Chapter 11

THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

For perhaps the first time in his life, William Brady, an exceedingly public man, did something important without much fanfare. After returning from a whirlwind tour of racetracks up and down the West Coast and joined by only a handful of his closest friends, he quietly slipped into New York’s St. Thomas Catholic Church and married Grace George, the actress-comedian he had courted at the six-day bike race.

Despite minor squabbling during the season—the usual manager-athlete wrangling over who pays what expenses—Brady’s contributions to Taylor’s career had proved momentous. He sponsored and fought for his inclusion in races. “A real man,” he often said, “should be known as a fighting man.” By sticking up for him at every opportunity and providing the best trainers, chefs, and pacemen, he had helped propel Taylor to worldwide fame. But more than anything, Brady believed in him when Taylor’s world seemed to cave in around him. Despite their polar opposite personalities and lifestyles, Taylor, reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “had a soft spot for Brady, the man with many irons in the fire.” During the summer of 1899, while the racing lords fought for overall control of the sport, the two men would part ways. Later, when the stakes were even higher, their paths would cross again.

That following winter Taylor donned his finest business suits and began a whirlwind tour of the nation’s bicycle trade shows. Leveraging his stack of world records, he signed a lucrative contract with the Sager Company, which called for him to embark on a nationwide marketing blitz of its chainless gear set. Ads that claimed Major Taylor, the Great Colored Rider, Rides a Chainless ran nationwide. Excluding his undisclosed arrangement with Stearns Bicycles during the second half of the six-day race, the contract with Sager was almost certainly the first time a black man sponsored an athletic product.

In New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and various other cities, hard-core racing fans and casual riders alike flocked to browse the latest gear and meet the world’s fastest man. Being an ideal role model for his race, blacks in attendance looked up to Taylor. “Every colored man and woman is proud of Major Taylor, the champion bicyclist,” remarked one journalist.

In rare moments of racial harmony, whites who may have otherwise expected a black man to fetch their luggage or step to the side hovered around his booth to shake his hand and shoot the breeze. Taylor—whose booth was usually the first one visitors saw as they entered the various trade shows—handed out pamphlets and willingly entertained audiences in his usual unassuming manner.

Standing alongside the bike on which he had set the one-mile world record, he described the speed qualities of his Sager-equipped machine and spun tales of his racing exploits, just as Zimmerman had done for him years before. “He demonstrated he can talk wheel as well as he rides one,” wrote one Philly paper. He was the center of attention everywhere he went and crowds responded; the Taylor-sponsored Sager-equipped bicycles were among the best sellers, putting to rest the much-questioned viability of using a black man to sell athletic products. “You cannot imagine,” Harry Sager would say of his decision to sign Taylor, “how much good it has done me.” With the winning combination of talent, dogged determination, and understatement, Taylor had knocked down previously impenetrable fortresses, blazing a trail for others to follow. While in Chicago, Taylor stumbled upon his old friend and mentor Birdie Munger. By 1899, the bicycle shows had taken on a new look. Many of the same men who made bicycles showed up at the shows with strange-looking contraptions called horseless carriages, or automobiles. Even before his Worcester Bicycle Manufacturing Company fell to the industry’s consolidation wave, Munger had been working on a new type of automobile wheel and tire. His presence at the Chicago show suggested he was there pitching his new wheel to a rapidly changing world.

For Taylor, now without a manager, Munger’s presence both calmed and reassured him. The two men lingered into the small hours of the night reminiscing about their Indiana days. Before turning in for the night, Munger agreed to assist Taylor with some of his affairs that summer. With his instinctive understanding of the sport, he cobbled together an ambitious plan for the 1899 racing season. They both agreed it was time to go all out, to shoot for the World Championships in Montreal. But they had their differences on strategy. Knowing Taylor’s nerve-racking tendency to hover back of the field and then thread his way along the pole down the stretch, sometimes agitating his rivals, Munger strongly suggested that he tone down his aggressive racing style. But Taylor thrived on a certain amount of danger. For better or worse, that would be one command Taylor never obeyed.

With the security of his Sager contract and peace of mind knowing Munger would lend his support whenever he could that year, Taylor was so motivated he had trouble containing his excitement. “I do not get half enough sleep,” he would tell the Boston Globe, “for I think all the time about . . . those Montreal races.”

After completing his road show, Taylor swapped his business suits for his racing togs. In preparation for the 1899 racing season, Munger and a noted trainer named Bert Hazard drew up a brutal training regime involving weight lifting, running, boxing, and, when weather permitted, cycling.

Across town, the rebel riders in the outlaw organization kept a keen eye on the daily happenings within the LAW. From the moment Taylor appeared on the nation’s tracks that summer, word spread within racing circles that his body was finely tuned and his mind bent on world domination. His five-foot-seven-inch frame that had been a jockey-like 118 pounds in 1895 was now filled out to 160 pounds of rock-hard thighs, striated calves and arms, washboard abdominals, and well-defined, v-shaped back muscles. His new look added another imposing element for his competitors to ponder. Reporters and fans praised his appearance and looked forward to seeing him race. The rebels, having worked hard to get rid of him, wanted nothing to do with him.

In a preemptive strike designed to ease their concerns over a possible return of their black nemesis, riders in the competing league inserted a new rule into their union bylaws. They minced no words: Blacks were barred. But before the ink had time to dry, the press pounced, claiming cowardice and prejudice. Keenly aware of the obvious target of the new rule, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter called the directive “the most unsportsmanlike move on record.”

The split-up caused some interesting banter. With Gardiner, Cooper, Kiser, MacFarland, and Bald in the competing league and Taylor, McDuffee, McCarthy, and Tom, Frank, and Nat Butler leading the LAW, fans and sportswriters argued over which league was superior. The NCA clearly boasted more riders and had two previous champions in Bald and Cooper, but the LAW probably had the best riders for each of the three main disciplines—short, mid, and long distance. There was even talk of a world series of sorts at year’s end to settle the matter.

One of the welcome effects of the separation was that the competitive forces caused an increase in the daily purse at some races. To entice riders to switch allegiances, the LAW offered purses as high as $1,000. Elite riders, Taylor included, could also command as much as 50 percent of the gate receipts at certain events, an amount that could rival the purse.

Taylor’s painstaking attention to conditioning paid dividends immediately. After signing a lucrative contract with Stearns Bicycles in Syracuse with Munger’s aid, he tore through the early season, winning a high percentage of races and lining his pockets in town after town: $875 at Charles River Track on Memorial Day, $1,000 a few weeks later in Boston and Westborough, hundreds in St. Louis in early July. But with success came geographic realignment. Race handicappers slid him back to the scratch position. He would never again be among the limitmen.

He continued to draw crowds: ten thousand in Boston on May 27, fifteen thousand on June 18. Even in the sleepy town of Janesville, Wisconsin, teams of horses lined both sides of the streets for half a mile on opening day. But if anyone believed Taylor would escape prejudice with some of his rivals gone to another league, they were mistaken. While not as frequent as in previous seasons, the elbowing, pocketing, and intimidation continued. It didn’t always involve outright physical contact. Sometimes suggestive “stare downs” were enough to sap his morale. While Bald, MacFarland, and Gardiner, who reportedly received aid from other riders when they rode against him, could no longer incite trouble, others stood ready to step in their shoes. The three famous Butler brothers were masters at teamwork and used it against Taylor at every opportunity. And he had Barney Oldfield to contend with, a future winner of the Indianapolis 500. Oldfield would become known for his desire to “restore the supremacy of the white race.”

Taylor struggled to find shelter from the racial storm even in, of all places, the bucolic surroundings of Ottumwa, Iowa. A major railroad hub in the 1890s, Ottumwa was no place to hold a convention of Sunday school superintendents. Known as the headquarters of sin between Chicago and Denver, this raucous Wild West–like town had many times the number of gambling dens and saloons—called “blind tigers”—as it did churches. Once liquored up at their favorite watering hole, visitors sought inspiration at myriad houses of prostitution stretching from one end of town to the other. Given all the choices, these adventurers had difficulty making up their minds. Eventually middle-class visitors slipped into 303, a deceptive upstairs establishment on the northwest corner of town. The flusher ones and those needing discretion snuck in the back door of Auroras, a gothic red brick building on East Main Street. Those who didn’t care one way or the other drifted into “The Road to Hell” on South Market Street, otherwise known as “Battle Row.” Here, notorious owner Stormy Jordan, who famously spilled whiskey on his sidewalk to attract patrons, stood under his Stetson ready and willing to take anyone’s money. Whenever someone tried reforming the bustling town—say an evangelist or the temperance folks—the “house of sin” owners simply grabbed their hammers and nails, charged down to the houses of worship, and pounded in new pews, effectively silencing their critics for a few more years.

The Klu Klux Klan lingered there as well. For a teetotaling, God-fearing black man, it could not have been a desired destination.

But to many people’s dismay, Major Taylor happened through that not-so-sleepy town on July 26, 1899, snuffing out all hope his rivals had of running away with the field.

Once there, he cleaned house in two races, took second in another, and set a track speed record. Soon afterward, a fuming local writer let Taylor have it. “Taylor is a queer specimen. He is supremely arrogant and egotistical and does not readily make friends. He imagines he is the whole performance.” The unnamed writer’s diatribe went on to mention how Taylor was “marble hearted,” how the crowd “did not like him,” and how he “arrogantly” swung around his rivals to win.

It turns out the editor was also co-owner of the Ottumwa Track. He was incensed that Taylor hadn’t told him of his entry sooner; having Taylor’s name on the race card well enough in advance would have allowed them time to paper the town with advertisements. His star power, combined with a heavy marketing blitz, could mean the difference between crowds of a few thousand to as many as ten to twenty-five thousand.

Taylor’s out-of-nowhere appearance in Ottumwa apparently caught everyone by surprise, including himself; he was supposed to be in Chicago trying to lower the world speed records with Munger, only to have the attempts postponed right before the Ottumwa meets. Like Savannah, Georgia, Taylor found the town and his rivals cold and inhospitable—“something on the order of that lawn-party and the skunk business,” he remembered with a quiver. But after his unwelcome victories, he felt a little better. “I guess I spoiled their little party,” he said, partially vindicated.

As the day rolled on, the hospitality didn’t improve. When dusk fell over the Midwestern settlement, titillating the nightlife to come out of hiding, Taylor clopped off to the closest inn to eat and bed down for the evening. But like many times before, he was turned away by the proprietor because of his color. He kept searching—reportedly causing a rouse among innkeepers—but to no avail.

His was a bittersweet existence, one minute enjoying adulation from thousands of cheering fans, the next, on the streets, hungry, disrespected, and alone. In the darkness, the world’s fastest man lay under the moonlit sky tired and hungry, eagerly awaiting the next train headed for safer ground. With a sinking feeling, he soon parted Ottumwa, never to return, even to collect his prize money. For that seedy job, he sent Frank Gateley, a friend and part-time rider who occasionally traveled with him. Upon returning home, Taylor hustled to the bank, deposited his $350 winnings, then surely washed his hands.

From “Little Chicago,” as Ottumwa was called, Taylor’s train clattered into the real Chicago for his first race in the Windy City since the Black National Championship in 1895. Chicago was a cycling hotbed, and Taylor wanted to show the fervent local racing fans how far he had advanced in the intervening years. Before a raucous crowd in the feature event, the one-mile open, Taylor crossed the line seemingly well ahead of the rest of the field. But the presiding steward called it a dead heat between him and a local rider named Jimmie Bowler, a man who would later play a role of paramount importance in Taylor’s life.

Sportswriters were stunned by the ruling. Convinced of his victory and not too thrilled with the idea of sharing the winning purse, Taylor challenged Bowler to a rematch—winner takes all. But Bowler, overjoyed for having stayed anywhere near the Black Whirlwind, refused, irritating the crowd. For Taylor, it was just another day. “I have never received the benefit of a close decision,” he vented as his train rumbled east.

For Major Taylor, every meal, training session, and waking moment was geared toward his number one goal: winning the World Championships. The title of world champion then, as today, wasn’t about money. It was about prestige, notoriety, and national pride. To Taylor it meant even more: no native-born African American had ever won a world championship in any sport. More than anything, he wanted to prove to other blacks that, with hard work and an unyielding will to win, they could achieve anything they set their minds to.

July faded and D-day, August 10–12, drew closer. The papers were full of speculation about whether the outlaw riders from the NCA would be allowed to compete in the World Championships. To plead for their inclusion, NCA president A. G. Batchelder traveled tirelessly to and from New York and Montreal. Without the rebel riders, especially three-time champion Eddie Bald, Batchelder warned that the event would lack credibility. And the fans, he said, would shy away. Not everyone agreed. “Most of the outlaw men are has-beens,” wrote the Montreal Daily Star, “and there isn’t a one of them that Major Taylor could not give five seconds to in a mile and best him out.”

While cycling’s internal wars carried on in the press, many wondered out loud about the status of Eddie Bald, the NCA’s star rider. For whatever reason, since the sport had split into two separate leagues, Bald’s lightning sprint lacked the zeal that had earned him the nickname Cannon Ball. Known as a lover of the “fleshpots,” perhaps he simply wanted to enjoy more playtime, drifting into that familiar slipstream inhabited by other superstar athletes. Several reports had him haunting the prestigious Eastern horse tracks, hobnobbing with famous jockey Tod Sloan, another man avowedly bent on carnal pleasures. Maybe, as others speculated, it was simply being careful what to wish for as you might just get it. After rejecting Taylor for years, he had partially succeeded in ridding him from direct competition. But with Taylor now in another league, perhaps the absence of those intense, black-versus-white, nose-to-nose finishes had sapped excitement from his game. Some believed that Bald was well aware of Taylor’s extraordinary condition that season and simply wanted nothing to do with facing him on the sport’s largest stage.

In either case, Bald was never the same dominating rider after Taylor’s departure. Days before the World Championships, without even telling his trainer Doc Morrow, the Cannon Ball, one of America’s greatest cyclists ever, was nowhere to be found.

In preparation for the event scheduled for August 10–12 at Queens Park Track, Montreal went into overdrive. In its mission to create North America’s most modern track and host one of the greatest bike races ever held, an army of workers had been doing yeomen’s work for seven months. They added concession stands, seats, press boxes, electric lights, and bookmaking facilities. Ashinger Company, a noted track builder, installed a new wood track. In what may have been a first at a Canadian sporting event, Bell Telephone Company erected a large tent abutting the track and stocked it with rotary phones, a novel idea for those able to scrape together four cents for an outgoing call.

Keeping a close eye on the progress, Montreal’s mayor, himself an ardent racing fan, deemed opening day a civic holiday and called for merchants to shutter their doors. Lord Minto, the governor-general of Canada, gave patronage to the race and stressed the enormous social weight of the affair. Race headquarters, the Windsor Hotel, as well as every other hotel in town, sold out in advance. Private families stood poised to help with any overflow. Gold and silversmiths had already cast shiny medals and trophies. Chartered trains were en route from every direction. Down at the Waltham, Massachusetts, rail station, more than one hundred riders from the NCA were packed and ready to board a special train. The city was abuzz in race talk.

Meanwhile, skeptical reporters crawled around race headquarters waiting for news on the rebel NCA riders. Would they even be allowed to race? If not, what would become of the event?

Just when everything seemed in perfect order, Britain’s Lord Henry Sturmey, the reigning king of the International Cycling Union (now the UCI), a giant of a man in stature and disposition, pounded his gavel. The outlaw riders from the NCA, he decreed at the eleventh hour, were not welcome in Montreal. With that, the air went out of the organizers’ sails. Many thought the event was destined to flop. Back in Waltham the rebel riders received the unfortunate telegram, unpacked their bags, and hollered out every expletive they knew.

Having invested significant time and money, track owners, racing officials, and civic leaders gathered for a solemn sweating session behind closed doors inside the Windsor Hotel. As they paced inside room 21 slurping coffee and trying to figure out how to exit the scene gracefully, a lone man named H. B. Donnelly, secretary of the Canadian Wheelmen, strutted outside on the newly surfaced track. “Give us Major Taylor,” he told a reporter, his voice jaunty and self-assured, “and we can run the meet without any other American professionals. I consider him the best attraction we can secure, and with him as an American representative, I do not fear.”

No one else knew what to think.

Amid all the doubt of that important moment, one thing now seemed clear: a great deal rested on the drawing power of a certain twenty-year-old black man perusing his Bible on a slow train rattling their way.

Taylor’s train pulled into Montreal three days before festivities opened. His first time on foreign soil, he had no idea how he would be received. It did not take long to find out. The minute the train doors swung open and he stepped onto Montreal’s sun-baked soil, he found himself wandering into fans and reporters. “He is a very pleasing looking boy, especially when he smiles,” boasted one of those reporters, “with looks as soft and as smooth as velvet.” They tailed him to the track, where more than ever before, Taylor would learn the art of balancing his time between training and maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the press.

At Queens Park large white tents lined the perimeter of the track. Inside them stood over one hundred of the best riders from all over the world. Many had been congregating there for weeks. In the days before Taylor’s arrival, hundreds of fans gathered to watch the riders glide through their training sessions. When Taylor arrived on the spanking new track for his workouts, fans began migrating en masse, the number jumping to around five thousand. They hung over the rails, showering him with applause as he hunkered over his bike and ripped across the track.

Opening day came and nervous racing officials braced themselves. Soon people rolled in from all directions. Swarms of business leaders, obeying the mayor’s declaration of a civic holiday, shuttered their doors and scampered to the track. Scores of special bicycle excursion trains from the United States and Canada rolled in. Ships weighed down with racegoers steamed in from Quebec and Toronto.

The race organizers, peering on as fans continued to stream in, took a deep breath. Over the next few days, their early apprehension over the enthusiasm and number of fans vanished. All told, at a championship meet without any of the elite riders from the NCA, Taylor’s star power helped pull in over forty-five thousand fans*, the largest paying crowds in Montreal sports history to date, at times overwhelming track personnel. There was simply no greater draw in all of sports.

Outside the track the lines of people trying to buy tickets—and those who already had tickets and were just trying to get inside—were backed up as far as the eye could see. More than five thousand angry fans, many of whom had traveled long distances, were eventually turned away.

On the inside, every seat was booked. Every inch of aisle space was clogged with bodies. Racing officials escorted the overflow underneath the stands, their chins level with the surface of the track, heads peeking out through the fence slats, making them look as one newsman wrote, “like a row of prisoners before the bar of the Recorders Court.” One solemn figure sidled up on top of the roof overhanging the grandstand and dangled over the edge, scaring the wits out of everyone below. Bank accounts got slimmer as thousands were wagered on the race at special “deal tables,” apparently legal in Canada.

Reporters from all over the world lingered in the press section conducting interviews and hammering out every detail of race preparations. There were so many scribes from so many countries an “official press organizer” from Mexico was employed to organize the chaos.

When Taylor emerged onto the track for the opening event, the half-mile race, the band played the American national anthem, sending an emotional wave of patriotism through him. What began as a field of more than one hundred riders had, through a series of preliminary heats, been whittled down to six of the world’s best.

At the starting line, Taylor stretched his leg over his bike frame, then cinched his feet into his toe straps. He looked down the row of elite international riders and focused in on his greatest rivals, Nat Butler and Charles McCarthy. His main goal was winning the one-mile race, but if given a clean break for the finish line, Taylor believed he stood a good chance of wearing a half-mile World Championship medal as well. A loud crackle sounded, sending the peloton into a wild burst of speed. The grimacing cyclists bore down on their machines jockeying for position while the crowd rose and let out a deafening roar. Nat Butler immediately muscled Taylor to the outside, leaving a wide berth for McCarthy to blaze through. Right on cue, McCarthy came from the back to take over the lead, Taylor second with Nat Butler close behind. As they had done many times in the past, the two men had successfully wedged Taylor into a pocket. Having been pocketed throughout his career, Taylor knew exactly what to do. He remained calm and eased up a tick on his pedals. This surprised both McCarthy and Butler, causing them to ease up and look back at him. Just as they craned their necks backward, Taylor pounced. Before the riders had a chance to react, Taylor had found a minute hole and shot through it, taking the lead. McCarthy scowled, then dropped his head lower onto his machine. He stomped down on his pedals, retaking the lead. A seesaw battle followed.

Motivated by the animated crowd, Taylor gracefully yet mercilessly powered his machine past McCarthy. Racing pell-mell behind, the rest of the field dropped into the distance, becoming mere spectators. Looking forward down the stretch, Taylor saw nothing between him and the finish line. A thought surely kicked around in his mind: Within seconds I may become the half-mile World Champion.

But in his peripheral view, he saw a tall form gunning alongside him. He shifted in his saddle and glanced to his side; it was McCarthy rapidly gaining ground on him. He hadn’t shaken him. Releasing the nervous force that had been coiled up in him all season, Taylor locked his eyes on the tape and powered forward with a potent push. McCarthy was right there. The two men felt the therapeutic rush of crushing speed as they exchanged leads, then rolled over the line together.

Convinced of Taylor’s victory, the vast throng leaped and whooped, the grandstand trembling beneath them. Taylor, who was also certain that he had won, circled the track basking in the glory of the moment. Taylor wheeled over to the winner’s circle and dismounted his bike. He looked toward the stewards’ stand where a team of men huddled together. There was an awful delay.

In 1898, one year before the Montreal World Championship, W. C. Petrie, an enterprising racing fan from St. Louis, invented and patented a device that snapped photos of horses—next to a clock—as they left the gate and as they crossed the finish line. For whatever reason, this ingenious idea of a “photo finish,” designed to aid race judges, would not see widespread use in horse or bike racing for many years.

Meanwhile, all eyes glared out on Montreal’s Queens Park Track. A lone judge sauntered over to the tote board to enter the winner.

The winner of the half-mile World Championship was American Charles McCarthy.

Taylor’s charcoal face turned pale.

Like air being released from a tire, a sibilant whir greeted the stewards’ decision. A man near the finish line hollered, “Taylor! Taylor! Give the colored man a chance.” A woman next to him joined in, followed by a third. Soon the entire grandstand, convinced of Taylor’s victory, screamed his name. Even the mayor and the governor-general, who sat in president boxes straight out from the finish line, protested. Five minutes of relentless hissing and screaming passed. The racing officials, aging before everyone’s eyes, huddled together again. The crowd suddenly grew unruly, lobbing names and hurling epithets at the judges.

Someone suggested that all those who were against the decision should stand up. With that, every single man, woman, and child, black and white, rose in unison. After thirty minutes of continued howling from the grandstand, William Inglis, the presiding judge, finally broke from their meeting and walked indifferently toward the race announcer. Behind a long black megaphone, the announcer, his voice catching in his throat, barked out the final ruling. The original verdict stood. McCarthy was the half-mile world champion.

What happened next was nothing short of sheer mayhem. Spilling down from the grandstand came popcorn, soda cans and bottles, race programs, cigars—anything that wasn’t nailed down was sent aloft. The track resembled the center of a cyclone with everything swirling and raging and roaring while a mass of humanity shrugged and shrieked and anathematized. Officials struggled to get a grip on the irate crowd. Large teams of Mounted Canadian Police galloped onto the scene, trying to quell the boisterous mob. A gaggle of secret servicemen enveloped the mayor, governor-general, and a host of other suited luminaries. The crowd raged on. Deeply concerned about the raucous scene unfolding before him, Taylor rolled over to the stewards’ stand, expressed his disbelief, then asked if that was their honest decision. After they said yes—that their decision was indeed final—Taylor walked over to the press stand and spoke. “Well, all right,” he said calmly, his arms folded, “if that is your verdict, gentlemen, I shall have to abide by it.” With that, the crowd simmered. Taylor pulled himself together and limped back to his dressing room. In the press section, reporters were unanimous in their incredulity. “There was only one mistake and it is extremely difficult to account for,” cried the Montreal Gazette, “that was why Major Taylor was deprived of a race that he won.”

Back in the States, the question on the lips of racing fans appeared in glowing prose on the front of a major paper’s sports page: WILL MAJOR TAYLOR BE A WORLD’S CHAMPION? This question would be answered the next day.

A pea-soup fog greeted the dawn of the following day. In the afternoon, it lifted, replaced with blue skies and an August sun that bathed the fans in the summer heat. From an international field of thousands of pro cyclists, only twenty-one qualified for the main event: the one-mile World Championship race. Through a series of preliminary heats, this original band of twenty-one elite riders had been further culled down to five of the world’s best athletes. After enduring fierce battles in the prelims, Taylor was one of those few men left standing for the finals.

In what was the most important race of his life, Taylor learned that he had more than race judges to fret over. The duo of Nat and Tom Butler, two brothers who had trained themselves nearly into the ground for this one race, lined up next to each other on the inside pole. “My biggest concern,” Taylor said, “was being trapped in one of their pockets.” Next to the Butlers stood the tree-trunk thighs of Angus McLeod, the brawny champion of Canada. Rounding off the grupetto, swathed in the red, white, and blue uniform of France, stood the imposing figure of the French National Champ, Courbe d’Outrelon.

The first big outburst from the fans, many of whom stood in aisles or the infield, could be heard when Taylor emerged from his locker room and circled the track during his warm-up laps. At five o’clock, Taylor rolled over to the starting line.

A hush settled over Queens Park.

The eerie silence was interrupted by the loud crack from the starter’s gun, followed by the resounding chants of thousands of racing fans. The pace of the first half mile was nervous and tentative, each rider gauging the other’s strength while jockeying for position. At the halfway marker, the pace quickened. The famous Butler brothers got down to business. Like eagles in flight, they swerved out in unison, tag-teaming Taylor to the outside and taking the lead. Staying composed, Taylor then gunned forward, passing Tom Butler before settling in behind brother Nat. Taylor powered toward the remaining brother, but Nat Butler, in the best form of his life, refused to let him pass.

Once again, Taylor found himself in the middle of one of the most formidable combinations in the world. Just as he began his move to overtake Nat Butler, he saw a figure coming into his side view. It was Tom Butler out of his saddle, weight forward, stomping on his pedals in a mad dash. His explosive burst propelled him past Taylor, putting him right where he wanted to be—alongside his brother Nat.

To everyone’s surprise, Angus McLeod, the large Canadian who had sympathizers from the hometown crowd, put on an unexpected display of power, gliding his way alongside the Butlers. They leaned toward him, trying to drive him to the outside. As the field arced around the first turn of the second lap, Taylor stretched out in the back of the pack, drafting, plotting, watching the race unfold in front of him. A fine position.

On the backstretch of the second lap, the race tightened. Like a string of railcars trailing a locomotive, the quintet of riders blazed down the backstretch, one after the other. Rounding the far turn, the neat order of the formation disintegrated.

Grown men began to crack. The first to unhitch from the speeding train was Angus McLeod, the big Canadian. Shortly afterward, having spent himself too early trying to keep up with his brother, Nat Butler faded.

Taylor was in the third slot as the field veered around the far turn of the last lap. As he was being sucked along by the gathering momentum of the pack, many in the crowd wondered when or even if he was going to make a move. Taylor was biding his time, waiting for a clear opening in front of him. Another sixteenth of a mile ticked by and the positions had not changed.

Some observers believed Taylor had plenty left. But Taylor could not have been so sure. He was putting out nearly everything he had, yet he was still trailing Tom Butler and Frenchmen d’Outrelon.

From his position to their rear, Taylor saw a slender lane through the middle of the two men open. He had to act. Sinking in his saddle and bent over his bike as he streaked down the homestretch, Taylor was ripe for the kill. He pointed his front wheel at the gap, then punched his way toward the slender hole that had opened in the center of the track. Before long, he found himself splitting Butler and d’ Outrelon in two. Within 150 yards of the finish, the three riders pedaled into a virtual dead heat.

As the field drew to within a football field of the line, the pace went from relentless to suicidal.

Within yards of the finish line, the field of thousands of professional cyclists from around the world had been whittled down to just three men, Tom Butler, Frenchmen d’Outrelon, and Major Taylor. They forged onward, leaving everything they had on the track. They heard the distinct sound of chains gnashing, the whirling of wheels, and the hum of rolling tires. They felt the release of endorphins, and the ensuing rush of euphoria that only a cyclist blazing forty miles per hour under his own power feels. Out in front, nothing but a white line, open air, and a split second in time separated them from the title of the fastest bicyclist in the world. Butler lunged, d’Outrelon stretched, Taylor surged. There was no elbowing, pocketing, or intimidation—just three men at their limit, crossing the line within feet of one another.

The crowd rose to their feet screaming. According to virtually everyone present, Major Taylor had just become the first native African American world champion.*

The stewards grouped again. Several minutes ticked by without a verdict being announced. The crowd began to stir. Not again. The Montreal Star weighed in: “The crowd, fearing that their dark-skinned boy was going to get the worst of it again, began to be a little demonstrative.” Canada had never seen such affection given to an athlete. “The hold which Taylor has taken upon the sympathies of the people in the grandstand,” one reporter wrote, “is something wonderful.”

William Inglis, the same presiding steward who had pronounced Taylor’s defeat in the half-mile race, trotted over to the bulletin board with his verdict. Twenty-year-old Marshall W. “Major” Taylor had rolled across the line as champion of the world!

The crowd was hysterical. All around the grandstand swirled a bewildering maze of men and women dancing in the aisles. From the infield came the strain of “The Star-Spangled Banner” scarcely audible above the chatter of thousands. On the track, with an American flag wrapped around his waist and a huge bouquet of roses in his arms, Taylor circled to thunderous applause. Even with all the racism he had endured over the years, even though next to the article in a Montreal paper praising him for his World Championship title was another about a lynching back home, Taylor’s love for his country rang true. “My national anthem took on a new meaning for me from that moment,” he beamed. “I never felt more proud to be an American.”

But he was disheartened about one thing. “During that joyous demonstration, there was but one regret,” wrote Taylor, “which was that Birdie Munger could not be present to witness his remarkable prophecy, that I would become the fastest bicycle rider in the world.” Taylor would go on to win the two-mile championship race as well, cementing his position as world champion.

For a few fleeting moments during that summer of 1899, the wheel of Major Taylor’s life had spun to unprecedented heights. On the top step of the awards podium, flanked by Butler and d’Outrelon, he stood poised in the regal stance of a world champion—head high, eyes scanning the adoring crowd, gold medal glistening in the sun. All things shining!

But three thousand miles across the vast Atlantic, a Frenchmen—said to be the most superior cyclist of all—read of Taylor’s win and smirked: “The Major hasn’t found his master on the other side of the water,” the Great Edmond Jacquelin, who was unable to make it to Montreal, would say to reporters. “So hear this, that is going to change!” With those fighting words, the first seed of one of the greatest sports showdowns in history was sowed.

The summer of 1899 yielded to fall. Taylor had somehow breezed through the rest of the season, winning an astonishing twenty-two out of twenty-nine races and walking away with the League of American Wheelmen Championship title. He was presented with a handsome gold medal struck from special dies made for the league. The Butler brothers received the silver and bronze. Across town, Tom Cooper outdueled Eddie Bald to win the American Championship in the rival NCA organization. Talk of pitting the two American titans against each other in a cycling world series was bandied about by the press. But because neither organization seemed willing to recognize the other’s existence, the grand match-race idea withered and died. As a result, the reverence toward Taylor’s accomplishments was partially muted. He became agitated that some people, mostly NCA riders, seemed reluctant to give credence to his title of American or world champion. Without the possibility of a grand showdown with Cooper, Taylor’s restlessness over the lack of clarity on the subject of American cycling supremacy mushroomed.

While biding time with family and pitching the Sager-equipped Orient bicycle at H. T. Hearsey’s bike shop in Indianapolis, Taylor was interrupted by a rap on the front door. A courier handed him an urgent telegraph from Harry Sager, his bike-parts sponsor. Taylor ripped it open. He paced around as he read. It was not good news. His reign as the fastest man in the world had come to an abrupt halt. The rawhide-tough Bostonian Eddie McDuffee, who was also having a remarkable season, had dropped the one-mile world speed record all the way down to a shocking 1:21.

Taylor had read enough. Rather than viewing the news as a negative, he looked at it as a challenge—and the ideal way to silence remaining critics. After congratulating McDuffee, Taylor contacted Sager, Munger, and trainer Hazard, and asked them to pack their bags.

In November 1899, Team Taylor rolled west out of Union Station for Chicago’s Garland Park Track, primed for an assault on the new world speed record. But this time in the luggage compartment of the train, nestled alongside his trusted bicycle, sat new weapons. Instead of the thirty or so burly pacemen who had paced Taylor to world speed records one year prior, Sager commandeered two mechanics and a crude-looking, steam-powered tandem motorcycle, similar to the device McDuffee had used to eclipse Taylor’s record.

If recent history was to be any guide, the mechanics would come in very handy. Earlier in the year, following a promotional blitz, seventeen thousand fans snarled traffic and cleaned out concession stands at Charles River Track, hoping to see Taylor and McDuffee break records behind the new machines. After several hours of futile mechanical adjustments, the event was finally called off. The overflow crowd went home disgusted, seriously questioning this whole motorized bicycle scheme.

In the first few days of their arrival in Chicago, the mechanics were the most important men in attendance. Because the motorcycle was a new invention, they tweaked and adjusted and experimented and tweaked some more until it was finally reliable enough to pace the world champion for a one-mile sprint around the track. As they had earlier in the year, thousands of onlookers staked out their territories around the track rail and bleachers, peering on in bewilderment. Some traditionalists looked at the machine as an unnecessary nuisance while others wondered if they were witnessing the bicycle’s replacement. Taylor was concerned with only two things—the new machine lasting long enough and being fast enough to keep up with the tremendous pace he pictured himself riding.

On November 15, eight official clockers stood on the side of the track braving frigid conditions. Taylor leaned over his machine at the starting line. All around the track, a hardy gathering of Chicagoans, hoping to witness history, chanted as the elongated machine whirled past. Taylor ripped out of the gate and tore around the first turn, trying to catch up with the speeding device. Somewhere along the backstretch, man and machine eventually drew even. Taylor clung on as if his life depended on it, drafting mere centimeters from the back of the machine. In a seat near the finish line, Sager couldn’t decide what he wanted to watch more—a gorgeous young woman in the stands he thought was Taylor’s wife, or Taylor’s relentless pursuit toward a world speed record achieved on his bicycle components. Being a gentleman of remarkable multitasking abilities, he managed both.

Nearing his breaking point around the far turn, Taylor lunged to the fore with stunning rapidity. The machine, also on the rivets, steamed forward, draping him in a haze of miniature steam clouds. The dual battle of Taylor versus McDuffee and man versus machine was joined.

At the time, America did not know which was faster—man under his own power or this newfangled motorized contraption. Taylor answered the question. On the homestretch, somehow finding that little extra energy, he pleaded with the drivers to step on it. There was no reaction. Within yards of the tape, he veered around the most advanced machine America could throw at him and blitzed across the line at a never-before-recorded, knee-buckling speed of 45.56 miles per hour. The crowd looked on in amazement. The team of clockers looked down at their watches. One mile in 1:19. He had wiped out McDuffee’s world record by 1 2/3 seconds. Watching from the sidelines, McDuffee charged home and retired from cycling.

And with that, the doubting Thomases were all but drowned out by the sound of editors singing Taylor’s praises nationwide. In a long cover piece dedicated to Taylor, the Chicago Times expounded on THE COLORED BOY WHO HAS ASTONISHED THE WORLD. Back in the East, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle would boast that “their” man “Major Taylor, The Wonder is Now Back Home,” even though Taylor had only lived in Brooklyn for a few months. Taylor and Bert Hazard booked a train east for Worcester, pausing briefly at Sager’s Rochester headquarters where Taylor was treated like royalty. Seeing dollar signs, Sager immediately began a national advertising push linking his bicycle parts with Major Taylor, “the fastest man in the world.”

As the curtain was about to fall on the 1800s, one sportsman stood a rung above all others having overcome incredible odds, including apparent attempts on his life. Having pierced through a seemingly impenetrable wall of prejudice and bigotry, Major Taylor found himself standing on the top step of one of the world’s largest sports stages.

Back in Worcester, he could raise his window shades and scan the open sky. Outside, a rapidly expanding nation that had been so profoundly affected by the bicycle awaited the future. Henry Ford, Wilbur Wright, and Horace Dodge tinkered in their bike shops. The twentieth century was coming, and America tilted its highly industrious face skyward.

Gazing out his window, Taylor could run his hands over his World Championship medals and crack a smothered smile. But underneath the smile, he would have felt a stab of apprehension. In the distant sky, a Nor’easter was forming. With it would come turbulent times.

___________

* This attendance figure, like all others in this book, comes from published reports. Since attendance figures varied from one publication to another, the authors used a medium figure. At the World Championship in Montreal, some newspapers reported a total attendance of 40,000 and others as high as 50,000.

* George Dixon won the bantamweight boxing World Championship title in 1891. Dixon, however, was born in Canada, making Taylor the first native-born African American world champion in any sport.