Grantland Rice, Gene Sarazen and Craig Wood at the 1935 Augusta National Invitational Tournament. Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS

There were already whispers that Craig Wood was a bad-luck golfer when, in late March of 1935, he accepted an offer from Bobby Jones to play in his second Augusta National Invitational Tournament in Augusta, Georgia.  Known as the “Blond Bomber,” Wood had literally made a splash at the 1933 British Open at St. Andrews—he had tied Denny Shute for the lead after 72 holes, but lost in a playoff when his booming drive found the famous Swilcan Burn, a thin channel of water that cuts across the first fairway.

At the inaugural “Masters” (as it would later become known), in 1934, Wood had lost to Horton Smith, who inconceivably holed two long putts on the final holes to win by a stroke. Later that year, Wood finished second in the 1934 PGA Championship, losing once again in a playoff to Paul Runyan, who just a few years before had been his assistant pro at Forest Hills Golf Club in White Plains, New York.

Still, Wood, a native of Lake Placid, New York, was a polished and respected player when he arrived in Augusta in April 1935; a reporter described him as someone “who has so often had the door to opportunity slammed in his face.” By the end of the 1935 Augusta National Invitational, however, Craig Wood would be known as the most jinxed golfer the game had ever known. It would happen in a matter of seconds during the final round, when Eugenio Saraceni, the son of an immigrant carpenter and better known as Gene Sarazen, reached into his pocket for a lucky ring, then reached into his bag on the 15^th fairway and made a swing for the ages—the “shot heard ’round the world”—and paved the way to another playoff.

Bobby Jones was already a legend: he had retired from competition in 1930, at the age of 28, having dominated the game like no other American for nearly a decade. But after founding the Augusta National Golf Club in his native Georgia, Jones came out of retirement in 1934 to help boost the new Augusta National Invitational, and he would continue to play the tournament on an exhibition basis for years to come. He was not only the biggest star in golf, but also the biggest and most beloved star in all of sports at the time—the only athlete to receive two ticker-tape parades down Broadway in New York City. Perhaps on the strength of his competitive reputation alone, Bobby Jones was the bookie favorite to win the 1935 Masters.

Sarazen in 1939. Photo: Wikipedia

Wood was among the favorites as well, but the smart money was on Sarazen, who was at the top of his game. Although he was just 33, he was considered a crafty veteran, having already won six major tournaments. He also preferred to wear the traditional plus-fours (so called because they’re four inches longer than traditional knickers) when most golfers had opted, he said, for “sloppy slacks.” Sportswriter Grantland Rice played a practice round with the golfer nicknamed “the Squire” and wrote that he’d “never seen him hit the ball any better.” His 65 in a friendly round tied Bobby Jones’ course record.

In the days leading up to the tournament, Sarazen told Rice that the stars seemed to be lining up for him, even though he’d only just played the new course for the first time. “When I came here, I had three cows at home,” he told Rice. “Now I have three cows and two calves. That’s a hunch, and you know how I like hunches. I’m keen about the course, and I never saw any golf battlefield in better shape. I honestly think I can step along here.”

If Sarazen had dreams of victory the night before the tournament, they were interrupted at 4 a.m. by the sound of his hotel room door opening and the sight of a woman’s silhouette in the door frame. He jumped out of bed, picked up his driver and chased her down the corridor until she disappeared into another room. (“I was thinking of the forty dollars I had left on my dresser,” he said. “These are tough days. I can use that forty dollars to feed my four cows.”)

The episode had little effect on his game; he shot a 68 in the opening round, and it could have been lower had a few close putts dropped. Tommy Armour, who was paired with him, told reporters his partner played “one of the greatest rounds of golf I have ever seen. It matched the greatest golf I have ever seen Harry Vardon or Bobby Jones play. It was a masterpiece of golf art. Gene could have used his foot and kicked the ball in for a 65 or 66. I was hitting the ball quite well. I was only one over par, and yet in this round I felt like a hacker.”

By the end of the first round, the “par-wrecking field” saw Sarazen near the top with a 68 and Wood just one stroke behind. Henry “the Hershey Hurricane” Picard led the field with a 67, but Jones posted a 74, seven strokes off the lead.

Following round three on a stormy Saturday, April 6, Wood had taken the lead at seven under par, followed by Olin Dutra, Picard and Sarazen in fourth place, three strokes back. Wood had played spectacular golf in difficult conditions. Sportswriters marveled at his score, considering that he’d hit into a ditch and a water hazard, and missed a four-foot putt on the ninth. Sarazen had managed only a 73, and Jones could not get into contention. As the players teed off on a cold and rain-soaked course for Sunday’s final round, Wood found himself paired with Picard, while Sarazen played with his friend and rival Walter Hagen, who was out of contention and would spend the round reminiscing about old times and “his women,” Sarazen recalled.

Wood put together another solid round. Picard and Dutra faded, and Jones’ erratic putting (he missed a one-footer) kept him from mounting any challenge. When Wood birdied the 14th, 15th and 18th holes for a 73, he went into the clubhouse at six under par with a three-stroke lead over Sarazen—the only player still on the course who had a chance. (Final-round pairings were not based on scores then, so Wood, despite being the third-round leader, had teed off several groups ahead of Sarazen.)

Sarazen could hear the roar that greeted Wood’s final birdie, and as he approached the 15th tee, he turned to his caddie, Thor “Stovepipe” Nordwall, and asked what he needed to win.

“What do you mean, boss, to beat Craig Wood?” Nordwall asked.

Sarazen nodded. Standing on the tee, Hagen began to titter at the thought of a late round charge.

“Oooh,” the caddie mused, looking at the scorecard. “You need four threes, Mister Gene. Three, three, three, three.”

That would be an eagle, par, birdie and birdie. Picturing the four holes ahead, Sarazen didn’t think much of his chances. Back in the clubhouse, Wood was feeling confident. “I knew then the odds were 1000 to 1 in my favor,” he told a reporter later that night.  “I felt the tournament was over.”

Sarazen blasted his tee shot down the 15th fairway—but “received a sudden jolt when I saw my lie” on the par-five hole, he would say. “It was none too good.” Most of the fans had been following Wood, so the gallery around Sarazen was sparse. Nordwall suggested a three-wood for the second shot into the green. There would be no laying up—not with Wood in the clubhouse, up by three strokes. Sarazen judged the lie to be “sitting down” and he thought he couldn’t lift the ball with a three-wood, so he “went to the bottom of his leather quiver” and grabbed his four-wood—a new model, the Wilson TurfRider.

Bobby Jones, pictured here in 1930, was one of the few people to witness  Sarazen’s “shot heard round the world.” Photo: Wikipedia

Knowing he’d need to carry the ball 235 yards to the pin to give himself a chance at an eagle, he remembered a “lucky ring” that his friend Bob Davis had given him the night before. Davis told Sarazen that the ring had belonged to former Mexican president Benito Juarez. Sarazen thought the gaudy ring was too cumbersome to wear during a round of golf, but the Squire was also superstitious, so he had stuffed the bauble into his pocket that morning. (Davis later confessed that it wasn’t Juarez’s ring; he’d simply bought the trinket in Mexico.)

Now he pulled the ring out of his pocket and walked over to his caddie and began rubbing it on Nordwall’s head for luck. Hagen, who liked to play fast, was eager to finish the round. “Hurry up, will ya?  I’ve got a date tonight,” he said.

Inside the clubhouse, Wood’s name had already been inscribed on the winner’s check, and his wife, Jacqueline, was standing by her husband, accepting congratulations. Wood’s lead looked “safer than a dozen Gibraltars,” one reporter observed. It was the couple’s first wedding anniversary, and Wood was hoping to make a “husbandly effort to present this title to his wife,” as well as the winner’s check for $1,500. (The traditional awarding of the green jacket to the Masters champion did not begin until 1949.)

At the same time, Sarazen, described in newspapers afterward as the “swaggering little Roman,” stepped up to address his ball. He slowly began his backswing, then powered down through the ball, which, one reporter noted, “left the face of the spoon like a rifle shot.”

The shot landed on the front of the green. A cheer went up from the spectators—and then a roar as the ball began to roll, tracking slowly toward the pin. Ever so deliberately, it “spun along its way and finally disappeared in the cup for a double-eagle two,” one reporter wrote. “A two on a 485-yard hold where even an eagle three wouldn’t have helped.”

Jones, who had finished his round, saw Sarazen’s miraculous second shot from the fairway. “That was one golf shot that was beyond all imagining, and golf is largely imagination,” Jones said. “From duffer to star we all dream of impossible shots that might come off. This one was beyond the limit of all dreams when you consider all the surrounding circumstances. I still don’t believe what I saw.”

Another reporter observed, “Had anyone other than Sarazen holed a 230-yard [shot] for a deuce on a 485-yard hole, it could easily be set down as a miracle, but coming from the fighting little Italian, it was a manifestation of superb competitive courage, garnished, of course, with a smattering of luck.”

Later that night, Sarazen told Rice he had been “afraid of the lie I had.” When he saw the ball sailing toward the green, he hoped he’d have a short eagle putt. Then he heard the roar of the crowd and discovered he’d made a double eagle. “Nothing else could have saved me,” he said. “When that wild howl went up, I felt, for just a second, like crying.”

Back in the clubhouse, Jacqueline Wood felt like doing the same. She was spotted standing “anxious, trembling and miserable.” As word of Sarazen’s double eagle spread and electrified the grounds, one of the players’ wives approached her and said, “You’ll get used to this, dear.”

With one swing, Sarazen had made up three strokes on Wood. He parred the last three holes, which left him tied for the lead after four rounds. A 36-hole playoff loomed on Monday—another raw day. A reporter wrote that Wood would try to “beat back destiny,” but the end of the 1935 Augusta National Invitational would be anticlimactic. Wood was “hitting perfect figures all the way, while Sarazen was curing two mistakes with as many birdies,” in one reporter’s account. Sarazen won by five strokes.

Wood didn’t express any bitterness about the defeat. He recalled losing the inaugural tournament to Horton Smith, but said, “It never occurred to me that anyone was going to hole a shot of 230 yards to stop me again.”

He eventually became the first golfer to lose all four major championships in extra holes—a distinction that lasted until Greg Norman came along. Unlike Norman, however, Wood rebounded from his defeats in Augusta; in 1941 he won the tournament in wire-to-wire fashion. He then removed the “jinx” label by winning the very next major—the 45th U.S. Open—in what is widely considered one of the greatest years any golfer has ever had.

Sarazen didn’t win much after the 1935 Augusta National Invitational, but he could be counted on to return to Augusta to hit the ceremonial opening shot, along with Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, right up until his death, at age 97, in 1999. In 1955, the Augusta National Golf Club built the Sarazen Bridge at the edge of the pond in front of the 15th hole in honor of the Squire and his double eagle. “It was the greatest thrill I’ve ever known in golf,” he said just after his 1935 feat, “or ever expect to again.”

Sources

Books: Gene Sarazen and Herbert Warren Wind, Thirty Years of Championship Golf, Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1950. David Owen, The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf’s Most Prestigious Tournament, Simon & Schuster, 1999. Ken Janke, Firsts, Facts, Feats, & Failures In the World of Golf, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Robert McCord, Golf Book of Days: Fascinating Facts and Stories for Every Day of the Year, Citadel Press Books, 1995.  Matthew E. Adams, In the Spirit of the Game: Golf’s Greatest Stories, Globe Pequot Press, 2008.  Tim Glover and Peter Higgs, Fairway to Heaven: Victors and Victims of Golf’s Choking Game, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd., 1999. Tom Clavin, One for the Ages: Jack Nicklaus and the 1986 Masters, Chicago Review Press, 2011.  Julian I. Graubart, Golf’s Greatest Championship: The 1960 U. S. Open, Taylor Trade Publications, 2009.  Robert Sommers, Golf Anecdotes: From the Links of Scotland to Tiger Woods, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Articles: “Amazing Accuracy Brings Sarazen Victory Over Wood in Playoff of Masters’ Golf Tournament,” Boston Globe, April 9, 1935. “Sarazen’s 144 Wins Masters Golf Playoff,” by Charles Bartlett, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 9, 1935. “Sarazen Ties Wood for Masters’ Title,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 8, 1935. “Wood Cards 68 to Top Golfers,” Washington Post, April 7, 1935. “Craig Wood Conquers Elements and Par to Snatch Lead in Augusta Open Golf,” by Grantland Rice, Hartford Courant, April 7, 1935. “Wood Cards 68; Leads Masters’ Tourney,” by Charles Bartlett, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1935. “Henry Picard Shoots 67 to Lead Par-Wrecking Field in Augusta National Golf,” by Grantland Rice, Hartford Courant, April 5, 1935. “Still Feared by Golf’s Greatest,” by Grantland Rice, Daily Boston Globe, April 3, 1935.  “Jones Prince or Hosts, but Stars Fear Sarazen,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 3, 1935. “Gene Sarazen Ready to Recreate Famous Double Eagle at Masters,” by Jim Achenbach, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, April 11, 1984. “Mystery Man was a Champ,” by Garry Smits, The Florida Times Union, November 10, 2008.  “Early Decision Set the Stage for Drama,” by John Boyette, The Augusta Chronicle, February 9, 2012.  “Golf Dress Sloppy, Says Gene Sarazen,” by Oscar Fraley, The Tuscaloosa News, February 11, 1965.

Bat Masterson, toward the end of his life, in New York City. Photo: Wikipedia

Bat Masterson spent the last half of his life in New York, hobnobbing with Gilded Age celebrities and working a desk job that saw him churning out sports reports and “Timely Topics” columns for the New York Morning Telegraph. His lifestyle had widened his waistline, belying the reputation he had earned in the first half of his life as one of the most feared gunfighters in the West. But that reputation was built largely on lore; Masterson knew just how to keep the myths alive, as well as how to evade or deny his past, depending on whichever stories served him best at the time.

Despite his dapper appearance and suave charm, Masterson could handle a gun. And despite his efforts to deny his deadly past, late in his life he admitted, under cross-examination in a lawsuit, that he had indeed killed. It took a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, Benjamin Cardozo, to get the truth out of Masterson. Some of it, anyway.

William Barclay “Bat” Masterson was born in Canada in 1853, but his family—he had five brothers and two sisters—ultimately settled on a farm in Sedgwick County, Kansas. At age 17, Masterson left home with his brothers Jim and Ed and went west, where they found work on a ranch near Wichita. “I herded buffalo out there for a good many years,” he later told a reporter. “Killed ‘em and sold their hides for $2.50 apiece. Made my living that way.”

Masterson’s prowess with a rifle and his knowledge of the terrain caught the attention of General Nelson Appleton Miles, who, after his highly decorated service with the Union Army in the Civil War, had led many a campaign against American Indian tribes across the West. From 1871-74, Masterson signed on as a civilian scout for Miles. “That was when the Indians got obstreperous, you remember,” he told a reporter.

Bat Masterson in 1879, sheriff of Ford County, Kansas. Photo: Wikipedia

Masterson was believed to have killed his first civilian in 1876, while he was working as a faro dealer at Henry Fleming’s Saloon in Sweetwater, Texas. Fleming also owned a dance hall, and it was there that Masterson tangled with an Army Sergeant who went by the name of Melvin A. King over the affections of a dance-hall girl named Mollie Brennan.

Masterson had been entertaining Brennan after hours and alone in the club when King came looking for Brennan. Drunk and enraged at finding Masterson with her, King pulled a pistol, pointed it at Masterson’s groin, and fired. The shot knocked the young faro dealer to the ground. King’s second shot pierced Brennan’s abdomen. Wounded and bleeding badly, Masterson drew his pistol and returned fire, hitting King in the heart. Both King and Brennan died; Masterson recovered from his wounds, though he did use a cane sporadically for the rest of his life. The incident became known as the Sweetwater Shootout, and it cemented Bat Masterson’s reputation as a hard man.

News of a gold strike in the Black Hills of South Dakota sent Masterson packing for the north. In Cheyenne, he went on a five-week winning streak on the gambling tables, but he tired of the town and had left when he ran into Wyatt Earp, who encouraged him to go to Dodge City, Kansas, where Bat’s brothers Jim and Ed were working in law enforcement. Masterson, Earp told him, would make a good sheriff of Ford County someday, and ought to run for election.

Masterson ended up working as a deputy alongside Earp, and within a few months, he won election to the sheriff’s job by three votes. Right away, Masterson was tasked with cleaning up Dodge, which by 1878 had become a hotbed of lawless activity.  Murders, train robberies and Cheyenne Indians who had escaped from their reservation were just a few of the problems Masterson and his marshals confronted early in his term. But on the evening of April 9, 1878, Bat Masterson drew his pistol to avenge the life of his brother. This killing was kept apart from the Masterson lore.

City Marshal Ed Masterson was at the Lady Gay Saloon, where trail boss Alf Walker and a handful of his riders were whooping it up. One of Walker’s men, Jack Wagner, displayed his six-shooter in plain sight. Ed approached Wagner and told him he’d have to check his gun. Wagner tried to turn it over to the young marshal, but Ed told Wagner he’d have to check it with the bartender. Then he left the saloon.

Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp in 1876. Photo: Wikipedia

A few moments later, Walker and Wagner staggered out of the Lady Gay. Wagner had his gun, and Ed tried to take it from him.  A scuffle ensued, as onlookers spilled out onto the street. A man named Nat Haywood stepped in to help Ed Masterson, but Alf Walker drew his pistol, pushed it into Haywood’s face and squeezed the trigger.  His weapon misfired, but then Wagner drew his gun and shoved it into Masterson’s abdomen.  A shot rang out and the marshal stumbled backward, his coat catching fire from the muzzle blast.

Across the street, Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson reached for his gun as he chased Wagner and Walker. From 60 feet away, Masterson emptied his gun, hitting Wagner in the abdomen and Walker in the chest and arm.

Bat then tended to his brother, who died in his arms about a half hour after the fight.  Wagner died not long afterward, and Walker, alive but uncharged, was allowed to return to Texas, where Wyatt Earp reported that he later died from pneumonia relating to his wounded lung.

Newspapers at the time attributed the killing of Jack Wagner to Ed Masterson; they said he had returned fire during the melee. It was widely believed that this account was designed to keep Bat Masterson’s name out of the story to prevent any “Texas vengeance.” Despite the newspaper accounts, witnesses in Dodge City had long whispered the tale of the Ford County sheriff calmly shooting down his brother’s assailants on the dusty street outside the Lady Gay.

Masterson spent the next 20 years in the West, mostly in Denver, where he gambled, dealt faro in clubs and promoted prize fights. In 1893 he married Emma Moulton, a singer and juggler who remained with Masterson for the rest of his life.

The couple moved to New York in 1902, where Masterson picked up work as a newspaperman, writing mostly about prizefighting at first, but then also covering politics and entertainment in his New York Morning Telegraph column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely Topics.” A profile of him written about him 20 years before in the New York Sun followed Masterson to the East Coast, cementing the idea that he had killed 28 men out west. Masterson never did much to dispute the stories or the body count, realizing that his reputation did not suffer.  His own magazine essays on life on the Western frontier led many to believe he was exaggerating tales of bravery for his own benefit. But in 1905, he played down the violence of his past, telling a reporter for the New York Times, “I never killed a white person that I remember—might have aimed my gun at one or two.”

He had good reason to burnish his reputation. That year, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Masterson deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York—an appointment he held until 1912. Masterson began traveling in higher social circles, and became more protective of his name. So he was not pleased to find that a 1911 story in the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser quoted a fight manager named Frank B. Ufer as saying Masterson had “made his reputation by shooting drunken Mexicans and Indians in the back.”

Masterson retained a lawyer and filed a libel suit, Masterson v. Commercial Advertiser Association. To defend itself, the newspaper hired a formidable New York attorney, Benjamin N. Cardozo. In May 1913, Masterson testified that Ufer’s remark had damaged his reputation and that the newspaper had done him “malicious and willful injury.” He wanted $25,000 in damages.

Future Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo cross-examined Bat Masterson in a libel trial in 1913. Photo: Wikipedia

In defense of the newspaper, Cardozo argued that Masterson was not meant to be taken seriously—as both Masterson and Ufer were “sporting men” and Ufer’s comments were understood to be “humorous and jocular.” Besides, Cardozo argued, Masterson was a known “carrier of fire arms” and had indeed “shot a number of men.”

When questioned by his attorney, Masterson denied killing any Mexicans; any Indians he may have shot, he shot in battle (and he could not say whether any had fallen). Finally, Cardozo rose to cross-examine the witness. “How many men have you shot and killed in your life?” he asked.

Masterson dismissed the reports that he had killed 28 men, and to Cardozo, under oath, he guessed that the total was three. He admitted to killing King after King had shot him first in Sweetwater. He admitted to shooting a man in Dodge City in 1881, but he wasn’t certain whether the man died. And then he confessed that he, and not his brother Ed, had shot and killed Wagner. Under oath, Bat Masterson apparently felt compelled to set the record straight.

“Well, you are proud of those exploits in which you killed men, aren’t you?” Cardozo asked.

“Oh, I don’t think about being proud of it,” Masterson answered. “I do not feel that I ought to be ashamed about it; I feel perfectly justified. The mere fact that I was charged with killing a man standing by itself I have never considered an attack upon my reputation.”

The jury granted Masterson’s claim, awarding him $3,500 plus $129 in court costs. But Cardozo successfully appealed the verdict, and Masterson eventually accepted a $1,000 settlement. His legend, however, lived on.

Sources

Books: Robert K. DeArment, Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend, University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.  Robert K. DeArment, Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson’s New York City Years, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.  Michael Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Soft Skull Press, 2000.

Articles: “They Called Him Bat,” by Dale L. Walker, American Cowboy, May/June 2006. “Benjamin Cardozo Meets Gunslinger Bat Masterson,” by William H. Manz, New York State Bar Association’s Journal, July/August 2004. “‘Bat’ Masterson Vindicated: Woman Interviewer Gives Him ‘Square Deal,’ ” by Zoe Anderson Norris, New York Times April 2, 1905. “W.B. ‘Bat’ Masterson, Dodge City Lawman, Ford County Sheriff,” by George Laughead, Jr. 2006, Ford County Historical Society, http://www.skyways.org/orgs/fordco/batmasterson.html.  ”Bat Masterson and the Sweetwater Shootout,” by Gary L. Roberts, Wild West, October, 2000, http://www.historynet.com/bat-masterson-and-the-sweetwater-shootout.htm. “Bat Masterson: Lawman of Dodge City,” Legends of Kansas, http://www.legendsofkansas.com/batmasterson.html. “Bat Masterson: King of the Gunplayers,” by Alfred Henry Louis, Legends of America, http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-batmasterson.html.

Battling Siki in 1925. Photo: Wikipedia

Despite the promoters’ best efforts, the 1922 light-heavyweight fight between the popular European champion Georges Carpentier and an obscure Senegalese brawler named Amadou Mbarick Fall, better known as “Battling Siki,” wasn’t supposed to be much of a fight. In the run-up to the September 22 event, newspapers confidently reported that fight fans could “expect to see the French idol win inside of six rounds.”

And yet more than 50,000 Parisians flocked to the Buffalo Velodrome, creating the first “million-franc” boxing match. Carpentier was a war hero beloved by his countrymen, and even though he had a lackluster record, Battling Siki was more than willing to help stir up interest in the fight. He was billed as the “Jungle Hercules,” and reporters described him as a man who fought “like a leopard,” with “great muscles” rippling under his dark skin and “perfect white teeth so typical of the negroid.” Siki had taken a hit on the head with a hammer, one paper stated, “and scarcely felt it.”

Even Siki’s own manager, Charlie Hellers was quick to point out the fighter’s “gorilla’s skill and manners” to reporters. “He’s a scientific ape,” Hellers said. “Just imagine an ape that has learned to box and you have Battling Siki.”

Georges Carpentier, the Orchid Man. Photo: Library of Congress

For his part, Siki told reporters that he was going to knock Carpentier out in the first round because he had plans to fight the world heavyweight champion next. “Tell Jack Dempsey he’s my next meat,” Siki was quoted as saying.

In truth, the fighter was born and raised in the Senegalese city of Saint-Louis and moved to France as a teen. “I have never even seen a jungle,” he would say later. He was often spotted around Paris dressed in expensive suits and fancy hats, sometimes with his pet monkey perched on his shoulder. His training, it was said, consisted of “caviar and cognac,” and he preferred doing his “roadwork on a dance floor.”

On the afternoon of September 22, fight fans packed the velodrome to see Carpentier defend his title. Nicknamed the “Orchid Man” for the corsages he often wore with his tailored suits, Carpentier had been fighting professionally since he was  14. Although he was coming off a failed attempt to win Dempsey’s heavyweight title, he’d helped secure boxing’s first million-dollar gate. Fighting again as a light-heavyweight, the Frenchman’s future was still bright—so bright that Carpentier’s handlers were taking no chances.  They offered Battling Siki a bribe to throw the fight. Siki agreed, under the condition that he “didn’t want to get hurt.” What followed was one of the strangest bouts in boxing history.

Although Siki later admitted that the fight was rigged, there’s some question as to whether Carpentier knew it. Early in the first of 20 scheduled rounds, Siki dropped to a knee after Carpentier grazed him, and then rose and began to throw wild, showy punches with little behind them. In the third, Carpentier landed a powerful blow, and Siki went down again; when he got back on his feet, he lunged at his opponent head first, hands low, as if inviting Carpentier to hit him again.  Carpentier obliged, sending Siki to the canvas once more.

At that point, the action in the ring turned serious. Siki later told a friend that during the fight, he had reminded Carpentier, “You aren’t supposed to hit me,” but the Frenchman “kept doing it. He thought he could beat me without our deal, and he kept on hitting me.”

Suddenly, Battling Siki’s punches had a lot more power to them. He pounded away at Carpentier in the fourth round, then dropped him with a vicious combination and stood menacingly over him. Through the fourth and into the fifth, the fighters stood head to head, trading punches, but it was clear that Siki was getting the better of the champion. Frustrated, Carpentier charged in and head-butted Siki, knocking him to the floor. Rising to his feet, Siki tried to protest to the referee, but Carpentier charged again, backing him into a corner. The Frenchman slipped and fell to the canvas—and Siki, seemingly confused, helped him get to his feet. Seeing Siki’s guard down, Carpentier showed his gratitude by launching a hard left hook to Siki’s head just before the bell ended the round. The Senegalese tried to follow Carpentier back to his corner, but handlers pulled him back onto his stool.

At the start of round six, Battling Siki pounced. Furious, he spun Carpentier around and delivered an illegal knee to his midsection, which dropped the Frenchman for good. Enraged, Siki stood above him and shouted down at his fallen foe. With his right eye swollen shut and his nose broken, the Orchid Man was splayed awkwardly on his side, his left leg resting on the lower rope.

Siki returned to his corner. His manager, Charlie Hellers, blurted out, “My God. What have you done?”

“He hit me,” Siki answered.

Referee M. Henri Bernstein didn’t even bother counting. Believed by some to be in on the fix, Bernstein tried to explain that he was disqualifying Siki for fouling Carpentier, who was then being carried to his corner. Upon hearing of the disqualification, the crowd unleashed a “great chorus of hoots and jeers and even threaten[ed] the referee with bodily harm.” Carpentier, they believed, had been “beaten squarely by a better man.”

Amid the pandemonium, the judges quickly conferred, and an hour later, reversed the disqualification. Battling Siki was the new champion.

Siki was embraced, just as Carpentier had been, and he quickly became the toast of Paris. He was a late-night fixture in bars around the city, surrounded by women, and he could often be seen walking the Champs-Elysees in a top hat and tuxedo, with a pet lion cub on a leash.

Battling Siki in Ireland with his French sparring partner, Euguene Stuber in 1923. Photo: Wikipedia

Carpentier fought for a few more years but never never reclaimed his title. Retiring from the ring, he toured the vaudeville circuits of the United States and England as a song-and-dance man. Battling Siki turned down several big fights in the United States to face Mike McTigue in Ireland. That the bout was held on St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin was likely a factor in  Siki’s losing a controversial decision. He moved to New York City in 1923 and began a downward spiral of alcohol abuse that led to countless confrontations with the police. By 1925, he was regularly sleeping in jail cells after being picked up for public intoxication, fighting and skipping out on bar debts.

In the early hours of December 15, 1925, Amadou Mbarick Fall, aka Battling Siki, was wandering through the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York’s West Side when he took two bullets in his back and died on the street. Just 28 years old, Siki was believed to have been killed over some unpaid debts, but the homicide remains unsolved. Adam Clayton Powell presided over Siki’s funeral in Harlem, and in 1991, the pugilist’s remains were brought back to Senegal.

Sources

Books:  Peter Benson, Battling Siki: A tale of ring fixes, race & murder in the 1920s, The University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

Articles: “Dempsey’s My Meat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 18, 1922,  “Knocked Out, Battling Siki is Borne From Ring of Life Forever,” The New Amsterdam News, December 29, 1925.  “Siki Scientific Ape, Says Manager,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 1, 1922.  “Siki Like a Leopard,” Boston Daily Globe, September 25, 1922.  “Million Franc Gate For Carpenter’s Bout with Battling Siki,” Boston Daily Globe, September 22, 1922.  “The Sidewalks of New York,” Boston Daily Globe, November 29, 1925.  “Saki is a Gorilla, Says Manager,” New York Times, September 26, 1922.  “Carpentier Crumbles Before Negro Wonder; Flattened in Sixth,” The Hartford Courant, September 25, 1922.  “Negro Tumbles Idol of France,” Boston Daily Globe, September 25, 1922. “The Fix Was In—but Then Battling Siki Got Mad,” by Roy McHugh, Sports Illustrated, April 24, 1989.

Marshall “Major” Taylor in 1900. Photo: Wikipedia

At the dawn of the 20th century, cycling was the most popular sport in both America and Europe, with tens of thousands of spectators drawn to arenas and velodromes to see highly dangerous and even deadly affairs that bore little semblance to bicycle racing today. In brutal six-day races of endurance, well-paid competitors often turned to cocaine, strychnine and nitroglycerine for stimulation and suffered from sleep deprivation, delusions and hallucinations along with falls from their bicycles. In motor-paced racing, cyclists would draft behind motorcycles, reaching speeds of 60 miles per hour on cement-banked tracks, where blown bicycle tires routinely led to spectacular crashes and deaths.

Yet one of the first sports superstars emerged from this curious and sordid world. Marshall W. Taylor was just a teenager when he turned professional and began winning races on the world stage, and President Theodore Roosevelt became one of his greatest admirers. But it was not Taylor’s youth that cycling fans first noticed when he edged his wheels to the starting line. Nicknamed “the Black Cyclone,” he would burst to fame as the world champion of his sport almost a decade before the African-American heavyweight Jack Johnson won his world title. And as with Johnson, Taylor’s crossing of the color line was not without complication, especially in the United States, where he often had no choice but to ride ahead of his white competitors to avoid being pulled or jostled from his bicycle at high speeds.

Taylor was born into poverty in Indianapolis in 1878, one of eight children in his family. His father, Gilbert, the son of a Kentucky slave, fought for the Union in the Civil War and then worked as a coachman for the Southards, a well-to-do family in Indiana. Young Marshall often accompanied his father to work to help exercise some of the horses, and he became close friends with Dan Southard, the son of his father’s employer. By the time Marshall was 8, the Southards had for all intents and purposes adopted him into their home, where he was educated by private tutors and virtually lived the same life of privilege as his friend Dan.

When Marshall was about 13, the Southards moved to Chicago. Marshall’s mother “could not bear the idea of parting with me,” he would write in his autobiography. Instead, “I was dropped from the happy life of a ‘millionaire kid’ to that of a common errand boy, all within a few weeks.”

Aside from the education, the Southards also gave Taylor a bicycle, and the young man was soon earning money as a paperboy, delivering newspapers and riding barefoot for miles a day. In his spare time, he practiced tricks and caught the attention of someone at the Hay and Willits bicycle shop, which paid Marshall to hang around the front of the store, dressed in a military uniform, doing trick mounts and stunts to attract business. A new bicycle and a raise enabled Marshall to quit delivering newspapers and work for the shop full-time. His uniform won him the nickname “Major,” which stuck.

Major Taylor racing in Paris in 1908. Photo: Wikipedia

To further promote the store, one of the shop’s owners, Tom Hay, entered Taylor in a ten-mile bicycle race—something the cyclist had never seen before. “I know you can’t go the full distance,” Hay whispered to the terrified entrant, “but just ride up the road a little way, it will please the crowd, and you can come back as soon as you get tired.”

The crack of a starter’s pistol signaled the beginning of an unprecedented career in bicycle racing. Major Taylor pushed his legs beyond anything he’d imagined himself capable of and finished six seconds ahead of anyone else. There he “collapsed and fell in a heap in the roadway,” he wrote, but he soon had a gold medal pinned to his chest. He began competing in races across the Midwest; while he was still 13, his cycling prowess earned him a notice in the New York Times, which made no mention of his youth.

By the 1890s, America was experiencing a bicycle boom, and Taylor continued to work for Hay and Willits, mostly giving riding lessons.  While white promoters allowed him to compete in trick riding competitions and races, Taylor was kept from joining any of the local riding clubs, and many white cyclists were less than welcoming to the black phenom. In August 1896, Taylor’s friend and new mentor, Louis D. “Berdi” Munger, who owned the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts, signed him up for an event and smuggled him into the whites-only races at the Capital City Cycling Club in Indianapolis. He couldn’t officially compete against the professionals, but his time could certainly be measured.

Some of the other riders were friendly with Taylor and had no problems pacing him on tandem bicycles for a time trial. In his first heat, he knocked more than eight seconds off the mile track record, with the crowd roaring when they learned of his time. After a rest, he came back on to the track to see what he could do in the one-fifth-mile race. The crowd tensed as Taylor reached the starting line.  Stopwatches were pulled from pockets. He exploded around the track and, at age 17, knocked two-fifths of a second off the world record held by professional racer Ray MacDonald. Taylor’s time could not be turned in for official recognition, but everyone in attendance knew what they had seen. Major Taylor was a force on two wheels.

Still, Munger’s stunt angered many local cycling officials, and his rider was quickly banned from that Indianapolis track. By that point, it didn’t matter; Taylor was on his way. Later in 1896, he finished eighth in his first six-day race at New York’s Madison Square Garden, even though the hallucinations got to him; at one point he said, “I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand.”

Munger, keen to establish his own racing team with the Black Cyclone as its star, took Taylor to Worcester and put him to work for his company. He was in Massachusetts when his mother died in 1898, which led Taylor to seek baptism and become a devoted member of  the John Street Baptist Church in Worcester. Before his teenage years ended, Taylor became a professional racer with seven world records to his name. He won 29 of the 49 races he entered, and in 1899, he captured the world championship of cycling. Major Taylor was just the second black athlete to become a world champion, behind Canadian bantamweight George “Little Chocolate” Dixon, who had won his title a decade before.

Taylor’s victory earned him tremendous fame, but he was barred from races in the South, and even when he was allowed to ride, plenty of white competitors either refused to ride with him or worked to jostle or shove him or box him in. Spectators threw ice and nails at him. At the end of a one-miler in Massachusetts, W.E. Backer, who was upset at finishing behind Taylor, rode up behind him afterward and pulled him to the ground. “Becker choked him into a state of insensibility,” the New York Times reported, “and the police were obliged to interfere. It was fully fifteen minutes before Taylor recovered consciousness, and the crowd was very threatening toward Becker.” Becker would be fined $50 for the assault.

It was abundantly clear to Munger and other friends that Taylor would be better off racing in Europe, where some of the strongest riders in the world were competing and where a black athlete could ride without fear of racially motivated violence. His advisers tried to persuade him to leave the United States, but  Taylor would have none of it. The prestigious French events held races on Sundays, and Taylor’s religious convictions prevented him from competing on the Sabbath.  ”Never on Sundays,” he insisted.

Still, the money to be made overseas was a strong lure, and the European promoters were eager to bring the Black Cyclone to their tracks. Promoters shifted events from Sundays to French national holidays to accommodate the American. In 1902, Taylor finally competed on the European tour and dominated it, winning the majority of races he entered and cementing his reputation as the fastest cyclist in the world. (He also married Daisy Morris that year, and continued to travel. When he and Daisy had a daughter in 1904, they named her Rita Sydney, after the city in Australia where she was born.)

Taylor raced for the rest of the decade, reportedly earning $30,000 a year, making him one of the wealthiest athletes of his day, black or white. But with the advent of the automobile, interest in cycling began to wane. Taylor, feeling the effects of age on his legs, retired in 1910, at age 32. A string of bad investments, coupled with the Wall Street crash in 1929, wiped out all of his earnings. His marriage crumbled, and he became sickly. After six years of writing his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, he self-published it in 1929 and spent the last years of his life selling the book door-to-door in Chicago. “I felt I had my day,” he wrote, “and a wonderful day it was too.” Yet when he died, in 1932, at the age of 53, his body lay unclaimed in a morgue, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave at the Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Chicago.

When they learned where Major Taylor’s grave site was, some former racing stars and members of the Olde Tymers Athletic Club of the South Wabash Avenue YMCA persuaded Frank Schwinn, owner of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, to pay to have Taylor’s remains exhumed and transferred to a more fitting location—the cemetery’s Memorial Garden of the Good Shepherd. There, a bronze tablet reads:

“Worlds champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way—Without hatred in his heart—An honest, courageous and God-fearing, clean-living gentlemanly athlete.  A credit to his race who always gave out his best—Gone but not forgotten.”

Sources

Books: Andrew Richie, Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Marshall W. Taylor, Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World: The Story of a Colored Boy’s Indomitable Courage and Success Against Great Odds, Ayer Co. Pub, 1928. Andrew M. Homan, Life in the Slipstream: The Legend of Bobby Walthour Sr., Potomac Books Inc., 2011. Marlene Targ Brill, Marshall “Major” Taylor: World Champion Bicyclist , 1899-1901, Twenty-First Century Books, 2008.

Articles: “Major Taylor—The World’s Fastest Bicycle Racer,” by Michael Kranish, Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, September 16, 2001. “‘Worcester Whirlwind’ Overcame Bias,” by Lynne Tolman, Telegram & Gazette, July 23, 1995. http://www.majortaylorassociation.org/whirlwind.htm “Draw the Color Line,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1898. “Trouble on Taunton’s Track,” New York Times, September 24, 1897. “Taylor Shows the Way,” Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1898.

Fred Lorz, Olympic marathoner and practical joker, 1904.
Photo: www.morethanthegames.co.uk

America’s first Olympics may have been its worst, or at least its most bizarre. Held in 1904 in St. Louis, the games were tied to that year’s World’s Fair, which celebrated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase while advancing, as did all such turn-of-the-century expositions, the notion of American imperialism. Although there were moments of surprising and genuine triumph (gymnast George Eyser earned six medals, including three gold, despite his wooden leg), the games were largely overshadowed by the fair, which offered its own roster of sporting events, including the controversial Anthropology Days, in which a group of “savages” recruited from the fair’s international villages competed in a variety of athletic feats—among them a greased-pole climb, “ethnic” dancing, and mud slinging—for the amusement of Caucasian spectators. Pierre de Coubertin, a French historian and founder of the International Olympic Committee, took disapproving note of the spectacle and made a prescient observation: “As for that outrageous charade, it will of course lose its appeal when black men, red men and yellow men learn to run, jump and throw, and leave the white men behind them.”

The Olympics’ signal event, the marathon, was conceived to honor the classical heritage of Greece and underscore the connection between the ancient and modern. But from the start the 1904 marathon was less showstopper than sideshow, a freakish spectacle that seemed more in keeping with the carnival atmosphere of the fair than the reverential mood of the games. The outcome was so scandalous that the event was nearly abolished for good.

Javelin contest during the Anthropology Days.
Photo: St. Louis Public Library (www.slpl.org)

A few of the runners were recognized marathoners who had either won or placed in the Boston Marathon or had placed in previous Olympic marathons, but the majority of the field was composed of middle-distance runners and assorted “oddities.” Americans Sam Mellor, A.L. Newton, John Lordon, Michael Spring and Thomas Hicks, all experienced marathoners, were among the favorites. Another American, Fred Lorz, did all his training at night because he had a day job as a bricklayer, and earned his spot in the Olympics by placing in a “special five-mile race” sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union. Among the leading oddities were ten Greeks who had never run a marathon, two men of the Tsuana tribe of South Africa who were in St. Louis as part of the South African World’s Fair exhibit and who arrived at the starting line barefoot, and a Cuban national and former mailman named Félix Carbajal, who raised money to come to the States by demonstrating his running prowess throughout Cuba, once trekking the length of the island. Upon his arrival in New Orleans, he lost all his money on a dice game and had to walk and hitchhike to St. Louis. At five feet tall, he presented a slight but striking figure at the starting line, attired in a white, long-sleeved shirt, long, dark pants, a beret and a pair of street shoes. One fellow Olympian took pity, found a pair of scissors and cut Carbajal’s trousers at the knee.

Cuban marathoner (and former mailman) Félix Carbajal
Photo: Britannica.com

On August 30, at precisely 3:03 p.m., David R. Francis, president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, fired the starting pistol, and the men were off. Heat and humidity soared into the 90s, and the 24.85-mile course—which one fair official called “the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over”—wound across roads inches deep in dust. There were seven hills, varying from 100-to-300 feet high, some with brutally long ascents. In many places cracked stone was strewn across the roadway, creating perilous footing, and the men had to constantly dodge cross-town traffic, delivery wagons, railroad trains, trolley cars and people walking their dogs. There were only two places where athletes could secure fresh water, from a water tower at six miles and a roadside well at 12 miles. James Sullivan, the chief organizer of the games, wanted to minimize fluid intake to test the limits and effects of purposeful dehydration, a common area of research at the time. Cars carrying coaches and physicians motored alongside the runners, kicking the dust up and launching coughing spells.

Fred Lorz led the 32 starters from the gun, but by the first mile Thomas Hicks edged ahead. William Garcia of California nearly became the first fatality of an Olympic marathon we he collapsed on the side of the road and was hospitalized with hemorrhaging; the dust had coated his esophagus and ripped his stomach lining. Had he gone unaided an hour longer he might have bled to death. John Lordon suffered a bout of vomiting and gave up. Len Tau, one of the South African participants, was chased a mile off course by wild dogs. Félix Carvajal trotted along in his cumbersome shoes and billowing shirt, making good time even though he paused to chat with spectators in broken English. On one occasion he stopped at a car, saw that its occupants were eating peaches, and asked for one. Being refused, he playfully snatched two and ate them as he ran. A bit further along the course, he stopped at an orchard and snacked on some apples, which turned out to be rotten. Suffering from stomach cramps, he lay down and took a nap. Sam Mellor, now in the lead, also experienced severe cramping. He slowed to a walk and eventually stopped. At the nine-mile mark cramps also plagued Lorz, who decided to hitch a ride in one of the accompanying automobiles, waving at spectators and fellow runners as he passed.

Hicks, one of the early American favorites, came under the care of a two-man support crew at the 10-mile mark. He begged them for a drink but they refused, instead sponging out his mouth with warm distilled water. Seven miles from the finish, his handlers fed him a concoction of strychnine and egg whites—the first recorded instance of drug use in the modern Olympics. Strychnine, in small doses, was commonly used a stimulant, and at the time there were no rules about performance-enhancing drugs. Hicks’ team also carried a flask of French brandy but decided to withhold it until they could gauge the runner’s condition.

Meanwhile, Lorz, recovered from his cramps, emerged from his 11-mile ride in the automobile. One of Hicks’ handlers saw him and ordered him off the course, but Lorz kept running and finished with a time of just under three hours. The crowd roared and began chanting, “An American won!” Alice Roosevelt, the 20-year-old daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, placed a wreath upon Lorz’s head and was just about to lower the gold medal around his neck when, one witness reported, “someone called an indignant halt to the proceedings with the charge that Lorz was an impostor.” The cheers turned to boos. Lorz smiled and claimed that he had never intended to accept the honor; he finished only for the sake of a “joke.”

Thomas Hicks, assisted by his trainers.

Hicks, the strychnine coursing through his blood, had grown ashen and limp. When he heard that Lorz had been disqualified he perked up and forced his legs into a trot. His trainers gave him another dose of strychnine and egg whites, this time with some brandy to wash it down. They fetched warm water and soaked his body and head. After the bathing he appeared to revive and quickened his pace. “Over the last two miles of the road,” wrote race official Charles Lucas, “Hicks was running mechanically, like a well-oiled piece of machinery. His eyes were dull, lusterless; the ashen color of his face and skin had deepened; his arms appeared as weights well tied down; he could scarcely lift his legs, while his knees were almost stiff.”

He began hallucinating, believing that the finish line was still 20 miles away. In the last mile he begged for something to eat. Then he begged to lie down. He was given more brandy but refused tea. He swallowed two more egg whites. He walked up the first of the last two hills, and then jogged down on the incline. Swinging into the stadium, he tried to run but was reduced to a graceless shuffle. His trainers carried him over the line, holding him aloft while his feet moved back and forth, and he was declared the winner.

It took four doctors and one hour for Hicks to feel well enough just to leave the grounds. He had lost eight pounds during the course of the race, and declared, “Never in my life have I run such a touch course. The terrific hills simply tear a man to pieces.” Hicks and Lorz would meet again at the Boston Marathon the following year, which Lorz won without the aid of anything but his legs.

Sources:

Books: Susan Brownell, The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008; David E. Martin, The Olympic Marathon. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2000. George R. Matthews, America’s First Olympics: The St. Louis Games of 1904. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005; Pamela Cooper, The American Marathon. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998; Daniel M. Rosen, Dope: A history of Performance Enhancement in Sports From the Nineteenth Century to Today. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2008; Charles J. P. Lucas, The Olympic Games, 1904. St. Louis, Mo: Woodward & Tieran Printing Co., 1905.

Articles: “The Olympics of 1904: Comedic, Disgraceful, and ‘Best Forgotten.” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2004; “Marathon Captivated Crowd at 1904 Olympics.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 14, 2003; “New York Athlete Wins Marathon Race.” New York Times, April 20, 1905; “1904 Set Record for the Unusual.” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1984; “The 1904 Marathon Was Pure Torture.” Cedar Rapids Gazette, August 3, 2008; “Marathon Madness,” New Scientist 183 (August 7-13, 2004); “St. Louis Games Were Extremely Primitive By Today’s Standards.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 2004; “One Man’s Poison In a Brazen and Forgotten Incident of Doping.” Boston Globe, February 22, 2009.

Fanny Blankers-Koen, the “Flying Housewife,” wins the third of her four gold medals at the 1948 Olympics in London. Photo: Bettman/CORBIS

The last time London hosted the Olympics, the scarred city hadn’t yet recovered from the ravages of World War II. In 1948, after a 12-year hiatus from the Games, the sporting world hadn’t recovered, either. Neither Germany nor Japan were invited, and the Soviet Union declined to participate, Stalin believing that sports had no place in communism.

London built no new facilities or stadiums for what were called the “Austerity Games.” Male athletes stayed in Royal Air Force barracks, while women were housed in college dormitories. All were told to bring their own towels. With postwar rationing still in effect, there were immediate complaints about the British food. A Korean weightlifter lost 14 pounds while in England, and the Jamaicans were extremely displeased and “kicking about the poorly seasoned foods.” Rumors of food poisoning ran rampant, as numerous athletes suffered debilitating stomach pains, but British public relations officers ascribed the incidents to “nervousness,” noting that doctors had detected “nothing more than a mild digestive disorder.” Still, English athletes chose to consume unrationed whale meat, and American reporters who arrived in advance hoped Uncle Sam might send enough steaks, eggs, butter and ham for everyone.

A 57-year-old gymnastics official from Czechoslovakia became the first Olympic political defection when she refused to return to her Communist bloc nation following the Games. There was a row when the International Swimming Federation declared that athletes from Northern Ireland could compete only for Great Britain, and the Irish withdrew from the swimming and diving competition in protest. (They’d already lodged a protest when officials declared that the state be designated “Eire” rather than Ireland, as the team had wished.) As it turned out, Eire would win just one medal at the Games, when 69-year-old Letitia Hamilton picked up a bronze medal for her painting of the Meath Hunt Point-to-Point Races in the Olympic art competition.

Still, the London Games managed to set an Olympic attendance record, and an unlikely Olympic star emerged. Fanny Blankers-Koen of Holland, 6 feet tall and 30 years old, was a “shy, towering, drably domesticated” straw-blonde mother of a 7-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter who talked of how she liked cooking and housekeeping. She also won four gold medals in track and field and became “as well known to Olympic patrons as King George of England.”  Nicknamed the “Flying Housewife,” Blankers-Koen achieved this feat while pregnant with her third child.

Born Francina Elsje Koen on April 26, 1918, in Lage Vuursche, a village in the Dutch province of Utrecht, she demonstrated remarkable athletic abilities as a young child and ultimately settled on track and field after her swim coach advised her that the Netherlands was already loaded with talent in the pools. At 17 years old, Koen began competing in track events and set a national record in the 800-meter run; a year later she qualified in the trials for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in both the high jump and the 4 x 100 relay. She attended the Games, and although she did not medal in her events, she did manage to meet and get an autograph from her hero, the African-American track star Jesse Owens, whose record four gold medals she would later match in London. The meeting was, she would later say, her most treasured Olympic memory.

Fanny Blankers-Koen was voted female athlete of the century in 1999 by the International Association of the Athletics Federations. Photo: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid / NOS

Fanny was just coming into her prime as a runner when she married her coach, Jan Blankers, in 1940. She’d won European titles and set multiple world records in the 80-meter hurdles, high jump and long jump. But because of the war, the Olympics were canceled that year and again in 1944.  Still, she qualified to return to the Olympics, leaving her children behind in Amsterdam. “I got very many bad letters,” she recalled, “people writing that I must stay home with my children.”

The British team manager, Jack Crump, took one look at Blankers-Koen and said she was “too old to make the grade.” Few knew it at the time, but she was already three months pregnant and training only twice a week in the summer leading up to competition.

The Games began on July 28 under a sweltering heat wave, when King George VI opened the ceremonies at Wembley Stadium before more than 80,000 people. The athletes entered the stadium, nation by nation, and toward the end of the pageant, the American team, dressed in blue coats, white hats, white slacks and striped neckties, received a tremendous and prolonged ovation for their efforts during the war. It was a moment that, one American reporter said, “provided one of the greatest thrills this reporter has had in newspaper work.”

Blankers-Koen got off to a strong start in the 100-meter sprint, blowing away the field to capture her first gold medal, but despite being favored in her next event, the 80-meter hurdles, she was slow out of the blocks, bumped a hurdle and barely held on in a photo finish to win her second gold. Feeling the pressure, she burst into tears after one of her heats in the 200-meter event, complained of homesickness, and told her husband that she wanted to withdraw.

In addition to hyping Blankers-Koen as the “Flying Housewife,” newspaper coverage of her exploits reflected the sexism of the time in other ways. One reporter wrote that she ran “like she was chasing the kids out of the pantry.” Another observed that she “fled through her trial heats as though racing to the kitchen to rescue a batch of burning biscuits.”

Her husband patiently talked to her about continuing, and Blankers-Koen reconsidered, regrouped, then set an Olympic record in the 200 meters on her way to winning her third gold medal of the Games. In her final event, she was to run the anchor leg in the 4 x 100 relay, but the Dutch team was panicked to learn, shortly before the finals, that Blankers-Koen was nowhere to be found. A shopping trip had delayed her arrival at the stadium. She finally made her way down to the muddy track in her bright orange shorts, and by the time she’d received the baton, the Dutch were in fourth place, well behind. But she came roaring toward the finish line, closed a four-meter gap and caught the lead runner to win the gold.

Despite eclipsing Babe Didrikson’s three Olympic medals at the Los Angeles Games in 1932—a performance that vaulted the American athlete into superstardom—Blankers-Koen is mostly forgotten today. As the world record holder in both the high jump and long jump at the time, it’s possible she could have added two more gold medals in 1948, but Olympic rules allowed participation in only three individual events, and the Dutchwoman chose to run rather than jump. When she returned to her country, she received not millions of dollars worth of endorsement contracts, but a new bicycle.

Statue of Fanny Blankers-Koen in Rotterdam. Photo: Ruud Zwart

In 1972, she attended the Munich Games and met Jesse Owens once again. “I still have your autograph,” she told her hero.  “I’m Fanny Blankers-Koen.”

“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Owens replied. “I know everything about you.”

In 1999, she was voted female athlete of the 20th century by the International Association of Athletics Federations (Carl Lewis was voted the best male athlete). And yet Blankers-Koen was surprised. “You mean it is me who has won?” she asked. Yet despite her modesty and demure giggle, her biographer Kees Kooman portrays her as a deeply competitive athlete. Fanny Blankers-Koen died in 2004 at the age of 85.

In preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games, Transport for London created a commemorative “Olympic Legends Underground Map,” but among the more than 300 athletes listed, Fanny Blankers-Koen’s name was nowhere to be found.  The agency has since acknowledged the “mistake” and promised to add her name on future printings.

Sources

Articles: “Eyes of World on Olympics,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 29, 1948.  “Seldom Seen London Sun Fells Many, Wilts Others” Washington Post, July 30, 1948.  “No Food Poisoning Among Olympic Stars,” Hartford Courant, August 8 1948.  “Holland’s Fanny Would Have Won 5 Titles With Help From Olympic Schedule-Makers,” Washington Post, August 8, 1948.  “Dutch Woman Wind Third Olympic Title,” Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1948.  “Athletics: Mums on the run: Radcliff can still rule world despite pregnant pause,” by Simon Turnbull, The Independent, October 21 2007. In 1948, “London Olympics provided different challenges,” by Bob Ryan, Boston Globe, July 27, 2012.  “Fanny Blankers-Koen,” The Observer, February 3, 2002. “The 1948 London Olympics,” by Janie Hampton, August 15, 2011, http://www.totalpolitics.com/history/203762/the-1948-london-olympics.thtml

Books: Kees Kooman, Fanny Blankers-Koen: De huisvrouw die kon vliegen, De Boekenmakers, 2012.

Carl Mays, pitcher for the 1920 New York Yankees Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Chicago Bulls and their fans watched in horror as their star guard, Derrick Rose collapsed on the floor toward the end of a recent playoff game against the Philadelphia  76ers. Just days later, the New York Yankees and their fans watched Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history, fall to the ground while shagging fly balls before the start of a game in Kansas City. Both athletes suffered torn anterior cruciate ligaments in their knees, putting their futures and their teams’ prospects in doubt. Sportswriters called the injuries “tragic.”

Of course, both injuries were shocking, but “tragic” might be better reserved for matters of life and death and athletic contests gone awry—such as a confrontation that took place more than 90 years ago in New York, in the heat of a pennant race, when a scrappy Cleveland Indians shortstop stepped into the batter’s box against a no-nonsense Yankees pitcher.

The Indians were in first place, a half-game ahead of the Yankees on August 16, 1920, when they arrived at the Polo Grounds, the home the Yankees shared with the New York Giants until Yankee Stadium was built three years later. It was the start of a three-game series on a dark and drizzly Monday afternoon in Harlem. On the mound for the Yankees was right-hander Carl Mays, the ace of the staff, hoping to notch his 100th career win. Mays, a spitballer (legal at the time), threw with an awkward submarine motion, bending his torso to the right and releasing the ball close to the ground—he sometimes scraped his knuckles in the dirt. Right-handed submariners tend to give right-handed batters the most trouble because their pitches will curve in toward the batter, jamming him at the last moment. Mays, one baseball magazine noted, looked “like a cross between an octopus and a bowler” on the mound. “He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find, generally until along about 5 o’clock, when the hitters get accustomed to it—and when the game is about over.”

Mays had good control for a submariner, but he also was known as a “headhunter” who was not shy about brushing batters, especially right-handers, off the plate; he was consistently among the American League leaders in hit batsmen. His feud with Detroit Tigers great Ty Cobb was particularly intense: In one game, he threw at the cantankerous “Georgia Peach” every time he came to bat, prompting Cobb to throw his bat at Mays, Mays to call Cobb a “yellow dog,” the umpires to separate the two as they tried to trade blows, and Mays to hit Cobb on the wrist with his next pitch. In another game, Cobb laid a bunt down the first-base line so he could spike Mays when the pitcher covered the base.

Ray Chapman of the 1920 Cleveland Indians Photo: Wikipedia

Mays went unloved even by his teammates, since he had a habit of berating them if they made errors while he was pitching. And he once buried a fastball in the stomach of a heckling fan.

So when Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman stepped to the plate in the top of the fifth inning before more than 20,000 New York fans, Mays could not have been in the best of moods. The Yankees were trailing, 3-0, after he gave up a homer and his fielders committed errors worth two more runs.

Chapman was popular among both fans and players—even Ty Cobb considered him a friend. Married before the start of the season to Kathleen Daly, the daughter of a prominent businessman in Cleveland, the 29-year-old shortstop had hinted to teammates that if the Indians made the World Series, he might retire from baseball to start a family (his wife was already pregnant) and work in his father-in-law’s business.

He was a solid hitter, but had never had much luck at bat against Mays. Chapman took his usual stance, crouching and crowding the plate. A fog had settled over the field, making the afternoon even darker. Mays wound up and let loose with one of his high and tight pitches, and Chapman didn’t move an inch. In a split second, a loud crack echoed around the Polo Grounds.  The ball trickled toward the mound, and Mays quickly fielded it, tossing it to first for what he thought was the first out of the inning. But Chapman had sunk to a knee in the batter’s box, his eyes closed and his mouth open.

Yankee catcher Muddy Ruel quickly seized Chapman before he collapsed, helping him down softly onto the grass. Home-plate umpire Tommy Connolly, sensing trouble, called to the stands for a doctor. Chapman lost consciousness; players and a doctor tried to revive him. After a few minutes, they got the shortstop to his feet, and Chapman took several steps toward the clubhouse before his legs buckled beneath him. He was carried off the field.

Mays, who never left the mound while Chapman was being attended to, asked for a new ball to face the next batter. The ball that struck Chapman was tossed out of play. The game continued, and despite a Yankee rally in the bottom of the ninth, the Indians won.

Chapman was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital, where doctors took X-rays and recognized that he was in critical condition. Before the game he had given a diamond ring, a present from his wife, to Indian trainer Percy Smallwood for safekeeping. Now, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he told Smallwood he wanted it back—unable to speak, he pointed to his finger.

The blow to Chapman’s head had caused a depressed fracture more than three inches long on the left side of his skull. The doctors determined that he needed immediate surgery. In an operation that began just after midnight and lasted more than an hour, they removed a piece of Chapman’s skull, observing that he had been “so severely jarred” that his brain was lacerated on both sides from hitting the bone.

On the news that his pulse had improved and that he was breathing more easily, Indians who had gathered at the hospital headed back to their hotel. Their player-manager, Tris Speaker, notified Kathleen Chapman of her husband’s injury and she quickly boarded a train for New York. But when Speaker and his teammates woke up the next morning, they got word that Ray Chapman had died just before sunrise.

A Philadelphia priest who had been a friend of Chapman’s arrived in New York to meet Kathleen Chapman as she stepped off the train and take her to a hotel. The widow fainted at the news.

Carl Mays, according to friends, “broke down completely” when he heard of Chapman’s fate and determined to “give himself up to the district attorney at once.” He gave a tearful statement to the district attorney, saying he had thrown a fastball—a “sailer” that came “a little too close.” He added, “It was the most regrettable incident of my career and I would give anything to undo what has happened.”

Chapman’s death was quickly ruled accidental, and Mays was not charged. But players in Detroit and Boston drew up a petition demanding that he be barred from baseball, and they discussed refusing to play in any game in which Mays took part. Two umpires released a statement saying, “No pitcher in the American League resorted to trickery more than Carl Mays in attempting to rough a ball in order to get a break on it which would make it more difficult to hit.”

Owners had complained that “hundreds” of balls were being thrown out of play every year because of this act, and umpires were urged to keep balls in play as much as possible. The darkened baseballs were more difficult to see. It was widely reported that Chapman never even saw the ball that hit him.

Umpires were soon urged to take any balls out of play that were not bright white. Stricter “bean ball” rules were called for, and the next season, new pitchers would be banned throwing spitballs. (Despite calls for protective headgear, batting helmets would not become common until the 1940s.)

“It is my honest belief that Mr. Mays never will pitch again” because of the bitterness against him, said Ban Johnson, the American League president. Johnson was wrong about that; Mays kept at it until 1929. His record of 207-126 (including 27 wins  in 1921, his best season) was comparable to those of pitchers in the Hall of Fame, but he was never elected. “Nobody ever remembers anything about me except one thing,” Mays later wrote. “That a pitch I threw caused a man to die.”

The Cleveland Indians went on to win the 1920 World Series, beating the Brooklyn Robins. Chapman, of course, never got to choose whether to retire.

Sources

Articles: “Carl Mays,” by Allan Wood, SABR Baseball Biography Project, Society for American Baseball Research, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/99ca7c89. “Ray Chapman Seriously Hurt in N.Y.,” Atlanta Constitution, August 17, 1920. “McNutt Tells of Big Game,” Atlanta Constitution, August 17, 1920. “Player Hit in Head May Die,” Boston Daily Globe, August 18, 1920. “Chapman Suffers Skull Fracture,” New York Times, August 18, 1920. “Chapman Dead; Nation’s Fans Pay Him Tribute,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 19, 1920. “Ray Chapman Dies; Mays Exonerated,” New York Times, August 19, 1920. “Sox Blame Chapman Death on Failure to Penalize Bean Ball,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 19, 1920.  “New York Solemn Renewing Series,” Boston Daily Globe, August 19, 1920. “Players May Bar C. Mays,” Atlanta Constitution, August 19, 1920. “Discuss Plan to Bar Mays,” New York Times, August 19, 1920. “Headgear for Players,” New York Times,  August 19, 1920.  “Speaker Breaks Down in Grief,” Boston Daily Globe, August 21, 1920.  “Mays May Not Pitch Again, Says Johnson,” New York Times, August 21, 1920.  “Overshadowed: The 1920 Cleveland Indians,” by Will Carroll,  http://www.netshrine.com/willcarroll.html.

Books: Mike Sowell, The Pitch that Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman and the Pennant Race of 1920, Ivan R. Dee, 2003.

A crowd of 250,000 jammed Times Square to see the start of the race. From www.sportscardigest.com.

Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.

The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was suppoed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.

In Times Square that morning 17 men, including drivers, mechanics and journalists, crammed into six cars from four countries: three from France, and one each from Germany, Italy and the United States. A quarter of a million people lined Broadway up to northernmost Harlem; those who couldn’t glimpse the cars had to settle for the whiff of gasoline and the strains of a brass band. The American entry, a 60-horsepower touring car called the Thomas Flyer, carried three extra gasoline tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons and primitive canvas convertible top. The race was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., when Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Union Civil War general, planned to fire the starting pistol, but he was characteristically late. At a quarter-past, railroad financier Colgate Hoyt snatched the golden gun from the table and shot it into the air.

The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or “our bodies will be found inside the car.” Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.

Emilio Sirtori, the driver for the Italian Zust, took with him 21-year-old journalist and poet Antonio Scarfoglio, who had threatened to pilot a motorboat across the Atlantic if his father didn’t let him enter the race. (His father, a prominent newspaper editor in Naples, relented.) The German entrant, driving the Protos, was an aristocratic army officer named Hans Koeppen who regarded the race as an opportunity to raise his rank from lieutenant to captain. Montague “Monty” Roberts, manning the Thomas Flyer, was a gregarious crowd favorite and one of few American drivers who actually trained for races. His teammate was George Schuster, a 35-year-old mechanic for the E. R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, New York. One of 21 children born to Casper Schuster, a German immigrant who worked as a blacksmith, George was an expert radiator solderer, chassis inspector, motor tuner and test driver. To Roberts, he was an ideal choice—high enough in the factory hierarchy to be considered indispensable, but too low to steal attention from Roberts himself. After the starting shot, the cars moved forward, Scarfoglio wrote, “between two thick hedges of extended hands amidst a roar as of a falling torrent.” The poet blew a kiss to the crowd, and they were off.

The American team was headed by Monty Roberts and George Schuster, in the Thomas Flyer. From www.sportscardigest.com.

August Pons, driver of the French Sizaire-Naudin, drpopped out after only 96 miles with a broken differential. The De Dion, the Zust and the Thomas Flyer quickly emerged as the leaders, with the Protos and the Moto-Bloc bringing up the rear. In Hudson, New York, the cars plowed through foot-deep snow in a single file. Schuster circled the Thomas Flyer—which had no heater or windshield—with a stick to check snow depth and put down planks for traction. The trail out of Auburn, which the New York Times described as the worst road in the United States, lived up to its reputation, with the three leading cars getting mired at Dismal Hollow in the Montezuma Swamp. The men prepared to camp for the night, but an American guide hired by the Italians came with six horses to pull the cars through.

They settled into a routine, rising at 5 a.m. and driving until 8 p.m., with the mechanics tinkering with the cars until midnight to repair cracks in the chassis and drain the radiators to keep them from freezing. (At the time, antifreeze was primarily used to produce explosives.) They stopped at hardware stores to fill up on gasoline, one bucketful at a time. The teams forged a tense agreement that they would alternate leadership every five hours, but this spirit of cooperation quickly dissolved. They convinced themselves that an hour or two would make a difference in a six-month race, and feared that their opponents would sneak off in the middle of the night. St. Chaffray took to giving imperious orders: “When you wish to go into a city ahead, you ask me,” he told Roberts. The American replied, “From now on you will know this is a race.”

The animosity increased as they trekked through the snow-battered Midwest, with the Italians accusing the Americans of cheating by using railroad tracks and the aid of a trolley car. A few of the foreign competitors took offense at the locals, whom they perceived as boorish. Scarfoglio sent off a snide dispatch: “I do not like the Americans as a whole, just as I do not like the cheesemonger whom a prize in a lottery or a sudden rise in the price of potatoes has made wealthy. There is still too much of the herdsman about them.” In Indiana, the Moto-Bloc and  Protos teams resented the fact that they had to pay significant sums for the aid of horses and men while the Thomas Flyer was swarmed by Hoosiers anxious to volunteer. They sent a plea to the president of the Chicago Automobile Club, which the Tribune printed under the headline, “FOREIGNERS’ PATHETIC APPEAL”: “We are discouraged,” the note began. “The peasants demand $3 per mile for helping us…they charged $5 each to permit us to sleep on the ground. Peasants along the way have filled up road dug by leading cars, so as to help the Thomas car…would it be possible to influence public opinion to aid us?”

By March 8, the Thomas Flyer was leading in Julesburg, Colorado, and traveling with a new passenger: Hans Hendrick Hansen. The Norwegian had quit St. Chaffray’s team after the De Dion got stuck in a particularly bad snowdrift; when Hansen, the Artic expert, failed to extricate it, he and the Frenchman began to argue. They agreed to settle the matter with a duel, but before they could find their pistols St. Chaffray made an executive (and cool-headed) decision to fire Hansen. “I could go afoot over the Siberian route and beat the De Dion car,” Hansen retorted, and pledged his allegiance to the American flag.

Pulling the Thomas Flyer out of Colorado mud. From www.ameshistoricalsociety.org.

Meanwhile, the Zust was in Omaha, the De Dion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Moto-Bloc in Maple Park, Illinois, and the Protos a bit behind in Geneva, Illinois. As the Thomas Flyer approached frenzied crowds in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Monty Roberts knew that his time in the great race was nearing its end. He wanted to sail to Paris in May and race in the Grand Prix. E. Linn Mathewson, the son of the general agent for Thomas cars in the Midwest, would drive the Flyer through Wyoming to Utah. Professional driver Harold Brinker, famous for surviving a crash the previous year that had killed another driver, would take command in Ogden. George Schuster, the indefatigable mechanic, would drive through Alaska and Siberia, and Roberts would return when the car neared Europe.

Before leaving Cheyenne, Schuster bought a .38-caliber Colt with a six-inch barrel, reasoning it might come in handy. He continued to sacrifice himself for the journey when no one else could or would, walking ten miles in the dead of night to find gasoline and navigating the car out of gullies they couldn’t avoid. His acumen had kept the car running through blizzards, freezing temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he repaired the fresh damage and readied the Flyer for the next leg of the journey. And he was so unheralded that newspaper reports frequently misspelled his name when they bothered to mention him at all.

By the time the Americans left Wyoming, they were leading by two states. The Italians were starting across Nebraska from Omaha. St. Chaffray was in Iowa, awaiting parts for the De Dion, while Lieutenant Koeppen in the Protos and Charles Godard in the Moto-Bloc were just entering Iowa. The Moto-Bloc was having mechanical trouble, although Godard was loath to disclose specifics. Desperate, he decided—in violation of the rules—to ship his car to San Francisco by railroad, but abandoned the idea when a photographer caught him in the act. Godard received a cable from the owners of his car: “Quit race, sell car and come home.” The Moto-Bloc was finished, leaving only four cars.

The German Protos in Ogden, Utah. From www.theoldmotor.com.

Harold Brinker drove the Thomas Flyer from Utah through Nevada and around the border of Death Valley, arriving in San Francisco the third week of March, 900 miles ahead of his closest competitor, the Zust. Factory whistles sounded and automobile drivers blew their horns on Market Street. “The record of the Thomas car from New York to San Francisco was a remarkable feat,” the New York Times concluded. “Many skeptics declared when the New York to Paris racers started out from New York in the dead of winter that none of them would get across Wyoming until summer, some that they would not reach Chicago and a few that they could not cross New York State.” The Americans prepared to ship the Flyer on a freighter to Seattle. After a two-day trip there, it would be transferred to a cargo ship headed for Valdez, Alaska. Brinker begged Schuster to let him to continue with the team, even as an assistant, but the mechanic refused. It was finally his car and his turn.

On Wednesday, April 8, the Flyer touched Alaskan soil. The welcoming committee consisted of the entire population of Valdez, few of whom had ever seen a car. Schuster wasted no time investigating the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail in a single-horse sleigh, and concluded that the only way to cross Alaska in a car would be to dismantle it and ship the parts by dogsled. The Parisian race committee abandoned the idea of Alaska and the Bering Strait and directed the Americans to return to Seattle. Their new plan called for the cars to sail to Vladivostok and drive to Paris from there. While the Americans were still at sea, their competitors, including the ever-troubled Protos, arrived in Seattle and set sail for Russia. Then the Americans lost time getting their Russian visas in order. The Flyer had been the first to arrive on the Pacific coast but was now the last to leave, a few weeks behind the competition.

The Italian and French teams were forging across Japan when the race committee made another decision. In recognition of the time the Flyer lost detouring through Alaska, the American team was given an allowance of 15 days—which meant, essentially, that the Zust and the De Dion could beat the Flyer into Paris by two weeks and still lose. The Protos, meanwhile, would be penalized 15 days for resorting to the train from Ogden to Seattle; the committee didn’t disqualify Lieutenant Koeppen entirely, concluding that there had been some honest confusion (unlike in Godard’s case) about the rules.

The Thomas Flyer in Japan, with George Schuster at the wheel. From www.time.com.

In Russia, the racers were advised to give up and take the Trans-Siberian Railway. Scarfoglio reported that the “great men of the Russian government, all covered with gold lace,” outlined the many reasons the venture would fail: “We shall be met on the road by Chinese brigands, Manchurian tigers, fever, plague, pestilence, famine—to say nothing of the mud after three months of rain, mosquitoes as big as locusts and other similar delights.” The drivers agreed to start again evenly matched. With one day to prepare, George Schuster searched for a supply of gasoline, which was scarce in Siberia. Back at his hotel, he received a note summoning him to St. Chaffray’s room. When he arrived he saw that the Italian team was already there.

“There is no petrol,” the Frenchman announced. “There are no means of getting any. What there was is in my possession, and I offer it to the car which will agree to take me onboard.” The Italians left the room in disgust. St. Chaffray tried to reason with the Americans, stating that he could get a seat on the German car, but the Flyer was sure to beat the Protos into Paris and he wished to be on the first car to arrive. He added that “it would not look well for a Frenchman to ride on a German machine.” Schuster calmly said he’d think about it, but he was seething. Privately he told his team that he’d rather stay in Vladivostok for the rest of his life than accept St. Chaffray’s bribe. Without fanfare, St. Chaffray transferred the rights to his gasoline to the Italian team, but was not allowed to join. His sponsor, the Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, had decided he was finished.

In Perm, Russia, Schuster received a telegram from the Thomas factory in Buffalo: “Do you want us to send Montague Roberts to help you when you get on the good roads of Europe?” Schuster was so mad he could’ve “eaten nails,” as he put it, and sent an immediate reply: “July 9: Arrived today. Expect to reach Paris on July 24. Schuster.” The suggestion that he was good enough to drive the Flyer through the bogs of Siberia but not through the capitals of Europe impelled him, despite deadened nerves and aching limbs. He was now only a day ahead of the Protos and determined to maintain his lead.

There was one problem: Schuster kept getting lost. The Russians couldn’t understand hand signals and the Americans couldn’t understand Russian. One wrong turn cost the Americans 15 hours. Worse, the Flyer sunk into a mudhole and needed a day’s worth of repairs. Schuster heard that Lieutenant Koeppen had left St. Petersburg the same day and was on his way to securing a three-day lead. The Italians remained 3,000 miles behind, in Atchunsk.

At 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, five and a half months and 21,933 miles from the start in Times Square, Lieutenant Koeppen arrived in Paris, slowly guiding the Protos down Boulevard Poissonniere. A delegation of editors from Le Matin greeted him with tepid enthusiasm and served a cold buffet at his reception. At the same time, Schuster was having breakfast at the Imperial Automobile Club of Berlin, where several people congratulated him on his good showing. He didn’t bother to explain that the Protos would ultimately be docked two weeks for using the train in the American west, and that the Flyer was allotted two extra weeks for attempting the trip to Alaska. Schuster had a month in which to get to Paris and still win the race.

Parisians welcoming George Schuster and the Thomas Flyer. From www.time.com.

Schuster and his crew arrived on July 30, the Flyer making its way through the lines of lighted cafes, the crowds shouting wildly: “Vive le car Americain!” They cruised toward the Place de l’Opéra, where, in front of the Café de la Paiz, a gendarme stopped the car.

“You are under arrest,” he declared. “You have no lights on your car.”

A crowd of Americans rushed from the café and tried to explain, but the officer waved them away. The law was the law: a car had to have a headlight to be on the streets of Paris at night, or the driver was to be placed under arrest. A quick-thinking man on a bicycle rode up to the car, jumped off and deposited his bike, which had a headlight, in the Flyer next to Schuster. Problem solved. The gendarme stepped aside.

Schuster graciously insisted that Monty Roberts be present for the Flyer’s triumphant return to Times Square on August 17, 1908. After the accolades and parties died down, he returned to his job at the Thomas factory, where he was promised employment as long as the company was in business. Five years later, the Thomas company collapsed and all its goods were auctioned off. Lot number 1829 was listed simply as the “Famous New York to Paris Racer.”

Sources:

Books: Julie M. Fenster, Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race. New York: Crown, 2005; Dermot Cole: Hard Driving: The 1908 Auto Race from New York to Paris. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Allen Andrews: The Mad Motorists: The Great Peking to Paris Race of ’07. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965.

Articles: “Macedonian Cry for Help from Foreign Autoists.” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1908; “First in Chicago Autos’ Aim.” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1908; “New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago.” New York Times, February 10, 2008; “Race to Paris Starts Today.” New York Times, February 12, 1908; “The Greatest Race—1908 New York to Paris,” by Art Evans. Sports Car Digest, September 28, 2011: http://www.sportscardigest.com/the-greatest-race-1908-new-york-to-paris/; “Tour of Autoists Like Polar Trip.” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1908; “Mathewson At Wheel of Racer.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 1908; “American Car Will Try to Cross Alaska.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1908; “Thomas, Winner, Reaches Paris.” New York Times, July 31, 1908.

A Roman chariot race, showing men from two of the four color-themed demes, or associations, that produced the Blues and the Greens. From a poster advertising the 1925 film version of Ben-Hur. Image: Wikicommons.

“Bread and circuses,” the poet Juvenal wrote scathingly. “That’s all the common people want.” Food and entertainment. Or to put it another way, basic sustenance and bloodshed, because the most popular entertainments offered by the circuses of Rome were the gladiators and chariot racing, the latter often as deadly as the former. As many as 12 four-horse teams raced one another seven times around the confines of the greatest arenas—the Circus Maximus in Rome was 2,000 feet long, but its track was not more than 150 feet wide—and rules were few, collisions all but inevitable, and hideous injuries to the charioteers extremely commonplace. Ancient inscriptions frequently record the deaths of famous racers in their early 20s, crushed against the stone spina that ran down the center of the race track or dragged behind their horses after their chariots were smashed.

Charioteers, who generally started out as slaves, took these risks because there were fortunes to be won. Successful racers who survived could grow enormously wealthy—another Roman poet, Martial, grumbled in the first century A.D. that it was possible to make as much as 15 bags of gold for winning a single race. Diocles, the most successful charioteer of them all, earned an estimated 36 million sesterces in the course of his glittering career, a sum sufficient to feed the whole city of Rome for a year. Spectators, too, wagered and won substantial sums, enough for the races to be plagued by all manner of dirty tricks; there is evidence that the fans sometimes hurled nail-studded curse tablets onto the track in an attempt to disable their rivals.

In the days of the Roman republic, the races featured four color-themed teams, the Reds, the Whites, the Greens and the Blues, each of which attracted fanatical support. By the sixth century A.D., after the western half of the empire fell, only two of these survived—the Greens had incorporated the Reds, and the Whites had been absorbed into the Blues. But the two remaining teams were wildly popular in the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, and their supporters were as passionate as ever—so much so that they were frequently responsible for bloody riots.

The Byzantine Empire at its height under the Emperor Justinian in c. 560. Map: Wikicommons.

Exactly what the Blues and the Greens stood for remains a matter of dispute among historians. For a long time it was thought that the two groups gradually evolved into what were essentially early political parties, the Blues representing the ruling classes and standing for religious orthodoxy, and the Greens being the party of the people. The Greens were also depicted as proponents of the highly divisive theology of Monophysitism, an influential heresy which held that Christ was not simultaneously divine and human but had only a single nature. (In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., it threatened to tear the Byzantine Empire apart.) These views were vigorously challenged in the 1970s by Alan Cameron, not least on the grounds that the games were more important than politics in this period, and perfectly capable of arousing violent passions on their own. In 501, for example, the Greens ambushed the Blues in Constantinople’s amphitheater and massacred 3,000 of them. Four years later, in Antioch, there was a riot caused by the triumph of Porphyrius, a Green charioteer who had defected from the Blues.

Even Cameron concedes that this suggests that after about 500 the rivalry between the Greens and the Blues escalated and spread well outside Constantinople’s chariot racing track, the Hippodrome–a slightly smaller version of the Circus Maximus whose central importance to the capital is illustrated by its position directly adjacent to the main imperial palace. (Byzantine emperors had their own entrance to the arena, a passageway that led directly from the palace to their private box.) This friction came to a head during the reign of Justinian (c. 482-565), one of Byzantium’s greatest but most controversial emperors.

The ruins of Constantinople’s Hippodrome in 1600, from an engraving by Onofrio Panvinio in De Ludis Circensibus. The spina that stood at the center of the chariot racing circuit was still visible then; in modern Istanbul, only three of the ancient monuments remain.

In the course of Justinian’s reign, the empire recovered a great deal of lost territory, including most of the North African littoral and the whole of Italy, but it did so at enormous cost and only because the emperor was served by some of the most able of  Byzantine heroes—the great general Belisarius, who has good claim to be ranked alongside Alexander, Napoleon and Lee; an aged but vastly competent eunuch named Narses (who continued to lead armies in the field into his 90s); and, perhaps most important, John of Cappadocia, the greatest tax administrator of his day. John’s chief duty was to raise the money needed to fund Justinian’s wars, and his ability to do so made him easily the most reviled man in the empire, not least among the Blues and Greens.

Justinian had a fourth adviser, though, one whose influence over him was even more scandalous than the Cappadocian’s. This was his wife, Theodora, who refused to play the subordinate role normally expected of a Byzantine empress. Theodora, who was exceptionally beautiful and unusually intelligent, took an active role in the management of the empire. This was a controversial enough move in itself, but it was rendered vastly more so by the empress’s lowly origins. Theodora had grown up among the working classes of Byzantium. She was a child of the circus who became Constantinople’s best known actress—which, in those days, was the same thing as saying that she was the Empire’s most infamous courtesan.

The Emperor Justinian, from a mosaic at Ravenna. Image: Wikicommons.

Thanks to the Secret History of the contemporary writer Procopius, we have a good idea of how Theodora met Justinian in about 520. Since Procopius utterly loathed her, we also have what is probably the most uncompromisingly direct personal attack mounted on any emperor or empress. Procopius portrayed Theodora as a wanton of the most promiscuous sort, and no reader is likely to forget the picture he painted of a stage act that the future empress was said to have performed involving her naked body, some grain, and a gaggle of trained geese.

From our perspective, Theodora’s morals are of less importance than her affiliations. Her mother was probably an acrobat. She was certainly married to the man who held the position of bear-keeper to the Greens. When he died unexpectedly, leaving her with three young daughters, the mother was left destitute. Desperate, she hastily remarried and went with her infant children to the arena, where she begged the Greens to find a job for her new husband. They pointedly ignored her, but the Blues—sensing the opportunity to paint themselves as more magnanimous—found work for him. Unsurprisingly, Theodora thereafter grew up to be a violent partisan of the Blues, and her unswerving support for the faction became a factor in Byzantine life after 527, when she was crowned as empress—not least because Justinian himself, before he became Emperor, had given 30 years of loud support to the same team.

Justinian’s empress, Theodora, a leading supporter of the Blues, rose from the most humble beginnings, captivating the emperor with her beauty, intelligence and determination.

These two threads—the fast-growing importance of the circus factions and the ever-increasing burden of taxation—combined in 532. By this time, John of Cappadocia had introduced no fewer than 26 new taxes, many of which fell, for the first time, on Byzantium’s wealthiest citizens. Their discontent sent shock waves through the imperial city, which were only magnified when Justinian reacted harshly to an outbreak of fighting between the Greens and the Blues at the races of January 10. Sensing the disorder had the potential to spread, and eschewing his allegiance to the Blues, the emperor sent in his troops. Seven of the ringleaders in the rioting were condemned to death.

The men were taken out of the city a few days later to be hanged at Sycae, on the east side of the Bosphorus, but the executions were botched. Two of the seven survived when the scaffold broke; the mob that had assembled to watch the hangings cut them down and hustled them off to the security of a nearby church. The two men were, as it happened, a Blue and a Green, and thus the two factions found themselves, for once, united in a common cause. The next time the chariots raced in the Hippodrome, Blues and Greens alike called on Justinian to spare the lives of the condemned, who had been so plainly and so miraculously spared by God.

Soon the crowd’s loud chanting took on a hostile edge. The Greens vented their resentment at the imperial couple’s support for their rivals, and the Blues their anger at Justinian’s sudden withdrawal of favor. Together, the two factions shouted the words of encouragement they generally reserved for the charioteers—Nika! Nika! (“Win! Win!”) It became obvious that the victory they anticipated was of the factions over the emperor, and with the races hastily abandoned, the mob poured out into the city and began to burn it down.

For five days the rioting continued. The Nika Riots were the most widespread and serious disturbances ever to occur in Constantinople, a catastrophe exacerbated by the fact that the capital had nothing resembling a police force. The mob called for the dismissal of John of Cappadocia, and the Emperor immediately obliged, but to no effect. Nothing Justinian did could assuage the crowd.

On the fourth day, the Greens and Blues sought out a possible replacement for the emperor. On the fifth, January 19, Hypatius, a nephew of a former ruler, was hustled to the Hippodrome and seated on the imperial throne.

It was at this point that Theodora proved her mettle. Justinian, panicked, was all for fleeing the capital to seek the support of loyal army units. His empress refused to countenance so cowardly an act. “If you, my lord,” she told him,

wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest winding-sheet.

Belisarius, the Byzantines’ greatest general—he once conquered the whole of Italy with fewer than 10,000 men–led the troops who massacred 30,000 Greens and Blues in the Hippodrome to put an end to the Nika Riots.

Shamed, Justinian determined to stay and fight. Both Belisarius and Narses were with him in the palace, and the two generals planned a counterstrike. The Blues and the Greens, still assembled in the Hippodrome, were to be locked into the arena. After that, loyal troops, most of them Thracians and Goths with no allegiance to either of the circus factions, could be sent in to cut them down.

Imagine a force of heavily armed troops advancing on the crowds in the MetLife Stadium or Wembley and you’ll have some idea of how things developed in the Hippodrome, a stadium with a capacity of about 150,000 that held tens of thousands of partisans of the Greens and Blues. While Belisarius’ Goths hacked away with swords and spears, Narses and the men of the Imperial Bodyguard blocked the exits and prevented any of the panicking rioters from escaping. “Within a few minutes,” John Julius Norwich writes in his history of Byzantium, “the angry shouts of the great amphitheater had given place to the cries and groans of wounded and dying men; soon these too grew quiet, until silence spread over the entire arena, its sand now sodden with the blood of the victims.”

Byzantine historians put the death toll in the Hippodrome at about 30,000. That would be as much as 10 percent of the population of the city at the time. They were, Geoffrey Greatrex observes, “Blues as well as Greens, innocent as well as guilty; the Chrionicon Paschale notes the detail that ‘even Antipater, the tax-collector of Antioch Theopolis, was slain.’ ”

With the massacre complete, Justinian and Theodora had little trouble re-establishing control over their smoldering capital. The unfortunate Hypatius was executed; the rebels’ property was confiscated, and John of Cappadocia was swiftly reinstalled to levy yet more burdensome taxes on the depopulated city.

The Nika Riots marked the end of an era in which circus factions held some sway over the greatest empire west of China, and signaled the end of chariot racing as a mass spectator sport within Byzantium. Within a few years the great races and Green-Blue rivalries were memories. They would be replaced, however, with something yet more threatening–for as Norwich observes, after Justinian’s death theological debate became what amounted to the empire’s national sport. And with the Orthodox battling the Monophysites, and the iconoclasts waiting in the wings, Byzantium was set on course for rioting and civil war that would put even the massacre in the Hippodrome in sorry context.

Sources

Alan Cameron. Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; James Allan Evans. The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002; Sotiris Glastic. “The organization of chariot racing in the great hippodrome of Byzantine Constantinople,” in The International Journal of Sports History 17 (2000); Geoffrey Greatrex, “The Nika Revolt: A Reappraisal,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997); Pieter van der Horst. “Jews and Blues in late antiquity,” in idem (ed), Jews and Christians in the Graeco-Roman Context. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006; Donald Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007; Michael Maas (ed). The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: CUP, 2005; George Ostrogorsky. History of the Byzantine State. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; John Julius Norwich. Byzantium: The Early Centuries. London: Viking, 1988; Procopius. The Secret History. London: Penguin, 1981; Marcus Rautman. Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire. Westport [CT]: Greenwood Press, 2006.

The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Photo: Wikipedia

One year into the Great Depression, millions of Americans were turning to football to take their minds off unemployment, bread lines, debt and deflation. Despite the hardships of 1930, there was something to cheer about in New York. The Giants had won an NFL Championship in 1927, and two years later, owner Tim Mara bought another NFL team, the Detroit Wolverines, mostly so he could acquire standout quarterback and Michigan native Benny Friedman. In the autumn of 1930, the Friedman-led Giants jumped out to a 10-1 record and appeared to be on their way toward another championship.

Still, sportswriters and sports fans were not entirely convinced that the best football in the country was being played in the National Football League. Not with Notre Dame beating every college team it played in sold-out stadiums across the country. The Fighting Irish’s famous and feared 1924 backfield, immortalized as the “Four Horsemen” by sportswriter Grantland Rice, was six years gone, but the 1930 team was coming off an undefeated championship season in 1929 under legendary coach Knute Rockne. By November of 1930, they still hadn’t been beat.

Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne. Photo: Wikipedia

That fall, Northwestern University had announced that if Notre Dame would play next season’s scheduled game at Chicago’s Soldier Field (which could accommodate 125,000 fans), Northwestern would donate, in advance, $100,000 from the proceeds to Illinois Governor Louis Lincoln Emmerson’s unemployment fund. Such efforts were springing up throughout the nation; in New York City, Mayor Jimmy Walker had formed his own fund to help the unemployed. Walker hoped the Giants would be interested in playing an exhibition game for the benefit of his fund, so he met with Mara and some sportswriters to kick around ideas for a matchup that would capture the public’s imagination.

“Why not Notre Dame?” one writer asked.

Many fans had been asking the same thing. Could the Fighting Irish beat one of professional football’s strongest teams? The NFL wasn’t sure it wanted to know. The league, after 10 years of play, was still struggling to establish credibility, and the Giants had been around for only five years. Notre Dame, on the other hand, had been a proven dynasty under Rockne. Fans across the country had little doubt that the best college teams, and certainly Notre Dame, were playing a brand of football that was superior to the pro game. A Giants-Irish matchup would certainly raise enough money to make Mayor Walker happy, but a Giants loss could also destroy the NFL.

Walker and the Giants named sportswriter Dan Daniel chairman of a committee to organize the game, and Daniel approached Rockne with the idea. Rockne loved it, but scheduling would be a problem. The game would have to take place on the weekend of December 13, but Notre Dame was playing in Los Angeles against the University of Southern California on December 6. The trip back east would be too long for his team to be ready to take on the Giants. But Rockne came up with another idea: What if he could bring back the Four Horsemen and other former Fighting Irish greats instead?

The game’s promoters were thrilled. The Horsemen—quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, fullback Elmer Layden and halfbacks Jim Crowley and Don Miller—were much bigger names than any of the current Notre Dame stars. Never mind that all four of them had moved on to coaching; they were all still in their 20s, and Rockne assured everyone they were always in top shape. “And what’s more,” he said, “I’ll coach ‘em, too.”

Rockne, however, didn’t want to get too far ahead of himself. Notre Dame still had to play Army as well as USC, and the Fighting Irish were beginning to show signs of vulnerability. On November 18, “Galloping Joe” Savoldi, Notre Dame’s hulking Italian star fullback, was forced to withdraw from the university after officials discovered he had violated school rules by getting married, to a local teenager. (Savoldi exposed his own secret by filing for a divorce. He signed with the Chicago Bears a few days later.) Notre Dame still beat Army’s undefeated team, 7-6, in a heavy rain before 100,000 fans at Soldier Field the next week, leaving them just one win away from another undefeated season and back-to-back championships. But USC was a tough team.

New York Giants owner Tim Mara, circa 1930. Photo: Wikipedia

Back in New York, Dan Daniel secured the Polo Grounds in Harlem for the contest between the Notre Dame All-Stars and the Giants, and with 55,000 fans sure to fill the seats, Walker could expect to raise more than $100,000 for his fund. But if Notre Dame was showing signs of vulnerability, the Giants were collapsing: their coach, Leroy Andrews, “just got himself all worked up thinking about this great meeting with Rockne,” Benny Friedman said later, and “lost control of himself completely.”

After the Giants dropped two consecutive games by the score of 7-6, Friedman and another player, Steve Owen, went to Mara with their concerns. Andrews was quickly out, and Friedman and Owen took control of the team for the last two games of the season. Winning them both, the Giants set the stage for the big showdown in Harlem.

Knute Rockne brought his team to Los Angeles to face USC amid more bad news: his other backfield star, Larry “Moon” Mullins, was injured and could not play. It had been just two years since Rockne inspired his team to beat Army with his “win one for the Gipper” speech—telling his players that his 1920 star, George Gipp, had said as he was dying of pneumonia, “I’ve got to go, Rock.  It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.” It seemed he would need something equally potent against the Trojans, who were 8-1.

In the days before the game, Rockne said, “I’m afraid we’re going to take a beating from Southern California.… If we can hold the Trojans to a two-touchdown difference, we’ll go home feeling pretty good.” Some reporters suspected it was a psychological ploy, but he denied it: “While my boys may rally to give the Trojans a fairly good game, I see no chance of victory.” The team, he said, had been beaten up over its last three games, and the trip west was too much. Oddsmakers made USC the favorite, and even Grantland Rice, who called the 1930 Notre Dame squad “the greatest football team I ever saw,” didn’t think the Irish would win.

More than 88,000 fans filed into the L.A. Coliseum on December 6, and a slaughter soon followed—but it was Notre Dame that dominated the game, beating USC, 27-0, and repeating as national champions.

After a parade in South Bend, Rockne gathered his all-stars for four days of workouts in Indiana before they hopped a train to New York. “At first I thought these fellows might not be able to put up a good game after several years’ layoff,” Rockne told reporters, “but when I got to South Bend on Wednesday I found them a little older but was pleasantly surprised to see the way they handled the ball. This is not going to be merely a spectacle but a real game.”

New York Giants quarterback Benny Friedman. Photo: Wikipedia

Rockne planned to start his Four Horsemen-led 1924 team; in reserve, he had the speedy Bucky O’Connor and All-American quarterback Frank Carideo from the undefeated 1930 Fighting Irish team. When he got his team onto the Polo Grounds field, he realized that the Giants’ defensive line averaged 230 pounds—dwarfing his offensive line. Rockne told his players, “Fellows, these Giants are heavy but slow. Go out there, score two or three touchdowns on passes in the first quarter, and then defend and don’t get hurt.”

Nothing went as Rockne had hoped: the Giants jumped out to a 15-0 lead. Walking back to the locker room at the half, the Notre Dame coach ran into Giants president Harry March. “I came here to help a charity,” Rockne told him. “You are making us look bad. Slow up, will you? I don’t want to go home and be laughed at. Lay off next half.”

The Giants did, playing their reserves for the rest of the game. But it didn’t matter. Notre Dame never advanced the ball into Giants territory and managed only one first down the entire game. The final score, 22-0, barely conveyed the Giants’ domination.“That was the greatest football machine I ever saw,” Rockne told his players after the game. “I am glad none of you got hurt.”

Thus the NFL avoided a catastrophic loss of reputation. A few days later, Tim Mara handed Mayor Walker a check for $115,000 for his relief fund. Rockne did not get much of a chance to live down the loss. Three months later, while he was on his way to Hollywood to assist in the making of the film The Spirit of Notre Dame, the airplane he was flying in broke apart in the skies over Kansas, killing all eight people aboard.

Sources

Books: Barry Gottehrer, The Giants of New York: The History of Professional Football’s Most Fabulous Dynasty, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963. Carlo DeVito, Wellington: The Maras, the Giants, and the City of New York, Triumph Books, 2006.

Articles: “Four Horsemen’ Play Again in Charity Game,” Washington Post, November 10, 1930. “Notre Dame and N.U. All Set For Charity Game,” Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1930. “’Galloping Joe’ Savoldi Withdraws From College,” Hartford Courant, November 18, 1930. “Rockne Thinks 1930 Team Best in Rambler History,” Hartford Courant, November 23, 1930. “Notre Dame Beats Army, 7-6, In Rain, as 100,000 Look On,” New York Times, November 30, 1930.  “’So. California Will Win But It Is Going To Be Great Contest,’ Says Rockne,” Hartford Courant, December 6, 1930. “’You Played Greatest Game of Year,’ Rockne Tells Team,”Chicago Tribune, December 7, 1930. “Rockne Trots ‘Four Horsemen’ Into New York,” Boston Globe, December 13, 1930. “Rockne Stars Play Pros Today,” Washington Post, December 14, 1930. “Giants Defeat Notre Dame All Stars, 22-0 in Charity Game Before 50,000,” New York Times, December 15, 1930. “Rockne’s Final Game: Always the Master Salesman, Notre Dame Coach Let USC Believe It Was Better; Then Came a 27-0 Irish Victory,” by Early Gustkey, Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1990. “The Time Notre Dame Played the New York Giants (for the Unemployed!) by Ethan Trex, Mentalfloss.com, September 23, 2011, http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/101307