The Books: The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘Legend of a Sport’, by Alva Johnston

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

The Only Game in Town is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. So far, I have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories (profiles), The Fun of It (Talk of the Town pieces), and The New Gilded Age (financial writing), and Secret Ingredients (food writing).

Alva Johnston was born in the 1880s and died in 1950 (the same year that this profile was published in The New Yorker). He started out as a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, and then moved to New York, writing for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He wrote a couple of books too. His fascinating piece about conman Prince Michael Romanoff was published four parts in The New Yorker in 1932. Well worth the read. I have not read his other stuff, but based on that 1932 piece, and this 1950 piece, Johnston was interested in the Rascals of the world, the conmen, the charming connivers. Both pieces deal with people who didn’t quite like their original identities and so went about crafting new ones. There’s a benign quality to the rascals profiled in these two pieces. Yes, they may have fooled some people, and talked a big game, but Johnston seems to find it entertaining rather than something that should be punished and scorned.

This piece is about Wilson Mizner, a fascinating guy whose name has sunk into obscurity but who was notorious/famous during his lifetime.

Johnston wrote a book about Wilson Mizner and his brother Addison called The Legendary Mizners (published posthumously in 1953). That book inspired Stephen Sondheim to write a musical about the brothers called Road Show. They were sort of a benevolent con-man partnership.

Wilson Mizner had a life with many chapters. He was a playwright, he owned The Brown Derby restaurant, and every time he opened his mouth he said something worth quoting. When he was a lad, in the late 1890s, he and a couple of his brothers traveled to the Klondike to participate in the Gold Rush. He didn’t really hunt for gold, though. He just set about conning everyone who had flocked to the area. He robbed people, he started managing fighters around this time. He was a good pal of Wyatt Earp. You know, some lives are just larger than fiction. Wilson and his brother moved to New York after the Klondike and opened a shop where they sold antiques and relics from South American countries. Wilson got around. He “managed” fighters (he had started that in the Klondike), but also wrote plays, a couple of which were hits. He never had a dime to his name though. He lived the high life. People liked him. They probably paid his way, because they liked having him around. Then – fascinatingly – he married a wealthy widow. She was a millionaire. She lived in a mansion. The mansion was filled with priceless artwork, which Mizner duplicated and sold as originals. He was a born conman.

Johnston’s piece opens with the marriage of Mizner and his wealthy widow. Mizner was starting to freelance-manage boxers at that time, so he set up what was basically a boxing gym in her gigantic mansion. There were many issues with this set-up. First of all, boxing was in its Wild West days, the sport was illegal and unregulated. People who were drawn to it usually had one foot in the criminal class. So there are all these crazy stories of what was going on in that mansion, with people shooting guns through open doorways, and causing ruckuses. The image of Wilson Mizner setting up a gym in his wife’s hoity-toity mansion is just hysterical. It is not a surprise that the marriage was a bust, and the couple soon parted.

Mizner kept going. He managed a hotel. He became addicted to opium. He got deeper and deeper into the fight racket. Alva Johnston’s piece is about Mizner’s management of fighter Stanley Ketchel.

Ketchel’s story alone would warrant an entire book. He was a middleweight who took on heavyweights. He lived a rough life. Alva Johnston goes into all of that in his piece, including Ketchel’s murder, which is a very strange story.

The whole story is strange.

At the center of it is Wilson Mizner, a man who clearly had tons of energy and ideas, but also was lazy and couldn’t really do the work. But that’s not entirely true. I know what it takes to finish a play. You can’t be lazy and complete anything. Lazy people say, “If I had the time, I’d write a play.” He took on fighters, and set up the fights beforehand for the gambling folks who were counting on so-and-so to win, to lose, whatever. It was a dirty sport. One of the really interesting things about Alva Johnston’s piece, which is quite lengthy, is its snapshot of Boxing in the early years of the 20th century. It reminds me a bit of William Hazlitt’s famous essay ‘The Fight’, published in 1822. Hazlitt loved sport, and loved fighting. But it was just not something that was seen as civilized, and it was not something that was seen as worthy of Literary Men, for sure. And yet fights drew the crowds. They always did.

Here is an excerpt from Johnston’s essay that talks about the early days of the relationship between Mizner and Ketchel, in the rough and tumble world of the New York boxing scene.

The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘Legend of a Sport’, by Alva Johnston

Ketchel had emerged from obscurity on July 4, 1907, when he fought a twenty-round draw at Marysville, California, with Joe Thomas, claimant of the middleweight championship. In the next two years, Ketchel knocked out middleweight and heavyweights in great abundance. He was being managed by a San Francisco photographer named Joe Coffman, who was said to hypnotize him, keep him locked in a bedroom, and impound his clothes every night to prevent other managers from stealing him. In 1908, Willus Britt climbed up a fire escape and stole Ketchel in a bathrobe, according to W.O. McGeehan, the famous sports columnist. Britt was regarded as the smartest manager in the country. A few years earlier, he had been considered rattle-brained. He had once tried to borrow five hundred dollars from James W. Coffroth, the San Francisco sporting czar, for a business trip to New York. Noticing that he was dressed in evening trousers but no coat, Coffroth loaned him a hundred freshly minted pennies, which Willus took for five-dollar gold pieces. Overwhelming Coffroth with gratitude, Britt caught the next train east in his shirtsleeves, with his rouleau of one-cent pieces, and a few weeks later came home comparatively wealthy. Coffroth was greatly impressed, named a saloon the Willus in Britt’s honor, and went into business with him. Willus was credited with inventing the Native Son decision, according to which any Californian, if alive at the end of a prizefight, was automatically victorious over any nonresident. After mopping up the Western territory with Ketchel, Britt decided to take him East. W.O. McGeehan, who was then living in San Francisco, called on Britt and Ketchel shortly before they left California and was surprised to find Ketchel wearing a Phi Beta Kappa key. Britt said that he had procured it at Abe Attell’s pawnshop and that he attended to present Ketchel in New York as a young fellow fighting his way through college. Coffroth disapproved on the idea because Ketchel said “dese,” “dem,” and “dose.” Britt said that New Yorkers would never know the difference, but Coffroth had the key stolen, and Britt decided to take Ketchel to New York as a cowboy in high-heeled boots, spurs, chaps, and a sombrero.

Mizner became involved in the management of Ketchel as an unpaid specialist on the political and graft setup in New York. Prizefighting was as illegal as cockfighting and bullfighting. The referees never named a winner, since the fighters were not supposed to seek vic tory but to cooperate like dancing partners. Any person who “instigated a contention” was liable to a five-hundred-dollar fine or a year in jail, the same penalties were incurred by persons who “published a challenge” or who “trained or assisted a fighter to train.” Like streetwalking and gambling, however, prizefighting was generally tolerated upon the payment of protection money. In his ignorance of New York, Britt found himself paying protection to the wrong parasites, and he called Mizner to teach him the difference between the responsible tapeworms and the frauds. Fights were at that time put on by “athletic clubs,” which were organized the way speakeasies were later. Every new arrival was scrutinized by sentinels; anybody who looked like a reformer or a stool pigeon was banned. There was no public sale of tickets. Only duly elected club members were admitted. The payment of two dollars at any saloon near the arena made any man a duly elected club member and provided him with a card calling for a good seat; one dollar made him a junior member, with a card entitling him to a bad seat. According to the late Bob Davis, every card was issued in the name of John Smith, in order to simplify the clerical work. Club meetings usually started with a speech bawling out members for being derelict in attendance at previous meetings and threatening drastic action under the bylaws.

In spite of the punctual payment of graft, fights were raided whenever the authorities were seized with a fit of law and order, and elaborate precautions were considered necessary to prove that the entertainment consisted strictly of amateur sparring exhibitions of, for, and by club members. The principal arenas were an old dance hall and an old stable, Madison Square Garden having become too ladylike for fistic programs. The legal niceties of boxing were like those of drinking in the prohibition era. Soft punches were innocent, like soft drinks under the Volstead Act. But a hard blow was like hard liquor and instantly transformed all present into criminals. The only thing that saved the boxing game in those dark days was club loyalty. It was impossible to find a clubhouse who had seen a violation of the law. On one occasion, a Headquarters detective tried to stop a fight in the stable. He was thrown down a twenty-foot hay chute. The incident was invisible to fifteen hundred clubmen, including about a hundred policemen, all honorary members. But at best the boxing situation was precarious. Newspapers joined the reformers in demanding the suppression of the sport. The New York Globe asserted that the so-called sparring matches were gory encounters, denoting a low state of civilization, and charged that “the brutalized spectators howl with delight at a knockout.” A bill was offered in Congress making it a crime to mail a picture of a fighter and canceling the postal rights of newspapers that printed news of fights. It was dangerous for a pugilist to admit that he was a pugilist; it placed him outside the law and in danger of being “bagged”, or jugged as a vagabond. Ketchel and Mizner were once arrested on a charge of speeding. When Ketchel appeared in court, he was asked his occupation. “Physical instructor,” he said. In view of the general situation, Britt felt that he couldn’t have too much unpaid advice. He wouldn’t trust anybody but Californians, and Mizner became his chief advisor. Britt and Mizner called in Hype Igoe, a cartoonist and sportswriter of Native Son origin, as an additional consultant.

One of Britt’s peculiarities was that although he constantly solicited advice, he seldom took it. After collecting the best opinions available, he would leave all important decisions to a pack of playing cards. He had studied under celebrated fortune-tellers, and he always carried in his pocket a deck of cards, which he used as an artificial brain. Whenever he had to make a decision, he would select a card and take a surreptitious look at it. If the card was lucky, he would say, “Yes”; if unlucky, “No”; if dubious, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” One day, Mizner stole Britt’s little god of fifty-two opinions and substituted a deck consisting entirely of queens of spades. Every time Britt peered into the future, the lady of disaster glared at him. He went all to pieces, spent a week in bed under a doctor’s care, and thereafter meekly accepted the suggestions of Mizner and Igoe.

Ketchel’s most spectacular fight in New York was his ten-round battle with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Nobody knows who won it. O’Brien, the light-heavyweight champion, was one of the cleverest fighters alive – a jigging, feinting, shuttling, sidestepping, jabbing artist. For seven rounds, he played Ketchel like a snare drum. But his style required incessant motion and, beginning to tire in the eighth round, he spent the rest of the fight trying to save himself. Ketchel landed one of his authentic knockout punches in the closing seconds of the last round. As the referee was counting “six”, the gong sounded. O’Brien was unconscious for half an hour. Referees’ decisions being forbidden by law, there was only the “newspaper decision,” which was mixed, some writers declaring for Jack, since he had won the majority of rounds and was way ahead on points, while others maintained that no man could win a fight in a coma. Some weeks later, in Philadelphia, Ketchel knocked O’Brien out in three rounds. The contemporary accounts credit O’Brien with great gameness under a savage battering, but O’Brien told a different story to Leo McClatchy and other Washington correspondents nearly twenty years later, when he was in the capital in quest of publicity for Philadelphia Jack’s Gymnasium for Business Men, in New York. The newspapers had revealed that President Coolidge was taking off weight by riding a mechanical horse, and O’Brien had memorized a speech to the president in which he offered to come to Washington three times a week and fight the president into condition in the White House basement – FREE. But when he was presented to the president, Jack turned pale, trembled, and couldn’t say a word. He tried afterward to salvage a little publicity by telling the correspondents the nature of his mission, and he threw in the story of his life, including the statement that he had taken a dive in the third round of his second fight with Ketchel. Ketchel’s backers, he said were willing to pay for a quick knockout, believing that it would convince the public that Ketchel was a genuine White Hope, with a real chance of delivering the great Caucasian race from its bondage to Jack Johnson, the colored champion.