The Great White Hopes Read Free

allowed ashore. The non-whites were put on a Japanese mail ship and conducted to Hong Kong. Within another five years, by the time that Burns fought Johnson, most of the South Sea Islanders who had been recruited in the nineteenth century to work in the cane fields of the north had been sent back home.
    So how did a black boxer become heavyweight champion of the world on Australian soil? White Australians loved their sport and were becoming increasingly good at it. The English cricket team which had toured the continent in 1907/08 had lost four of the five games it had played against the Australians, while at the 1908 Olympics the Wallabies had defeated England, the only other entrant for rugby football, 32–3.
    In addition, boxing was immensely popular in Australia, and in Squires and Lang the country had just produced a pair of formidable heavyweight boxers of its own. So highly were these two regarded by their fellow-countrymen that the world’s leading big men, Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns, had been imported in the hope that the favoured home-grown boxers would defeat them. Unfortunately, both Australians had been crushed by Burns, while Johnson had compounded the national disappointment by thrashing Lang. These impressive results had led to a public outcry for Burns to defend his title against the black challenger, and Johnson had been allowed to return to meet him.
    The black fighter’s subsequent victory was a watershed in the history of sport. For the first time, boxing left the sports pages and was featured all over the world in major news stories on the front pages of the contemporary tabloids and broadsheets alike. Typical was the New York Evening Journal, which published a picture of Johnson occupying most of the front page, unprecedented coverage for a sporting personality. Caucasian supremacy had been publicly challenged and humiliated. The fact that the breakthrough had occurred in the haphazard and often crooked world of professional boxing made matters even worse. What, people wondered, appalled, would happen to the established order with the scarcely known and unpredictable ogre Jack Johnson now bestriding the sport like a colossus, a figurehead for his oppressed race?
    In the immediate aftermath of his victory the new champion felt that, under the circumstances, he would be more popular on a tour of the remoter areas of Australia than he would in the large cities. He cashed in on his new title by touring Western Australia, fighting exhibition contests and making public appearances. In the outback, with his outgoing personality, gold teeth, shaven head and colourful ring attire, he was a great success. By the end of his short small-hall tour of the Antipodes, he had almost doubled the money he had been paid for fighting Burns. If he had been self-confident before, Johnson was now positively ebullient.
    An example of his strong self-worth and refusal to buckle under white pressure occurred in the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie, when he stopped for a drink in the Palace Hotel. While he was there, one of his many new-found instant friends admired Johnson’s superb defensive qualities but remarked that it would not have been much of a fight at Rushcutters Bay if Burns had not done most of the attacking. Johnson disagreed in lordly fashion, stating that his ability was such that he could force any opponent to lead, while picking him off with his devastating counter-punches. At this, a 61-year-old respectably dressed gentleman with luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers stepped forward from the back of the crowd and informed Jack Johnson crisply that never in a million years could the new champion force him to lead unless he wanted to.
    A murmur of recognition went round the bar. The challenger was Larry Foley, the father of scientific Australian boxing, the man who had learnt his trade from Jem Mace, the Swaffham Gypsy, and who had passed it on in turn to such ring luminaries as Peter Jackson, Frank Slavin and Bob