John L. Sullivan and his handlebar mustaches were objects of manly admiration when a pint-sized Englishman arrived in Manhattan and decided to become a prizefighter himself. After a few fights, James J. Johnston reconsidered. A man with his brains shouldn’t risk having them knocked out.
He threw away his boxing gloves and bought a black derby. For the next 50 years, at a saucy angle, the derby accompanied Jimmy Johnston and his winged gab through boxing’s shady domain. Wearing neat dark suits, and never smoking nor touching whiskey, he hung out mostly at Lindy’s, and talked a kind of gay illiteracy straight out of Damon Runyon.
With a few words, a knowing nod and a confidential elbow-push in the stomach, he convinced many a jittery second-rater that he was really a wildcat. His persuasiveness worked the other way, too. Johnston once whispered to mighty Jess Willard: “Jess, you killed a man in your last fight. . . . I just thought I’d warn you, my boy has a bad heart.”
Wayward Wit. Six years ago loquacious Jimmy was hauled into New York’s Supreme Court, charged with libeling a state boxing commissioner. In a burst of silence, he heard Justice John McGeehan sum up his attributes: “One sees the rakish leer in his eye and gathers that he has a wayward wit. . . . He is engaged in a business that is mostly ballyhoo.” Few people remember that the man in the iron hat managed five world champions.
He once put an ad in a newspaper: “Wanted: young man to become Heavyweight Champion of the World.” The best of the applicants was a nondescript Welshman, who with the help of Johnston’s imagination and a dime-store bandanna emerged as Gypsy Daniels, eldest son of a gypsy king who lived at the foot of Rhondda Mountain in Wales. Jimmy also wowed New York’s Chinatown with Ah Wong, a “Chinese lightweight” whose real name was Mickey Mulligan.
Pick of the Garden. Jimmy fought his own biggest battle in Madison Square Garden, where he took over the boxing concession in 1931. He hung on for six stubborn years. The Garden management finally replaced him with his cagey, teeth-clicking archrival, Mike Jacobs.
Jimmy was all set to make his big promotional comeback next month at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. Last week, sitting in dusty, second-rate St. Nick’s Arena, he saw his white hope fall down five times in ten rounds. Said Jimmy: “It made me sick.” Next morning, 70-year-old James J. Johnston fell dead of a heart attack.
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