The Great White Hopes (32 page)

Frank Moran, the possessor of the notorious ‘Mary Anne’ punch, followed his friend Kennedy to Hollywood, but had to be content with small parts. He survived a minor conviction for smuggling bootleg booze during Prohibition. The hulking Al Kaufman also drifted out to the West Coast and secured minor roles in such movies as
Daredevil Jack,
a serial starring Jack Dempsey.

After Al Palzer had lost his White Heavyweight title to Luther McCarty in 1913, disconsolately he returned to his parents’ farm in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. As a 12-year-old, Palzer had run away from home to start an itinerant life, but after achieving fame in the ring had become reconciled with his family. After his return home in 1914, one day his 60-year-old father Henry, after a day of heavy drinking, picked a quarrel with his wife. He then produced a gun and started shooting wildly. Mrs Palzer received two bullet wounds in her arms. Al Palzer tried to wrestle the weapon from his father. It went off again and Palzer was shot in the stomach. Bleeding badly, he ran a mile and a half to the local hospital. He died there the next day, on 25 July 1914, fourteen months after the death in the ring of Luther McCarty. His father was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for manslaughter.

Lantern-jawed Arthur Pelkey, who had first been spotted and taken up by Tommy Burns after fighting a draw with Kent Salisbury in Boston in 1910, never won another fight after the death of McCarty in their Calgary bout. He died at the age of 37 of sleeping sickness. To the end he suffered from nightmares featuring the lifeless form of McCarty at his feet. His manager Tommy Burns, who inadvertently had sparked off the White Hope campaign by losing his title to Jack Johnson at Rushcutters Bay, had his last fight in 1920 at the age of 39. Flabby and out of condition, he used a frontman to promote a fight against the English champion Joe Beckett. Burns was stopped in seven rounds but cleared £4,000. He used part of the proceedings to buy a public house in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England. Later he operated a speakeasy in New York. He lost most of his money in the American stock-market crash. In the 1930s he became an itinerant minister of religion in California, calling himself ‘a paratrooper of the Lord’.

To the end the Canadian fired off indignant letters to the press in an attempt to correct the impression that Johnson had outclassed him during their Sydney bout. He died a pauper in 1955.

The massive and cheerful former Olympic wrestling champion Con O’Kelly opened a gymnasium in his adopted home of Hull. For years he could be heard exhorting his young charges, ‘Come on, lads, learn and train hard! It’s good for the soul!’ In the 1930s he accompanied his son, Con Junior, also a heavyweight and a former Olympic wrestler, on a tour of the USA. Con Junior had a reasonably successful career and then abandoned the fight game to become a priest, to the enormous pride of his father.

O’Kelly’s fellow countryman Jim Coffey, the Roscommon Giant, saved enough money from his bouts to be able to return to his beloved Ireland, where he purchased a farm and lived out his life in contentment. His 1959 Associated Press obituary stated accurately enough, ‘Jim Coffey, an amiable giant whose skill in the ring never matched his courage and determination, was one of the prize-ring figures who came close to the top but never made it.’

The South African Lodewikus van Vuuren, better known as George ‘Boer’ Rodel, was not as fortunate. He remained in New York after retiring from the ring, where the best work he could obtain was as a longshoreman. Perhaps even this was preferable to being paraded up and down a roadway in an old army greatcoat as a war hero by the scheming and unscrupulous Jimmy Johnston. Rodel died in 1955, at the age of 67.

Gunboat Smith, another former White Heavyweight titleholder, went on too long and lost his last two fights on first-round knockouts. One of these summary defeats was to Harry Greb, known as the ‘Human Windmill’. Greb gained an unfair advantage at the opening bell by promptly sticking his thumb into the Gunboat’s eye, and while his opponent was temporarily blinded he brought over a crushing right hand to finish the bout and Smith’s boxing career. The big man then became a top-class referee.

One bout at which he officiated was between his former opponent, Harry Greb, and Tiger Flowers for the world middleweight title. When both fighters came out to receive their pre-match instructions from Smith in the centre of the ring, Greb said cheerfully to the referee, ‘Hello, Gunboat, old pal!’ Smith, remembering the illegal thumbing incident, growled, ‘Where do you get that “old pal” stuff?’

Greb returned to his corner in a chastened mood, fully expecting to get the worst of any forthcoming decisions. At the end of the bout the two judges voted for Flowers. Gunboat Smith decided in favour of the man who had almost blinded him.

Tom Cowler, who had so impressed James J. Corbett when the latter saw him fight on one of his theatrical tours of Canada, never recovered from a beating by Jack ‘the Giant-Killer’ Dillon, who gave the Cumbrian 6 inches in height and almost 3 stone in weight and finished him off in two rounds. Cowler returned to England after the war, had a few more contests and died at the age of 59.

Jim Flynn, ‘the Pueblo Fireman’, who fearlessly fought them all, from Johnson to Dempsey, over an incredible 27-year period from 1903 until 1930, drove a cab in Phoenix when he gave up the ring. He would never be drawn on accusations that a destitute and desperate Jack Dempsey had gone into the tank in their first encounter in 1917, when Flynn had surprisingly won in the first round. After his retirement the Fireman suffered problems with his eyesight and died a poor man, at the age of 55, in 1935.

George Hackenschmidt retired from the wrestling ring, became a naturalised French citizen and lived to a great age. He wrote books on philosophy and became a guru on healthy living. In his eighties he was still working out with weights and running 7 miles several times a week.

Jess Willard, the White Hope who finally defeated Jack Johnson, did not have an easy time of it as champion. Not long after winning the title he was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons when he went to see the escapologist Harry Houdini perform at the Orpheum Theatre. When invited to come down onto the stage to represent the audience as an observer, the heavyweight champion sullenly refused to do so. This led to an altercation between the two men. It ended with Houdini, relishing the publicity he knew would ensue, shouting prophetically to the giant from the stage, ‘Remember this, I will be Harry Houdini when you are not the heavyweight champion of the world.’

Willard fled the theatre. Houdini’s agent started telephoning the newspapers. The next morning the headline of the
Los Angeles Times
read, ‘2000 Hiss J. Willard. Champion Driven From Theatre by Hoots and Calls’.

Willard made money touring with circuses and Wild West shows and in 1916 fought ten rounds with Frank Moran at Madison Square Garden in New York. The one unusual feature of this exercise in tedium was that it was the only World Heavyweight Championship bout in which no official decision was rendered. Willard received the newspaper verdicts, but Grantland Rice summed up the feelings of most present when he wrote that if the Willard–Moran bout was supposed to be brutal, ‘then dancing should be stopped on account of its innate cruelty and savagery. There are times when even an expert cannot tell which of the two sports is under way.’

Willard was an unpopular champion. Not only did he refuse to join the armed forces at a time of war, but he would not even box exhibitions for the troops. In 1919, he defended his title for Tex Rickard, making a comeback as a promoter. In their bout at Toledo, Ohio, the champion was slaughtered by Jack Dempsey, the best fighter around. Willard was floored seven times in the first round by the savage challenger, but lasted until the interval after the third round, when he retired. After the bout, clad in his baggy street clothes, alone and forsaken by his backers, Willard emerged from his dressing room into the almost empty stadium. Still semi-conscious and half-blind, he felt his way along the wooden fence, looking for a way out. He was discovered by reporter Charles MacArthur, later a Broadway playwright. Tenderly McArthur guided Willard to a taxi and took him back to his hotel.

The ex-heavyweight champion made a comeback four years later and was knocked out in eight rounds by South American Luis Firpo, who was then being groomed for a tilt at Dempsey’s championship. Later Willard abandoned ranching and went into real estate, earning extra cash by refereeing fixed all-in wrestling matches. He died in 1968 at the age of 86.

Many of the promoters and managers involved in the White Hope campaign remained unscathed in boxing for many years, but Hugh D. McIntosh, who had promoted the Jack Johnson–Tommy Burns bout in 1908, was not one of them. The Australian became disillusioned with the politics of boxing. In 1913 he gave up his lease on the Rushcutters Bay stadium. For a time he became a theatrical impresario and then opened a chain of milk bars in Britain. Eventually everything went wrong and he died in straitened circumstances.

Tex Rickard linked up with the new star, Jack Dempsey, and went on to become the leading promoter of his day, taking over Madison Square Garden. He survived a messy and highly publicised court case, being found not guilty of a charge of the rape of a 15-year-old girl. He died in 1929, at the age of 58, following an operation for appendicitis.

A character witness at Rickard’s trial had been Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, the millionaire banker who had backed Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. He remained on the periphery of boxing. At the age of 41, in 1917, he joined the Marine Corps and persuaded the authorities to include boxing in the basic training programme. He remained in the Marine Reserves, and, a decade after O’Brien’s fight with Johnson, Major Biddle enjoyed his finest hour before the Willard–Dempsey title match when he led a squad of Marines in an enthusiastic display of arms drill in the ring before the main bout. Biddle and his Marines’ heavy boots caused so much damage to the floor that the canvas had to be replaced before the bout could get under way.

Later, Biddle used his connections to obtain a post teaching unarmed combat to FBI agents. He also published a book on the subject, entitled
Do or Die
. Soldiers who had actually fought for their lives in the trenches said that the manual was virtually useless.

He became the subject of a stage show and a subsequent 1967 Walt Disney film,
The Happiest Millionaire,
in which he was portrayed by Fred MacMurray as a bumbling, well-meaning but ineffectual head of a wealthy household.

Jimmy Johnston kept on wheeling and dealing, but he never found his heavyweight hope. Instead, he managed a slew of champions at lighter weights, including middleweight Harry Greb, welterweight Ted Kid Lewis, and Johnny Dundee at featherweight. Perhaps his greatest moment came when he capitalised on the enthusiasm for boxing in Chinatown and persuaded an Irish fighter called Patrick Mulligan to have a pudding-basin haircut, dye his skin yellow and fight as Ah Chung, the lightweight champion of China.

Wilson Mizner remained an enthusiastic ringside spectator, but managed no more fighters, finding none who could give him the same charge that wild Stan Ketchel had done. He filled the gaps between his major activities of gambling and drinking by being a card sharp on transatlantic liners, collaborating in the writing of several successful Broadway plays, engaging in a major real-estate scam in Florida and supplying dialogue to order for Hollywood gangster movies.

Jack Curley made little money from organising the Johnson–Willard championship bout in Cuba, and when Rickard took over the reins of New York boxing promotion he drifted out of the game and back into professional wrestling. He scored a minor victory over Rickard when he succeeded in a legal injunction to prevent the Texan putting on wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden, because these would compete with Curley’s own New York promotions. He upset other competitors by ingratiating himself with the wealthy philanthropist Mrs William Randolph Hearst, co-staging charity tournaments with her to provide pasteurised milk for poor children, and securing the backing of her influential husband’s newspapers. In time, Curley was eased out of the wrestling scene by younger, and even more ruthless, competitors. He died in 1937, a wealthy man, on his Long Island estate.

Billy McCarney, who had managed Luther McCarty and had turned down the opportunity to handle Jack Johnson as soon as the champion started asking for loans, continued in boxing for many years. As late as the 1930s he was still wheeling and dealing. At an age when most men would have been enjoying retirement, he was observed trying to steal future world champion Max Schmeling from his rightful German manager, probably just to keep his hand in.

Gabby Dumb Dan Morgan remained a part of the boxing scene until he was in his eighties, outliving his White Hope Battling Levinsky by many years. In the Second World War he discovered his niche, touring military camps, sometimes in tandem with Jack Johnson, giving talks on the history of the fight game to enlisted men. He had a low opinion of modern heavyweights compared with the giants of the White Hope era. His view was shared by Johnson. On one occasion the old manager asked the ageing ex-champion why he did not abandon his flea circus to train and manage a modern heavyweight. Johnson shook his head in disgust. ‘These fleas can think better than the heavyweights around today,’ he snorted. Dan Morgan died in 1955, at the age of 82. Until his last years he was still being employed by promoters to ballyhoo their shows.

Tom O’Rourke had promoted the very first White Hope tournaments in 1911 and had managed the winner, Al Palzer. He died at the age of 84 on 19 June 1936, in the dressing room of Max Schmeling just before the German’s first bout with Joe Louis. O’Rourke had been visiting Schmeling, when he simply collapsed and died. His body remained shrouded in blankets on the rubbing table in the dressing room while the phlegmatic Schmeling went out to defeat Louis. Immediately before his death, O’Rouke had sued the New York Boxing Commission for depriving him of his judge’s licence on the grounds that he was too old.