The Great White Hopes (5 page)

Unfortunately for the Englishman, a wily local promoter called Billy McCarney had joined in the managerial scramble to find a White Hope. He had a secret prospect hidden away and was planning to match his hopeful with Cox in the near future. His heavyweight’s name was Jess Willard, known as the Pottawatomie Giant, a man of 6ft 5in in height and weighing 18 stone. Willard was slow and clumsy and at this stage almost completely untutored in the fistic arts. However, he was terribly strong and the possessor of a hard and extremely long left jab. He had won a few contests, but so far he had been kept under wraps and the ingenuous McLaglen had not heard of him.

Knowing of McLaglen’s inglorious fighting record, McCarney proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that McLaglen first fight a few rounds in the gym with Willard. If he acquitted himself well, promised the promoter, he would consider matching the Englishman against Joe Cox in a public contest.

It was not what McLaglen had been expecting, but he agreed to come back later and face Willard. As soon as the Englishman had left, McCarney spread the word that his giant was about to be let loose on a mug, albeit one who had fought the world champion only a couple of years earlier. When McLaglen returned, he found to his amazement that the gymnasium was packed to capacity. McCarney had charged fifty cents a head for eager locals to witness the slaughter. When he saw Willard for the first time, McLaglen must have wondered if he had been taken for a sucker. Willard, a former cowboy, had to duck his head to get through the door, and the breadth of his shoulders seemed to blot out the sunlight streaming in through the window.

Nevertheless, the bishop’s son did his best. He bundled in gamely to Willard, only to discover that there seemed no way past the big man’s telescopic left jab. When Willard finally unloaded a couple of devastating rights in the fourth round, McLaglen realised how badly he had been had. He quit on the spot and reeled bloodily away from the gymnasium, to the jeers of the spectators.

It was not quite the end of Victor McLaglen’s boxing career. Over the next few years, whenever he was out of work, he would summon up his resolve and grimly return to the ring.

To his credit, one of McLaglen’s victories was over a very useful second-rank heavyweight called Dan ‘Porky’ Flynn. During the course of a long career Flynn fought a number of the top White Hopes, including Carl Morris, Gunboat Smith, Boer Rodel and Battling Levinsky. He knocked out Rodel and went the distance with the others, so this victory by McLaglen was easily the Englishman’s outstanding ring achievement.

In 1912, to Victor’s great chagrin, another of the bishop’s siblings tried to get in on the act. This was the 6ft-8in-tall Leopold McLaglen, a drifter like his brothers, but more of a chancer than the others. He turned up in Milwaukee, falsely claiming to be the heavyweight ju-jitsu champion of the world. Down on his luck, a condition not unfamiliar to the McLaglens, Leopold tried to drum up interest in his unsuccessful stage act by challenging any boxer or wrestler in the USA to meet him in the ring. In the meantime he was forced to earn a crust by working as a cinema doorman.

None of this would have bothered Victor in the slightest had it not been for the fact that in his advertising material Leopold was appropriating the forenames of his two better-known fighting brothers, calling himself Victor Fred McLaglen, and claiming to have been the member of the family who had gone six rounds with Jack Johnson. To make matters worse, Leopold’s challenge was taken up by a very experienced heavyweight called Fireman Jim Flynn, who thrashed the inept Leopold McLaglen in a couple of rounds.

Victor was shocked by his brother’s chicanery and the brazen manner in which Leopold had attempted to steal his thunder. Without mentioning his treacherous brother by name, he fired off an indignant letter to the
Milwaukee Free Press,
which was printed on 10 March.

Plaza Theater, San Antonio, Texas, 6 March 1912:
Sporting Editor, Free Press.

To my surprise today I take up a paper and in the sporting column I note that they are advertising a fighter in Milwaukee who is taking the name of Vic McLaghlen [
sic
] and claims to be the first man to have fought Jack Johnson after he won the championship from Tommy Burns.

Now I wish to say that this man is an imposter and that he is taking my name and that I was the party that fought Johnson in Vancouver, 10 March, 1909. I am now in vaudeville, playing the interstate circuit.

The idea is this: I get the credit of taking that awful licking from Flynn, when I am hundreds of miles from Milwaukee. You might recollect I played the Crystal Theater in your town last summer under the name of Romano, doing a statue act and showing the various punches of famous fighters. You would do the public and myself a lot of good if you expose this imposter.

Victor M’Laghlen (of Romano Brothers)

By now Victor was 26 and tiring of fighting. Counting his early Army days, he had been in the ring, on and off, for ten years and had got nowhere. His fighting pretensions were even being ridiculed in the press. Even his former home-town newspaper, the
Milwaukee Free Press,
took a sideswipe at him in its edition of 23 February 1913 while ostensibly denigrating another fighter: ‘New York newspapers are acclaiming Greek Knockout Brown of Chicago as a coming world’s middleweight champion. That’s not surprising. They fell for Vic McLaughlin [sic] as a prospective white hope.’

The theatrical bookings were beginning to dry up as well. McLaglen and brother Arthur had had enough. ‘We got tired of that,’ he explained simply, ‘so we shipped for Hawaii. From there we went to the Fiji islands, Tahiti and Australia.’

Attempts to dive for pearls in the South Sea Islands failed, so they moved on to Australia. Arthur McLaglen had been there before. In 1910, he had fought three two-round exhibition contests with former world heavyweight champion Bob Fitzsimmons. However, as soon as they landed they heard of a gold strike in the interior. Ignoring his unpleasant prospecting experiences in Canada, McLaglen promptly joined in the gold rush with his brother.

Still their luck did not turn. On one occasion they almost died of thirst and starvation. They next set sail for South Africa. By this time McLaglen was practically down and out. He and Arthur had made no money in Australia. They reached South Africa only to hear that war had broken out in Europe. The news did not displease the McLaglens. Neither of them was averse to fighting, and at least military life offered the prospect of regular meals and adventure. ‘We left immediately for London to enlist and glad to get the chance,’ Victor McLaglen said.

News of the war had brought home all the McLaglen brothers old enough to fight: Victor, Lewis, Leopold, Clifford, Arthur and Fred. They arrived, broke but optimistic, from such remote places as China, Canada and South Africa. They were all a little weary and shop-soiled.

Leopold, red-bearded, broad-shouldered and a towering 6ft 7in tall, had been appearing at the Cape Town music halls, still spuriously claiming to be the world’s heavyweight ju-jitsu champion. He usually included a demonstration of hypnotism in his act. One night in Cape Town, when a member of the audience mutinously refused to fall under his influence, the exasperated Leopold had punched the man in the face. The assaulted South African had promptly fought back, driving the gigantic performer from the stage and causing his subsequent performances to be cancelled.

Fred had been fighting in the USA without a great deal of success. By the time he reached England again, Fred had opposed and been knocked out by such white heavyweight prospects as Dan Dailey, Al Reich, Carl Morris and Gunboat Smith. Doc Kearns had seen Fred fight during this period and had described him succinctly as a one-punch fighter: ‘One punch on the whiskers and he folded.’

His great moment had come in 1912, when the
Milwaukee Free Press
of 9 December had written, ‘Fred McKay, the Winnipeg giant, came a little closer into the limelight as a prominent white hope last night by knocking out Bill Tate at the Queensboro A.C.’ Unfortunately, only two years later, after a run of defeats on McKay’s part, on 27 October the same newspaper noted, ‘Fred Mackay [
sic
] of Canada, who has been one of the noted divers in the boxing game, has quit the sport and is going into the saloon business in Canada.’

To make matters worse, Fred had to put up with a considerable amount of ribbing when he met up with Victor in London. In one of his final bouts in the USA, in January 1914, Fred had been knocked out in two rounds by Porky Flynn, one of Victor’s occasional victims.

Fred’s story had an unhappy ending. All six brothers enlisted, achieving some newspaper publicity as ‘the Fighting Macs’, and went off to fight. Five of them returned in 1918, but Fred was killed while serving in East Africa.

Victor McLaglen was commissioned and spent a few months as a recruiting officer in London, addressing huge audiences in Trafalgar Square. In 1915 he managed to squeeze in one more bout, defeating Dan McGoldrick on a technical knockout in five rounds. His military career after this is obscure. There are no traces of him in the military archives of the Cheshire and Middlesex regiments, or the Irish Fusiliers, three of the units in which he claimed to have served.

In interviews McLaglen also told reporters that he had been posted to the Middle East where he saw action against the Turks at Sind, Judalia and Sheikh Saad, and that he had been promoted to captain for bravery. Again there are no official records of his having been present at such engagements.

He does resurface briefly. At the end of the war, by virtue of his impressive size, battered face and fighting background, he was appointed Assistant Provost Marshal of Baghdad, responsible for the discipline of both the troops stationed in the town and the Arabs who lived there. The job was no sinecure. He was involved in a number of brawls, trying to separate fighting soldiers and Arabs, and claimed to have been stabbed twice and to have survived an attempt to kill him with poisoned dates.

In 1919 he was out of the Army, unemployed again, penniless and by this time married. He was also 32 years old, past it for most heavyweights, especially less able ones who had taken as many ring beatings as he had. Nevertheless, as he had done so many times before, McLaglen made one last effort to restore his fortunes by entering the ring.

He was matched with the up-and-coming Frank Goddard, a future British heavyweight champion, although his title tenure of only three weeks would set a British record for brevity. Goddard’s other claim to fame was that he had been banned from one training camp because his language was too bad for the other boxers, and from another for throwing a plum pudding at a portrait of Queen Victoria hanging on the wall.

The former White Hope was billed as Captain Victor McLaglen, and much was made in the publicity build-up of his bout with Jack Johnson ten years before. McLaglen was no match for his younger opponent, who as a former humble trooper must have relished the prospect of hitting an officer with impunity, and he was knocked out in three rounds. It was one of his last fights.

It was during this period that McLaglen’s fiery father, the Bishop of Claremont, caused a public stir. On 14 November 1919, the 68-year-old prelate offered to fight five rounds with anyone of his own age in aid of a fund for disabled troops. The Associated Press report went on: ‘The bishop’s offer was prompted apparently by his indignation at something the newspaper printed concerning his son. “Why”, he asks, “is it astonishing that a man who chooses to fight in the ring for money should be the son of a bishop, or a man of considerable educational attainments? Neither is there anything contrary to Christianity in boxing. This is solely the nonsense of clergy who have forgotten that they are men, living in a world of men and not of Victorian old ladies.”’ Nobody responded to the Bishop’s challenge.

Victor McLaglen made another appearance on the British boxing scene in 1919. Booming, larger than life and full of blarney, he turned up at a Plymouth boxing hall. Full of wild stories about his recent service in the Middle East and insisting on being addressed by his rank of captain, the heavyweight had embarked on yet another temporary career, that of boxing manager.

His protégé was a 15-year-old Arab boy, Hussein Ibn Abbass. McLaglen claimed that he had discovered the youth abandoned by his tribe in the desert and that he had taken him in as his batman and servant. He had given the youth boxing lessons, he asserted, and was now launching him on a fighting career which was sure to lead to a championship.

Hussein Ibn Abbass caused quite a stir in Plymouth by entering the ring in a turban and the flowing robes of an Arab. Unfortunately, he was knocked out in the eleventh round by Seaman George Harris and was seldom heard of in the boxing ring again. He also caused something of a stir at the local Royal Hotel that night by breaking a curfew imposed upon him by McLaglen, shinning down a drainpipe and running off to sample the nightlife of the city. Years later, McLaglen took Hussein Ibn Abbass to Hollywood with him, always referring to the youth as his adopted son.

3

THE PHILADELPHIA IRISHMAN AND TWO WARM BODIES

A
lmost as soon as he had won the title, Johnson had signed up for a lucrative thirty-week stage tour. A month after his clash with Victor McLaglen in March 1909, he had already embarked on his stage appearances at the Gayety Theatre in Brooklyn, appearing between burlesque acts. His billing read:

During the Action of the Burlesque
  
Jack Johnson
The undisputed Champion of the World will appear in an Exhibition
  
of Bag Punching, General training for the Prize Ring,
and in a Three-Round Exhibition of Boxing in conjunction
  
with his sparring partner, Kid Cutler.

The trouble with Johnson was that his private life often seemed to be lived in public. He was dogged by reporters. Every unwise move or thoughtless remark was sure to be reflected in the headlines the following day. His first wife, who was black, had left him long since because of his infidelities. A long-term black girlfriend, Clara Kerr, ran away with Johnson’s best friend. They took with them everything of Johnson’s that had not been nailed down. A white, New York Irish consort, Hattie McClay, who had been with him at Rushcutters Bay, was fast becoming an alcoholic, causing even the pragmatic champion considerable embarrassment. Amid general horror and much sanctimonious hand-wringing from onlookers, he took up with other white women. One of these was Belle Schreiber, a 23-year-old white Milwaukee prostitute, a fact brought up eagerly in court when he was later arrested. He met another white woman, Etta Duryea, who left her husband to live with the fighter.