Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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When Johnson took up with a pale-as-alabaster nineteen-year-old courtesan within weeks of his first wife committing suicide, public fury prompted legal action. After his future mother-in-law charged Johnson with kidnapping her daughter, Lucille (who would eventually marry Johnson in a bid to avoid testifying against him in court), authorities closed in. But it was an earlier tryst with another working girl, Belle Schreiber, that ultimately led to his Mann Act conviction on May 13, 1913.

A larger-than-life embodiment of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen had recently called “conspicuous consumption,” Johnson swaggered through the early twentieth century at odds with the established racial mores of the United States. Like other hell-raisers of his era—Abe Attell, Stanley Ketchel, and Ad Wolgast—whose days and nights were perpetual scandals, Johnson lived life without a speedometer. Unlike his fellow rowdies, however, Johnson was black. That fact, combined with his audacious attitude—his defiance, his drinking, his omnivorous sexual appetite—in an age when black men were still targets for lynch mobs, made Johnson the object of near-hysterical outrage. Whereas his title-winning knockout of Tommy Burns had merely caused shock, his thrashing of Jim Jeffries in 1910 spurred race riots across the country. Not only did Johnson pummel Jeffries, but he also humiliated “The Boilermaker,” boldly taunting and grinning, gold-capped teeth glittering in the sun, as he dealt out nearly fifteen rounds of punishment.