Heroes and anti-heroes
TABLE TALK DENTS BROGAN
I suppose the first great international quarrel in which sport became a serious source of en-
mity and not of amity was the fight between Sayers and Heenan, 'the Benicia Boy' (my learned brother CoIm assures me that he be- longed to the same family as the Cardinal, and certainly in 1860 was better known than Car- dinal Heenan is in 1968 in the English-speaking world). The interest taken in the highly illegal contest was commented on ironically in Punch. Lord Palmerston is supposed to have been one of the spectators at this 'disgraceful brawl' and the fact that the fight was broken off when Sayers was getting the worst of it, is alleged by some to have caused more anti-British feeling than the subsequent activities of the 'Alabama.'
Another source of which has not quite totally died out, has been the continuous refusal of the New York Yacht Club to get defeated in the contests for the America's Cup. Even quite recently, when I went to lunch at the Yacht Club with one of my closest American friends (very pro-British), he pointed out, without the slightest sense of shame, the famous cup. It was a firm belief on the Clyde that that great Glasgow Irishman, Sir Thomas Lipton, was cheated when his various 'Shamrocks' failed to win the cup; and a more violently aggres- sive Irishman, Lord Dunraven, almost declared war on the United States when he was, as he thought, done out of victory. (When there was an alleged danger of war over the Vene- zuela crisis in 1895, it is asserted that the New York Yacht Club sent a message to the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes: 'We hope your war- ships are better than your yachts.') But the great source of international friction at that time was the success of Americans in sports which the British had invented and which they thought they owned. For example, Tod Sloan revolutionised English racing, riding in a very inelegant but only too successful way. And alas for the 'Bruisers of England,' celebrated by Borrow and Hazlitt, with the sudden appear- ance of John L. Sullivan 'flaming in the fore- head of the morning sky,' British boxing, at any rate on the heavyweight level, became some- thing to weep about, certainly nothing to shout about. 'John L.' was simply 'the champion of the world,' a title conferred on himself by him- self, and probably no heavyweight champion, not even the universally admired Joe Louis, has been such a public figure as John L., who dealt with T. R.(oosevelt) as one great power to another. After all, John L. was a much better boxer than T. R., if not quite as great a soldier.
Of course, there were many brilliant British, and more especially Welsh, boxers in the lighter categories, e.g. Freddy Welsh and Jim Driscoll, but British heavyweights have been a melan- choly sight all of this century. Another of my learned brothers tells me that the British body is badly shaped for producing good heavyweight boxers, but there is more to it than that. I can remember when I took some interest in the 'noble art' arranging with a Balliol friend of mine (now a very distinguished London lawyer) to go to see a middleweight fight in Boston in which the eminent Scottish boxer, Mick Mac- Adam, was to fight some American or other. When we went on the morning of the fight to pick up our tickets, the man in charge of the rather shabby office asked, did I know that those Scots people out at Concord had just phoned in to say they couldn't get to Boston because of the snowfall? It was not a very heavy snowfall by Boston standards, but very heavy by Glasgow standards. He then made a few unpleasant remarks of the type that shocked Mayor Daley's police, and gave us a rain-check for a match to be arranged in two or three weeks' time.
Since few people take less interest in organ- ised sport than I do now, I cannot account for the fact that I was apparently interested, merely as a spectator, as late as the 'twenties, but I can say, which few people can say, that I have shaken hands with John L. Sullivan and with James J. Corbett, and have seen the magnificent figure of Jack Johnson in Royal Exchange Square in Glasgow. When 'the Champion of the World' was making a melancholy tour with his 'cohort' Jake Kilrain, giving a rambling auto- biographical talk and making a few feeble ges- tures in the general direction of boxing, it was a long time since 'the Strong Boy of Boston' bad fought 'seventy-five red rounds' with Jake Kilrain—to quote Vachel Lindsay.
Corbett was, of course, a very different cup of tea. He had begun life as a bank clerk, to the delight of his climbing Irish father, but he was a secret boxer, and after an impressive victory over some very important American heavy- weight, he was given the chance to fight and, as it turned out, defeat John. L. Sullivan. His am- bitious father is supposed then to have said, `To hell with the Nevada Bank.'
The nearest approach to 'Gentleman Jim' Corbett was Georges Carpentier, who was champion of the world at all weights from fly upwards. He met more than his match in the person of Jack Dempsey. His defeat at Boyle's Forty Acres was a great shock to both the French and the British, who resented Ameri- can domination in so many fields, and a great surprise to that confident and almost always misguided prophet, Bernard Shaw. I last saw Carpentier a couple of years ago standing out- side his very smart bar near the Etoile, looking astonishingly elegant and young for his age. It is painful to remember what be did to a series of alleged British champions whom it would be almost flattering to call 'setups.'
There is also the very curious and comic his- tory of the revived Olympic Games. The Baron de Coubertin innocently thought that they would produce what William James wanted to produce, 'a substitute for war.' George Orwell hostilely described that and other sports as 'war without the shooting.' For until Russia went into the international sporting field in a big way, the left regarded sport even more than religion as the opium of the proletariat. That eminent, upright Huguenot Radical historian, Charles Seignobos, was very indignant when he discovered that his students at the Sorbonne were far more interested in Carpentier's chances against Dempsey than about the wickedness of Poincar6 and the hopes of a Radical revival.
Historically speaking. Seignobos was wrong, for it was with pleasure that I noticed two or
three months ago in America, in a very long list of people who were then supporting Mr Hubert Humphrey, that each of the signatories, including Miss Tallulah Bankhead, found it necessary to describe his or her claim to public attention. (Some of the claims were baseless) Only one signatory simply put down his name: 'Jack Dempsey.' No definition, no explanation was required.
A large number of Frenchmen and French- women were extremely annoyed that, for ten years at least, the most famous Frenchwoman was not Madame Curie or Colette, but Suzanne Lenglen. But nowadays the fate of nations seems to depend on athletic success and ath- letic success is, to vary Clausewitz, 'war pur- sued by other means.' This pursuit of athletic triumphs may backfire. Shortly after the last war, Moscow Dynamo came to Glasgow to play the Rangers. After a brief and brusque encounter with the Rangers, the Russians appealed to be allowed to bring on a substitute for one of their players who had been, so they said, dangerously injured. Reluctantly this was permitted. But two or three minutes later the vigilant crowd noticed that, in fact, the Rus- sians were playing twelve men. There was a howl of protest in which even Celtic supporters joined. This simple Muscovite trick was un- masked, and the 'Red Clyde' has been barely pink ever since.
There is one aspect of the Olympic Games which I remember extremely well. The mara- thon in 1908 produced a wonderful example of the British anti-hero, for the Italian entry, Dorando, was helped to win by British offi- cials, presumably less out of any malicious de- sign to cheat the Americans, than through sympathy with the unfortunate Italian who, overcome with fatigue, had been running in the wrong direction. Officially, the Yankees had to be given their due for training, discipline, superiority in performance and not the sport- ing qualities which the Baron de Coubertin and Sir Henry Newbolt praised so highly. And again, through a curious accident, the most learned of my athletic brothers and I once hired a car to take us down the Italian Riviera from San Remo, and learned only later from
an awestruck garage attendant, that we had been driven down the coast by Dorando him- self. The fame of the victim of 1908 was still lively in 1930, at any rate in his native land. And after all, war minus the shooting is not a bad idea for this depressing modern age.
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