Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online

was merely the world’s bête noire. In his hide-away cottage in Atlanta on the eve of his comeback fight with Jerry Quarry, Ali was running old Johnson movies, constantly jumping up from the couch to spar in front of the screen, giving cronies and visiting firemen a double image of Johnson as Ali, the black champion deprived of his title by a white ruling class which, if black heavyweight kings were to be thrust on it, insisted that they at least be self-effacing and compliant.
    The parallels between Johnson and Ali were far from exact,not nearly as neat as Ali portrayed them when he saw The Great White Hope and cried “That’s me! That’s the story of Muhammad Ali!” There was nothing overtly political about Johnson’s defiance in 1910. He did not, like Ali, challenge the federal government per se, although on a flimsy charge the Feds did challenge him. In the Jeffries fight the real encounter was not between glowering Jim and smiling Jack at all. That part of it, the physical part, Johnson easily took care of, giving the slow-moving white champ a boxing lesson that stirred the huge partisan crowd to an eloquent silence. It was not a fight but a primitive dialogue on race relations between all the white champions who had rallied to Jeffries’s corner, Corbett and Fitzsimmons, Sullivan and the rest of them versus the black shylock who came to collect his pound of flesh. Johnson parried every racist remark from “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, the cheerleader in this department, with witticisms and running commentary on the ability of Jeffries and his white allies that suggested Ali and Howard Cosell as a single two-headed man doing the fighting and the ringside commentary simultaneously.
    Johnson’s singular defiance reflected a time when there was no Negro or black movement to relate to, no group of white sympathizers, no national encouragement, no community support. No clenched fist symbolizing black power. No voices calling, “Brother, right on!” All alone, Jack Johnson chose to talk back to Whitey, laughing at him, thumbing his nose, flaunting the high life, fast cars, white women, and imported champagne. Not exactly the saint who grinned and suffered through “The Great White Hope,” still he dared to be his own man in a day when Jack London would choose for his lead on the results of The Fight: “Once again has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race. … ”
    We have a theory about the heavyweight championship, that somehow each of the great figures to hold the title manages to sum up the spirit of his time. All the great ones are not merely the best pugs of their day but demigods larger than life. It may all be accidental, but the main currents of their period eithershape their personalities or their personalities seem wondrously to reflect their times.
    Jeffries was the simple white boilermaker of 1905 and Johnson was the upstart “bad nigger of 1910.” Jack Dempsey slugged his way up out of the hobo jungles of the Jack London West, setting up the first million-dollar gate in the postwar boom—his fight with Georges Carpentier: the handsome French war hero against the draft-dodger (they called them slackers then) with the two-day growth. Ladies of the luxury-liner set, grandmothers of the jet-set swingers, the flapper celebrities and premature go-go girls of the early twenties decorated the ringside. Forever onward the Fancy would include a fashion show of lovely ladies from Broadway stars to high society to low society dressed for the ball. Tex Rickard, the architect of the naked race war disguised as an athletic contest (Jeffries-Johnson), introduced ballyhoo to boxing and made a conscious play to the liberated ladies of the Jazz Age. It was no accident that the first Gorgeous George was billed as “The Orchid Man.” Flapper hearts went a-flutter when the French war hero rapped the slacker on his granitelike chin. But this was straining the morality play; Carpentier