A brute of a kind John was. Nevertheless, he was a presence to be understood, as even Will Canaday perceived when John fought at Toronto. In that fight, ballyhooed as Englishman against Irishman, John knocked down, and out, in the twenty-eighth round, a British navvy who was Canada’s pride. John escaped an angry crowd, bent on stomping his arrogance into the turf, only with the help of the fists, power, and guile of the man who had been his sparring mate, and whose talent for escaping hostile pursuants was also legendary. I speak of Joshua.
And so it thereafter came to pass that John the Brawn was, at the age of thirty years, polarized as the heroic Irish champion of the United States, and matched against Arthur (Yankee) Barker, the pride of native Americans. The fight took place on a summer afternoon in 1854 at the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Troy road out of Albany, a hostel for wayward predilections of all manner and scope, where, as they say, cocks, dogs, rats, badgers, women, and niggers were baited in blood, and where Butter McCall, panjandrum of life at the Bull’s Head, held the purse of ten thousand dollars, five from each combatant, and employed a line of battlers of his own to keep excitable partisans in the crowd from joining the fight, and whose wife, Sugar, kept the scrapbook in which one might, even today, read an account of the historic fight taken from the Albany Telescope, a sporting newspaper, and written by none other than Butter himself, an impresario first, perhaps, but also a bare-knuckle bard, a fistic philosopher, a poet of the poke.
Wasn’t it a grand day [Butter wrote], when we all twenty thousand of us gathered in the Bull’s Head pasture to witness the greatest fight boxiana has ever known? It was a regular apocalypse of steam and stew, blood and brew that twinned John (the Brawn) McGee, also known as John of the Skiff and John of the Water (from his days on the river), and Arthur (Yankee) Barker, also known as the Pet of Poughkeepsie and The True American — twinned and twined the pair in mortalizing conflict over who was to be bare-knuckle champion of this godly land.
John came to the pasture like Zeus on a wheel, tossed his hat with the Kelly-green plume into the ring, and then bounded in after it like a deer diving into the lakes of Killarney. His second bounced in after him, Mick the Rat, a stout Ethiopian who, they say, all but broke the nozzle of the God of Water in a sparring meet. The Mick tied the Water’s colors to the post as the Yank trundled in, no hat on this one, just the flag itself, Old Glory over his shoulders.
Peeling commenced and the seconds took their stations while the flag was wrapped around the Patriot’s stake. Referees and umpires were appointed, the titans shook hands, and yo-ho-ho, off they went. The odds were even at first salvo, but the grand bank of Erin was offering three-to-two on the Water.
ROUND ONE
Both stood up well but the Pet in decidedly the handsomest position. Hi-ho with the left, he cocks the Skiffman amidships and crosses fast with a right to his knowledge box, but oh, now, didn’t he get one back full in the domino case and down.
ROUND TWO
The Pet didn’t like it a bit. He charged with his right brigade and hooked his man over the listener, which the Brawn threw off like a cat’s sneeze and countered with a tremendous smasher to the Patriot’s frontispiece, reducing him to his honkies. Said Mick the Rat from the corner, “Dat flag am comin’ unfurled.”
ROUND THREE
The Patriot came to his work this time with anger at the Mick’s funny saying, rushed like a hornet on ice at the Waterman, firing pell-mell, lefts, rights, and whizzers at the Water’s nasal organ. Water comes back bing-bing, and we see the claret running free from the Brawn’s nostrilations. First blood has been declared for the Pet, which raised the clamor of three-to-one on Patriotism and plenty of takers, including Brawny Boy himself, who ordered the Rat to take a cud of the old green from his jacket and off play the action. The Water let his bottleman second him while the Rat did his duty at the bank.
ROUND FOUR
The boys came up to scratch, the Pet again for business with vigor from Yankee heaven, pinning the Water boy on the ropes and hitting him at will. What happened to yer brawn, Johnny boy? Oh, it was fearful, and the claret thick as pea soup. Was he gone from us? Hardly. The skiffer outs with an ungodly roger up from the decks of Satan’s scow; evil was that punch and it hit the True One in his breadbasket, loosing the crumbs it did, for a great noise came out of the Patriot’s bung and he went flat as Dutch strudel.
ROUND FIVE
The Brawn lost blood, all right, but he’s a game one. Up for mischief again, he leveled a terrible cob on the Pet’s left ogle, leaving Pet’s daylights anything but mates, and the blood of the Patriot gushed out like the spout on a he-goat. The Skiffer grabbed the Pet’s head of cabbage around the throttle and used every exertion to destroy the Patriot’s vocal talent, which we thought a pity, for the Patriot loves to sing duets with his sweetpea, that lovely tune, “I won’t be a nun, I shan’t be a nun, I’m too fond of Arthur to be a nun.” The seconds separated the battlers and it was called a round.
ROUND SIX
Oh, the punishment. The Yankee Pet came up to scratch, erect on his pins, and lit out at the Skitter’s cabbage bag, but an uppercut sent him sliding like a chicken in a blizzard. The Brawn follows with the lefties and righties to the ogles, the smeller, and the domino case, but the Pet won’t go down. Tough he was and tough he stayed, but dear God the blood. No quarter now from the God of Water, who goes after the Pet’s chinchopper and schnotzblauer, which is a bleeding picture, and one of Erin’s poets in the crowd observes, “Don’t our John do lovely sculpture?”
ROUND SEVEN
The Patriot came to the scratch in a wobble of gore, both eyes swollen and all but closed, his cheek slit as if by a cutlass, the blood of life dripping down his chest and he spitting up from his good innards. Was ever a man bloodier in battle? I think not. Yet the Pet of Patriotism, a flag himself now — red, white, and blue, and seeing the stars and stripes — moved at the Skiffman, who had contusions of his own, but none the worse for them. And the Skiff let go with a snobber to the conk that put the Pet to patriotic sleep. Old Gory went down like a duck and laid there like a side of blue mutton. A sad day for the Natives, and Green rises to the top like the cream of Purgatory.
We would judge the victory a popular one in this pasture, city, state, nation, and hemisphere, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. John McGee proved himself a man of grain and grit, and the True Yankee now knows the measure of his own head. For those who wanted more fight, well, more there was — and plenty, too, which the Yankees found to their liking, loving punishment as they do.
A good time was had by all, nobody got killed that we know of, and the nigger carried off John the King on his shoulders.
John McGee, the black man’s burden, retired after this fight, claiming the American championship, and rightly so. He left his Blue Heaven only for occasional trips to Boston, New York, and other centers of manly vice to box with Joshua and a few select sparring mates in exhibitions for the sporting crowd. He was heroized everywhere and he approved of such. But in New York (he once told Joshua) he felt kin to all that he saw: the antlike mob of Irish, the Irish political radicals, the city politicians, the gamblers, the brawlers, the drinkers, and oh, those lovely women.
John always said he retired from fighting for the sake of his nose. “No sensible woman,” he said, “wants a man whose nose is twice as wide as itself, or that travels down his face in two or three assorted directions.”