Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,979

This is the grave of Jim Jeffries.

Born in 1875 in Carroll, Ohio, Jeffries grew up in Los Angeles. His family moved there in 1882, which was well before LA became a boom town. He was a working class guy and got a job as a boilermaker. But he was a big, athletic kid. Boxing was the biggest sport in America in the late 19th century. So he started participating in the fights and went professional at the age of 20.

It did not take Jeffries long to rise in the boxing world. He won several early fights. He made something of a wave by being willing to challenge Black boxers. For example, John L. Sullivan refused to fight Peter Jackson, a leading Black heavyweight of the era. Jeffries did though and defeated him in 1898. Even before that, Jeffries had fought Hank Griffin, a Black boxer who wasn’t a champion but was in that next class down and thus a very good fighter. In fact, that was Jeffries third professional fight. It only took Jeffries until 1899 to have his first shot at the title. He had only fought Gus Ruhlin to a draw, which angered many who thought Jeffries had won, so it wasn’t really held against him. When he beat Bob Anderson, he earned his shot at the title. He fought Bob Fitzsimmons in Brooklyn and won in the 11th round. He was the champ.

Jeffries had developed a new technique of crouching to come to dominate. This kept his center of gravity low. He took a ton of punishment. He was a punching bag sometimes, but his body could handle it and he would just wear other guys down. So he would win and keep the title and beat a lot of guys, but he really took massive punishment, just blow after blow. Sometimes he would win the bouts quick, and defended his title in 45 seconds against Jack Finnegan in his second title defense. When he took on Jim Corbett to defend the title again, Jeffries just got hammered. And these fights went on forever. This was a 25 round fight. There’s a good chance that Jeffries would have lost on the decision but he managed to finally put Corbett down in the 23rd round. Fitzsimmons battled him again and beat the living hell out of him again too. But Corbett once again was able to knock him out. He finally retired in 1905. He wasn’t that old yet and he hadn’t lost his title. But really, how much punishment can one man take?

Jeffries spent the next few years referring fights. In the meantime, something happened that shook up the boxing world. Jack Johnson had won the Heavyweight title. A black man? What would whites do?

The other thing worth noting here is that being Heavyweight champion meant you were the THE symbol of masculinity in turn of the century America. This was the idealized man to a lot of people. Boxing had an oversized impact on American culture, one that is hard to imagine today. Yes, MMA has taken some of the prestige away from boxing, though the sport being dominated by short-sighted greedy thugs like Don King and Bob Arum certainly helped create a vacuum for MMA to take over. So for a Black man like Johnson to win the title–and then so openly rubbing the noses of the white world in it, dating white women, living up to their stereotypes of the Bad Negro and all of this–it drove whites nuts. After all, how could the epitome of manhood in America be Black?

So whites demanded a Great White Hope to defeat Johnson. That became luring Jim Jeffries out of retirement. Whites raised a lot of money for him here. They paid him $40,000 (about $1.4 million today) and a rich guy gave him a personal contract for another $75,000. Who pushed this more than any other person? Jack London, who combined both every obesssion about masculinity common in his time with being a stone-cold racist, even as he was a leftist politically on issues around white men. London himself could not abide the idea of Johnson as the dominant man in America. So he worked on Jeffries to come out of retirement. London stated, Jeffries was “the chosen representative of the white race, and this time the greatest of them.”

And boy did the whites put their hopes on Jeffries here. The New York Times wrote, in anticipation of the fight:  “If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” Ah, the Times, always on the right side of history. Jeffries was happy to play this up. He was upfront about why he was coming out of retirement, stating, “”I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

The problem of course is that Jeffries was in no shape to fight. He had ballooned to well over 300 pounds. He was 35 years old. The fight was scheduled for a mere 45 rounds. The temperature was 110 degrees on a hot summer Reno day. John L. Sullivan–the white boxer who would never lower himself to fight a Black man knew what was going to happen the moment he saw how fat and old Jeffries was. Jeffries had no shot. Johnson toyed with the old man for awhile and took a few shots, but he hammered Jeffries and the fight was declared over in the 14th round by a TKO. Johnson would stick his thumb in the eye of the white man for awhile longer. That night, race riots broke out across America as whites took their racist frustration out on whatever Black person they could find. At least twenty people died because of this.

The only thing Jeffries really had in his life was boxing and what was an old man to do when he was finished? The answer was to train fighters and promote fights. He bought a house in Burbank, California, which was still semi-rural at the time. He grew alfalfa and trained boxers on his little ranch.

In 1946, Jeffries suffered a stroke. He needed care after that and he died in 1953, at the age of 77.

Jim Jeffries is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

If you would like this series to visit other boxers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John L. Sullivan is in Boston and Gentlemen Jim Corbett is in Brooklyn. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.