Free The Great White Hopes by Graeme Kent

clever for him. To make matters worse, O’Brien, who was commonly held to have no punch, actually knocked Kaufmann out in the seventeenth round.
    The big fellow came back. In the four years between his loss to O’Brien and his bout with Jack Johnson, he had fourteen more fights, completing one ten-round, no-decision contest with Tony Ross and winning all the others, eleven by knockout. He was then matched with Jack Johnson, being regarded as the best available of local heavyweights and likely to draw a crowd.
    There were many who thought that Kaufmann was in with a chance, but the fistic cognoscenti regarded the big fellow as strictly a dog, likely to be completely dominated by the champion. O’Brien and Ross had been outclassed by Johnson, they argued, while Kaufmann had been defeated inside the distance by the first and taken the full ten-round route by the second.
    Kaufmann was reluctant to take on Johnson, and talked selfrighteously of drawing the colour line. He said that his parents did not like the idea of his taking on a black fighter. In one interview he claimed that he would much rather box the white former Olympic heavyweight champion Sam Berger. Kaufmann also criticised Johnson for the manner of his display against Tony Ross.
    In the event the San Francisco fighter hardly laid a glove on the untrained and patently out-of-condition Johnson. By the eighth round Kaufmann was out on his feet. For the last three rounds the champion literally held the big man up, refusing to let him go down. At the final bell, Johnson half-carried the exhausted Kaufmann back to his corner and gently deposited him on his stool.
    The San Francisco Call, which had touted Kaufmann as a probable winner before the bout, had no doubt about the victor. Its headlines the morning after the fight screamed:
    Kaufmann Like a Babe in the Grip of Johnson
The Black Champion Plays with the Blacksmith
Johnson Declares Opponent Is Game.
    Kaufmann went on fighting for another five or six years, mostly in no-decision bouts. After the Jack Johnson experience his confidence was ruined. He was knocked out by fellow White Hopes Fireman Jim Flynn and Luther McCarty and won only two more fights. A year after his attempt to dethrone the champion, Kaufmann was magnanimously employed by Johnson as a sparring partner .

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    THE HOBO
    I n 1909, Jack Johnson was having no trouble outclassing his opponents in the ring, but he needed a credible and charismatic opponent to start making real money from his championship title. While he waited for a young hopeful to be allowed out of the gymnasium on his own by his manager, he was approached by an unlikely challenger, but one who actually seemed capable of bringing suckers in through the turnstiles.
    So precious were prospective White Hopes that managers were not above stealing them from one another. In fact, most managers were not above any nefarious act. One of the first fighters to be treated like a parcel in transit was the doughty middleweight Stanley Ketchel. Joe Coffman stole Ketchel from any or all of half a dozen barflies who had considered themselves to be custodians of the middleweight’s future. Willus Britt stole Ketchel from Coffman, and Wilson Mizner was about to steal Ketchel from Britt, only the latter died first. This must have disappointed Mizner, who had a larcenous soul and would almost certainly rather have procured Ketchel by chicanery than just inheriting him.
    It must be admitted that Ketchel was worth the bother. A hard, handsome, relentless, big-punching fighter of Polish/American descent, he is still rated by some experts as one of the best middleweights of all time. Born Stanislaus Kiecal in 1886 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was only 12 he discovered the body of his murdered father in a hayloft. Only a short time afterwards Ketchel’s mother was also murdered. The boy ran away from what was left of his home and headed west, hoping to become a cowboy. He rode the rods, panhandled, stole,