If the last decade of the nineteenth century saw the growth of glove-fighting to a high level of scientific achievement, the first decade of the twentieth saw the decline of its management to the uttermost pit of low commercial enterprise. Not that the promotion of any professional athletic contest has ever been entirely free from the besmirching influences of money: it has not. Rascality apart, there have always been hucksters who shouted their merchandise of weight and muscle and skill in raucous and unseemly tones. But when real if degraded cunning is brought to the job, the issues are obscured, and unsophisticated sportsmen, behind the times in business methods, are apt to be deceived.

Fighters, you may say, are born, whilst champions are made—in Fleet Street and the complementary thoroughfares of New York and San Francisco. A particular boxer is discussed in some newspaper every day for a considerable period. He is advertised, in fact. You get accustomed to the fellow’s name in exactly the same way as you get accustomed to the name of some coffee or toffee, tailor or tinker. You begin to regard him, quite unconsciously, as an inevitable concomitant of everyday life. And when the paper tells you that he is a champion, you, having a general interest in boxing but knowing very little about it, accept him as a champion.

This boxer happens to be a good boxer, wins many fights, and you take it as a matter-of-course. The newspaper pats itself as you might say, loudly on the back for having made a good shot. The boxer happens to be a bad boxer and is beaten every time, and you and the newspaper denounce and deride him—you, 148 because what you thought was your opinion is shown to be wrong, the newspaper which (in collaboration with the boxer’s manager, business-manager, publicity-manager, and general manager) invented the poor fellow: because it is unable to flatter itself.

The genuine champion, who will be content with a small c, is not made by newspapers. By his own merits he emerges from the ruck and he makes his own way. But he can make his way, probably, much quicker with the aid of newspapers, managers, who sometimes exploit him, and other sound business methods: and not his way only, but his fortune. Carpentier is a transcendent example. He is a magnificent boxer, who was bound to have made a name for himself by boxing and boxing alone. And we do not grudge him the fortune which boxing and boxing alone would not have brought to him. But we do grudge the vast sums made by spurious champions (or their managers), and the sums much more vast and rolling and altogether disgusting made by the promoters of what are, virtually, spurious contests.

Now the most notorious boxer of the first ten years of the present century, a really good fighter, of unorthodox methods and exemplary fortitude, was Tommy Burns. His real name was Noah Brusso, he was said to be a French Canadian by birth, and he had won the World’s Heavy-weight Championship by beating Marvin Hart in 1906. He was born in 1881, stood 5 feet 7 inches, and weighed 12 stone 7 lb. He was very broad for his height, and always somewhat inclined to fatness.

In 1907 Burns came to England, and in that and the following year summarily knocked out the best men that England could find to meet him. Our best in this country at that time were very poor indeed. Gunner Moir, quite a third-rate boxer in point of skill, was Champion of England. There was the wildest excitement about his match with Burns, because Moir’s prowess had been trumpeted far beyond its merits. Burns knocked him out in ten rounds. It was a disgraceful affair, because there can be no doubt that the Canadian could easily have beaten him much sooner. On that occasion it certainly seemed as though he were 149 boxing to please, or rather not to disappoint the spectators. The public like to have “value for money.” And, of course, there are always cinematograph rights. What will the much larger public, outside the actual place of battle, say if the film consists, as it has done before now, of five minutes’ display of American pressmen, seconds, and other boxers who have nothing to do with the matter in hand, and half a minute’s fighting with three visible blows? The public will be disgusted, and they won’t go to see that picture, and the film-rights will be negligible. I am unable to remember whether moving pictures were taken of the encounter between Tommy Burns and Gunner Moir, but if they were that would be a sufficient, if not a good, reason for the unnecessarily protracted bout, as it certainly has been the reason in other contests.

Burns, then, was Heavy-weight Champion of the World, and was, in the course of nature, liable to be challenged to fight for his title. And there had come into prominence a huge negro, Jack Johnson, who was anxious to fight Burns. In England we had hitherto heard very little of Johnson. He was three years older than the white champion, stood 6 feet and one-half inch, and weighed 15 stone. He appears to have started his career in 1899, and from that year down to December, 1908, when he finally succeeded in getting a match with Burns, he had fought sixty-five contests, half of which he won by means of a knock-out. Excepting Peter Jackson, he was about as good a black boxer as had ever been known. He was very strong, very quick, a hard hitter, and extraordinarily skilful in defence. He was by no means unintelligent, and, not without good reason, was regarded generally with the greatest possible dislike. With money in his pocket and physical triumph over white men in his heart, he displayed all the gross and overbearing insolence which makes what we call the buck nigger insufferable. He was one of the comparatively few men of African blood who, in a half-perceiving way, desire to make the white man pay for the undoubted ill-treatment of his forbears.

Whether Tommy Burns really wanted to avoid Johnson or 150 not it is difficult to say. Certainly, it seemed as though he did. Or, on the other hand, the long procrastination may have been deliberate, with the end in view of rousing public excitement, to its uttermost pitch of intensity: and thus, perhaps, of acquiring more pelf. Burns succeeded, at all events, in rousing the public impatience and irritation which immediately precedes boredom. And it would be a dull business to trace the whole story of Johnson’s efforts to get into a ring with him. It is enough to say that he finally succeeded, a match was made, and the two men entered the ring at Rushcutter’s Bay, Sydney, New South Wales, on December 26th, 1908.

As so often happens in a black and white affair, feeling ran very high, and it was feared by responsible people that black, in the person of Jack Johnson, would not on this occasion get a fair chance. But as the event proved, the fight was perfectly fair—in that sense, and we may be sure that Johnson was well cared for and guarded. Interference by the police was by way of being expected, and it was arranged before the contest that if the police did stop the fight in its course, the referee would give a decision on the merits of the encounter up to the moment of interference.

If Johnson’s demeanour had always been insolent, it is unnecessary to look for another word to describe the conduct of Tommy Burns. For all I know, at heart Burns may ............