Born in 1881, he was raised on a farm in Pottawatomie County, Kansas. After being swindled by his partners in the mule-selling business, he decided to try earning a living in the ring.
He was twenty nine by the time he fought his first professional bout. It was a late age to consider a boxing career, but he hoped to compensate for his lack of youth and experience with his sheer size. And he was big: Willard was six feet six and a half inches tall and weighed 230-250 pounds. Together with Primo Carnera and Vitali Klitschko, he stands as one of the tallest and heaviest champions in heavyweight boxing history.
Willard got a bad battering in his first fight before losing on a disqualification. But the money he received kept him at it. He began to accumulate victories but his style did not impress sportswriters. In 1913, he knocked out John Young, who died from a cerebral haemorrhage the following day. The death affected Willard deeply, who found it difficult enough to deliberately hurt his opponents.
Willard vs. Johnson
In 1914, Willard was approached with an offer to fight Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson. The two met in Havana, Cuba, on April 5, 1915. Johnson was 37 years old by then but his skills far outstripped Willard’s. It therefore came as a surprise when Willard knocked Johnson out in the 26th round. Much controversy exists concerning this fight: Johnson would claim in later life that he’d been paid to take a dive. Johnson dominated Willard for most of the fight and would have easily won a decision if the bout had been scheduled for 12 or 15 rounds. But despite rumours of a fix, the fact is that Johnson did become exhausted during the bout and would say afterwards that he believed Willard was simply too big for normal heavyweights to hurt.
Willard was now World Champion. But he became lax and ill-disciplined after winning the title, supervising his own training - when he did actually train - and he began to believe that he was untouchable, claiming that there was no man who could hurt him.
The Willard/Dempsey Fight
A grossly over-confident Willard staked his title against the up and coming Jack Dempsey in Toledo, Ohio, on July 4, 1919. Willard stood several inches taller than Dempsey and outweighed him by 40 pounds. However, Dempsey was renowned for his tremendous punching power and ferocious brawling style and he savaged Jess so badly, knocking him down seven times, that the Champion refused to come out of his corner at the start of the 4th round. A tally of Willard’s injuries tells it’s own story: four cracked ribs, six teeth knocked out and seven fractures in his jaw. Jess took the 100,000 dollars he’d received for the fight and retired to his farm in Kansas.
‘I never liked boxing,’ he would say in his later years. ‘ I hated it as I never hated a thing previously, but there was money in it.’ He died in 1968.
Sources:
Unforgivable Blackness The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson Geoffrey C. Ward Pimlico, 2006
