Jack Johnson
“The Galveston Giant”
Titles & honours
- World Heavyweight Champion (1908–1915)
Biography
John Arthur Johnson, born in Galveston, Texas in 1878, became the first Black world heavyweight champion in December 1908 by stopping Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. His seven-year reign, in the openly white-supremacist era, made him the most controversial sporting figure on the planet: the 1910 'Fight of the Century' against the undefeated former champion James J. Jeffries — 'The Great White Hope' — in Reno, Nevada drew a record purse and provoked race riots when Johnson won by 15th-round stoppage. He lost the title to Jess Willard in 1915 in Havana, Cuba, in a 26-round fight in extreme heat. Johnson was technically a generation ahead of his peers: a master of the shoulder-roll, the catch, and the patient pull-counter, he laid the template for every defensive heavyweight from Muhammad Ali onward. Was posthumously pardoned in 2018 for a 1913 racially-motivated conviction under the Mann Act.