to referee. The president said he was busy. Johnson was indisputably the best heavyweight of his time, the champion of the world since he'd ripped the title away from Tommy Burns in Sydney on December 26, 1908. They'd dragged old, white James J. off his alfalfa farm in Ohio, five years into his retirement, to “put down the uppity nigger,” this refugee from the Chitlin’ Circuit, who'd once had to be content to box his black brothers, among them the similarly gifted Sam McVey and Sam Langford, and then had left them far behind too.
But Jim, thirty-five, was too slow and Jack was too good. Johnson, who self-mockingly described himself as “the brunette in a blond town,” tormented Jeffries before putting him out of his misery in the fifteenth round in front of an audience of cowboys, hookers, and thieves.
For a taste of the evil of the times, Johnson himself is as reliable a source as many. He says this in his autobiography:
More than 25,000 people had gathered to watch the fight and, as I looked about me and scanned that sea of white faces, I felt the auspiciousness of the occasion. There were few men of my own race among the spectators. I realized that my victory in this event meant more than on any previous occasion. It wasn't just the championship that was at stake: it was my own honor, and in a degree the honor of my own race. The “White Hope” had failed.
Hysteria greeted Jack's deed. Blacks were murdered in race riots across America—nobody is sure how many—lynched and humiliated by the Klan and other white supremacists. The color bar went up just as Jack was trying to tear it down, albeit for his own purposes.
As the acclaimed American filmmaker Ken Burns said in his 2006 documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson: “Johnson in many ways is an embodiment of the African-American struggle to be truly free in this country—economically, socially, and politically. He absolutely refused to play by the rules set by the white establishment, or even those of the black community. In that sense, he fought for freedom not just as a black man, but as an individual.”
His people even wrote a spiritual about him:
Amazin’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,
Jack Johnson knock Jim Jeffries down.
Jim Jeffries jump up an’ hit Jack on the chin,
An’ then Jack knock him down agin.
The Yankees hold the play,
The white man pulls the trigger,
But it make no difference what the white man say,
The world champion's still a nigger!
And white did not want black ever to have even a chance of being champion again. Some black people agreed. Pastors and kindly old community leaders preached silence. Booker T. Washington, the conservative black intellectual fountainhead of his day, reminded his brothers and sisters, “No one can do so much injury to the Negro race as the Negro himself.” Angry blacks called that just another day of slavery. And number-one black of the day, Jack Johnson, said it loudest and longest.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the radical alternative to Washington, said: “Jack Johnson has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness, and great good nature. He did not knock his opponent senseless. Apparently he did not even try. Neither he nor his race invented prizefighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is Black.”
Du Bois was shaky on the boxing facts, and on the money with the social consequences. It would be well into the Great Depression before another black man would be in position to challenge the white man's stolen supremacy as the best heavyweight in the world.
Roxborough knew his history, all right. That's why, as a businessman, he would do whatever it took to get Joe his shot. It might not seem that savory from a distance, but he had to deal with the prevailing morals and attitudes of the day.
It was his good fortune to be doing business with Jacobs at just the time Uncle Mike was rising to the top of his profession, ready to make a move on the big job at the Garden. Johnston's job.
Having made no progress with Johnston, Roxborough got to work on Jacobs. Roxy went out of his way to assure the almost totally white fight-writing fraternity that Joe Louis would not be photographed with white women, wouldn't be seen alone in nightclubs, wouldn't have an easy or fixed fight, wouldn't humiliate a beaten foe by standing over him in triumph, would not “showboat” in any way, but would be a clean-living young athlete of which America, all of America, could be proud.
Joe went along with most of it—apart from the “clean-living” bit; he chased women, white or black, voraciously.
But they did a deal. Jacobs did the deal of his life; Joe did the only deal on offer. He wasn't complaining. All he wanted to do was fight. He didn't read the contracts, he just listened to his handlers, got fit, and knocked out anyone they put in front of him. To Joe, it could not be simpler. Eventually, of course, it would become so complex it would wreck his life. For now, though, he was a young, black, fighting genius rushing toward his destiny.
As the great adventure was getting underway in 1935, then, Jacobs was the man in control of Joe and the title. He did as he wanted with both, and he was not without friends, naturally. He had been co-opted on to what was to become the Twentieth Century Sporting Club and it had as its prime movers the preeminent media dictator of his day, William Randolph Hearst, plus Ed Frayne, the sports editor of the American, Bill Farnsworth, sports editor of the Journal, and the legend himself, Runyon, Hearst's favorite and most eloquent mouthpiece. It was a powerful team, and they had their eyes on the Garden. Johnston and his bosses didn't stand a chance. Joe was on his way. Just about.
After Jacobs got Roxborough to sign Louis up to the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, to promise white America that black America would not visit another Jack Johnson upon their precious heads, everything fell into place. It seemed so easy now for the scuffling Joe Gould to make lots of money. He did not let his boy Braddock down. Once Jim had the championship, Gould came into his own. He engineered a quick autobiography, Braddock: Relief to Royalty, and a flimsy legend was born. That was just the start of it.
When Joe knocked the stuffing out of the Ambling Alp, Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium (attracting 64,000 customers, twice the number who filled the Garden for Baer–Braddock), it seemed the clamor for Louis–Braddock would not be denied for long. It was put on hold—but for reasons that would not become immediately obvious. This was going to be a slow burn, kindled by the Hearst newspapers, which now had links to the Garden through the enterprising Runyon and his pals.
The lineage of boxing's most prized championship up to that point was, generally, a distinguished one: Sullivan lasted exactly seven months; then came James J. Corbett, 1892 to 1897; Bob Fitzsimmons, 1897 to 1899; James J. Jeffries, 1899 to 1905; Marvin Hart, 1905 to 1906; Tommy Burns, 1906 to 1908; Jack Johnson, 1908 to 1915; Jess Willard, 1915 to 1919; Jack Dempsey, 1919 to 1926; Gene Tunney, 1926 to 1928 (the title was in abeyance for two years after Tunney retired in 1928); Max Schmeling, 1930 to 1932; Jack Sharkey, 1932 to 1933; Primo Carnera, 1933 to 1934; and Baer, who held it a day short of a year.
That made it fourteen champions in forty-three years, almost a royal succession. What was to follow would do much to eat away at the credibility of professional boxing. After Braddock and all the way up to late 2006, just seventy-one years, the title changed hands a bewildering ninety-three times. What started as the biggest prize in sports became a very grubby enterprise, which then somehow managed to slide even further.
At least Lucky Jim's recognition meant something. He was all over the papers. People shook his hand in the street, bought him a drink in the clubs. He fit the picture. He'd risen from bum to hero in a twinkling. If he could do it, anyone could. America needed Jim Braddock badly in 1935, as the Depression gnawed away at the fiber of its being. To the guys growing weaker by the day at the soup kitchen, or riding the rails, Jim was one of them. Just like Dempsey had been. It didn't matter that he wasn't a great fighter. He fought great on one night. He sustained hope.
But Braddock too would be dispensed with soon enough. Asked how long the new champ might remain in office, Max Baer told reporters,