43) Mike Tyson KO8: US Fight Commentary TV -
v Mike Tyson 8 June 2002 WBC IBF Heavyweight Memphis Tennessee: [r1] … and Lewis comes right back with three uppercuts … [r2] … Lewis with a big right uppercut … another one … another right uppercut … Tyson’s only got in one body punch … [r3] … [Lewis] Outjabbing him and being cautious … Good body shot by Mike Tyson … left hook … [r4] … Nice solid right uppercuts [Lewis] … less jabbing from Tyson … Right hand [Lewis] … looked like a clear knockdown … [r5] … Tyson just can’t find the distance … Tyson looked worn out … Big round for Lewis … [r6] … Lewis again landing at will … That right hand hurt Tyson … another strong overhand right … Tyson looks very tired … Tyson’s best shot … [r7] … It’s all Lewis … He [Tyson] can’t take too many of those right hands … [r8] … Tyson told his corner he’d had enough … Good right hand by Mike Tyson … another … A big [Lewis] uppercut! … Lewis unloading! … Right hand and Tyson goes down! It’s over. US fight commentary
[8.7] JACK JOHNSON 104-73(40)-13-10-5: Bert Randolph Sugar - Jim Jacobs - Ringside: Top Ten Heavyweights TV - Ken Burns TV - Bundini Brown - Boxing's Best: Jack Johnson TV - Peter Wilson - In This Corner: Great Heavyweights TV - Jack Johnson - Michael Portillo TV - Finis Farr - Randy Roberts - Jack Johnson 1970 -
It was just a reform era. And here’s a black man and is the strongest man in the world. He represents boxing ... The premier athlete. And who is it? A black man. Jack Johnson had unwilled a tremendous hatred. And he didn’t care. He really didn’t. Bert Randolph Sugar, interview Ringside: Top 10 Heavyweights
1910 v James Jeffries (7/10 betting), Reno Nevada: All bets were off. And yet it was an ugly scene reflecting the attitude of the day. The social attitude ... It was a totally white crowd ... He out-pointed him. He out-slugged him ... It had ramifications. There were riots in cities with whites killing blacks. Nineteen dead. ibid.
When he was sitting in his corner he would purposely miss spitting into the spittoon and spit on the table with pin-point accuracy of all the writers sitting there hitting their papers. He loved crossing the color line. He loved doing outrageous things. Jack Johnson loved to be Jack Johnson. Bert Randolph Sugar, boxing author and historian
Now we’re back to that underlying question – it’s all right to have a black champion. As a middleweight, a welterweight, a lightweight – a heavyweight champion? All of a sudden Jack Johnson meant that the white man’s burden had become the white man’s master. Bert Randolph Sugar
Jack Johnson was brilliant. In fact, there were some – Nat Fleischer, the former publisher of The Ring magazine – thought he was the greatest fighter of all time. Bert Randolph Sugar
v Tommy Burns, Sydney Australia 1908: He chased Tommy Burns all the way to Australia ... He gets him in the ring ... The constabulary of Sydney Australia jumped in the ring to stop the fight. And they cut off the cameras ... Everybody hated him for it. Bert Randolph Sugar
1915 v Jess Willard: 105 degree heat in a scheduled 45 round fight ... Johnson gets knocked out in the twenty-sixth round. He then sells a confession – I threw the fight – to Nat Fleischer who never believed it. Bert Randolph Sugar
Jack Johnson was half a century ahead of his time. He was the first fighter who thought about self-preservation when he got into the ring. Jim Jacobs
At that time the public did not want a black man as Heavyweight champion. Jim Jacobs
Bert Randolph Sugar – We are at Number Four. And Number Four on Bert’s List is Jack Johnson. Why Jack Johnson so high, Bert? Ringside: Top 10 Heavyweights
They had come to see their hero – the white ex-Heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries take back the title from the first African-American ever to hold it, Jack Johnson. Ken Burns, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson I & II
Then suffered persecution at the hands of his own government. Then years of exile before the title was taken from him. ibid.
A danger to the natural order of things. ibid.
Burns v Johnson: the fight was scheduled for twenty three-minute rounds. ibid.
Burns and his cornermen kept up a torrent of racial abuse. ibid.
Johnson thought his private life was nobody’s business. ibid.
Jeffries refused to shake hands. ibid.
Jack Johnson’s troubles were just beginning. ibid.
His victory had provoked race riots all over the country. ibid.
Johnson was drinking heavily now. ibid.
Re: US v Jack Johnson (violation White Slave Act). ibid.
Some African-Americans began to abandon him. ibid.
Public Nuisance: On June 4th 1930 Judge Carpenter sentenced Jack Johnson to a year and a day in federal prison. ibid.
His money began to run out. ibid.
[Jess] Willard sometimes got mad, and he had a powerful right hand – powerful enough to have killed one opponent. ibid.
The fight was scheduled for forty-five rounds. Nearly 20,000 fans were on hand. ibid.
The temperature at ringside was 105 degrees. ibid.
He continued to drive as fast as he liked. ibid.
He was buried in Chicago. ibid.
Ghost in the house! Jack Johnson’s here! ibid. Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s cornerman
Afterwards famous novelist Jack London who was covering the fight for the New York Herald wrote that Jeffries was the only man who could defeat Johnson and rescue the white race. Boxing’s Best: Jack Johnson
And so it was for Jack Johnson, who married two white women, and had the gall to expect White America to except him on his terms. He was a black man who had it all. Johnson – for years denied a title shot – Johnson humiliated champion Tommy Burns in 1908. ibid.
He used his hands to cut, bruise and torment those he hated. And his tongue was almost as wounding. Peter Wilson
He managed to achieve greatness as a boxer, but it could be said he achieved something more as an American pioneer. In This Corner: Great Heavyweights
I am astounded when I realize that there are few men in any period of the world’s history, who have led a more varied or intense existence than I. Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out
Even a boxer must come in contact with Life and its many problems. Jack Johnson
I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist. Jack Johnson
Playing games and playing politics – the secrets of Britain's involvement with Hitler’s Olympics. The fight against discrimination: why the first black Heavyweight boxing champ was banned from fighting in London. Portillo’s State Secrets 5/10: Sport and Politics, BBC 2015
Jack Johnson: outcry by the church ... Winston Churchill took out the Injunction. ibid.
Now it was seen that Johnson was smiling, and talking to Jeffries. Corbett heard him say: ‘Come on, Mr Jeff. Let me see what you got. Do something, man. This is for the championship.’ Finis Farr, The Sports at Reno
Johnson kept smashing away left and right. By the end of the fourteenth round, Jeffries was in such distress that he could barely raise his arms. In the fifteenth, Jack knocked Jeffries half out of the ring; friends pushed him back, Rickard ignoring this violation of the rules, and Johnson chopped him down again with a left to the head. Somehow Jeffries got to his feet, to receive three snapping blows to the face that knocked him back to the floor. Sam Berger threw in a towel to concede defeat, but Rickard did not see it, and counted ten over Jeffries. Then Rickard lifted the fist of Jack Johnson as indisputable heavyweight champion of the world. ibid.
Later, locked in jail in Los Angeles, he talked some more. He wanted to set the record straight on several points. First of all he had made some mistakes, certainly. And he was sorry for them. But, he emphasized, he was still a great boxer and a loyal American. He reaffirmed that he had ‘laid down to Jess Willard in Havana' and he could still ‘lick any man in the world today’. In addition, during the war he had done valuable secret service in Spain. Randy Roberts, The Exile’s Return
He started his prison term in style. About 500 people greeted the train bearing Johnson when it arrived in Leavenworth. A black chauffeur offered the use of his car to the former champion, and Johnson took over the wheel and drove to the prison himself. ibid.