BOOK NEWS
New Book Examines First Great Black Heavyweight
By Ray Locker

Associated Press Writer

Long before Cassius Clay had the nerve to change his name to Muham-mad Ali and fight the military draft in the 1960s, another black heavyweight boxer in-flamed the passions of his era.

As author Geoffrey C. Ward clearly spells out in his rollicking biography, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,’’ (Knopf. 492 Pages. $26.95) that was Jack Johnson. But Ali, for all his trials, had it easy compared to Johnson in the first decades of the 20th century.

As a boxer, Johnson had skills that no heavyweight equaled until the rise of Joe Louis in the 1930s. He hit with power. He evaded punches, pulling his head back from approaching blows just as Ali did in his heyday.

And he infuriated conventional society.

As Ward shows, Johnson angered the white establishment, first by beating its boxers and second by dating and marrying white women. More than 50 years before the rise of the civil rights movement, this kind of race mix-ing was simply not done.

Nor was it tolerated.

Throughout “Unforgivable Black-ness,’’ the reader witnesses the rancid seediness of the “sweet science,’’ the sport’s brutality and the constant and virulent racism of early 20th-century America. Respectable newspapers and magazines throughout the nation casually referred to Johnson with racial slurs, such as “shine’’ or “coon’’ or worse. Cartoonists caricatured Johnson with drawings that would make lawn jockeys seem the height of political correctness.

That happened even before Johnson managed to get heavyweight champion Tommy Burns to give him a title shot in Australia in 1908. Until then, white boxers had ducked the category’s top contender for years, usually hiding behind claims of racial purity that hadn’t stopped them from boxing other black boxers.

But Johnson was no ordinary boxer, as he showed Burns in an outdoor ring in Sydney. There, he flattened the smaller boxer, taking his title.

“Again and again Burns rushes at the bigger man,’’ Ward writes, “who hits him on the way in, then gathers him into his long arms, rocks his head back and forth with uppercuts, and shoves him away again. And all the time Johnson keeps smiling and talking.’’

Afterward, the boxing establishment launched the search for what would later be fictionalized in the play “The Great White Hope,’’ as promoters, politicians and pundits looked for a white heavyweight who could snatch the title from Johnson. Their greatest hope, former champ Jim Jeffries, couldn’t deliver; Johnson pummeled him into submission in Reno, Nev., in 1910.

That was Johnson’s high point. While Ward shows the racism Johnson had to face each day, he also shows how Johnson caused many of his own problems. White America wanted Johnson to self-destruct. He didn’t let them down.

“But the private life he’d created for himself, the enemies he’d made along the way, and his own unwillingness to let anything or anyone interfere with his pleasures all had begun to work against him,’’ Ward writes.

By the end of 1911, Johnson had

been convicted on trumped-up charges of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes and fled the country. Unable to get legitimate fights, he let himself get fat and out of shape. By the time he met the latest white hope, behemoth Jess Willard, in Havana in 1915, Johnson was a bloated shadow of the man who stirred so much passion.

Willard took his title, pushing Johnson out of the limelight he loved.

Part of a book-documentary package done in collaboration with master documentarian Ken Burns, “Unforgiv-able Blackness’’ should be an essential part of any fight aficionado’s library. A diligent researcher, Ward has burrowed through many previously unused sources to find new details of Johnson’s life, starting with his childhood in Galveston, Texas.

In doing so, Ward has illuminated a part of American sporting history that needed illuminating, both because of Johnson’s pioneering role in boxing and because of the sport’s sordid and shameful past.