Jack Johnson packed a powerful punch. It was the kind of ham-fisted roundhouse that, as boxers say, will kill your opponent and his whole family, the kind of body-shaking blow that fells titans and makes lesser boxers weep in terror. Having one of his fists land on you was like having Paul Bunyan take a swing at you with an ax. Not until the arrival of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman on the scene more than half a century after Johnson’s time would the ring see such a combination of fearsome speed and devastatingly concentrated pounds per square inch. Not even the great Jack Tunney, Joe Louis, and Jack Dempsey could quite approach Johnson’s cordial lethality, which made history wherever he went.
Born Arthur John Johnson in Galveston in 1878, Jack Johnson grew up with a very highly developed sense of self. He told tall tales that would make Paul Bunyan’s inventor turn green with envy. He said that his father, for instance, was “the most perfect physical specimen I have ever seen,” even though Johnson senior was only five and a half feet tall and limped thanks to a leg mutilated in the Civil War. No matter. Years later, during World War I, Johnson claimed that he had single-handedly captured a German U-boat on the high seas, subdued the crew, and blew up the vessel, rescued only after drifting on the open ocean in a life raft for long days.
People believed him. Even as a teenager, he was tall, handsome, and picture-perfect, with arms like tree trunks. He was fully convinced of his greatness, too, and thought nothing of it when, for various transgressions, he was ejected from church, tossed out of school, and told to leave his parents’ home.
Instead, Johnson turned to fighting. He fought his first bout in 130 years ago, in 1893, when he was 15, and kept on smacking away until turning professional in 1897. In 1901, Joe Choynski, a former heavyweight champion, traveled to Galveston to train the young man, whose reputation had spread far outside Texas. Their first meeting was inauspicious, for in a sparring match Choynski knocked Johnson out, the police were called, and both did nearly a month in jail, boxing being illegal almost everywhere in the United States at the time. The two used their time in jail to train Johnson in secret, and by the time they emerged he was unstoppable.
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