- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Some sports historians argue that the two Olympic Games in 1956 and 2000 were the most important sporting events held in Australia, from an historical and cultural viewpoint. But the majority of experts insist that the contest for the Heavyweight Boxing Championship between the holder, Tommy Burns, and the challenger, Jack Johnson, on 26 December 1908, stands alone as the most significant sports event held in Australia.
Extensive film of the one-sided contest shows a huge, skilful, and cruel Johnson taunting and toying the smaller Canadian, holding Burns in clinches and smashing him at will with devastating upper-cuts, hard enough to hurt but not too lethal to knock him out.
While he was meting out this punishment, Johnson, in a trick that was picked up by Muhammed Ali, who studied Johnson’s fighting tactics and skills closely and appropriated many of them, taunted Burns with trash talk: “Why Mr Burns,” he’d say, after a mighty Burns swing grazed his body, “you can’t hit as hard as my wife.”
The fight was stopped by the police in the 14th round.
Johnson became the first black holder of the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
The popular writer Jack London, the author of the ‘The Call of the Wild’ and a champion of a new muscular, out-doors masculinity for white men around the English-speaking world, wrote impassioned articles calling for a ‘Great White Hope’ to take the title from Johnson.
At a recent conference in Sydney on sport, race and ethnicity at the University of Technology, Sydney, sponsored by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Randy Roberts, a biographer of Johnson argued that the fight transcended boxing (which is why it is so important): “At the time it was as dramatic as later breakthroughs by the likes of Muhammed Ali and Barack Obama.”
The fight was promoted by one of Sydney’s most famous and notorious ‘Wild Men’ (to use Cyril Pearls wonderful description) H. D. (‘Huge Deal’) McIntosh (1876 -1942).
McIntosh had sundry jobs as a boy and a young man — farm labourer, engine driver, baker’s boy, tarboy, stage-hand, chorus-boy, pie-seller and waiter — as he strove, valiantly and with intense imagination and drive to pull himself out of poverty.
He made some money, finally, by selling his pie business to Charlotte Sargent, the owner of Sargent’s pies.
To coincide with the arrival of The Great White Fleet (a huge American naval fleet sent around the world by Teddy Roosevelt), McIntosh build a vast wooden stadium at Rushcutters, Sydney Stadium, and then matched the world champion Tommy Burns against the Australian champion Bill Squires.
The fight was so successful, McIntosh talked Burns into fighting Johnson, even though Burns had misgivings about stepping into the ring with a black fighter. McIntosh made a killing on the fight with a crowd of 26,000 in attendance and 40,000 people outside.
Two days after the fight, 8,000 attended Sydney Stadium again to watch the film of the fight.
McIntosh later took the fight film around America for two years, making another fortune in the process.
Chris Cuneen’s biography of McIntosh was be read in the online edition of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
There is no doubt that ‘Huge Deal’ was one of the great promoters in Australian sport and politics and deserving of a television documentary along the lines of the Ken Burns masterpiece on Jack Johnson.
Dr David Headon, a sports historian and cultural adviser to the ACT Government, told the conference that the fight tested and proved wrong the then popular “cold climate myth” that insisted that cold temperatures which were inhabited by white people produced superior inhabitants, intellectually and physically, than hot temperature countries inhabited by blacks.
This myth was particularly strong in Australia in the 1900s.
One of the conditions on the siting of the new Australian capital Canberra was that it had to be in a cold part of Australia. King O’Malley justified this provision by claiming that “the history of the world shows cold climates produce the greatest geniuses.”
This myth, too, became part of the argumentative undertow for the White Australia policy, a policy that was directed against Chinese, Indians and blacks from America, Africa and the West Indies, and in a subverted and insidious form, against the indigenous Aboriginal population who did not get voting rights until 1967.
The Bulletin in 1908 placed under its masthead the phrase that summed up the zeitgeist of the times: Australia for the White Man.
H.D. McIntosh fostered these racist phobias and intimations of white racial superiority in the build-up to the fight with claims the two boxers “represented the champions of the white and black races who will determine the racial superiority of their race.”
Johnson was well-read, articulate and frothy with indignation against the racism heaved continually at him. He startled local journalists by quoting Bunyan, Milton and Shakespeare and espousing the political interests and cultural causes of Aborigines.
He was, too, as much a showman and promoter, especially of himself, as McIntosh.
At the end of conferences with the journalists he would go along with the hype by telling them what they wanted to hear: “The Big Coon am a’coming.”
If you google ‘Jack Johnson’ you can access up to 162,000 items with references to him. Like McIntosh, he was a shooting star who lit up the night skies and then fell to air in shards of glitter that petered out into the darkness towards the end of his life’s journey.
His comments after the fight, which were reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, were perceptive about the nature of Australian society at the time, and the future course of his own life: “Could any Christian nation have extended a more inhospitable welcome to a victor of a great contest … I never expected sympathy here as my colour is against me … I must bear your reproaches because I beat a white man.”
The search for The Great White Hope ended when Jess Williard ‘knocked out’ Johnson in Havana on 5 April, 1915. I put inverted commas in deliberately because the film of the fight shows Johnson lying on the very hot canvas with his back arched to avoid as much contact as possible and with his gloves across his eyes to shield them, too, from the glaring heat.
The managers of Joe Louis, who became the second black Heavyweight Champion of the World, ensured that he was never photographed with white woman (Johnson married two white women); that he showed no emotion when he pummelled white fighters, the Louis poker face; and that he never was photographed at casinos (although ironically when he fell on hard times in later life, he was a well-paid greeter of gamblers at casinos).
Muhammed Ali revived the legend and righteous contrariness of Johnson, even down to imitating his tendency to only punch out head shots to his opponents.
Johnson’s place in American history is that of an iconic black athlete who refused to accept his ‘place’ as a black in American society.
He married white women. He was knowledgeable about opera. He admired Napoleon, whom he thought he resembled in his life story. He was ostentatious in flouting his wealth, when he had it. He was despised by the self-styled negro establishment of leaders like Booker T.Washingtonn.
There is the story of him trying to book a room in a hotel in the Deep South. The man on the counter told him that people of his ‘type’ couldn’t be accommodated at the hotel.
Johnson persisted.
In the end, after waiting for something like 30 minutes, he delivered the killer response: “I’m booking the room for my wife.”
On 20 January, 2009, 100 years on from Jack Johnson’s great breakthrough triumph in a square ring in Sydney, another black man will make history by being sworn in as first African-American President of the United States.
There is no doubt in my mind that without Johnson there would have been no President Barrack Hussein Obama.
History, like God, moves in mysterious ways.