Word: willards
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...fated protagonist in two of the most controversial fights in ring history. The result was that for nearly half a century he was dismissed by the great majority of fight fans as the Great White Hoax. It was an unfair judgment, and before he died last week at 86, Willard was belatedly recognized as one of boxing's most underrated heavyweights...
Lethal Right. Raised on a ranch in Pottawatomie County, Kans. Willard migrated to Oklahoma, where he broke horses and ran a frontier freight-wagon service, Marveling at the way Big Jess tossed around 500-lb. bales of cotton, his friends told him that he was just the man to thrash Jack Johnson good and proper. Like many Americans, they considered it a national disgrace that Johnson, who eventually married three white women and romanced countless others, was allowed to reign as champion.* Willard who had never seen a boxing match sold his business and at 29 went into the ring...
...bout in this century. Five years later, Johnson, broke and living in Paris, sold a "confession" to a magazine in which he claimed that he had thrown the fight for $50,000 and the promise of leniency from the U.S., where he was wanted for violating the Mann Act. Willard's reaction: "If Johnson throwed the fight, I wished he throwed it sooner. It was hotter than hell down there...
Though the alleged confession is fancifully made the dramatic crux of The Great White Hope, there has never been any evidence to substantiate it. Indeed, a film of the match discovered just two years ago proves Willard's oft-repeated claim that he "beat him fair and square." Excerpts of the film, in a recently released feature on early fighters called The Legendary Champions, shows Willard dispatching the wilting, 37-year-old Johnson with a crunching overhand right that would have knocked out any heavyweight who ever lived...
Chunks of Cement? The Legendary Champions also shows the lean, hard, 24-year-old Jack Dempsey winning the title from Willard in one of the most savage beatings ever inflicted on a fighter...