The Pottawatomie Plowboy

The crowd goes wild. The band breaks into a jubilant, drum-thumping march. The loser, a shave-headed Negro, is led from the ring, while speaking ruefully with a reporter. The winner, a white man, is paraded about on the shoulders of the cheering crowd. One gloved hand mechanically extended, he stares ahead, his face a bloody mask of idiocy.

So ends The Great White Hope, the current Broadway play based on the career of Boxer Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight champion (1908-15). Typically, Jess Willard, the only one of several "white hopes" who was able to take the title from Johnson, is portrayed in the play as a grotesque symbol of all that was sick with the times.

In winning the title in 1915 and losing it four years later to Jack Dempsey, the 6-ft. 61-in , 250-lb. fighter became the fated protagonist in two of the most controversial fights in ring history. The result was that for nearly half a century he was dismissed by the great majority of fight fans as the Great White Hoax. It was an unfair judgment, and before he died last week at 86, Willard was belatedly recognized as one of boxing's most underrated heavyweights.

Lethal Right. Raised on a ranch in Pottawatomie County, Kans. Willard migrated to Oklahoma, where he broke horses and ran a frontier freight-wagon service, Marveling at the way Big Jess tossed around 500-lb. bales of cotton, his friends told him that he was just the man to thrash Jack Johnson good and proper. Like many Americans, they considered it a national disgrace that Johnson, who eventually married three white women and romanced countless others, was allowed to reign as champion.* Willard who had never seen a boxing match sold his business and at 29 went into the ring. Regarded as a curiosity at first, the Pottawatomie Plowboy gradually overcame most of his awkwardness and, by virtue of a lethal right uppercut, four years later won the chance to meet Johnson.

Man-Killing Rounds. The match, held at the Oriental Park Race Track in Havana on a blistering hot April afternoon, was scheduled for a man-killing 45 rounds. It lasted 26, or one hour and 44 minutes, making it the longest heavyweight championship bout in this century. Five years later, Johnson, broke and living in Paris, sold a "confession" to a magazine in which he claimed that he had thrown the fight for $50,000 and the promise of leniency from the U.S., where he was wanted for violating the Mann Act. Willard's reaction: "If Johnson throwed the fight, I wished he throwed it sooner. It was hotter than hell down there."

Though the alleged confession is fancifully made the dramatic crux of The Great White Hope, there has never been any evidence to substantiate it. Indeed, a film of the match discovered just two years ago proves Willard's oft-repeated claim that he "beat him fair and square." Excerpts of the film, in a recently released feature on early fighters called The Legendary Champions, shows Willard dispatching the wilting, 37-year-old Johnson with a crunching overhand right that would have knocked out any heavyweight who ever lived.

Chunks of Cement? The Legendary Champions also shows the lean, hard, 24-year-old Jack Dempsey winning the title from Willard in one of the most savage beatings ever inflicted on a fighter.

As Dempsey described the first round: "I hit him with a left hook on his cheek bone and temple. It busted his eye open and down he went, shaking the ring like an earthquake. I felt like I wanted to get down there on the deck on top of him and beat him some more. But then he started to get up. I stood right over him and beat him to the canvas again. And again. And again. These were the rules in those days."

Those days, when a fighter did not have to go to a neutral corner after a knockdown, are over. Willard did not have a chance, and for the remainder of his life he bitterly accused Dempsey of carrying "a bolt" or "chunks of cement" in his gloves. In all, Willard scored 20 knockouts in 36 fights. If he was not a truly legendary champion, it was perhaps because he lacked one essential ingredient. As he once said: "I never wanted to hurt anybody."

* In 1910, Johnson's defeat of the white ex-champion, Jim Jeffries, touched off race riots in U.S. cities that resulted in six deaths.

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