The Great White Hopes (24 page)

Squires stayed on in Ireland for a match with the loser Jem Roche, but, as both men had been knocked out in the first round by Burns, their bout was not well attended. Squires won on a fourth-round knockout and followed Tommy Burns to Paris for their rematch.

The second contest, held on 13 June 1908, was much better than their first abortive effort. However, it almost did not take place, because promoter Hugh McIntosh moved heaven and earth in a vain effort to steal the bout for Australia, where he knew it would draw a huge crowd.

Burns won the Paris fight in eight rounds, though not before he had been sent staggering in the fourth round and then dropped for a short count in the seventh. But, after regrouping, Burns connected with a hard blow to the body and Squires was unable to get up before the count of ten.

McIntosh hurried back to Australia, where he presented the local newspapers with an eyewitness account of the Paris bout, in which, he declared with a straight face, Burns had been most fortunate to win. The reporters fell for his account and used many inches of column space to tell their readers how close the Australian had been to gaining the world championship in France.

When Burns arrived in Australia, he played along with the prematch publicity, declaring that Squires was a worthy opponent and a credit to his country. For his part Squires averred that the champion had hit him harder than any other man he had met. A large crowd greeted Squires at the station when he arrived in Sydney for his final training sessions, and 15,000 spectators bought tickets for the third meeting between the two, which would be the first contest for the World Heavyweight Championship to be held on Australian soil.

Again Squires fought bravely, but the much smaller Burns was too much for him. The Australian built up a slight lead over the first few rounds and then the champion began closing him down. Burns’s style was unspectacular but effective and his body punches had Squires clinching and gasping for breath. In the thirteenth round Burns knocked Squires down three times. The towel was thrown in from the Australian’s corner, just as a police inspector at ringside was demanding that the bout be stopped.

Less than two weeks later, Burns fought the ever-optimistic Bill Lang in Melbourne. This time 19,000 hopeful fans crowded the arena. Before the fight could get under way, the canny Burns declared that he had forgotten an essential elastic support for his injured forearm. Lang’s handlers let the champion get away with his ploy and the nervous Australian had to wait while one of Burns’s men went back to the hotel to fetch the bandage.

When the fight finally started, the big-punching Lang caused a sensation when he floored a casual champion with a heavy left hook. This acted as a wake-up call for Burns. He boxed cautiously until his head had cleared and then dismissed all thoughts of carrying Lang for the sake of his supporters. Burns moved in viciously. He knocked his opponent down four times and, in the sixth round, Lang’s seconds threw in the towel.

There followed a momentary pause in the Australian heavyweight scene. Both of their hopes had been beaten by Burns, while Squires had also been hammered by Jack Johnson. In fact, the only bright spot on the Australian boxing horizon in 1908 had been the success of their amateur middleweight champion Reginald (Snowy) Baker in the London Olympics. Baker had won three fights in a single day to reach the final, where he had been matched against an England cricketer, J.W.H.T. Douglas. Baker had lost a thrilling bout on points to win the silver medal, but back home it was regarded as a moral victory, as the referee for the contest had been Douglas’s father.

For the two Australian heavyweights a certain amount of cautious consolidation was considered necessary before they were launched upon the world scene once again. When the furore following the Jack Johnson–Tommy Burns fight at Rushcutters Bay had died down, the rebuilding of the local big men got under way. In the following year Bill Lang was matched against former world heavyweight champion Bob Fitzsimmons. The Englishman was brought to Australia by Hugh D. McIntosh, who took over the mantle of Fitzsimmons’s manager for the duration of his stay, while Tommy Burns was recruited as the Englishman’s chief second.

Fitzsimmons was 47 years old. He had been boxing professionally for some twenty-eight years and had practically given up the sport to concentrate on his variety tours. Even so,
Boxing
optimistically gave the veteran a chance, pointing out Lang’s comparative lack of experience: ‘he has only been in the game since 1905’.

The bout was held at the Rushcutters Bay arena on 27 December 1909. It was scheduled over twenty rounds and billed as a fight for the heavyweight championship of Australia. In front of 12,000 people, the former world champion established a slight lead over the first few rounds but then succumbed to Lang’s power of punch. By the twelfth round Fitzsimmons was reeling around the ring, cut and bleeding. A hard blow sent the Cornishman reeling back to the ropes. He dropped his guard and Lang hesitated, unwilling to strike a defenceless man, but the proud Fitzsimmons beckoned him in.

Reluctantly, the Australian approached and hit his semi-conscious opponent with a light tap to the jaw. It was sufficient to send the English fighter to the ground, where he remained until the count had been tolled over him.

When he had recovered Fitzsimmons walked unsteadily to the ropes and addressed the sympathetic crowd. ‘I’m through,’ he declared. ‘I will never box again.’

The
Philadelphia Evening Star
of 27 December wrote sympathetically of the loser, ‘Though Fitz trained faithfully he lacked his old punch and cunning. Had it not been for the fact that Lang was a trifle awed in meeting a man of Fitz’s reputation, he would have finished the old man in half the time.’

A week later Bob Fitzsimmons was the guest of honour at another Sydney boxing tournament. Between bouts he was summoned into the ring and presented with a gold card case by Bill Lang on behalf of the local boxing fans. Fitzsimmons made a gracious little speech in which he wished Lang well for the future. Later that night the veteran sat up late in his hotel room with the young Australian heavyweight and Billy Williams, his manager, reminiscing about his fighting career and showing the younger fighter his favourite punches.

Although the Fitzsimmons bout was a meaningless one, it rehabilitated Lang in the eyes of his followers. Australian fans pointed out that he was still only 25, had never fought abroad, and that his two defeats had been at the hands of Johnson and Burns, the best men in the world at the time. Lang, it was decided, was definitely a White Hope and should be groomed for another shot at Jack Johnson.

These hopes suffered a blow in April 1910, when Tommy Burns made a comeback and was matched in Sydney with Lang for the British Empire Heavyweight Championship. Again Burns defeated Lang, this time over twenty rounds.

However, the ex-blacksmith reinforced his supporters’ hopes for him when he three times knocked out Bill Squires to assert his claim as Australia’s leading heavyweight. Apart from one abortive comeback attempt years later in 1916, Squires retired from the ring. He lived on to a hearty old age, dying in 1962 at 83 years old.

Lang was taken up by the ever-hopeful McIntosh, who escorted his White Hope to the USA, boosting him as the fighter who had beaten one former world champion, the elderly Fitzsimmons, and put up stern fights against two others, Burns and Johnson. However, the Australian’s putative attempt to establish himself as a slightly passé contender soon foundered. In fact, Lang’s main claim to fame on his visit to the States lay in being an unwitting central figure in a fistic scandal.

He was matched with former middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, now a burnt-out case at the age of 24 and increasingly reliant on his manager Wilson Mizner putting the fix in with potential opponents. There was an uproar when Ketchel suddenly pulled out of the bout, claiming a sore foot. The
New York Telegraph
caused a scandal when it published an interview with Lang’s manager, Hugh D. McIntosh, in which the latter claimed that he had refused to post a bond of $5,000 guaranteeing that Lang would not attempt to knock Ketchel out.

The article in the
Telegraph
killed any thoughts of a Lang–Ketchel bout. Instead, the Australian was matched against Al Kaufmann in Philadelphia. This was almost exactly a year after the San Francisco heavyweight had been humiliated by Jack Johnson in their tenround, no-decision bout. Since then, Kaufmann had been outclassed in a couple of no-decision contests against Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and had the ignominy of being recruited as one of Johnson’s sparring partners in the champion’s preparation for his title bout with James J. Jeffries in Reno.

No one considered the shot Kaufmann to be a White Hope any more, but merely a trial horse for aspirants to the cherished inner circle of good white big men. Lang was expected to knock out his tall opponent with little trouble. Instead he struggled over the course of a turgid six-round, no-decision bout with the Californian giant. True to prizefighting form, the Australian blamed his poor showing on an injured hand. In an interview with the
Police Gazette
of 21 January 1911, Lang claimed, ‘An injured hand prevented me from beating him. I almost had him out in the second round and could have finished him if I had been able to use my right hand. He saved himself by clutching me around the neck until the bell rang.’

When it became evident that Lang would not draw flies in the USA, McIntosh decided on one more throw of the dice in an effort to establish the Melbourne man. He took him to England and matched the Australian with the wildly eccentric Irishman, Petty Officer ‘Nutty’ Curran, for the Heavyweight Championship of the British Empire. Curran was a battered adherent of the Iron Hague laissez-faire school of training who boasted that he had never met an opponent who could get past his face.

Lang knocked Curran down in the first round but was disqualified when his follow-up blow struck the dazed Irishman while he was still in the act of rising from the canvas. But he redeemed himself slightly with a knockout win over American Jack Burns, and McIntosh decided to give his increasingly tarnished White Hope one last chance. In 1911, he matched Lang against Sam Langford at Olympia in London. Sports writer Trevor Wignall, present at the bout, described the build-up to the fight in his book
The Story of Boxing.
‘The contest was boomed to such an extent that it was the only thing talked about for weeks. Lang had arrived in London with the reputation of being a world-beater.’

McIntosh did his best to publicise the fight by writing a letter to the
Baltimore American
of 14 January: ‘I have just matched Sam Langford and Bill Lang, and I will endeavour to match the winner against Johnson. I will give it as my opinion now that Lang is the man destined to meet Jack Johnson for the championship of the world, and you can place me on record that Bill Lang will be the next world’s champion. I feel certain of this. He has improved out of all recognition.’

Sam Langford and Bill Lang went into training in London, but neither was of much use to their promoter when it came to building up their contest in advance. Langford had good reason to be wary of too much contact with white people and refused to attend any social functions with them, while Lang was too bashful to do more than utter a few non-committal grunts when interviewed by the press. Andrew Soutar, a sports writer who tried to interview the Australian, gave up in disgust when Lang would only reply with the words ‘Oh, yeah!’ to any question.

Nevertheless, the promotion was the most glamorous boxing tournament ever seen in England up to that time. Aided by ex-lightweight Jimmy Britt, who interrupted his vaudeville career to undertake publicity for the contest, McIntosh pulled out all the stops. On the night of 14 February the ringside glittered with men in dress shirts and white ties and bejewelled women in evening gowns. Stewards, many of them old fighters, looked incongruous in tight white linen jackets with gilt buttons, while pretty girls sold programmes.

To help the film cameras and hopefully enhance the visual effect, Langford had been issued with a set of white boxing gloves. The black fighter was extremely suspicious of this departure from the norm, but as usual philosophically went along with his white boss’s whims. A military band played both men into the ring.

During the preliminaries Lang, at 6ft tall and weighing 14 stone, towered over his opponent, outweighing Langford by 2 stone. From the first bell, the Australian was nowhere in the fight. Andrew Soutar, watching from ringside, wrote of Lang in his autobiography
My Sporting Life,
‘He was like a rabbit fascinated by a stoat. The little black walked straight up to him arms down by his side . . .’ Lang tried to keep his smaller opponent at the end of his left jab, but did not have the experience to deal with Langford’s in-fighting style. Totally outclassed, Lang was knocked down in the second round and again in the third and the sixth. James Butler described Lang as spending the best part of each round bent almost double in an attempt to escape Langford’s punches. At one point Langford even dropped his arms to his sides and stuck out his chin invitingly. Lang struck him on his unprotected jaw with no fewer than four consecutive blows. Langford only laughed and turned to wink at his seconds.

Towards the end of the sixth round Langford moved in for the kill. He swung his right, overbalanced and fell to the floor. Lang lashed out automatically in return. His glove slid across the top of his fallen opponent’s skull. It was a travesty of a real punch, but the referee Eugene Corri stepped forward and disqualified the Australian for hitting his opponent while he was down. Afterwards Corri said that he was only too pleased to have an excuse to bring the bout to an end before Lang got seriously hurt. He may have been right, for Lang collapsed in his corner before he could leave the ring. Langford chatted idly with his seconds and before he returned to his dressing room ostentatiously smoked a cigar.

As a fight it had been too one-sided to be interesting. Censoriously, Trevor Wignall reported from the ringside that Lang ‘was scared stiff when he entered the ring, and his display would not have done credit to a schoolboy’.