Chapter 7

SIX DAYS OF MADNESS

For years, Munger had been nurturing Taylor under his paternal wings. He had taken him into his home, trained him on seedy, old racetracks, raising him up through the amateur ranks through a dilatory and careful development. It wasn’t until the six-day race at Madison Square Garden under the glaring eyes of the sporting public, however, that Munger finally set him free.

With Arthur Zimmerman spending much of his time overseas, the nation eagerly sought a new hero. In the winter of 1896, America was in the third year of the most disastrous financial crisis in its history. The panic of 1893, which began around the time of Taylor’s first race, had washed over American life like a hurricane. In some towns nearly 25 percent of the population had lost their careers, their investments, their farms. Violent strikes and riots wracked the nation and the middle class began whispering fearfully of “carnivals of revenge.” A country that had grown supremely confident from its industrial success during the Gilded Age—when everyone was a potential Carnegie and success was celebrated as never before—was disheartened by rampant indigence. The strongest of citizens, including prominent bankers—more than five hundred banks had gone under—and Wall Street executives were overcome by feelings of hopelessness and trepidation. Their fears were not lost on politicians: Republican candidate William McKinley won the presidency with a simple promise to provide a “full dinner pail” for the unemployed.

Present-day writings often refer to the era as “the Gay Nineties,” highlighting the extravagances of the Morgans, Belmonts, and Vanderbilts. In reality, eleven million of America’s twelve million families lived below the poverty line, earning on average just $345 a year. The average income for blacks was considerably less.

Unlike the Great Depression, when more government programs were available to aid the impoverished, Americans were largely left to fend for themselves. Few areas, especially train depots, were without beggars. Some were content with finding their next meal; others too proud for handouts begged for jobs so they could fend for themselves; still others sought just enough money to afford temporary relief.

Relief came in many forms. In search of hope and encouragement, people filled churches to capacity. Entertainment venues like Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, The Magic Lantern Theatre, Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, and ragtime music led by Scott Joplin also helped people cope. Though motion pictures were in their infancy, people were spellbound by them. From New Jersey to San Francisco, they scraped together twenty-five cents, turned a crank, and peered into Edison’s kinetoscopes to watch Bicycle Trick Riders and Brady’s six-minute production of a Corbett fight—the first big moneymaker the movie industry ever produced.

Americans also sought relief in sports. But with radio and television decades away, the only access people had to sports heroes either came from reading newspapers or magazines, seeing them on billboards, or attending live events. Americans eagerly awaited the morning paper for word on their sports hero or for any news of the big stars coming to their town, their moods ebbing and flowing with the successes or failures of their chosen idol. Live sporting events, the preferred medium, often provided the first opportunity for rural farmers to meet urbanites as they passed through the gates of the era’s most popular sports: baseball, horse racing, boxing, tennis, and wrestling. But cycling arguably led the way. In 1896, the year of Taylor’s professional debut, all facets of cycling were wildly popular: leisure riding, road races, outdoor track races, lantern parades, and the overflowing bicycle manufacturers’ conventions.

In winter, no sporting event drew fans like the six-day bike races. As its name implies, the riders had six days—between Monday morning at 12:01 and Saturday evening at 11:59—to ride as many miles as possible. Around and around the steeply banked track they pedaled day and night, sometimes resting for only one or two hours a day. The rules were straightforward: after the final tally at the end of the sixth night, victory belonged to the man who had pedaled the greatest distance. The early version of the race was as brutal a sporting event as man had ever devised. But if a rider survived and won, the total winnings—$5,000 to $10,000 in the 1890s, $75,000 in the 1920s—was nearly enough to set up a man for life. Writers from most newspapers in America and Europe covered the race extensively. With one stroke of their pens, cyclists could gain unprecedented international exposure, instantly raising them from obscurity and poverty to fame.

In December 1896, cycling’s broad-based popularity, Americans’ need to escape, and the ruggedness of the era merged, greatly enhancing the spectacle of the race. The event, the stage, and the audience were set. It awaited only the lead actor, the new hero.

At that extraordinary moment at the dawn of the “separate but equal” era, Major Taylor, the eighteen-year-old, largely unknown black man, walked past the Garden’s Roman colonnades for the first time. That grand entrance off Madison Avenue, gleaming with lavender marble, must have been quite a sight for his pastoral eyes. It was the second of four buildings that have used the name Madison Square Garden and undoubtedly the grandest. No ordinary edifice, this was an indoor oasis so stunning the New York Herald considered it not just a building “but a state of mind.”

After the first Garden, owned by William Vanderbilt, was torn down in 1890, its new owners, J. P. Morgan and a brilliant young architect named Stanford White, had erected a grand monument to the city’s predepression taste and wealth. Extending 200 feet on one side and 485 feet on the opposite side, the building was an imposing structure of yellow brick and white Pompeian terra-cotta. On its roof was a popular observation deck that offered visitors a bird’s-eye view of the city.

As grand as the building was on the outside, it was on the inside where Taylor would have been most awestruck; pale red walls enfolded an auditorium 200 feet by 350 feet, the largest then in existence, with seats for eight thousand people and floor space for several thousand more, all laid out beneath an eighty-foot-high ceiling.

And then there were the wine rooms, far and away the most popular, located in odd corners of the building. This is where enormous sums were wagered on races, and, as Brady recalled, people went “to get gloriously fried.” Perhaps nobody more than he. “I must have been one of the best customers in the history of the old Madison Square Garden.”

But Morgan and White, perhaps caught up in the excesses of the era, had spent too freely. By the mid-’90s, just a few years after its completion, they were having trouble meeting expenses. So Brady, Kennedy, and Powers were able to lease the building for years at a time at a substantial discount.

If, by finishing fourteenth in his last amateur race, Taylor wanted to come in under the radar of the professional race handicappers, it had worked. Early Saturday night, December 5, before the start of the six-day event, Taylor had signed on to the half-mile open handicap to touch off his career. He went largely unnoticed. While a few handicappers had vaguely heard his name, none had any reason to believe that he was anything more than an also-ran. He was, wrote one of the few reporters to recognize his name, nothing but “a Dark Horse.” A Kansas City sportswriter referred to him as “a little ink-stained fellow.” Their minds had been preoccupied by weightier American names like Eddie “Cannon” Bald, two-time sprint champion of America; his closest pursuer, Tom Cooper; famed world-traveler, Nat Butler; and the thick-legged powerhouse, Arthur Gardiner, among others. In recognition of his green-as-grass status, the race handicappers positioned Taylor as limitman, with a thirty-five-yard advantage to the above scratchmen.

While he warmed up, and over the next six days, a melting pot of people would pour in by the tens of thousands, including the Vanderbilts and the Belmonts—Oliver and his new wife, Alva.

When the spectators entered, they moved through a long lobby entrance lined with polished yellow Sienna marble. They were greeted by the lively sounds of Bayne’s Sixty-ninth Regiment Band as they emerged into the arena. New York’s society folk were escorted to their red carpet suites. The commoners looked down from an upper level promenade that extended around the circuit of the arena. A catwalk arched over the ten-lap to the mile track where another thousand fans looked down on the riders. Hanging from the center of the track, a large electronic scoreboard allowed fans to track each rider’s progress.

The night before the six-day race, the riders competing in the half-mile handicap entered the track individually to the deafening roar of the crowd. They glanced up at the throng, strapped themselves into their toe clips, and waited on the tape, their trainers holding them up. Brady’s friend, a comely actress named Anna Held, squeezed the trigger, raising the curtain on Major Taylor’s professional career.

At the sound of the pistol, Taylor’s anxiety was quickly replaced with a massive forward push. He put his head down and stormed around the first lap of the track, his thirty-five-yard head start neither widening nor narrowing. After the second of five laps, some riders who had not yet closed the gap began to take notice of him. Others held their ground, figuring the new kid would eventually crack.

Eddie Bald, who’d probably never heard of Taylor but had a reputation to uphold, was the first rider to react to him. The man whose face appeared on cigarette packages nationwide and whose trading card was exchanged more than any other wasn’t about to let “a runaway African,” as one reporter called Taylor, beat him. Showing why he had earned the nickname “Cannon,” Bald picked his way through the maze of riders, passing Cooper, Gardiner, and Butler. The champion of America was on a tear.

At the beginning of the third lap, as the handicappers had expected, Taylor’s thirty-five-yard gap began dwindling; thirty yards, then twenty-five. The confident home crowd cheered New York’s Bald on, waiting for him to overtake Taylor as he had everyone else that year. Smoothly, fluidly, Taylor rolled on, dipping and swerving around the steep wooden track. From their private booth, Brady and Kennedy could study Taylor’s every move. They could see the grace of his cadence, the absence of wasted energy, the celerity of motion not unlike an eagle in flight.

From behind, Bald continued a relentless pursuit toward the speeding black man who looked like nothing more than a kid fresh out of high school. The rest of the field slid away, littered all over the track behind them. It was coming down to a two-horse race—the experienced Bald and neophyte Taylor. Pedaling with all that was in him, Taylor was alone on the lead, banking into the first turn of what he thought was the final lap. The half-mile race required five laps around the track. At the beginning of the fifth, suddenly, unexplainably, something happened. Out of nowhere, his right arm rose in a closed fist as though he was shaking it in triumph. There was a full lap left, yet he was celebrating as though he had won. Everything Munger had taught him about studying each track and staying calm had seemingly been lost. His lead was evaporating. Bald was closing. The crowd was shouting.

Perhaps he didn’t know the track’s length. Perhaps he had miscounted. Or the thunderous New York crowd, the web of international reporters, the grandeur of the garden, all combined to unnerve him. For a split second at the most significant juncture of his young life, Taylor wavered. The crowd, noticing his mistake, screamed themselves hoarse.

With less than three-quarters of a lap to go, finally realizing what was happening, Taylor dropped his head and lunged forward again. But under great pressure, his usual poise began unraveling. What had been a perfect matrimony between man and bicycle was now merely Taylor and his Birdie Special, struggling to regain their harmony. Craning his neck back, Taylor saw Bald charging at him. Looking ahead while ripping along at over forty miles per hour, Bald could see Taylor’s form crumble. He shot forward drawing even closer: twenty-yards, fifteen-yards. He was eating away at Taylor’s lead in chunks.

Bald stood up on his machine and pounced on his pedals, his legs straining, his long frame lunging to within yards of him.

Taylor was coming to the homestretch of his first professional race, eyes wide open, legs burning. Behind him were some of the greatest cyclists in the country. All around him, Madison Square Garden’s plush interior thronged with thousands of howling fans. Above him, a catwalk of fans, their hands reaching out toward him. Ahead of him, an empty undulating wooden track and the glistening white tape of the finish line. And hot on his tail, the two-time champion of America.

The two men looked forward and saw the tape rushing at them. Just then, Taylor looked down at the track floor and saw nothing but his front wheel flying over the tape.

Ten days removed from his eighteenth birthday in his first professional race, Taylor had crossed the finish line ahead of America’s sprint champion. All that remained of the crowd’s vocal cords shrieked themselves out as he circled the track triumphantly. He grinned ear to ear as admirers tossed bouquets at his feet with the band wailing “Way down Dixie!” Stunned, Bald poked his head out from the infield, his mouth gaped open. Neither he nor anyone else could believe what had just happened!

With five fast turns around the Garden track, Major Taylor had thrust himself into America’s sporting scene with tremendous force. In the press stands located in the center of the track, puzzled reporters leaped for their typewriters and began banging away. Cables and telegrams went out. A clump of managers, manufacturers, and promoters, including several from Europe, looked on quizzically from their booths—surely no one more so than William Brady.

Throughout the arena, fans who did not already have one shelled out fifteen cents for a race program and began thumbing through its pages. They mingled among themselves, asking the question: Who is this young, black man?

Munger’s slow cultivation of Taylor came to an abrupt halt one day after the half-mile race. Given Taylor’s proclivity for shorter distances and the fact that he had never raced more than seventy-five miles, perhaps he should have taken his $200 purse and gone home. But for whatever reason, perhaps for the extensive media exposure, Munger signed him on to the six-day race. The total purse, $7,500, had attracted twenty-eight top long-distance riders, including several Europeans who made the long journey overseas. The race always began with the era’s sports or entertainment stars firing off the pistol. In the early 1900s stars like Jack Dempsey, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, Bing Crosby, and Mary Pickford did the honors. In the 1890s, it was actresses Anna Held and Lillian Russell, and President McKinley, among others. When Taylor took to the line, he looked up and saw Eddie Bald, the sprint champion he had just beaten, chewing on a toothpick and glaring down at him, pistol in hand. Given the heated battles these two men would have in the future, some later wondered if Bald had considered pointing down instead of up.

With the crack of Bald’s pistol, around and around the twenty-eight riders went. Taylor stayed near the lead for the first few hours, but some of the more experienced riders were simply holding back in reserve. As the morning ticked on, the crowd began to thin. Some made the Garden their home for the entire week, cheering on the riders in the evening when the big crowds were there, then falling asleep in their seats in the early morning hours. After six hours of continuous riding, Taylor was holding up well, in second place, only a few miles behind Britain’s Eddie Hale.

As time passed, few thought Taylor would survive. Some fans even “laughed and chaffed” at him as he circled the track. One particularly belligerent man who, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, “looked as though he had been up all night,” had to be hauled outside and silenced by the police.

To keep crowd interest high, riders would occasionally compete in impromptu sprints. Fans repaid them by tossing money, called primes, at the winner. Over six days, a successful rider could add significantly to his overall earnings. No one seemed to understand the importance of entertaining the crowd better than Taylor, the only pure sprinter in the peloton. To please the speed-hungry crowd, he talked anyone who would listen into joining him in high-speed sprints. In so doing, fans and reporters began taking notice of him. “The star of the race thus far,” wrote one journalist, “is Major Taylor.”

But by day three, fatigue set in. Taylor drifted back to ninth place and the sprints became less frequent. Even his usually smooth form began sagging. To compensate, he got creative, fastening a pillow to his handlebars that he used to rest his chest on. Seeing this, the other riders joined in. Soon, nearly everyone circled the track with their chests buried into soft pillows, bringing chuckles from the stands.

By the end of day three, Taylor had logged nine hundred miles, but found himself one hundred miles behind front-runner Teddy Hale. While the more seasoned riders like Hale only slept for an hour or two a day, Taylor slept one hour for every eight hours of riding. At that rate, he stood little chance of an overall win. But he pushed on. Munger drifted in and out of the building, telling old racing stories and pitching the benefits of the Birdie Special to reporters. When he wasn’t there, he left matters up to trainer Rob Ellingham. Ellingham tended to Taylor, acting as chief motivator, nurse, psychologist, and all-important chef.

One day blended into the next. With his total miles surpassing the one thousand mark, Taylor struggled to take in as many calories as he was using. During his short breaks, he’d sit down to a whopping feast: two fried chickens, four and a half pounds of red meat, pots of beef tea, and bushels of vegetables, all topped off with endless jars of milk. Yet he still rode away craving more food. But he was by no means the only glutton in the peloton. The food intake during a typical six-day race was nothing short of astonishing: twelve sides of beef out of which were carved five hundred steaks, four hundred chickens, six hundred pounds of lamb chops, ten boiled hams, fifty pounds of bacon, three hundred dozen eggs, and fifty pounds of butter. In the cereal line, fifty pounds of rice, twenty pounds of oatmeal, six dozen boxes of cornflakes, and two hundred pounds of sugarcane. And to wash it all down, seven hundred quarts of milk, twenty-five pounds of tea, and to keep riders awake, seventy-five pounds of coffee.

These ample spreads did not always sit well. On one occasion following a particularly fervent gorging session, Taylor doubled over on his bike, his stomach so seized by cramps he could barely move. Suffering similar fates, others couldn’t take it any longer. Attrition began thinning the field. By the end of day four, the original band of twenty-seven had been whittled down to fifteen ragged riders.

At that point, Taylor and a Canadian named Pierce were in a close battle for sixth place. Exhausted, the two men made a few halfhearted attempts at sprints. Sprinting against distance riders, Taylor nearly always won—“It’s just too easy,” someone heard him say. On one occasion, their wooziness caused them to lock handlebars. Taylor, whose arms and legs were by then like jelly, wobbled uncontrollably until finally losing control of his wheel, his bike bounding along the track, body tumbling head over heels for twenty feet. Ellingham ran over, scraped him off the floor, and carried him over to the infield. There amid his repeated cries to quit the race, he wrapped him in liniments, gave him a few words of encouragement, and nudged him back on the track.

By the end of day five, Taylor had logged 1608 miles, 153 behind leader Teddy Hale, but just three miles behind Pierce who was in sixth place.

Surprisingly, given the era, the crowd was connecting with Taylor. Besides his lively sprints, he entertained them by whistling loudly or swooping high up the steep bank and chatting with them as he rode passed. His victory over Bald, his pleasant demeanor, and his capacity to endure combined to make him a crowd favorite. “The wonder of the race is Major Taylor,” announced the New York Times.

By day six, the word was already out. The crowds gathered en masse.

Even in the morning, despite ticket prices doubling to a dollar, six thousand fans had gathered. By six o’clock a massive evening crowd arrived. As they had the previous night, horse and man were backed up as far as the eye could see. Carriages of all types choked Madison Avenue. An extra force of police had difficulty keeping the avenue entrance clear. Ticket sellers were overwhelmed. The center of the track by seven o’clock was so thick with bodies, it was almost impossible to navigate. The rail by the track sagged under the weight of lines of shouting men and women twenty deep. Behind them, hundreds stood on tiptoe in a vain attempt to see the riders. By eight o’clock, every seat was sold, but because Brady and Kennedy, in those days before strict fire codes, were known to overbook, the crowd kept pouring in. Cots were set up along the upper railing for added seating. When attendants finally started turning away thousands of people at the ticket window, fights broke out and the police had to swoop in to simmer down the crowd.

On the inside, the ventilation system stood no chance against row after row of cigar-puffing fans, their smoke filling the auditorium and saturating the riders’ eyes and lungs. On the track, the lack of sleep was sucking whatever life remained out of the riders. They were becoming “peevish and fretful,” and the wear on their nerves and muscles was causing some riders to have terrible fits. Being the youngest and most inexperienced rider in the group, Taylor, in bike racing parlance, was among those cracking. During one break, he broke down in tears inside his tent, pleading with Ellingham to let him quit. “You fellows want me to stay here until my leg drops off so you can sell it to the doctor,” he grumbled incoherently.

On another occasion he dismounted his bike, leaned it against a fence, walked across the track, sat down on a low rail, yawned, and fell asleep. Seeing this, a few fans stood up and tried cheering him back to life. Soon hundreds, then thousands joined in. “I cannot go on with safety,” he mumbled near a reporter, “for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand.” His face, according to a few reports, became “thin and emaciated,” and “his naturally large lips became larger still with the condition of his face.” Spectators thought he was finished.

Taylor wasn’t the only rider losing his bearings. J. S. Rice, twenty-seven miles behind front-runner Hale, also became delirious, claiming that someone was throwing things at him. “He said he didn’t care about bricks and stones,” wrote one sportswriter, “but he objected to iron pillars being thrown at him.”

Into this scene waltzed Teddy Roosevelt’s men. As New York’s police commissioner, he was responsible for leading a team of police surgeons into the Garden to check the pulse, temperature, and overall well-being of the riders. Human rights groups had been complaining about the race being inhumane. Knowing they were fighting an uphill battle against the immense popularity of the race, they sent in police surgeons as a temporary compromise. Brady, with his rawhide-tough upbringing, sneered at them. “It was nonsense,” he later wrote, before lightheartedly telling the story of one six-dayer who was so damaged “he died, prematurely burned-out I suppose, just a month shy of ninety-one.”

Inhumane or not, he and Kennedy stopped the race at ten o’clock, two hours before the scheduled witching hour. When they did, only four men remained on the track: winner Hale, sixth-placed Pierce, a rider named Maddox, and a thin, black teenager who was still trying to eke out a few sprints for an appreciative crowd.

Outside, horse-drawn floral wagons clopped up. An army of men hauled in loads of floral tributes, which were tossed at the riders as they circled the track. Their tonsils all but imperiled, the crowd stayed until they left the building. Hale, mobbed by overzealous well-wishers, needed a police escort to make it to his hotel across the street.

In the infield, someone uncorked a bottle of champagne. It was flat. Everyone went home.

They had witnessed one of the most remarkable demonstrations of human endurance ever displayed. Hale had traveled 1,910 miles, besting the previous record by 310 miles. Taylor was eighth with 1,732 miles. He too had shattered all previous six-day records. Given his age, fans were impressed with his fortitude. In this erstwhile unknown underdog, some saw themselves: alive but suffering, suffering yet enduring.

But it was a curious way to start a sprinting career. Taylor had survived an event that, because of its excessively taxing nature, would soon be forced to change. Though it didn’t fit his racing style, the event fit the era. This was, after all, 1890s America. And it was, wrote author Ted Harper, “Six days of Madness.”

On the morning of December 14, 1896, Brady, Powers, and Kennedy woke up in awfully good moods: $37,000 in net gate receipts and a similar number in concessions surely had something to do with their collective jolly. Waiting for them in the corridors of Hotel Bartholdi stood scores of haggard-looking men. The six-dayers, accompanied by their trainers and handlers, were looking to collect their shares of the purse. At noon, they were escorted into a reception room where they saw Kennedy and Powers standing behind a podium. Splayed out on a table sat rolls and rolls of gold. From his rostrum Kennedy congratulated the riders for their incredible fortitude, then called them forward one by one. Powers distributed the proper allocation of shining, double eagles.

In no physical or mental condition for an extended celebration, most riders accepted their money, then bolted for the door. But reporters stood near the exits, drilling them with questions while surveying their overall condition, which they reported on in illustrative detail.

Because the race only came to New York once or twice a year, the newsroom boys were going to have fun with this one. Winner Hale, who had slept twice as many hours the previous night as he had during the entire six-day race, could barely speak, his vocal cords lost somewhere in the Garden’s haze. In true fighting-Irish style, he desperately tried pushing out a few words, but nothing came out, so he just bowed to the crowd and then walked away, red-faced. A few others ambled toward the table in a peculiar waddling gait, painful saddle sores rendering them nearly immobile. Even more riders were heavily bandaged or had surly scars on their faces and bodies, injuries obtained from countless high-speed spills. Rice, the second-place finisher, looked and felt empty. Though he had just consumed three whole chickens, several bowls of oatmeal, a loaf of bread, and a pot of beef tea, he couldn’t satisfy his hunger. “I still feel half-starved,” he said, somehow stringing together a few words. One top-ten rider who had to be carried across the street after the race asked Brady and company if they would please mail his winnings to him.

With trainer Ellingham watching, Taylor pressed forth on “swelled” knees, collecting $325 with little comment: $200 for his five-lap, half-mile win which took less than a minute, $125 for placing eighth in the six-day race that took 17,320 laps and 8640 minutes. Though this was equal to an entire year’s wages in a factory, he would never again have to work so hard for so little.

The jolliness radiating from the promotional trio didn’t end with presentations to the eleven scheduled prizewinners. Several riders who weren’t supposed to receive anything were given $75 in gold. They expressed their gratitude to the magnanimous promoters. They “worked hard and had earned it,” bellowed Kennedy in what must have been the understatement of the century, the smoke from his cigar further gagging the riders.

With that, the meeting adjourned, everyone scattering in different directions: the promoters to the bank, some riders straight to bed, and others—the more flush riders—to a Turkish bath or a local parlor for a deep massage, New York–style.

Taylor wasn’t able to leave so easily. There were promoters, manufacturers, photographers, and newsmen who wanted a piece of him. Though Hale had won the six-day proper and had received extensive coverage, sprinters were coveted by reporters because they competed more often. They were the men of the hour. “The highlight of the event was flashed in the bicycle world in the form of a veritable black diamond,” The Referee said of Taylor, “he was all at once enthralled as the popular hero.”

They had their subject. Their new hero, for the first time a black man, had come upon them. Major Taylor’s seminal hour had begun.

In their desire to know everything, they would ask the obvious, the curious, and the absurd. Just how exhausted was he during the six-day race? Exactly how much did he eat? Did he plan to enter another six-day race? When? Where? One man seemed hell-bent on knowing how many times he had gone to the men’s room during the race.

Taylor looked a little drawn in the face and sounded hoarse, remarked one writer, as he bounced from one reporter to the next.

“I feel very well, considering . . .” Taylor responded, perhaps holding himself in reserve for what would be years of reporters’ inquisitions.

“Where are you going now?” asked a Brooklyn Eagle reporter.

“I am headed at once to Munger’s home in Middletown to recover.”

As Brady had assumed, Taylor was going to be all right. Save for a little stiffness in the knees, commented a surprised New York Times reporter, “Major Taylor was none the worse for his ride . . .”

Perhaps trying to one-up his counterparts, another writer claimed Taylor had succumbed to exhaustion and died from the race. Back in Indiana, Taylor’s parents had to read that report in horror.

Within weeks of his first pro race, the news coverage already exceeded all previous years combined. That kind of coverage of a black man was unheard of. Some historians credit the great runner Jesse Owens with being the first black to be lionized by the American press, but four decades before, Taylor had somehow crashed through generations of racial barriers. “Men and women who normally did not care for blacks had cheered him on at the top of their lungs,” wrote one reporter. “His game riding won for him many friends among people ordinarily opposed to the colored race.”

In the coming months, the first of many nicknames would begin appearing. Sobriquets like Black Cyclone, Ebony Streak, Black Whirlwind, Ebony Flyer, Colored Cyclone, Worcester Whirlwind all found their way into the nation’s papers. One journalist dreamed up the ultimate nickname, The Black Zimmerman—a superb but lofty claim for a young man with so many obstacles ahead of him.

The extraordinary coverage of Taylor would mirror that of the sport. Every major paper, many small ones, and several cycling-specific publications covered the sport at great length. The New York Times, Boston Daily Globe, Brooklyn Eagle, and Washington Post, among others, covered it nearly every day, including during winter, in special sections called News of the Wheelmen. Bearings, a twice-a-month cycling periodical, often spanned several hundred pages. Some papers had separate writers covering the cycling beat, but because the languages and sometimes the tracks were so similar, others doubled as turf writers covering horse racing, a sport that was also popular at the time.

Following behind the reporters came mustachioed photographers standing behind their cumbersome tripods, fingers pressed firmly against the flash lever, smoke puffing all around. Out came the earliest photographs of a man who would soon become among the most photographed sports figure in the world. The first known photo, a very grainy production, exposed his smooth baby face and his still-thin and short frame, around five-foot five inches and 125 to 140 pounds. One of the photos taken early in 1897 showing Taylor alongside several white riders was striking more for what it lacked than what it contained. In it were no signs of a meek black man cowering to the superiority of his white masters. Taylor blended in seamlessly as he had with Daniel Southard, his white boyhood playmate. Apparently it was all perfectly normal to him—he and his friends preparing to go out for another spin, neither white nor black, just young men sharing the same goals, the same dreams, all of them created equal. When blacks were expected to doff their caps and step aside for superior white men, Taylor, in his photos and his words, appeared neither conceited nor humbled, only modest and quietly self-assured.

While writers typed and photographers clicked, manufacturers scratched their heads: Would a black man using their bicycles be good for business, or turn potential customers away? Believing they knew the answer, many manufacturers refused to come within a stone’s throw of a black athlete. Others agonized over the issue. This was no small matter for athlete or manufacturer. Bike makers and tire, chain, and component companies hadn’t batted an eye in their decision to pay Teddy Hale more than $4,000 for using their products during his six-day victory. But he, of course, wasn’t black. It’s likely no black athlete had ever been paid to endorse a product.

That is, perhaps, until Major Taylor entered Madison Square Garden. Taylor never revealed the financial arrangement between himself and Munger. Perhaps Munger paid Taylor’s expenses in exchange for using the Birdie Special and the free publicity that Munger received from it. This seems likely considering Munger’s dwindling reserves following Colonel Pope’s decision to cut prices and consolidate the industry. For half the race, Taylor rode a Birdie Special. But for the second half of the race, he had switched over to a Stearns bicycle. Though he never revealed his agreement with Stearns, it is unlikely that he would have switched away from Munger without monetary compensation, making the six-day race possibly the first instance of a black professional athlete being paid to endorse a product.

Finally, race promoters and track owners would face similar questions. Like manufacturers, some promoters wanted nothing to do with black athletes; after all, it hadn’t worked in baseball and was beginning to unwind in horse racing. But to any promoters who had seen or read about the six-day race, the racial question should have already been answered. Fans by the tens of thousands showed up to watch an event many writers claimed was being starred by a black man. But that event was held in New York. How would he be received in less friendly cities like those in the West or South?

For the time being at least, the desire for profit overcame possible prejudice. Taylor received an invitation to compete in the upcoming six-day race in Chicago. Since there were already rumblings of Brady becoming Taylor’s manager, the offer likely came from Brady’s group who controlled the Chicago Coliseum. But if Brady had already pondered being Taylor’s manager, it would have to wait. Shortly after the six-day race, he lost his first wife unexpectedly to Bright’s disease. Brady was grief-stricken. It would be months before he and Taylor would cross paths.

Meanwhile, Taylor analyzed the Chicago offer. He mulled over it, then probably threw it in the garbage along with the sensationalized article claiming he had died of exhaustion at the six-day race. His stunning victory over Bald in the half-mile handicap race had defined his future. His strong suit was short-distance races.

There would be no return to the six-day grind.

With all the attention surrounding him, the world seemed to be spinning under Taylor’s powerful legs, slowly fixing the eyes and ears of the nation’s sporting public on him. He would handle this newfound celebrity with an unusual amount of poise for someone his age, answering inquiries in a respectful, albeit laconic fashion. “He is fairly modest,” commented one writer, “rather conservative, and not overly proud nor stuck up.”

But in a world of finite resources, any attention given to one athlete had to mean taking away from others. For many years, the racing world had its heroes—dominant white men who had enjoyed considerable attention and wealth. These men had worked their way up the ladder slowly, earning their way to the top. Any novice trying to steal their spotlight was bound to meet with stiff resistance, especially a “lucky little black lad,” as some claimed Taylor was after Bald purportedly slipped on resin during their half-mile race.

The six-day race had kicked off Taylor’s professional career, but that was a sideshow to the main event. The outdoor racing season had arrived; the train stood waiting.