Wills and Langford

"I was in in Panama a few years ago, with Kid Norfolk, the coloured heavyweight, and champion of the Isthumus. The kid had licked them all and was taking it easy, as is his custom.
Things were getting a little monotonous when suddenly word slipped about the little republic that Harry Wills of New Orleans was in the country. Norfolk packed his grip and left for the United States. He made no bones about why he was leaving. Simply stated he was not in the New Orleans mans class.

Wills took on several heavyweights imported there as a source of amusment for the sport-hungry Americans and Panamanians and then the crop failed.
Sam Langford was brought down for a try-out with Wills. They fought twice. Langford took the full count both times from punches delivered in the region of the stomach. Sam lay on the floor and writhed in aparent agony for 5 or 10 minutes and the crowd on each occasion yelled 'Fake!!".

Harry's wife was there for the first meeting. She is a nice-looking coloured woman and seemed to be entirely of the opinion that her husband would shelve 'The Tar Baby' and so expressed herself to the crowd in unmeasured terms. She went about with a wad of good sized bills betting on her husband. Sam had a lot of supporters and when the end came pork and beans were assured for the Wills family for an indefinite period.

When the two men stepped into the ring it looked like a fight between an aberdeen angus bull and a cougar. Wills looked entirely too ready for the Boston gentleman and he stepped right up and stabbed Langford inummerable times in the face. This seemed to only irrate Sam and he made a move to clinch but Wills side-stepped and slapped him again with great earnestness. None of these things pleased the Tar Baby and he referred to Wills unbecomingly and he tossed an uppercut towards Wills chin, the intention of which was in no way disguised. This seemed to bring Wills to a realisation that Sam was cross about something and he wrapped himself around his opponent in such a manner that the referee, who was a very able-bodied citizen, could hardly pry them apart.

As they were seperated Sam looked at the crowd and smiled. Wills did not think this was the right thing for Samuel to do and expressed his indignation by cutting his eye open. My, but did Sam act ugly for a while. But he cooled down later and stood like a block of Vermont granite and took the jabs offered by Wills with becoming dignity. This sort of thing kept up for six rounds, then Harry reached down in his shoe and pulled forth a blow that looked like a streak of sunlight. His hand disapeared in Langford's midriff and Sam doubled up and fell flat on his face on the floor. He did not put out his hands to protect himself. His hands were as useless as a pair of worn-out socks and about as limp. He made serveral ineffectual efforts to rise. He did succeed in getting to his corner some 10 minutes later, with the help of Wills, the referee and two physicians, which showed great will-power.
Sam said the blow was a foul.

The second fight, fought a month later, was about the same as the first, with the exception that Sam did not collect Wills knuckles until the 7th round, but the effect was the same. Sam gathered his end of the purse after this fight and placing it in his pocketbook left the Isthumus.

I saw both fights. They may have been faked. I am not capable of judging, but Wills attitude during the fights and after them struck me very favourably. He is quiet, reserved and very polite outside of the ring. I believe that if Wills and Dempsey were to ever meet Dempsey will have his championship crown knocked into the Great Lakes."

(by Sid Smith - The Gazette Times - Oct 8, 1922)

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Sam Langford often fought the same opponents over and over as was typical of coloured boxers at the time. Langford and Wills tangled at least seventeen times (up to twenty-two times by some sources) between 1914 and 1922. They knocked each other out twice and Wills generally had the better of the series, although it must be noted that the first meeting occurred when Langford was 31 years old.

The first Wills v Langford fight was a 10-round newspaper decision win for Langford. The rematch (pictured here) in November 1914 and second fight in their long series went like this -
"With a left swing to the jaw, Sam Langford of Boston knocked out Harry Wills from New Orleans, in the fourteenth round of a scheduled twenty-round fight this afternoon at Vernon. Both men were knocked down repeatedly, Langford himself taking the count four times in the first two rounds. Langford early in the fight hurt his left ankle as he fell to the mat in a vicious breakaway. Wills' effective straight-arm drives gave him an apparent even break in most of the rounds, but Langford fought with a superior knowledge of the game that gradually wore out Wills. As the soreness left Langford's injured ankle, his footwork improved and the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth rounds showed Langford winning. His speed, judgment and force then enabled him to play with Wills. The final swing was delivered after a torrent of blows had left Wills staggering." (Indianapolis Star)

Langford had more than ten fights each against Sam McVey, Joe Jeannette, Jim Barry, Jeff Clark, and Bill Tate.

After over three hundred recorded bouts, Sam Langford retired in 1926 at the age of 43. In his last years in the ring, he was troubled by eye problems which eventually resulted in blindness. In 1944, Al Laney of the New York Herald Tribune decided to write a story about Langford, but he had trouble finding him. Several people suggested that Langford was probably dead, but Laney persisted and finally found Langford living at a rooming house on 139th Street in New York City. Langford had 20 cents in his pocket. Shortly after Laney's story was published, a fund was set up for Langford. As a result, he lived relatively comfortably for the rest of his days. Langford passed away suffering from diabetes on January 12, 1956 at a private nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Harry Wills retired from boxing in 1932, also at the age of 43, and ran a successful real estate business in Harlem, New York. He was known for his yearly fast, in which, once a year, he would live on only water for a month. Wills died, ironically also from diabetes, on December 21, 1958. He left an estate valued at over $100,000, including a 19-family apartment building in upper Harlem. His biggest regret in life was never getting the opportunity to fight Jack Dempsey for the World Title.

 

theres reference to this in the article...i suppose i should add it while i have it...


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I went all over Harlem searching for Sam Langford. Nobody even knew the name. Nobody had heard of him. Finally, someone said "You know, when I was at Amherst I played against Frtiz Pollard, a Negro from Brown. Find him. Maybe he can help."
I went back to 125th Street and asked for Pollard and was told "Oh, sure, he's a booking agent. He books Negro acts into all the Negro theaters"
I found Pollard and said "Look, I want to find Sam Langford. Do you know anything about him?" - He didn't. But I figured he could still help me. I wrote a piece about him, as a matter of fact, to butter him up. It wasn't really one of the series because there wasn't much to write about him. Anyhow, one day he said, "Let's go to the ration office" This was during the war and he meant the place where you get your ration books to buy a pound of meat and so on. We went down there. They had never heard of Langford.
"Well," Pollard said, "let's go over to the welfare office." - At welfare they said "Yes, Langford used to come in. He used to be on welfare."
This was the first lead I had, after almost a month. So we knew Langford was somewhere in the area. We left, and as I was walking with Pollard down Lenox Avenue, he said "Let's go in here" It was a butcher shop. Pollard said, "I know this fellow. He's a great sports fan."
The butcher was a white man. Pollard asked him if he had ever heard of Sam Langford. The man said "Sure, he comes in here every day. I give him pig's feet. He lives around the corner."
That's where we found him, in a terrible, terrible old room. He was blind of course. I knocked on his door, this rickety old door, and I said "Sam?"...and this voice says "Yes, c'mon in"
We went in. I could see by the light through the door that he was reaching for a string to turn on the light above him. He was sitting on this bed, the only thing in the room. There was a tiny little window facing on to the courtyard.
I sat and talked with him. The stench in the place was awful. He was so cheerful, laughing all the time. Of course, he didn't know me from Adam. I told him who I was. He asked if I knew all the old people he used to know. We talked and talked. He told me he had been on and off welfare so much the welfare office had lost track of him.
I went back to the office and wrote a piece that night. It ran the next morning. It was quite a short piece, no more than a thousand words. When I saw it in the paper I said to myself, "My God, what a terrible job I've done."
But then I was deluged with money. Every day came dozens and dozens of letters with postage stamps and dollar bills and two-dollar bills, and quaters wrapped in bits of paper. The piece had been picked up by the Associated Press and put on the wire. So this stuff was coming in from all over the country.
This was early in December, and at Christmas I went back to see him again and do another piece. I neglected my family to go up there. By this time we had all this money, and I bought him a guitar, a box of cigars, a bottle of gin, all that stuff. He loved to take a slug of gin. He never took much.
Sam was wonderful, and there was this one wonderful touch. He was blind, remember, but he said, "I got a little money now. Buy me a couple of candles, will you?"
He fished into his pocket and gave me a quarter. "I want you to light the candles. I can't see them. But I want the candles lit for Christmas."
The christmas story turned out to be better than the other. In anthologies they put the two stories together because they supplement one another. They put a title on it, "A dark man laughs" It's in a dozen or so anthologies.
I wrote five pieces on Sam altogether, and we raised twelve thousand dollars. We got a lot of pleasure out of the Langford story and the organization of the fund.
Sam was such a wonderful person. There was no evil in him. Nothing but sweetness. He had no grudge against anybody. The only person he didn't like was Harry Wills. He kept telling me, "Don't you accept nothing from Harry Wills. I don't want anything from Harry Wills."
Sam had fought Wills nineteen times, but he couldn't fight for the title. No Negroes were fighting for titles back then. By the time Jack Johnson was champion and Negroes were beginning to be accepted for big bouts, Sam was practically blind. He got that lime stuff in one eye, and the eye was gone. But he still fought on. He fought at 160 pounds. Fought the heavyweights too.
Sam and I were friends until he died. We got about a hundred dollars a month for him, which was plenty at the time. He got more and more feeble and then he got diabetes very bad. He kept telling me "I'm going back to Boston". He had a friend up there, a fellow who ran a pub. He finally came down and got Sam and put him in a nursing home. There was enough money to pay his way up there. That's where Sam died.
There was one thing I forgot. Sam is noted for calling everyone "Chief" and I forgot to put that in the story. The first thing I heard him say was "C'mon in, Chief."
The story was not a straight job of reporting. For the facts about Sam, you could say "There he is. He's forgotten. He's blind. He hasn't got any money. And he's very cheerful about it." That's all there is to it, that would be the whole story, if you were just using facts. But this kind of feature reporting is different.

By Al Laney

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From The New York Times - Feb 3rd 1992...
"Al Laney, a sportswriter for more than four decades, died last Sunday at his retirement home, the Fellowship Community, in Spring Valley. He was 92 years old.
In 1924, Mr. Laney went to Paris for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and worked there until 1930, when he went to New York to work for The Herald Tribune. In New York, he covered baseball, tennis and golf.
He is survived by a son, Michael Laney of Spring Valley."


photo of langford from then here..

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