Jack Johnson and Sam Langford argument

that was good

 

This article pulls a lot of historical threads together.

Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, Stan Ketchel, Al Kaufman, Barney Oldfield, the diamond belt.

 

I think Johnson would have gone through with the fight but knowing it would be a hard one ,he wanted to be well paid for it,and for the hard training to round his dissipated body back into shape to take on a formidable foe like LANGFORD.
I find it very telling that Johnson reiterated that two blacks would not draw ,and ,therefore he wanted a side bet .
Johnson was offered £3000 to fight Langford by Peggy Bettinson the manager and promoter of the National Sporting Club in London.Johnson would have had to pay his travelling expenses out of that .This was the only real offer that the UK made for the fight as opposed to" newspaper talk".
Contrast this with the $10,000 bonus Johnson received just for signing to fight Jeffries.
And ,with the purses he received to challenge Burns for the title $5,000, and the $5,000 guarantee he received to pad through 6 rds to a no dec with Jack O Brien.

 

There were some big money offers for fights with Langford and McVea in Australia and Russia, but they came after Johnson had been charged under the mann act.

 

Regarding these offers, was the money really there?

Russia ????? The place was in chaos.

Australia? I find it hard to beleive that a country whose national newspapers described Johnson as," a destructive beast"," a huge primodial ape",[ cartoons likened Johnson to , "a shaven headed reptile"],[Australia appears to have been fully as racist as the US],should be desperate to see the out come of a fight between to men "of colour".

Johnson actually made more money from a vaudeville tour of Australia than he did from challenging and thrashing Burns for the title,in fact after beating Burns on Boxing Day, he toured," Down Under", till mid Feb of the New Year.


Talk is cheap.

 

I suspect that some of these offers did have money behind them.

Australia was a country where there was a lot of racism, but they did not understand the concept of the colour bar. It just confused them. It was also a country where a lot of money was put up for big fights. That offer is a definite maybee.

The offer in Russia is more open to question. Had it come off, it would have been a bit like the Ali Foreman fight in Zaire, in that it would have broken new ground. There was a lot of disposable income in Russia the time, and the money behind it sure as hell could have been genuine.

 

Without wishing to insult a poster of your calibre ,this appears to be a contradiction in terms,
A " Mendozaism".

 

Mcintosh made £26,000 profit from the Burns Johnson fight,and he wagered nearly all of it on Johnson to beat Jeffries.

 

"I met you once Sam, and Defeated you." "Yes, yes you did, but I was only a child then."


Classic Stuff...I still think Jack Johnson overwhelms Langford at any point in his career

 

Langford was 24 years old, and had engaged in 50 fights when he fought Johnson, considerably more than Jack.

 

i disagree with you. i think sam beats johnson at some point. langford fought wills, jeannette, and mcvey so many times that he deserved about 10 tries at johnson's title.

 

"Langford was 24 years old, and had engaged in 50 fights when he fought Johnson, considerably more than Jack."

Although it's not impossible that this date could someday be proved innacurate, all the research I did led me to conclude that Langford's birthdate was March 4, 1886, as he claimed, and that would make him 20 years old at the time he fought Jack Johnson in April of 1906.