The Great White Hopes Read Free Page B

as newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the search. Competitions for big men were held in halls all over the world. Managers began to scour the factories, farms, armed services and even prisons for a behemoth who would be their meal ticket in the lucrative scramble to dethrone the black champion. The White Hope campaign had started. It was to lead to seven years of trouble and madness.

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    THE FUTURE ASSISTANT PROVOST MARSHAL OF BAGHDAD
    T he first fighter that Johnson met after winning the title was probably one of the worst. He was also one of the most interesting and irrepressible. The name of the first White Hope was Victor McLaglen. He was a 22-year-old English soldier of fortune, the son of a South African bishop. For the previous five years, since 1904, he had been working his way optimistically around North America doing a variety of menial jobs. His fighting record was negligible. He was matched against Johnson as a lastminute substitute because the champion and his connections knew that the burly and willing youngster had no chance.
    McLaglen claimed to have been born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1886, one of eight brothers and a sister, although his birth certificate gives the less salubrious East End of London as his birthplace. He had been brought up in South Africa, where his father became Bishop of Claremont. The family then returned to England in 1899, at the time of the Boer War. One of McLaglen’s older brothers, Fred, joined the colours and left for Cape Town.
    The 14-year-old McLaglen dearly wanted to follow him, but his father forbade it. McLaglen, who captained the Tower Hamlets schools’ football team, was already tall and looked older than his years. He ran away from home, lied about his age and joined the Life Guards, in the anticipation of being sent to the war. The attestation book of the 1st Life Guards for this period records that he enlisted on 30 July 1901. He gave his age as 19, his trade as engineer, and claimed to have been born in Stepney, London. His complexion was dark and his eyes were hazel.
    To his chagrin, Trooper McLaglen, instead of fighting the Boers, found himself spending most of his time on guard duty outside Windsor Castle. It was here that he first learnt to box and took part in his regimental heavyweight championships, fighting grown men when he was only 15 or 16.
    For a future professional fighter McLaglen had joined the Army at just the right time. The first independent Army championships had been held only seven years earlier, in 1894. In the following year the sport was given an enormous fillip when Field Marshal Lord Wolsey, the Commander-in-Chief of all Britain’s armed forces, attended the Guards’ boxing competition at Chelsea Barracks and was so impressed by the fighting spirit he saw in the ring there that he declared that in future he wanted to see every soldier a boxer.
    Wolsey was just the man to be impressed by a public display of aggression. As a young subaltern he had decided that the fastest, if riskiest, way to promotion was to place himself in harm’s way at every conceivable opportunity. At a speech at the Brigade of Guards’ championships in 1899, before a wildly cheering audience, he stressed the importance of boxing for soldiers: ‘It is conducive to endurance and pluck, and makes men of them – the sort of men who alone can defend us against our foes.’
    Efforts to make Army boxing socially acceptable, however, were less successful. When Colonel G.M. Fox, Inspector of Gymnasia at Aldershot, invited a number of ladies to attend the Army finals, the first contest they witnessed was such a bloody one that they swept out en masse, and the experiment was not repeated. But Wolsey’s imprimatur was all that the sport needed in military circles. Officers everywhere did their best to accede to the field marshal’s expressed wish, and placed boxing high on the agenda of training exercises. By 1900, there were 137 entries for the Army