December 26, 1908: Jack Johnson, a 30-year-old black man from Texas, known as the Galveston Giant, knocks out Canadian fighter Tommy Burns at Sydney Stadium in Sydney, Australia. This makes Johnson the 1st black man to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
(Johnson wasn't really a giant: He was 6 feet even, but a solid 200 pounds at his peak fighting condition.)
It was what we would now call a technical knockout: It was stopped after the 14th round, because Burns, considerably lighter and possibly ill with the flu, was totally outmatched.
Ironically, Burns might well be totally forgotten today had he won the fight. After all, who remembers who he beat for the title? (It was Marvin Hart.)
This "conquest of the white man," and his flamboyant lifestyle, made Johnson the most hated man in America. Even many black people hated him, for making them look bad. He didn't care: He was still going to be Jack Johnson.
So America's white establishment looked for a "Great White Hope" who could beat Johnson. Four times in 1909, a fighter was put up against Johnson:
* Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, the Light Heavyweight Champion, fought him in Philadelphia. It was a draw, but O'Brien didn't want a rematch.
* Tony Ross fought him in Pittsburgh, and Johnson beat him.
* Al Kaufman fought him in San Francisco, and Johnson beat him.
* Stanley Ketchel, the Middleweight Champion, a vicious fighter known as the Michigan Assassin, made a deal with Johnson, the same deal that O'Brien had made with him: They would fight to a draw, and thus split the proceeds from the film rights. It was a good plan. Except Ketchel got greedy, for the title and the money, and knocked Johnson down. All that did was make Johnson mad, and he not only knocked Ketchel out, he knocked out a bunch of his teeth. The film of the fight is clear enough to see Johnson brushing Ketchel's teeth out of his glove.
Now, the search for a Great White Hope became truly intense. Novelist Jack London, tapping into the racism of the time, had a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and used it to address Jim Jeffries, who had been Heavyweight Champion from 1899 to 1904, and retired undefeated to an alfalfa farm outside Los Angeles. London wrote, "Jeff, it's up to you."
Johnson was willing to fight Jeffries. Having waited so long for his shot at the title, he knew he had no right to duck anybody. Jeffries had gotten fat in his retirement. He went on a crash diet and exercise program, and actually got back down to his usual fighting weight. But losing so much weight so soon weakened him. And the fight was the middle of the desert, in Reno, Nevada. Jeffries was used to California heat, but not this kind of heat, and the South Texas native Johnson was used to it. And Johnson was in peak physical condition.
So the fight was a mismatch. It was scheduled for a maximum of 45 rounds, which sounds brutal for the modern era, where the norm became 15, and eventually 12 by the 1980s. Jeffries hung on for 12 rounds, but in the 13th, Johnson did what (it was said -- the records may be wrong) no other fighter had ever done: He knocked Jeffries down. Jeffries got up. He shouldn't have, because Johnson knocked him out in the 15th.
In 1912, Johnson was arrested for violating the Mann Act, which forbade "transporting women across State lines for immoral purposes." The woman in question was Lucille Cameron. Contrary to what is often reported, Cameron was not already Johnson's wife, which would have made the charge impossible to prove in court -- not that an all-white jury would have cared. But she refused to cooperate, and soon married Johnson.
In 1913, Johnson was arrested on the Mann Act again. This time, in a Chicago courtroom presided over by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later to become the 1st Commissioner of Baseball and the perpetuator of the sport's "color line," Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury, and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
He skipped bail, and escaped first to Canada, then to France. Having only defended his title once since the Jeffries fight, he could now only do so abroad. On December 19, 1913, in Paris, in the 1st-ever Heavyweight Championship fight between 2 black men, he may have recognized the significance, and held back a little, as he fought Battling Jim Johnson (no relation) to a rather lackluster draw. In 1914, he defeated Frank Moran in Paris. In early 1915, he knocked Jack Murray out in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Finally, it all caught up with him. Jess Willard, a 6-foot-6 Kansan, became the latest "Great White Hope." On April 5, 1915, at Oriental Park, a horse racing track in Havana, Cuba, in a fight scheduled for 45 rounds, and held in heat even worse than in Reno 4 years earlier, perhaps he finally got tired of being Jack Johnson, and threw the fight. Or maybe, at 37, the oldest Heavyweight Champion ever (and he would remain so until Jersey Joe Walcott in 1951), he just wasn't in shape anymore. Willard knocked him out in the 26th round.
Jack and Lucille Johnson continued to live abroad. Finally, on July 20, 1920, Jack crossed the border from Mexico to America, and surrendered to federal agents. He was taken to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas (with some irony, in Willard's home State), and began serving his sentence. He was released early, on July 9, 1921.
Lucille was the 3rd of what turned out to be 4 wives for Jack Johnson. Only the 1st was black. On June 10, 1946, he was driving on U.S. Route 1 near Franklinton, North Carolina, when he crashed into a telegraph pole, and died. He was 68 years old.
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December 26, 1908 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. Football season had ended. Professional basketball did not exist. And the biggest hockey league of the time, the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association, didn't start its season for another 11 days.
But there were scores. It was Boxing Day, and, in Britain, there was a tradition of soccer teams playing each other on back-to-back days, a home-and-home series on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. On the 25th, Woolwich Arsenal and Leicester Fosse played each other to a 1-1 draw at the Filbert Street stadium in Leicester. On the 26th, they played at The Arsenal's home, the Manor Ground, in Plumstead, South-East London, and Arsenal won, 2-1. Eventually, Woolwich Arsenal would move to North London, and become simply Arsenal Football Club; while Leicester Fosse became Leicester City.
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