can be made independent by allowing Jeffries to win, he will do it. I don't think the crowd would stand for the Negro being returned the winner, and I am confident that Johnson would fall down and knock himself out if that was the only way he could let Jeffries win."

Jeffries was trout fishing the narrow San Lorenzo River near his training camp at the tiny village of Rowardennan in the Santa Cruz Mountains with Walter Kelly, a vaudevillian and the future uncle of Grace Kelly, when he received word that the fight had been driven from his home state. "I should tell them all to go to hell and go back home," he told Kelly. "If it wasn't for Tex, that's just what I would do."

Later Kelly wrote: "In my soul I believe that incident was the blow that whipped Jeff."

Ask to comment on the frame-up charge, Jeffries said: "I am inclined to believe Gov. Gillett was misquoted."

Every metropolitan paper in the country carried the headline, or some variation of it: "GILLETT VETOES THE BIG FIGHT."

John I. Day, an obviously creative writer for Inter?Ocean "dusky fan," whom he quoted: "Dat dah white trash fighter, he is a friend of Goveno' Gillett, an' dah Goveno' he done stop dah fight, so Jack can't beat his haid off."

The next day the New York Times stature. He deserves the heartiest praise of all good citizens."

For a few days this praise was echoed in church and reform circles. With election time nearing, the California chief executive, a priggish teetotaler who had originally run and won on a reform platform, decided it was time he established greater distance between himself and the heavyweight champion. Followed by a motorcade of writers and photographers, the governor led the way to Johnson’s training headquarters, a beachfront resort named Seal Rock Home, where he and his media guests were taken into a room where the champion, as naked as the day he was born, lay stretched out on a rubbing table. The oily administrations of a naked masseuse held the rapt attention of a dozen stylishly gowned white women.

“This is too much,” snapped Gov. Gillett after he had regained control of his stomach. “I want to talk to you but I want these women out of here first.”

Johnson smiled at the pompous little man. “The ladies is most welcome here, and so is you, gov’nor.”

That said, Johnson reached out with one large, muscular arm and pulled the struggling and sputtering Gillett close. He winked at the photographers, who, while the giggling white ladies gathered about, quickly carpeted the marble floor with burned out flashbulbs.

A few weeks later, Gillett and his committee for a cleaner California slumped in silence, waiting for state caucus returns to come it. Early news reports had not been good and when the returns came in they were as bad as they could get: Gillett had failed to get his party’s nomination by a 3-to-1 margin. The public’s indignation over the circulated photos of the governor seemingly consorting with the naked champion and a party of white women had been too big an obstacle to overcome. Johnson had turned the prude into a prune.

“What do I tell the press?” Jack Overland, one of Gillett’s public relations people, asked.

According to several reports, the former governor replied: “Tell them that if that Black ape ever returns to these parts, I will have him roped and castrated.”

With bowed head, Gov. Gillett then slipped into his topcoat and obscurity.

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
Johnson–Jeffries (Part 3): Full House
by Pat Putnam from Sweet Sience

Undaunted by the fight’s banishment from California, Rickard, who had already sold $133,000 worth of tickets, with the strong backing of Nevada Gov. Denver S. Dickerson, a man of broad views, moved the fight to Reno. With a population of 40,000, few of them female or ministers, Nevada was the only state where boxing was legalized. Businessmen belonging to the Reno Athletic Club had promised to erect a $20,000 arena at E. 4th and Toano Sts., pay the license fee, and guaranteed a $250,000 return at the gate.

Rickard had offers from Goldfield and Salt Lake City, but he had chosen Reno because of its superior railroad facilities and because of Dickerson's patronage and the promises of local businessmen. Within hours after the new site was announced, San Francisco speculators had reserved all the hotel rooms in Reno. It was later estimated that Reno’s merchants, saloonkeepers and gamblers took in close to $1 million.

When Rickard had first approached Gov. Dickerson, the governor asked him just one question: "Tex, tell me man to man, is the fight on the level?"

Rickard assured him both men would be trying to win. Dickerson then assured Rickard that there were no reformers in his state, except, of course, for that one minister in Reno, and, said Tex, “everybody in the state knows he’s a nut.” To many Americans, Reno was a moral wasteland. They assumed the town's population of 15,000 was to some degree associated with vice and sin. Gambling was wide?open and going full bore. In one five?block area there were more than 50 saloons, with bare board floors and bar wooden walls but barrels of booze, and names like Jim May's Palace, Lacey's Louvre, The Casino, the Oberon, and the Mecca, all in all, a little slice of heaven. And Reno was the divorce capital of America. One popular song of the era went "Shoutin' the battle cry of freedom, I'm on my way to Reno.” After close observation, one British visitor, H. Hamilton Fyle, said: "Reno's attitude toward gambling, drinking and divorce tends to attract a class of visitors which cannot be said to shed any luster upon the town."

Magazine writer Harris Merton Lyon described Reno as “a broad-shouldered, tan cheeked, slouch-hatted, youthful town, one that believed in red neckties and fireman’s suspenders.”

Dickerson's sole concern of a possible fix was an honest one, a worry that was surfacing more and more, and one that led Gillett to boot the fight from his state. From many quarters it was reported that Johnson had guaranteed a Jeffries victory, which partially explains why fat and old Jeffries was installed as a 10?7 favorite when the two fighters began to train near Reno. "You hear nothing but fake, fix, and double?cross everywhere," wrote Tad Duggan, the San Francisco writer and cartoonist.

“If the black wins,” London wrote in one of his periphrastic tomes to The Herald, “it may be the last act of his life.”

Like most rumors in boxing, it failed to make any sense, not that many folks at the time seemed able to work it out. Johnson had a $2,500 loan from Rickard plus his $10,000 bonus, and he had wrangled his training expenses on credit. Even if he bet the whole $12,500 on Jeffries, his return would only be $9,000. The winner's end of the purse was $60,600, and if Johnson bet his bankroll on himself, at 10?7, his return would be another $12,000. It would have taken a freight car full of money to persuade Johnson to give up his title.

One of the guys turning up the heat on the fix rumor was Martin Julian, Bob Fitzsimmons's former manager, a nasty fellow who may have been trying to manipulate the betting. "I know that Jeffries is in no condition to fight," Julian told a writer named Senator Ford. "Nobody can come back after laying off for five years. He not only has a lot of fat around his belly, but he has fat around his kidneys, and all the training in the world can't get that off without weakening him. Legs are important in a fight, and no man whose legs are in shape has to push himself up from a sitting position with his arms and hands (as Jeffries was doing.) But Jeffries's condition won't make any difference in this set?up. Hock your furniture and put your money on Jeffries. He's going to win. It's in the bag. Jeff wouldn't have come back if he thought he could lose. He may not be in on the deal but he must have an inkling of what's going on. As I got it, Johnson is to get $90,000 for laying down."

A few days before the fight, Julian had changed his tune. He told Ford: "The fix is off."

After the fight, Julian, who could not seem to make up his mind, told Ford: "I told you the fix was on and it was. But Johnson double?crossed the fixers. In the shape Jeffries was in, Johnson could have flattened him with a couple of punches. But he was under orders to give the suckers a run for their money. Look at the movies of the fight; take a good look at Jeffries's legs when he's introduced. He can hardly stand up, and the muscles in his legs quiver like a kootch dancer. I guess he knew what was coming."

Most writers must have believed the rumors: Only Rube Goldberg and Tad Dorgen picked Johnson to win. Asked for his opinion, Bat Masterson, the famed lawman turned sportswriter, said, while changing trains in Chicago: "Johnson stands no chance of winning." Of the former world champions, only Burns and John L. Sullivan picked the challenger. Even some of the country’s top black heavyweights, Langford and Jeanette, stood solidly in Jeffries’ camp. Observed Jeanette, who fought Johnson eight times: “Why, Jeffries can lose half his strength, have his endurance cut in two, carry a ton of extra weight and still whip Johnson. He has the head and the heart to do it.”

At least one cynic I know suspects Jeanette maybe have been interviewed while standing in the shade of an oak tree by a dozen guys wearing sheets and carrying a rope.

Langford, expelling bitterness no doubt for Johnson’s refusal to fight him, said, “I hope that the first punch Jeffries lands will end the fight. Johnson is entirely overrated as a fighter. He never would fight me again, because I knocked him down and after that he was afraid of me. I know the champion has no punch and that he does not like to take a beating.”

Johnson and Langford fought once, on April 6, 1906, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Defending the “colored” heavyweight championship, Johnson knocked the 156-pound Langford down twice and won a 15-round decision. Johnson said Langford was the toughest man he ever fought and told a friend, “and it won’t happen again.” According to James Butler in his “The Fight Game,” after glowing reports of his prowess after he had knocked out Tiger Smith, a gnarly Welsh southpaw, in four rounds, Langford said: “Hey, boss, I’m not the best out there. There is a big smoke back home called Jack Johnson who is unbeatable. He licked me good in Massachusetts last year and he is improving every month.”

Johnson had heard the fixed-fight rumors as well. On the Friday before the fight, scheduled for Monday night, he sent a message to Jeffries's camp telling him there was no fix and Jeffries had better be ready to fight. Years later, in an affidavit given to Ring Magazine , Johnson said he sent that message because he had been approached about a fix and wanted to give fair warning.

Johnson even named the woman he claimed was involved in the plot.

Before the fight, Johnson told Charles Mathison of the New York Press : "I'll do my best to prove that the fight is on the level and I'll give Jeffries the licking of a lifetime, just to show up some of the newspapermen who have been riding me and have been belittling my ability in an effort to scare me."

One of the first of the celebrity writers to appear on the scene in Reno was Rex Beach, the author, who considered himself qualified as a boxing writer because of the action scenes in his novels. Like Jack London, he was paid 10 cents a word for his daily prose. After visiting Jeffries at his California camp at Rowardennan, Beach wrote for his newspaper syndicate: "I pick Jeffries because after watching the caveman's work for a month I can't picture that huge bulk lying on the floor...On the other, I can picture Johnson, dazed and bewildered. *The difference is in both breeding and education.”

One has to have doubts that Beach, well bred and immaculately lettered, was ever in a serious fistfight.

Arriving just behind Beach was London, in the company of a couple of hoboes named Watertank Willie and Seattle Sam, and with a face swollen from a fight with a bartender in Ogden, Utah. London's observations were just about as penetrating as those of Beach. Obviously, he took his boxing expertise with the same solemn seriousness that seems to afflict all literary giants, most of whom would not know a right cross from a $3 hooker, whenever they are thrust upon the scene of a heavyweight championship fight.

Far more famous "expert writers" covering for various papers were Corbett, Robert Fitzsimmons, Abe Attell, Battling Nelson, Tommy Burns, Frank Gotch and William Muldoon, an ex?wrestler with more than a nodding acquaintance with a punch in the nose. Reviewing that list, author Beach lamented that there were not more of his literary lot. "I lament at the absence of 'Walloping' Dean Howells of New England. He may not possess the literary style of Joe Choynski or an Abe Attell, but he has a certain following nevertheless. And 'Battling' Howey James, the Devonshire Demon...His diction is stilted, perhaps, and lacking the fluent ease and grace of 'Philadelphia Jack' O’Brien, but he is entitled to be heard from."

A good editor would have removed the last word – ‘from” – from his copy.

Another of the athletic experts was John L. Sullivan, there at Rickard's invitation as the elder statesman of boxing, and reporting for the New York Times. Sullivan had not touched hard liquor for five years, which did not make him a bad man, and had grown immensely fat, giving him the outline of Santa Claus, if not the laugh; like all reformed drunks he needed little time to establish himself as a pain in the ass. Hardly had he alighted from the train, when the ex?champion proclaimed loudly and soberly: "It looks like a frame?up to me."

When Jeffries was told of Sullivan’s remark at his training quarters in a roadhouse in Moana Springs on the Truckee River, he said: "That big stiff had better not come here or I'll turn the fire hose on him! I always hated a knocker."

Five days before the fight, Sullivan interviewed Johnson, who told him: "Cap'n John, I'm going to win. I'm as happy as a kid on Christmas morning." Later that day, Johnson wired his brother Claude in Chicago: "Bet your last copper on me."

Awakened one night by an aide who thought he might like to witness the passing of Haley’s Comet, Jeffries snarled at the messenger: "I told you not to wake me up to see no comet. Who cares about comets? I want my sleep!"

Johnson's camp at a place called The Willows, four miles east of Reno, was more relaxed. The champion enjoyed watching the desert sunsets, and at the end of the day's work he could be found outside, as one Los Angeles biographer of his told his readers, “watching the blue sky turn to amethyst and rose.” From his perch he could hear the mechanical piano in The Willows taproom playing "Oh, You Beautiful Doll," one of his favorites. Going inside, he would often grab a bull fiddle, and the party would be on.

Johnson had volunteer masters of ceremonies: wine agents Bob Vernon and Harry Lehr, a social consultant to Mrs. Styvesant Fish of New York City. Near dusk, Vernon and Lehr would arrive as the vanguard of a parade of automobiles loaded with Eastern society ladies and huge hampers of champagne. The pair came armed with Japanese butlers to pour the bubbly. The society ladies were not there for the fight; their mission in Reno was to obtain divorces under Nevada's profitable six?week residency law.

Johnson's training base was an armed camp. The champion had two pistols, one in his pocket, and the other near his bedside. After everyone had left for the night, a sentry, a former National League catcher named Cal McVey, armed with a shotgun, patrolled beneath Johnson’s bedroom window. As most readers quickly surmised while reading Mes Combats, Johnson possessed a lively imagination; he once claimed he had been pursed by a 19?foot shark.

Never far from anyone’s thoughts was the fear of robbery. Reno had become a gathering place for some of the more noted thieves in the country. One was the eminent bank robber Cincinnati Slim, and rumor had it that the Sundance Kid was due any day. (The Kid had yet to be shot to death in South America.) Also there were such underworld figures as Won Let, a hit man for the New York branch of the Hip Sing tong. Let, it was said, had 30 notches on his hatchet handle. Along with the more famous thugs, there were hundreds of minor crooks: three?card Monte players, pick pockets, pimps, politicians, prostitutes, muggers, lush rollers, gamblers, conmen, burglars and robbers, plus a large detachment of hobos and bums that had passed through Chicago during the second week of June and headed for Reno after being urged westward by the Chicago cops. Also well represented was a colorful assortment of Indians, cowboys, Mexicans, cattle rustlers, miners, and and, it was said, two train robbers.

Against this roving pack of human predators, Gov. Dickerson amassed a strong force of armed and deputized citizens; Pinkerton detectives from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco; a detachment of Nevada State Rangers; and a patrol of Arizona Rangers headed by a well?known tough lawman, Captain Cox, who carried two pistols and believed in expediency when dealing with the lawless; he shot them dead on the spot.

Said Colonel Abe Slupsky, a St. Louis politician who arrived with $3,000 under a porous plaster on his chest: "It was the only way to carry money in Reno. I would have stuck it on my back except there wasn't anybody I could trust to do it for me. The night before the fight, I kicked away twenty empty wallets on the planked walks. The dips would take the money and toss them away." Col. Slupsky also reported seeing gutters lined with cheap tin watches, which indignant pickpockets had thrown away in disgust.

Armed and protected, Johnson spent his nights strumming on the bull fiddle – "I've Got Rings on My Fingers"; "By The Light of the Silvery Moon"; and "I Love My Wife." He also liked clowning with writers in the traditional vein of watermelon?devouring, chicken?stealing humor expected of his race. "No stolen chicken ever passes the portals of my face," he would say, flashing that golden smile. "Chickens see the gleam in my eye and keep out of my way. Chicken and corn fritters are affinities. They are meant for each other and both are meant for me."

Another time a writer asked the champion if he was worried. Johnson nodded seriously. "Yes," he said gravely. "I tell you in the strictest confidence..."

The writer leaned in, better to hear the soft words.

"...I am worried that a fat rooster I saw killed this morning will be overdone if I don't get in to dinner."

An almost daily routine at Johnson's camp were the court sessions, with Johnson acting as the judge, handing out sentences as he saw fit. Most of the victims protested, but they all paid whatever penalty the champion handed down.

Once his happy crew mutinied, demanding a new judge be appointed. "All right," said Johnson, “we'll settle this fair and square. We'll have an election."

Chips from a roulette wheel were distributed: a white for Johnson, a red for Frank Sutton, who ran against him. The result was a tie: 8 and 8.

"But there are only 15 of us," someone pointed out. "The champ stuffed the ballot box."

Johnson leaped up, grinning. "I'm still the judge and I'm gonna clear the courtroom." After he had laughing wrestled them all out the door, Johnson pronounced a sentence on Professor Burns, a musician in the group. He was sentenced to one night’s exile from the piano.

Another time Johnson sentenced two newsmen for malicious mischief; their crime was inducing a cartoonist to lampoon the champion. Doyle of the San Francisco Chronicle* delighted in drawing cartoons of Johnson depicting him as a blackface buffoon. The two guilty newsmen were held face down on a stool while Johnson paddled them with a plank.

Wrote one of the paddled, Jack Dansham of the Chronicle: "The big fellow did not know how much he hurt them, but he did hurt. The victims are now taking their meals from the nearest approach to a mantel?piece they can find in Reno."

London was still hard at work on his racist assaults. After visiting Johnson at his training camp, he wrote that the champion's "happy?go?lucky" disposition resulted from Johnson's concern only for the moment and his genetic inability to plan for the future.

Another writer, Alfred Lewis, took it a step beyond: "As essentially African, Johnson feels no deeper than the moment, sees no farther than his nose, and is incapable of anticipation...The same cheerful indifference to coming events has marked others of the race even while standing in the very shadow of the gallows. Their stolid unconcern baffled all who beheld it. They were to be hanged; they knew it. But having no fancy, no imagination – they could not anticipate."

Asked writer W.P. McCloughlin: "Is Johnson a typical example of his race in that lack of that intangible 'something' that we call 'heart?' I have observed closely Jack's alleged 'impenetrable' guard and do not see any reason why it is so designated."

However, in Jeffries McCloughlin saw "the hope of the white race, a gradually growing sullen ferocity."

Wrote one observer in the Inter?Ocean , about Jeffries: "Under his skin of bronze the muscles rippled like the placid surface of a body of water touched by a gentle breeze."

When Jeffries read that, he said it made him sick to his stomach.

Writers trying to approach Jeffries had a serious problem. Never overly friendly, now he was sullen and mean. Writers compared him to an injured bear. Wrote one: "He growls and snarls and grumbles like an old grizzly when strangers come around...He has a bear's aversion to being disturbed???particularly when he eats.” Wrote Roberts: “There obviously was a concerted journalistic effort to soften the ex?champion's image: stories poured forth on how he was kind to his wife and sparring partners, and that his home life was clean and wholesome – but there was a difficulty trying to gloss over his irritable and unfriendly disposition. Eventually reporters stopped trying to get close to him and began to submit fictional pieces about how friendly Jeffries might be if he wasn't so damn unfriendly. Writers assigned to Jeffries' camp survived on inspiration.”

At the other camp, unlike the dyspeptic Jeffries, Johnson seemed totally relaxed. Writers at the scene were puzzled by the champion’s calm. One wrote: "Though sharp as a razor in a sort of undeveloped way, he seems oblivious to the seriousness of his task. He fiddles away on his bull horn, swaps jokes with a ready wit, shoots craps, plays baseball, listens dreamily to classic love songs on the phonograph."

At a cost of a dime a word, London’s longwinded June 26th dispatch to the New York Herald said this about Jeffries:

"...His legs are like columns???not gnarled and knotty columns, but clean?swelling columns, soft?lined and in keeping with the soft?lined strength of the rest of him. There is little doubt that in the history of the ring there was never a heavyweight so well and symmetrically proportioned.

"His thighs are so mighty that they remind one inevitably of the legendary Teutonic warrior who, by the grip of his thighs, made his war horse groan beneath him. It would have to be an armor?plated, steel?trussed horse that Jeffries could not make groan.


"Lean?bellied as a Greek athlete, the muscles of his torso begin their long, deep swell outward and upward from the waist. His back muscles played in matted masses, while those of his shoulders and biceps leap into a twisted roll at the slightest uplift of those arms."

One has to wonder if London was there to write about Jeffries or ask him out on a date.

That John L. Sullivan went to Jeffries camp is fact. There are, however, what happened after he did arrive at the camp comes in two versions:

There was this one: When Sullivan finally turned up at Jeffries' camp, Jeffries forgot about his threat to turn the fire hose on him. Instead he asked the old champion's advice on how to fight Johnson. "I know you didn't mean what you said about me, John," said Jeffries. "I don't know why I have to be the favorite."

Sullivan studied the big man. Then he replied: "Jim, all I know is God Almighty hates a quitter."

Even on his best day, Sullivan was never the brightest ember in the firebox.

And this one: A few days after his now famous "frame?up" quote, Sullivan made his way to the Jeffries camp on the Truckee. Jim Corbett, who had taken his title from him on Sept. 7, 1892 (KO?21, New Orleans), greeted him at the gate. There was little love lost between the two American icons.

"What the hell do you want?" the slender Corbett asked.

As fat and out of shape as he was, it was not a question one would want to ask John. L., not even Corbett. An angry argument started, heat words were exchanged. Onlookers feared a dustup.

Finally, Sullivan snarled: "If you're running the camp I don't want to see him."

As Sullivan drove away, Walter Kelly remembered: "I had a lump in my throat as I watched John. L. drive away. He was leaving the camp of a heavyweight champion without even the tribute of a handshake or a goodbye. For some reason, it did not seem right."

No matter. Both were typical of the dark mood of Jeffries's camp. Jeffries had prepared for the fight as if getting ready for a funeral, his own. By the evening of the fight his friends feared that he was overwrought. Unable to eat that night, Jeffries retired early, but could not sleep. William Muldon remembered him pacing about his room. Mrs. Jeffries went to his door once and spoke to him, but he told her to shut up and go back to her own room. He remained alone in his room for almost 12 hours.

The reformers remained in force. Mr. Rockwell of Cincinnati, with nearly 200,000 of his postcards not yet posted, had them readdressed and mailed to Gov. Dickerson, who, it is said, found a use for them in his fireplace. Said the Rev. M.P. Boynton, the pastor of a Baptist Church in Chicago: "Prizefighting has been driven into the nation's backyard, that portion of the country that seems to have to promote and protect the sins of the nation that have been outlawed everywhere else. There should be some way by which our nation could recall the charter of a state that has become a desert and a moral menace. Nevada has no right to remain a part of our nation, with the powers of a state."

Still the special trains pulled into the Southern Pacific yards from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Omaha, Salt Lake City, Denver, San Francisco, Bloomsburg, Pa. and Schenectady, N.Y. One 10?car train contained a party of Illinois sports headed by racing man Lou Houseman, who after one quick stroll around town, observed: "There is ample opportunity for a man to lose a bankroll here. It can cost a man plenty if he spends time in the many specially rigged gambling joints set as traps for the unwary."

Among the morally bankrupted were the fight writers, an army of them, covering an event about which Henry Wales of the Chicago Tribune years later wrote "no event in modern times so permeated the mind of the world until Charles Lindbergh's flight from Long Island to Paris 17 years later." By Wales’ count, more than 300 writers were at work in Reno by the end of June. (Twice that number covered the actual fight) At that time newspaper pages were broad and deep and, except for headlines, set in small type. The stories were torturously long; more than a million words – the equivalent if not equal of 25 Jack London novels – were filed each day.

*On the morning of the Fourth, the day of the fight, for breakfast Johnson ate four lamb cutlets, three scrambled eggs, and several slices of rare Porterhouse steak. He passed on desert.

Jeffries took only a little fruit, toast and tea, and then proclaimed: "When the gloves are knotted on my hands tonight and I stand ready to defend what is really my title, it will be at the request of the public, which forced me out of retirement. That portion of the white race that has been looking to me to defend its athletic superiority may feel assured that I am fit to do my best. If Johnson defeats me, I will shake his hand and declare him the greatest fighter the sporting world has ever known."

Countered Johnson: "Every fighter on the eve of his fight declares that he hopes the best man wins. I am quite sincere when I say that I do, and if Mr. Jeffries knocks me out or gains a decision over me, I will go into his corner and congratulate him as soon as I am able. My congratulations will not be faked. Let me say in conclusion that I believe the meeting between Mr. Jeffries and myself will be a test of strength, skill and endurance. I plan to gradually beat him down and finally make him take the count. However, should I meet defeat I will have no excuse to offer and will proclaim Mr. Jeffries king of them all."

As one may have guessed, ghostwriters had prepared both formal statements well in advance.

Less statesmanlike was Abbott of the Defender, who penned in apparent frenzy: "If our Johnson is forced to fight Jim Crow delegations, race prejudice, and insane public sentiment, and if he wins in the face of all of this, he is truly entitled to a Carnegie Hero Medal. When the smoke of battle clears away, and when the din of mingled cheers and groans have died away in the atmosphere, there will be deep mourning throughout the domains of Uncle Sam over Jeffries' inability to return the pugilistic scepter to the Caucasian race."

The pastor of St. Mark's African Methodist Episcopal Church, located near Abbott's office, felt no such certainty. The minister opened the sanctuary early the morning of the Fourth of July for a prayer service that continued through the fight. Numerous Negro congregations across the nation did the same. In Hutchinson, Kansas, the Colored Holiness Church announced that it would hold special services to pray for Johnson. To counterbalance that plea for heavenly help, a Midwestern white minister announced that he would pray for Jeffries. The Rev. H.E. Trials of the First Baptist Church in Omaha told his congregation: "Every man with red blood in his veins should see Jim Jeffries regain the heavyweight championship from Jack Johnson."

Wrote Arthur Rhul in Collier's magazine: "The betting was 10 to 6 on Jeffries and the talk about 1,000 to 1. You couldn't hurt him – Fitzsimmons had landed enough times to kill an ordinary man in the first few rounds, and Jeffries had only shaken his head like a bull and bored in. The Negro might be a clever boxer, but he had never been up against a real fighter before. He had a yellow streak, there was nothing to it, and anyway, 'Let's hope he kills the coon.'

"That was the mental atmosphere as Johnson, wrapped in a dressing gown and smiling his half?puzzled and rather pleading smile climbed into the ring," Rhul's report of the fight went on. "I had a seat directly opposite Jeffries, and I can unhesitating state that I have never seen a human being more calculated to strike terror into an opponent's heart than this scowling brown Colossus as he came through the ropes, stamped like a bull pawing the ground before his charge, and, chewing gum rapidly, glared at the Black man across the ring. If looks could have throttled, burned, and torn to pieces, Mr. Jack Arthur Johnson would have disappeared that minute into a few specks of inanimate dust. The Negro had his back turned at the moment, and as he took his corner and his trainer and his seconds, crowding in front of him, concealed the white man, a sort of hoot, wolfish and rather terrible, went up from the crowd. 'He daresen't look at him! Don't let him see him.' And when Jeffries pulled off his clothes with a vicious jerk, and standing erect and throwing out his chest, jabbed his great arms above his head once or twice, I don't suppose one man in a hundred in that crowd would have given two cents for the Negro's chances."

Ignoring his own man, Gentleman Jim Corbett studied Johnson. Later he would admit that a terrible fear assailed him as he studied the champion’s Herculean body. An expert on conditioning, he knew Jack had not acquired that rippling flatiron stomach eating watermelons and fried chicken and leaning against a bar. "Jeffries will find his yellow streak," Corbett muttered to Farmer Burns, another corner man. He knew if he were mistaken, and he feared the worst, Jeffries was in for a painful beating.

By fight time, 600 or so journalists were there, swelling the crowd to just over 16,000, none of them packing weapons or hard liquor. Rickard had installed curtained boxes for the women, and had posted deputy sheriffs at each of eight entrances to confiscate pistols and strong drink. At that time, cheap, nickel?plated revolvers sold in general retail stores for as low as $1.50 and most male citizens carried at least one. Rickard's worry was over himself: as the referee, he would have to announce the decision, should it go to that. He felt more comfortable knowing that if it should turn out to be Johnson, the audience would not be allowed to retrieve their weapons until after he and the principals were well beyond small bore range.

Across the nation, the public awaited telegraphed reports of the fight. The *Kansas City Star had rented the city's convention hall for a crowd of 14,000, which had a blow?by?blow account telegraphed from the ringside and bellowed by announcers at the hall through megaphones. On Long Island, a more select audience gathered at the Edgemere Club, where folks like William K. Vanderbilt, Howard Gould, Lawrence Drake and others of such wealthy ilk followed the fight through the New York Times bulletin service. The Edgemere clubmen had hired an agent to stand in front of the Times to run to a telephone booth and pass the word after each bulletin was posted. In Chicago, the warden of the county jail had installed a special wire so that a description of the fight could be shouted through the cellblocks by a trusty. At the Chicago Coliseum, a great crowd, including many Blacks, watched as illuminated electrical figures nine feet high reenacted every move on an electrical scoreboard. At the Pekin Theater, at 27th St. and State St. in the Black belt of Chicago, Robert Motts, the manager, stood on the stage and read reports from slips of paper brought by a telegrapher posted in the wings. At Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, who had declined to cover the bout as a reporter, set aside a special assembly room to received telegraphic reports from Reno.

In Chicago, one very tiny Black lady sat alone under a single spotlight on the stage of the Ebony Star theatre. Johnson’s mother would be handed the round-by-round bulletins from Reno. Hundreds of the champion’s fans paid $10 to watch the old woman change expressions.

It seems I've already read some of this stuff verbatim before. Not sure how much was this author or how much he took from other sources.

Is everybody aware of this new book by Wayne A Rozen re the Johnson-Jeffries fight? It's supposed to contain plenty of related photographs, illustrations and contemporary articles.

Here's a link detailing the book with a sampling of photographs.

www.onlyagame.org/shows/2005/11/20051119_14.as

Johnson–Jeffries (Part 4): Fight of the Century
by Pat Putnam

At the arena on a day that dawned spotlessly clear and with a promise of searing temperatures, as an army of drunks stumbled into the sap-perspiring arena on the outskirts of the town, the military brass band climbed into the ring and played patriotic songs. One of the “patriotic selections” was *All Coons Look Alike to Me, which some of Jeffries supporters had persuaded the relatively sober musicians to play.

The crowd was not all white; an estimated 1,000 Blacks filed into Reno’s temporary arena; a few of the more intrepid were boisterous, but most were quiet, alert to danger, heart-hammering hopeful. A few days before the fight, “Black special trains” arrived from Chicago and Oklahoma City. A New Yorker named One Pin came with a party of 36. Blackie Williams brought a delegation of 35 from the state of Washington. Clarence Estelle shepherded a large group from San Francisco. They headquartered at the Johnson Club, not far from the Golden Hotel, which had been taken over by Jeffries fans. If a man had the price of a drink, a dinner, or a bed, Reno’s business community did not look at the color of his skin.

Fearing violence before the fight started, Rickard had called upon William Muldoon, a pompous, humorless and very large man, to give a speech from the ring. In a forceful voice, Muldoon, a onetime great wrestler and John L. Sullivan's former trainer, implored the fans not to judge Johnson too harshly because he was a Negro, and that regardless who won, the verdict should be accepted in a sense of fair play. Since the only beverage available was lemonade, and everyone seemed to be sobering under a scorching sun, Muldoon's speech was accepted without too many catcalls. It should be noted that it was Muldoon who unnerved Jeffries the most at his training camp with his never?ending plea: "Jim, you must win for the white race. You MUST."

Before the fight, Uncle Billy Jordan, the leading ring announcer of his day, boldly introduced Jeffries "as the great white unbeaten heavyweight champion of the world", which did little to lessen Johnson's desire to beat the devil out of his bronzed opponent. Johnson had asked Rickard not to permit that announcement, but Rickard had opted for personal safety and ignored his plea.

Johnson was the champion, but he only shrugged when they told him Jeffries had demanded to enter the ring last. With his patented smile firmly in place, and wearing a gray silk robe and royal blue tights held up by an American-flag belt, Johnson was first into the ring. There was only one shady corner and Johnson laid claim to it. When it was Jeffries turn, he entered wearing a gray business suit and gray golf cap, which he quickly shed, revealing a pair of natty purple trunks and an American-flag belt. Their gloves were skintight leather and weighed four ounces each. By the time both men were in the huge 28-foot ring, it was estimated that the day's temperature had hit 110 degrees. After Jeffries made his grand entrance, he went to Johnson and asked if he would mind tossing a coin to see which got the shady corner. Johnson declined to toss, but then he graciously offered the corner to Jeffries, who quickly took it. By agreement, the two men did not shake hands.

Giving up the shady corner to Jeffries was surprising. Johnson held no love for the former champion. "Jeffries was bitter toward me," he said years later. "He indulged in many hateful and venomous remarks concerning me. He condemned me in scathing terms. For a long time he declared he had drawn the color line. He had attacked Burns for fighting me, saying that he was money mad and that he had sold his pride and the pride of the Caucasian race by fighting me. Jeffries's father, a minister, said he would disown his son if he appeared in the ring with me. I guess he forgot that I had fought his other son, Jack (KO?5), in 1902, and that Jeff and Jack had both fought other men of my race".

When the bell rang, both men moved forward warily. Johnson sparred cautiously, unwilling to take early risks. Jeffries stayed in his famous crouch, a fighting form that Jack Dempsey would copy during his own great career; massive shoulders guarded his head. Jeffries never started aggressively in any of his 22 professional bouts; he was content to save energy, absorbing whatever punishment the other man offered, waiting for the other fellow to tire, as he surely would.

The second round was a little more active, but neither needed to draw on his reserves. Testing Jeffries, Johnson appeared to lower his guard. Jeffries lunged forward, throwing a powerful drive to the head. With perfect timing, Johnson sidestepped the punch and danced away, grinning. “Missed,” he said.

In the second round, Corbett, in line with his strategy of trying to irritate Johnson, called out: "He wants to fight a little, Jim." Corbett was the most vocal racist in Jeffries' corner. He openly hated all Blacks, Johnson more that most, and spoken often about his theory that Blacks were rendered useless fighters when enraged. During the early rounds, he screamed a steady stream of racial insults at the champion.

Johnson turned every Corbett insult aside with a smile, usually just before or just after belting Jeffries. As Arthur Ruhl, a writer for Colliers cleverness to keep the respectful ingratiating ways of the Southern darky."

That Johnson refused to be baited only further enflamed the ex-champion.

Near the end of round two, with Corbett calling out, "He wants to fight you a little, Jim,” Johnson replied: "You bet I do,” as he delivered a stinging right uppercut to Jeffries' jaw.

The paced quickened slightly in the third round. Johnson caught Jeffries with a solid shot to the head; Jeffries countered with a punch in the mouth, drawing blood. Jeffries did not have the speed to catch up with Johnson's masterly boxing, but did land a blow to the body near the end of the round. During the round, Corbett was heard to cry out: "Come on now, Jeff. Let me see you do something, man. This is for the champ?eenship." Whereupon, Johnson smacked Jeffries in the face, looked over at Corbett and grinned, and said: "There's something, Mr. Corbett."

At the end of the round, Johnson waved to a few friends in the audience.

In the fourth, Johnson began hammering his left jab into Jeffries’ reddening face. "I can go on like this all afternoon, Mr. Jeff," he said, politely.

Opening round five, Jeffries’ breathing began to quicken. Taking notice, Johnson began to lean on Jeffries, further sapping his strength. Jeffries tried smashing at Johnson's body to keep him away, but the target was hard and lean and the blows had no apparent effect, except, perhaps, to make Jeffries wish he was home planting alfalfa. Working close, Johnson began to score with uppercuts to the face, leaving Jeffries's features well marked and blood leaking from the mouth. At the close of round five, his was the weary walk of the condemned man stumbling up a gallows’ steps.

In the sixth, a Johnson punch ripped open an old scar over Jeffries's left eye; gushing blood began to impair his vision. Johnson went after the cut, widening it, closing the eye. By the eighth round, Jeffries, knowing he was getting sorely whipped, began to throw desperation punches, but he was exhausted and the few blows that did land were weak and ineffective. Johnson acknowledged the weak assaults only with a flash of his golden teeth.

Years later, Johnson would remember: "I think it was the blow that closed Jeff's left eye that started his downfall. I led and drew him out, and then he thought I would come back with my right hand, but I crossed over and uppercut him with my left. That ring strategy took Jeff so by surprise that he lost the fight then and there."

During the eighth round, Corbett called out: "It only takes one or two, Jeff." Johnson promptly landed two stingers, paused, and landed another. "See that," he yelled at Corbett. “You’re right, just two.”

During the ninth round, Corbett yelled: "Make the big stiff fight." Johnson laughed, and remarked: "That's right. Yeah, that's what they all say."

At the end of the round, before he sat down, Jeffries snarled at Corbett: “Shut up. All that stuff out of your mouth just makes him hit harder.”

The crowd soon was aware that the bleeding and partially blinded Great White Hope had no chance. The only remaining hope was that Jeffries would go the full distance, 45 rounds. No one wanted to see their hero on his broad back with a Black man standing over him.

By round 12, Jeffries mouth was cut inside; his nose was broken and bleeding; he was cut over his left eye; his face and eyes were swollen and covered with blood. And he was still chewing gum.

At the bell to open the 13th, Johnson came quickly from his corner; Jeffries' approach to center ring was more reluctant. Chewing fiercely, he seemed barely able to stand. His corner men, Corbett and the others, had urged him to stay on his stool, but he had refused. He had told them that he would continue to fight until Johnson knocked him out. The crowd screamed for the towel to be tossed in, but Rickard, either fearing for his life or wanting to create as much fight film as possible, refused to stop the fight.

The 14th round was intense and brutal. Johnson punished his helpless opponent without pause; almost out on his feet, Jeffries refused to fall. Staggering back to his corner, he was barely conscious, on his feet only through the tremendous force of his courage and will. At one point in the round, as he battered his challenger, Johnson asked: "How do you feel, Jim. How do you like that?" After taking three more lefts, Jeffries mumbled: "They don't hurt." As the round ended, the writers leaped up, crowd surged forward, ready to invade the ring. They wanted it ended before Jeffries was knocked out.

Wary guards tightened grips on axe handles.

The hammer had hardly struck the bell to open the 15th when Johnson, who had enough of his own taunt and thrash tactics, charged across the ring, signaling that playtime was over. His first punch, a shattering blow to the jaw, sent Jeffries tumbling out of the ring. Well-meaning friends sent the dazed challenger tumbling back inside the ropes. Praying for divine intervention, Rickard ignored the rule’s violation; he picked up the count from the timekeeper. Fans shouted for Jeffries to stay down, but he refused, rising just before Rickard could reach 10. Johnson dropped him again with a rain of hard blows. Hardly had Jeffries gained his feet this time, when a left?right combination draped him over a lower rope, leaving him hanging half out of the ring.

Corbett leaped into the ring; not finding a towel, Berger threw in a sponge and then followed Corbett into the ring, ending the fight. Off the hook, Rickard, looking about for someone who may have smuggled a gun into the arena, quickly raised Johnson's arm and even more quickly fled. He had only reached seven before he stopped counting.

The reaction of the horrified crowd was silence. It was as though the people had just watched a favored and much loved thoroughbred fall, break his leg, and then be destroyed. Quietly, sadly, they claimed their weapons and filed out of the arena. Most took the sensible approach and headed for the nearest saloon. Across the nations, thousands of other men who had crowded the fronts of newspaper offices to hear news of the fight found their own bars, there to brood and think ugly thoughts. The emotions laid naked by the fight were real, and now uncovered, in some cases would prove deadly.

In Chicago, a tiny Black woman alone on a stage stood up and smiled.

After the fight, Jeffries said: "I was the white hope, they told me. My pride got the better of my good judgment. Six years ago it would have been different. Now I guess the public will let me alone after this."

Wrote London after the fight: "Once again has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race and this time the greatest of them. And as of old, it was play for Johnson...It was not a great battle after all, save in its setting and significance...Johnson played as usual...And he played and fought a white man, in the white man's country, before a white man's audience...The greatest fight of the century was a monologue delivered to twenty thousand spectators by a smiling Negro who was never in doubt and never serious for more than a moment at a time...Jeffries today disposed of one question. He could not come back. Johnson, in turn, answered another question. He has not the yellow streak. But he only answered that question for today.... But the question of the yellow streak is not answered for all time."

London just would not quit.

Then the novelist ended with his usual plea, although this one was a somewhat watered down version: "And where now is the champion who will make Johnson extend himself, who will glaze those bright eyes, remove that smile and silence that golden repartee?"

At least he did not call for a rematch. Jeffries would searched him out and demonstrated the explosive effect of four hard knuckles slamming into a nose.

For one of the few times in his long career, Beech was near speechless. “Today we saw a tragedy,” he wrote, glumly. “A tremendous crushing anticlimax has happened and we are dazed….”

Two hours after the fight, Johnson boarded a special train headed for Chicago. He and his female attendants partied all night.

The following day's headlines told of the national horror the result of the fight had unleashed:

Half a Dozen Dead as Crowds Attack Negroes; Reign of Terror Here.

Africans Dragged from New York City Street Cars and Attacked in Streets in Fury of Whites Over Jeffries' Defeat???Physician Stops Mob With Pistol

POLICE RESERVES MARSHALLED IN PARK TO BE READY FOR IMMEDIATE SERVICE

Negroes Also Attacked and Lynchings Threatened in Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, Atlanta, St. Louis and Many Other Points

LARGE NUMBER OF VICTIMS TAKEN TO HOSPITALS

Man Attacked in Lincoln Square Has Fractured Skill and Probably Will Die???Shooting of Pistols in Celebration Starts Trouble in Some Localities

"Serious rioting occurred at Washington, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Chattanooga, Norfolk, Los Angeles, Guilderland, and Puebla, cities which embrace the territory between California on the west, Florida on the south, and New York on the east.

"Chief rioting in New York City took place in the Negro quarter in the 9th Ave. district. Many drunken Blacks paraded the thoroughfares, insulting white men, who promptly retaliated...Mobs of white men caught two Negroes and tried to lynch them by hanging them to lamp posts, but police rescued the victims. One Negro had an especially narrow escape: the rope was already around his neck and thrown over the bar of a lamppost, when police charged and pulled him away. The Negro was unconscious from fright.

"Serious racial riots also occurred in Washington. Many Negroes, frenzied with whiskey and gin, attacked white man and woman along Pennsylvania Ave...Three Negro women attacked two white women sitting on the porch of their residence. A mob chased several females Negroes, shouting, "Lynch them."...Three hundred Marines from the Navy yard at Norfolk paraded the streets shouting they intended to lynch the Negroes for their insulting behavior. Many of the Negroes caught were unmercifully beaten.

"A Reuters special telegram states that three Negroes met their death at Ulvadis, Georgia in a battle with whites at a construction camp. Negro workmen, who had been insolent to whites for several days, began drinking, and became so boisterous that a white posse was organized. As the posse approached it was fired upon. The fire was returned and when the Negroes fled they left behind three dead and five badly wounded. The Negroes are still being hunted."

(The reader may have notice that in all the stories, not one of the drunks was white.)

Fearing riots, city and state government officials were quick to bar any showing of the films of the fight. They were urged on by the Christian Endeavor Society???still endeavoring to tell other folks how to live???which sent telegrams from its national headquarters to branch societies throughout the world to keep up the agitation against the moving pictures. The films were banned in Maine, Arizona, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Iowa, the District of Columbia, Boston, Oakland, Guilderland, and San Francisco. A few braver mayors, those in St. Joseph's, Missouri and Seattle, said they would allow the films to be shown. Said Mayor Hiram C. Gill: "Whenever I am convinced that the city is unable to handle any riot from the exhibition of fight films in Seattle, I will immediately tender my resignation."

Five months after the Johnson?Jeffries fight Congress, in its great wisdom, made it a criminal offense to transport fight films across state lines.

Penned British boxing writer Gilbert Odd: "This is the story of the saddest comeback in ring history???the story of a man who had retired undefeated as heavyweight champion of the world, was tempted into returning to the ring, only to suffer the most humiliating defeat boxing has known. The champion at the time was Jack Johnson, that arrogant, strutting Negro."

Writing for a 1921 issue of the Sioux City, Iowa *Journal*, Norman E. Brown began: "Jack Johnson's abuse of the heavyweight title and the honor that went with it is one of the sad chapters of the heavyweight game."

He ended: "And before the excitement surrounding the Jeffries?Johnson battle had died down there arose a cry for a "white hope" who could beat Johnson. The five years that elapsed between the defeat of Jeffries and Johnson's defeat at the hands of the human mountain, Jess Willard, furnished the newspapers with more prize fight copy than any other similar period in the game's history. White hopes bloomed over night???and fizzled with a punch."

Weeks after the fight, Jeffries said: "I am positive I was the victim of trickery. Something was done to me. It would have been impossible for me to break down so suddenly in the condition I was in, unless someone got to me in an underhanded way. That I was tampered with is a certainty. Eight days before the fight, on a Saturday morning, I went on a fishing trip. We had breakfast while out, and when I returned that afternoon I went to bed and to sleep.

"From that day on I was never myself. I wanted to sleep all the time. At first I thought I had worked too hard and that a rest for a couple of days would fix me up all right. But the laziness never left me. From day to day I tried to make myself believe that I was all right, but the tired feeling would always grab me after dinner and I could do nothing but loaf.

"I also was attacked by dysentery, for which not even the doctors could account, for I had been extra careful. I did not recover until two weeks after the fight. Why don't the experts account for the lifeless hulk that staggered around the Reno ring that day? The day of the fight I only remember going down the aisle toward the ring. I cannot recall a single thing before or after that. If I could have had my brain working, I would have asked Tex Rickard to call off all the bets. I know nothing of the fight except what I have been told. They say I took my introduction with my legs spraddled apart and did not even bow to such a tremendous ovation. Can you imagine me being such a fool? I don't even remember the ovation.

"Once, must have been the sixth or seventh round, a punch to the jaw cleared my brain a minute. I shook my head, trying to get myself together. But before I got another punch I was back to the dopey situation. I was not knocked senseless, although I would have been if Sam Berger not interfered. A woman could have beaten me that day. Deep down in my heart, I know that crookedness cost me the fight."

Jeffries said he did not blame Johnson, but was pointing the finger at trusted members of his own camp.

Said Johnson about all of that: "I have been told that Jeffries has said he was doped and that members of his party have risen to express the same belief. About the only dope which Jeffries suffered from was that administered by myself in the form of jabs and uppercuts to the jaw."

On June 10, 1946, at the wheel of his speeding Lincoln Zephyr on his way to New York to see the second Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight, Johnson swerved to avoid an oncoming truck in North Carolina, lost control when the big car hit a ditch, and rolled over after crashing into a power pole. Knocked unconscious, the former heavyweight champion was rushed to St. Mary’s Hospital near Raleigh, N.C., where he died an hour later from multiple injuries.

The last of his white wives, Irene Pineau, a middle-aged patron of the arts whom had he married a few months after he divorced Lucy in 1924, had his body shipped to Chicago, where he had lived fast and played hard for a number of years. There, at an undertaker's parlor, his body was put on display in a bronze casket for long lines of Blacks and whites to file past in silent tribute.

John Arthur Johnson, 68, was laid to rest next to Etta and not many foot steps from the grave of Ruby Bob Fitzsimmons in Graceland Cemetery on the North Side of Chicago.

A solid granite slab marks his grave. On it there is just one word????JOHNSON.

Never heard the doping story before. I always found it interesting how quickly Jeffries seemed to run out of steam in that fight. I just attributed it to the primative training methods used in his massive weight loss. It's hard to believe something could be given to him continuously for a week.

More likely he was not the same fighter, knew it, and cracked under the massive pressure before the fight began.

As I understand it, Jeffries did not approach Johnson at all prior to the fight. If there was a preferred corner, I'd say that it would've automatically gone to Jeff. Certainly, I doubt that Champ Johnson was even consulted re the pre fight music entertainment - "All Coons Look Alike To Me" but I suppose they did do Jack one favour (& themselves) by having all guns checked. As to the demand for Jeffries to enter last, the superstitious Johnson would've preferred entering first anyway so I guess everybody was happy on that score.

Re the doping rumour. I think I've read that it was purportedly Jeff's close buddy, Barney Oldfield, who deliberately fabricated and circulated that story with Jeff going along with same. An obvious effort to lessen the damage to Jeffries' rep after his emphatic loss to Johnson. Apparently, a depressed Jeffries went on a drinking bender with Oldfield for many months following the fight but eventually pulled himself out & got back to normal.

Jeffries quick fatigue is no brainer. For starters, he was 35 yo and almost 6 years out of the ring, ballooning up to 300+ lbs during the interim (incl. a fair intake of alchohol). Extreme pressure on him not just to return for a one off fight against HW Champ Johnson but to emerge victorious also. Tortured his body just to lose the weight and approach something looking like fighting trim. Surrounded by a somewhat deluded and useless entourage. Experienced mounting, energy sapping tension as the fight approached . If that's not enough to be getting on with, he fights in searing out door heat against a perfectly tuned and conditioned all time great HW Champ in the form of a near enough to prime Johnson. I've read that the heat was even beginning to tell on Johnson by the later rds, after which Johnson sought to end matters asap.

That Jeffries somehow kept hauling himself back out, rd after rd, is an enormous credit to the man's durability and character. .

I hope that Jeffries's comments were written for him by someone else. His discussion of his feeling of being "doped" would make excellent fodder for an attorney in a closing statement. He didn't remember a thing about the fight--but he remembers that once a punch jolted him into consciousness, and he remembers that it must have been around the sixth or seventh round. How he knows that it must have been then, aside from his memory of a fight that he cannot remember, he doesn't explain. And he knows that he was not knocked senseless, although--by his testimony--he already was senseless.

He was beaten, fair and square. It's true that he wasn't the Jim Jeffries of his prime. We can debate whether Johnson in his prime would have defeated Jeffries in his prime. (I certainly think that Johnson would have won, prime to prime--but that fight never occurred, so the outcome is at least somewhat speculative.) But I wish that Jeffries had said that, on that day when he was beaten, the fight was on the level.

GorDoom
Thanks for posting these i really enjoyed reading them.

'After packing it in, Jeffries refereed a contest between Jack Root, a mediocre heavyweight from Chicago, and Marvin Hart, another mediocre heavyweight, from Fern Creek, Kentucky, which is just a hoot and a holler from Hollow Creek. Jeffries declared Root had won by knockout and was, by his declaration, the new champion. Later, Jeffries claimed he had not declared Root anything but the winner, but no one believed him. Seven months after winning the title, Root lost to Burns, the smallest man ever to win the heavyweight title'.

I've only read the first part but if this is the standard I'm not even gonna bother with the rest. :rolleyes

You're welcome Danny. How is Rita doing?

GorDoom

didnt Marvin Hart win that fight and became champ on a 20 round or so points victory?

Yes, there are a few anomalies in the piece (footnote Hart defeated footnote Root by KO of course). How about this one:-

"During the round, Corbett was heard to cry out: "Come on now, Jeff. Let me see you do something, man. This is for the champ?eenship." Whereupon, Johnson smacked Jeffries"

Funny. That quote (not quite in the same words) has otherwise been uniformly attributed to Johnson (in his derision of Jeffries during the fight). Though I've read most of the contents before, it's still an interesting piece all the same (a patchwork job from various sources with some errant twists on the orig source facts). Certainly, I didn't stop watching Unforgiveable Blackness when it skipped Johnson's loss to Hart or incorrectly displayed a pic of Joe Walcott (Barbados) instead of Sam Langord. Simply too much rare footage to miss.

As to Jeffries admitting outright defeat on the day, at least one alleged quote more or less suggests that he did -(not verbatim) "I could never have beaten Johnson at my best, I couldn't have reached him, not in a thousand yrs. Can you ask Johnson if I can have his gloves"? Quite a unique admission in boxing but hardly evidence to suggest anything about how a prime v prime match up may've turned out (my pick - Johnson by decision or very late KO/stoppage over 20 rds). Jeffries was also attributed to have said that he wasn't a good fighter anymore and that things would've been "different" (result not defined) if the match occurred during his prime. As to the dope rumour, when Johnson's time arrived (v Willard) he didn't admit a fair & square loss either.

America On The Ropes

Reviewed by Thomas Gerbasi

Jack Johnson vs Jim Jeffries. It was an event that we’ll never see again, one that transfixed and polarized a nation, dividing the United States along racial lines while leading to riots in its immediate aftermath. All for a boxing match between a brash African-American champion and a white former champion pulled out of retirement to ‘save’ his race.

This single fight is the subject of Wayne Rozen’s coffee table book “America On The Ropes – A Pictorial History of The Johnson-Jeffries Fight”, and for a boxing fan, it’s not only a must-read, it’s a must see.


See More MaxTV Videos
It's good to be a member
“Ever since I was young and fell in love with boxing, I always thought this was the supreme underdog story,” said Rozen, a syndicated columnist for a national sports wire, as well as a guest analyst for ESPN. “With everything stacked against Johnson, how he was able to stand up to it all, perform, and be the victor, I think is still remarkable.”

Weighing in at eight pounds, this tome could act as a coffee table if you put legs on it, but if you’ve got your muscles toned up to lift it, “America On The Ropes” does a number of things – it fleshes out the stories of two of the sport’s greatest champions, gives you a look at a tumultuous nation far removed from what we see today, and it introduces you to some of the intriguing characters around the periphery of the fight that in some cases can be more interesting than the combatants themselves, such as Tex Rickard, Joe Choynski, Sig Hart, and Jack London.

It’s this exhaustive research that gives the book its punch, and Rozen has the photocopies to prove it.

“I have in my house, 30 cartons full of copies from all the old newspapers, from all the old books, from all the Police Gazettes, because that’s all that exists,” said Rozen. “There are no survivors to tell the story.”

But with reporters such as London telling the tale, you truly get a sense of what was at stake with this fight, and what America was like just after the turn of the century. It wasn’t such a pretty picture either, with racism running rampant, making you do doubletakes at some of the language being used and images being portrayed in the daily press.

“That was honest America at that time,” said Rozen. “No one ever thought of that behavior as being racist. It was so virulently racist, but that’s how everybody thought and no one thought of it as being racist.”

Johnson would even joke about it. One instance came at the contract signing for the Jeffries fight, where the room quickly became smoky from the flashbulbs that went off from the numerous cameras recording the event. Someone yelled out, “Let’s wait till the damn smoke clears out.” Johnson quickly retorted, “Lordy, do I have to clear out before I sign?”

But all levity aside, the racial component around the fight was immense, as reflected by newspaper cartoons and writers’ prose. In fact it was London who called for Jeffries to come out of retirement to beat Johnson and restore order to the heavyweight championship. Jeffries seemed to be bullied into a return, but in the end, money spoke the loudest, even if beating Johnson was going to be a longshot at best.

“I think Jeffries, when you look back at it, right from the get go knew that all the cards were stacked against him,” said Rozen. “The pressure wasn’t on Johnson; the pressure was all on Jeffries. The expectations of the country and of the white world were on Jeffries’ shoulders. I really think he didn’t do it because he wanted to be the hope of the white race; I think he did it for the money.”

It was to be a painful payday for Jeffries, who, as a mere shell of his former self, was beat down by Johnson en route to a 15th round stoppage. London, who had bet his sizeable payday from his $1 a word newspaper gig on Jeffries, wound up having to mortgage his house, and he probably wasn’t the only one.

“It showed you how much they all got taken up in this white hope thing and how nobody thought with their heads – they thought with their hearts,” said Rozen.

And going through “America on The Ropes”, you will also see the heart that Rozen poured into the book, a three-year odyssey that has produced a true collector’s item for boxing fans. Why? Not just for the compelling story and the writing, but for the true star of the book – the photos.

At 11.5 x 14, the photos in the book will have you gazing for hours and even coming back to look at little details days after finishing the final page. And while many of the shots will be familiar to boxing historians, many more have never been seen before. What these shots do is humanize two mythical figures in Johnson and Jeffries. No longer are they just snapshots from a time few of us could relate to, but the blown-up and crystal clear shots can transport them in time to where you could see both fighters competing in today’s sport.

And as far as the fight shots go, the larger shots give a true sense of what actually went on in the ring on that July day in 1910, and how Johnson toyed with the former champion, whose face told the tale as round after round he fell deeper and deeper behind. For Rozen, Johnson was a precursor of what fight fans would see in the 60’s from Muhammad Ali.

“You could not land on the guy,” he said of Johnson. “He was a safety-first fighter – there’s no question about it, but if you look at Ali’s stuff, he copied so much of what Johnson did.”

Beating Jim Jeffries was perhaps Jack Johnson’s greatest victory, yet after this watershed moment, the government would increase efforts to bring down the champion and they eventually (and wrongfully) succeeded. But nothing could take away that fight, one that would never be forgotten for its fistic and social significance.

Thankfully, we now also have the book, “America On The Ropes” to truly capture and remind us of this moment in American history.

Highly recommended.

gd- now this sounds like a great book- about how much. thanks

America On The Ropes:
A Pictorial History of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight
By Wayne A. Rozen

Reviewed by Katherine Dunn


Jack Johnson is a haunting figure in American sports.
Many of today’s fight fans first learned about the
great black champion from Muhammad Ali, who hailed
Johnson as a hero and role model. In 2005, the
remarkable two-part documentary by Ken Burns,
"Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack
Johnson" was broadcast twice by the Public
Broadcasting System. The film maker launched a
substantial movement including political and labor
leaders, as well as boxers, petitioning President Bush
to pardon Johnson from his federal conviction under
the Mann Act. Every substantial history of boxing in
America pays respects to Johnson, and to the bizarre
extravaganza that surrounded his smashing of the
original Great White Hope, Jim Jeffries, in their July
4th, 1910 bout. Still, as author Wayne Rozen notes in
his introduction, until now there has not been a book
solely about this match, which defined Johnson and
threw a harsh clear light on the racial conflict in
the United States half a century after the Civil War.

Rozen’s big new history of the famous
Johnson-Jeffries bout is a gorgeous monster in size
and content. It is packed with amazing photographs,
posters, cartoons, clippings, and other ephemera, that
help bring the men and the era to life. Rozen’s
entertaining prose paints dynamic and cranky
personalities, and the hurtling momentum of their
times. Though it is carefully researched and
documented, "America On The Ropes" reads like
adventure. We may already know the plot, and the
eventual outcome, but Rozen dishes up so much engaging
detail, so many obscure or raucous anecdotes, and such
a strong day-by-day progression toward the climax that
we live the nervy suspense as the big fight
approaches.

Rozen sets the scene in that first decade of the 20th
century with America still building its Western
states, and the economy booming in the wake of the
California and Yukon gold rushes. "High button shoes
were in style, hats were big, and a new game imported
from Great Britain, Ping-Pong, was all the rage."
Boxing was still illegal in many jurisdictions. The
telephone was gradually replacing the telegraph.
Trains carried freight and passengers all over the
country. Automobiles were beginning to appear in some
Pacific Coast cities. As Rozen writes, "America was
the land of opportunity, a land where every man had
his own shot at fame and fortune….Unless, of course,
he was black…Between 1901 and 1910, 754 blacks were
lynched in the United States…In 1910 the social and
political rights of blacks were less secure than at
any time since slavery."

In this volatile context, Rozen sketches the lives of
Johnson and of Jim Jeffries, and of the dashing
promoter, Tex Rickard, who orchestrated the historic
clash. The story gathers steam as the stalwart
heavyweight champion, Jeffries retires, having
enforced the color bar and refused to allow any black
fighter to challenge for the title. When the Canadian
Tommy Burns took the championship, Johnson chased him
to Europe--enduring humiliations remarkable even for
that era--and then to Australia.

Burns had defended the title twice in Australia,
defeating local boys in shows promoted by tough Hugh
McIntosh. Buoyed by his popularity with the Aussies,
and convinced by McIntosh’s offer of the
then-substantial $30,000, Burns agreed to let Johnson
challenge for the championship. Johnson was so eager
that he accepted the promoter’s offer of $5,000 for
the match but he was so grieved at the disparity in
pay that in the dressing room on the day of the fight,
Johnson threatened to back out of the fight and
demanded more money. McIntosh ended the dispute by
putting a gun to Johnson’s head.

On Dec. 26th, 1908, Johnson toyed with the out-classed
Tommy Burns. The most significant character watching
in the huge crowd was the American writer, Jack
London. Stopping off in Australia on his way home from
covering the Russo-Japanese War for American
newspapers, London had a contract to cover the fight
for the New York Herald. London was as racist as most
people in those days, and his description of the white
champion’s humiliation at the hands of Johnson seemed
to blanket North America in a matter of days. The
crucial paragraph was London’s final plea for Jim
Jeffries to come out of retirement and "remove that
smile from Johnson’s face." This inflammatory article
and the press that followed powered the storm that
drove Jeffries and the nation to the events in Reno,
Nevada on July 4th, 1910.

Rozen’s history includes the entire London article,
which takes on malicious heft given the surrounding
circumstances. The saga that follows introduces dozens
of clashing or conniving characters including the ring
royalty in Jeffries corner---Joe Choynski, J.J.
Corbett, Bob Armstrong, Farmer Burns, and others---the
former greats then wielding ink for the press—John L.
Sullivan, Stanley Ketchel—and a swarm of politicians
and gamblers, promoters and profiteers. It’s a rich
cast, whose many sub-plots and rivalries Rozen plays
out in zesty specifics.

Rozen’s wonderful description of the Johnson-Jeffries
bout itself is illustrated by an impressive series of
round-by-round photographs of the ring action. The
aftermath is swiftly dealt with, but the author
sketches each of the fighters lives to their end. The
book concludes with the popular Mutt and Jeff cartoon
strips that ran on the funny pages of the nation’s
daily papers in the weeks leading up to and following
the Johnson-Jeffries match. The gritty ink comedians
play out their shady triumphs and absurd catastrophes
on the way to and from the big fight—a wry mirror for
a grand, if grotesque, folly.

America On The Ropes:
A Pictorial History of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight
By Wayne A. Rozen
Pub. 2005 By Casey Press, Binghamton, NY
323 pages
Hardcover, 11 3/4 inches by 14 1/2 inches

Sportsbooks: Johnson's struggle
By Andrew Baker
(Filed: 22/12/2005)


Here are the components of a heavyweight boxer's life: early hardship, exceptional talent and strength, national and world titles, fame, adulation and wealth, fast cars, fast women, booze, bling, jail and ruin.

Mike Tyson, right? That recipe would certainly sum up the former champion. But another great boxer trod a similar path many years before Tyson, and many would argue that Jack Johnson's achievements were greater than any of his successors as world heavyweight champion. Because Johnson fought not only his opponents, but prejudice so vehement and widespread that it beggars contemporary belief.

The title of Geoffrey C Ward's biography, Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico, £8.99) sums up, in a phrase, Johnson's plight. While his achievements in the early years of the last century should have brought him the affection of his nation, the majority of the population of the United States at that time could not bring themselves to see beyond the colour of his skin.

The scale of the hatred stirred up by promoters, politicians and the media against a great champion is breathtaking, but the book is much more than a sorry tale of one individual's struggle against a dysfunctional society.

Ward is a distinguished and diligent historian, and he has mined original sources to tremendous effect. The detail is dazzling (the footnotes alone would make up a worthwhile volume) but the prose zips along, and the reader has less time to draw breath than many of Johnson's unfortunate opponents.

Arthur John (Jack) Johnson was born into poverty in Galveston, Texas, on March 31, 1878. Both his parents were former slaves. In later life he would embellish tales of his youth, but there seems little doubt that the growing Jack turned his hand to every menial trade in town.

He soon discovered that his most valuable assets were his fists, and he rapidly graduated from street fights to reputable contests. Soon his fame was such that the greatest heavyweights, including champion Jim Jeffries, were forced to play the 'race card' to avoid him.

Eventually, on July 4, 1910, Johnson and Jeffries were brought together in Reno, Nevada, to fight for the undisputed world heavyweight title. Johnson destroyed his brutal and braggartly opponent, a result that caused a sensation across America and far further afield.

Johnson earned at least $100,000 from the fight and might have retired, at 32, to a life of ease and luxury. Instead he resumed a peripatetic existence, travelling wherever there was a purse and a promoter, and felling a long series of 'Great White Hopes'.

There was more to the champion than his ability in the ring. He was a man of culture, elegance and eloquence, which would later serve him well on the vaudeville circuit.

While his fame would always guarantee a full house, Johnson's declining years took on the tone of a tragic soap opera. He remained a party animal to the end (in this respect, at least, he makes Tyson look an amateur) but it was his powerful libido that laid him low.

His girlfriends and wives were numerous and often concurrent, and one of his spouses killed herself. Shortly afterwards, Johnson was arrested for transporting a teenage (but not under-age) girlfriend across a state line. He fled to Paris, but later returned to serve a prison sentence.

Johnson was still boxing in exhibition matches into his sixties, and he never lost his taste for the fast life. He died in June 1946, when he wrapped his powerful Lincoln Zephyr around a telegraph pole.

This is the first British publication of a book which was acclaimed in the United States last year. It deserves an audience far beyond fans of the ring game: I will be surprised if a better sporting biography is published in the next 12 months.

asm far as the doping of jeff and his remarks on; through at least the 20s if not until he died; he gave that excuse. jeff was a great fighter but also something of a blowhard; he was not a modest man.imo

According to the December 28, 2005 edition of
the Hollywood Reporter, the Librarian of the
U.S. Congress added twenty-five films to
the National Film Registry, including the
1910 JEFFRIES-JOHNSTON WORLD'S
CHAMPIONSHIP BOXING CONTEST.
"Congress created the registry in 1989
to preserve films of cutural, historical,
and artistic significance. Selection in the
National Fil Registry singles out films for
preservation either in the Library of Congress's
own archive or facilities elsewhere."

- Chuck Johnston

After neary a century, Johnson film gets noticed

By MIKE LACKEY from Lima News.com



One of the year-end rituals that sometimes gets lost amid the holiday hoopla is the annual announcement of the latest additions to the National Film Registry. The registry, created in 1989, recognizes “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant films that should be preserved for future generations. By now, the 425 films on the registry represent a cinematic tour of American life in the 20th century.
This year’s selections, announced last week, span “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams” and the cult classic “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Also listed are 13 min-utes of footage showing the destruction from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Perhaps the strangest new entry is “Mom and Dad.” An exploitation flick promoted as an exercise in sex education, “Mom and Dad” was one of the top grossing films of the 1940s.
But the most noteworthy cultural artifact on the latest list might be the film record of the 1910 heavyweight champi-onship fight between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, described as “the most widely discussed and written-about mo-tion picture” until the appearance in 1915 of “The Birth of a Nation.”
That is no overstatement. To many Americans 95 years ago, it was unimaginable that a black man could publicly beat up a white man and get away with it. That he could be richly rewarded for his efforts was scandalous.
That the grisly spectacle could be filmed and exhibited all over the country left many people positively aghast.
Johnson was the first black claimant to boxing’s heavyweight title. He won it from an overmatched Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. Jeffries, the unbeaten former champion coaxed out of retirement at age 35, was the great white hope counted on to redeem the honor of his race and restore order to a society that seemed in danger of being turned upside down.
Instead, Johnson systematically demolished Jeffries with a relentless onslaught of “jabs, jolts and uppercuts,” finally finishing him off in the 15th round.
The owners of the movie rights figured they had a property worth $1 million — the equivalent of nearly $20 million today, and eight times what the bout’s promoters took in at the gate. But within two days, the moviemakers were embroiled in a legal battle for the right to show their film.
Steps were taken to ban the film not only throughout the South but also locally or statewide in Illinois, Pennsylva-nia, Wisconsin, New Jersey and elsewhere. In some places, exhibitors were arrested. Even where screenings were allowed, police stood ready to shut down theaters in the event of what was termed “race trouble.”
Johnson did nothing to calm the uproar. He attended a showing in Brooklyn, as he said, eager to see himself “whip Jeffries on the screen.”
“I really did the job up brown, and the pictures show every blow landed,” he said afterward. He was “much amused,” he added, watching the expressions on his face as he teased and ridiculed James J. Corbett, another ex-champ who had helped to prepare Jeffries for the fight.
White reporters who saw the film were moved mainly by the sight of Jeffries trying “as though his heart would break” in a vain effort to vanquish “the great gorilla-like Negro.” To a writer who attended a private viewing at the home of Tex Rickard, the fight’s promoter, Jeffries “seemed bewildered by the black shadow forever dancing before him.”
Soon, Congress was considering how to protect Americans from the sight of a black man walloping the daylights out of a white man. In 1912, President Taft signed a bill outlawing interstate trafficking in prizefight films.
Showing such films remained illegal until 1940.
It’s remarkable the film of Johnson and Jeffries survives. According to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, up to 90 percent of all movies made before 1920 are lost.
In this instance, we got lucky

how much of Johnson Jeffies made it?