Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight Read Online Free PDF

the 1870s. Yet the next decade saw the institution of segregation on the nation’s diamonds, a baseball apartheid that would last nearly seventy years. As early as 1809, the former slave Tom Molineaux had fought for the heavyweight boxing championship. By the end of the century, however, white champions routinely insisted on only fighting men of their own color.
    There was no rule per se that Blacks could not fight for the heavyweight championship. But a succession of champions, the most celebrated personalities of their era, simply refused to fight a black man. From John L. Sullivan, the first boxer to defend the title under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, to Jim Corbett, to Bob Fitzsimmons, no champion would risk his prestige by losing to a lowly Negro, although blacks could still contest the crown of lower divisions. This informal ban lasted for more than two decades, until 1905, when the so-called “golden age of boxing” came to an end with the retirement of the champion Jim Jeffries.
    Jeffries’s departure from the sport is considered by some as the end of the greatest era of boxing. It also set the stage for the man who would shake America to its foundations.
    After the retirement of Jeffries, the championship was won by a journeyman Canadian named Tommy Burns. Boxing had lost its lustre and the crop of white contenders was mediocre, failing to entice the fans that had turned out in droves to see the colorful personalities of the previous era. While there was clearly no white contender worthy of a title bout, and more importantly none who could attract the kind of gate that would make a promoter take notice, there was one fighter whose feats were gaining widespread attention.
    Jack Johnson was born in 1880 to former slaves in Galveston, Texas. In the fifth grade, he dropped out of school to do odd jobs and help support his six siblings. After beating up a local bully, he began training to box, and by 1897 he had turned professional. From 1902 to 1907, Johnson won more than fifty matches, most of them against other black boxers. But in 1906 he fought Bob Fitzsimmons, the ex-heavyweight champion, and knocked him out. None of the boxers who had succeeded Fitzsimmons would agree to fight Johnson because of his color.
    After Burns won the crown in 1906, there was a growing chorus of voices arguing that Johnson deserved a chance at the title. Confident that Johnson, nicknamed “Little Arthur,” would easily be handled by his racially superior foe—“the match will set to rest for all time the matter of fistic supremacy between white race and colored”—the New York Sun chided Burns to accept Johnson’s challenge. Finally, Burns relented.
    The bout was to be fought in Australia, so the expected American outrage over a fight between a black challenger and a white champion was somewhat tempered. Still, feelings ran strong. Jack London, author of Call of the Wild, is best known as an adventure novelist and a fervent socialist. But he was also one of America’s greatest boxing aficionados and would frequently cover matches for the New York Herald. Sent to Australia to cover the Johnson-Burns bout, scheduled for Christmas Day, 1908, London signaled the attitude of most Americans in his pre-fight dispatches. “I am with Burns all the way,” he wrote. “He is a white man and so am I. Naturally I want to see the white man win.”
    London and millions of white Americans were shocked at the result. It was bad enough that Johnson displayed a complete mastery over the hapless Burns, knocking him out in the fourteenth round. But the way he did it made things much worse. The challenger continuously taunted Burns, a smile on his face as he toyed with the champion, dancing around, jeering for his opponent to “come get me.” Sixty years later, these kinds of tactics would infuriate boxing fans when employed by Muhammad Ali, who would claim to be the reincarnation of Johnson. But in 1908, reports of this kind of behavior by a