Website review: Cache of boxing great Jack Johnson&...
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•iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/09/america/NA-FEA...
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Teiresias discovered 9 months ago- Jack Johnson's Little-known French Musings Becomes New Memoir "A true fighter should be able to, and want to, fight with anyone with enough talent to aspire to the title. And that means not building a wall around himself, the gate of which is strictly forbidden to anyone likely to beat him. . . ." Jack Johnson, addicted to attention and craving a colorful legacy, loved to chronicle his rise from a restless Texas teen to the world's first black heavyweight boxing champion. Now, nearly a century after his most famous bout -- the 1910 defeat of "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries -- and decades after his death, Johnson has more tales to tell. His largely unknown 1911 musings to a French sports magazine, including candid observations on racism likely never intended for American readers, have been translated to English in their entirety for the first time. The result, "My Life & Battles," is 127-page book by and about the man considered by many to be one of history's most important athletes. "To get new material and new stories from Jack Johnson is significant not just in sports, but sociologically as a look into that whole era," said Bert Sugar, a boxing historian and author of dozens of books on the sport. Johnson's 1908 championship and his 1910 defeat of Jeffries touched off race riots among downtrodden black Americans who considered him a hero and white separatist Americans who deemed him a threat. Prof. Christopher Rivers, a boxing enthusiast who teaches French at Mount Holyoke College, first noted references to the French articles in Geoffrey Ward's 2004 biography, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson." At Rivers' request, Ward sent him copies of all the French-language magazine articles. Rivers translated them and blended them with excerpts already used in Johnson's 1914 "Mes Combats" ("My Fights"), of which Harvard University's Widener Library owns the only known complete copy. The result: Rivers was able to translate and publish the memoirs in their entirety, a rare glimpse into the life of a legend whose extravagant stories are his only descendants. Johnson's 1927 memoir, "Jack Johnson: In the Ring and Out," touches lightly on racism, but only in brief and restrained language. The 1911 articles, however, assess what he called the "color line" with more frankness. While rarely sounding bitter, Johnson made it clear he did not appreciate being painted as a dumb, brutal animal -- a slur he defiantly tossed back in the faces of his critics by indulging in the finest tailored clothes, diamonds, cars and the best possessions his large winnings could buy. He also questioned the hypocrisy of white fighters who avoided better-skilled black fighters, suggesting they were avoiding the embarrassment of a loss by rejecting the fights under the thin cloak of "scruples." "A true fighter should be able to, and want to, fight with anyone with enough talent to aspire to the title," he said in the memoir. "And that means not building a wall around himself, the gate of which is strictly forbidden to anyone likely to beat him." Johnson, renowned for the gusto of his storytelling, also could be counted on to boost a tale's entertainment value or to burnish his legacy, according to sports historians and his biographers. Yet for all of Johnson's amusing tales inside and outside the ring, the reality of his life after the 1911 magazine memoirs was darker. . . . Full article
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