BoxRec

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July 9th, 1921

at 42 Johnson claims $10,000 offer to face Fred Fulton in Havana; an gives us yet one more (bogus) claim of 'that severe Cuban heat'

Bogus? You don't think it was hot that day?

Tuan_Jim wrote:Bogus? You don't think it was hot that day?

I should have left the word out - now you will have to read a long reply, sorry.

I too always believed it was hot that day, 101, 104, 105, Etc. and got in quite an argument with Kalan over it. Kalan claimed that Havana in April 'just doesn't get that hot.'

I tried like hell to prove that the temperature was indeed a debilitating 100+ that day just to prove Kalan wrong (yet again).

But what I found was that no one who was actually at the fight sought fit to mention the temperature - It wasn't an issue addressed in the ringside reports; there were no firsthand accounts of the heat.

I of course found hundreds of secondary sources, all making the claim. In fact just about every history written on the fight makes the 100+ claim, but I couldn't find a single primary (fight side) source to confirm it, and none of the histories offer one to support their claims either (except for the fighters themselves, but they are both known liars.) - I couldn't prove Kalan wrong, and it really pissed me off - so I kept looking . . .

Then I found this webpage that has the weather/temperature for Havana from the past eight years (2010-2017 inclusive) - that meant I had 240 April Havana days to look at.

(Yes the fight took place 100 years earlier but climate doesn't change quickly enough to explain the results I found.)

Out of the 240 April days in Havana there were ONLY THREE DAYS where the temperature reached 93 degrees. There were NO DAYS where the temperature went above 93 degrees, forget about a 100+ - but more importantly the average temperature for those 240 April days in Havana comes in somewhere around the mid-80s (there were many days in the high 70s.)

If the temperature the day of the fight was a debilitating 100+ it would have been a profound weather anomaly, someone would have mentioned it from ringside.

A plus 90 degree day is already an anomaly for Havana in April - forget about it reaching 105. (I have seen several claims of 105; must be the yellow press at work.)

This forced me to concede to Kalan and have come to the conclusion that the 100+ temperature day is an urban legend; just one more Jack Johnson story people like to repeat. - Some argue that later in life Jess Willard got his July 4th Dempsey fight confused with the Havana fight; his may have been an unwitting lie; Johnson liked to lie.)

I am still looking for a primary source to confirm the heat, (Know of any?) until then Kalan is right, is wasn't that hot.

- Posted this or like article after JJ prison release in a period of denial of then boxrec regulars who refused to grasp JJ wanted a title shot. Most have kicked the bucket, but their heirs tend to be as dense.

Also researched the national weather records going back decades before the Willard fight up to 2008, taken near the tip of Key West, and including the two bookend months to the fight, the temp never over high 80s.

Photos show men in full dress shirt, tie, wool suit jackets, often with no hat. At 110 in 85% humidity, they'd have been sitting in a pool of sweat, but all look cool as cucumbers.

Possibly the ring canvas spiked the temp for the fighters, but 85 degrees and humidity at a pace will sap the best fighter. Johnson did himself proud in his best performance, but underestimated a really rough tough cowboy ready to do the business come hell or highwater.

Moral: boxing writers are generally closer to a herd of cows than real writers save both propensities to being unremitting drunks.

APerno wrote:But what I found was that no one who was actually at the fight sought fit to mention the temperature - It wasn't an issue addressed in the ringside reports; there were no firsthand accounts of the heat

That's because it wasn't that hot... But if you ever walked on hot sand at the beach in bare feet -- then you know what hot is -- and the air temperature doesn't have to be blistering hot... If there's a cloud here and there, there is periodic cooling, but a sun beating down steadily intensifies the exposure.

Sometimes you have a favorite pair of boxing shoes that fit perfectly so you wear them a lot -- but the soles are worn down like Adlai Stevenson's dress shoes.. Maybe you've been meaning to get them resoled but your shoemaker was on vacation and then you went on vacation -- and then something else happened and you never actually got them resoled like you planned for the last few months.

So the soles are getting really thin, but they seem fine for now and you decide to use them over your other pairs because you want 100% comfort for this fight. Except that the canvas is just a little hot and your feet have been on it for 100 minutes since you stepped into the ring -- an unusually long period of time.. Although your feet were fine for an hour you're thinking, "Yup, should have gotten those soles done." ... How often do you watch a fight where somebody's sole comes off their shoe or their shoe actually comes apart? They probably knew they weren't perfect when they put them on, but they prefer that pair.

I should add that when I looked at those April temperatures the humidity was always in the 80s. I have no clue how to factor a heat index but if it was a 90 degree day with an 80+ humidity it could have felt like hell in that ring.

But that doesn't excuse all those histories who claim it was 103 degrees that day.

Could have been a result of the massive crowd sitting all together so closely in proximity to the ring ?
The body heat of everyone and all ?
anyway maybe you should go look up what the Havana newspapers of the time
and what they had to write about as far as the weather report that was published the day afterwards.
Also it is curious that I never read of any Cuban newspapers account of the fight in Spanish,
have you ever seen one ?

What did he mean by saying his feet are still hot from that fight?

Just that it was hot in the ring, or something else?

Cutman Scabbers wrote:What did he mean by saying his feet are still hot from that fight?

Just that it was hot in the ring, or something else?

Its just Kalan gibberish.

That was Johnson talking, not me dumb ass.

Cutman Scabbers wrote:What did he mean by saying his feet are still hot from that fight?

Just that it was hot in the ring, or something else?

I suspect Jack Johnson was referring to how Hot the canvas had been under his shoes beneath the blazing sun without a canopy overhead,
and and the friction for constanly having to move around the hot canvas fighting for almost an hour and 45 minutes.

Caractacus wrote:

Cutman Scabbers wrote:What did he mean by saying his feet are still hot from that fight?

Just that it was hot in the ring, or something else?

I suspect Jack Johnson was referring to how Hot the canvas had been under his shoes beneath the blazing sun without a canopy overhead,
and and the friction for constanly having to move around the hot canvas fighting for almost an hour and 45 minutes.

Ah ok, thanks!

Cutman Scabbers wrote:

Caractacus wrote:

Cutman Scabbers wrote:What did he mean by saying his feet are still hot from that fight?

Just that it was hot in the ring, or something else?

I suspect Jack Johnson was referring to how Hot the canvas had been under his shoes beneath the blazing sun without a canopy overhead,
and and the friction for constanly having to move around the hot canvas fighting for almost an hour and 45 minutes.

Ah ok, thanks!

just an opinion of course.

Depending on the angle of the sun, the canvas can get hot... It depends on how high in the sky the sun is, and not always how hot it is... You have more direct rays without intermittent cloud cover so it intensifies... and the farther south you go the more likely you'll encounter that... and it becomes like sand on the beach and absorbs a lot of heat, depending on the weave of the canvas.. And if your walking on the beach for a few minutes your feet might not get hot, but if you go for a ways they might heat up quickly.

My guess it may actually have been the canvas that made the ring over 100 degrees.
Was the canvas white ?
That would explain why it was 115 degrees "inside the Square ring".

Caractacus wrote:My guess it may actually have been the canvas that made the ring over 100 degrees.
Was the canvas white ?
That would explain why it was 115 degrees "inside the Square ring".

Are you saying it would be cooler to stand on a black canvas in 100 degree sun? - That doesn't work for me.

well the canvas was underneath them not over them.

Caractacus wrote:well the canvas was underneath them not over them.

Ok - I am not being cheeky, really OK - I have no clue how all that light/heat physics works. It just seems odd to me that something white would make things hotter.

the canvas looks kind of greyish in the film to me.

Im guessing that the colour of the canvas in the Johnson vrs Willard fight was probably either red (Johnson vrs Jeffries) or brown (Dempsey vrs Willard).
because a white canvas would have reflected the sun up into the fighter's eyes.

Caractacus wrote:Im guessing that the colour of the canvas in the Johnson vrs Willard fight was probably either red (Johnson vrs Jeffries) or brown (Dempsey vrs Willard).
because a white canvas would have reflected the sun up into the fighter's eyes.

Saw what you saw in the other article you posted (good article) -

"At the feet of the Gargantuan pugilistic was a dark spot which was slowly widening on the brown canvas as it was replenished by the drip-drip-drip of blood from the man’s wounds.”

How did you confirm 'red' canvas for Johnson-Jeffries?

there is a quote in Geoffry Ward's book from somewhere about it being red canvas in a 22 foot ring.

yeah,thats what inspired me to post that here quite frankly.
You know,if they ever decide to colourize some of those really old fights,it would be important to know
things like that.I read somewhere that Jeffries wore red/scarlett trunks and one source present there said his trunks were purple trunks
and Johnson wore blue trunks(with the American Flag intertwined).
in their fight in Reno in 1910 and that the canvas was red too.