Australian Tragic

Montague James Furlong was born in Sydney on 22 July in the year of 1868. We know little of his early days, save that he was an apprentice plasterer before discovering he was good with his fists. These were bare-knuckle times, and Jim Hall, as he would call himself, was only too pleased to take the gloves off for man, woman or beast. It was said that a drunken Hall once struck a man in The Rocks, then the man’s wife for interfering, finally backhanding the couple’s child for crying out in defence of his parents. Whatever the truth, the magistrates of Sydney were well pleased when Jim began fighting professionally in 1886. Hall mostly fronted up for scrappy duels in Foley’s Hotel, a pugilist’s pub in Sydney’s George Street that was affectionately known as ‘The Iron Pot’, on account of the sweat that dripped from the walls when the nights steamed with drunken roars and fighting fury. 

Jim, a six-foot middleweight, showed that he had some mettle – on his third professional show, he fought to a draw with Mick Dooley, a one-time heavyweight champion of Australia, and in January of 1889 he held his own for five rounds against Bob Fitzsimmons, an ex-pat Kiwi who was widely regarded as the toughest around, and who would go on to thrill America as one of the greatest fighters the world would ever see. It was the beginning of one the most intense and anticipated rivalries in the Victorian boxing era, the watershed of which would arrive on a rainy winter’s night in New Orleans in 1893. 

But it was on 8 May in 1889 that Hall first made the crowds stand up and take notice, knocking out middleweight title-holder Edward ‘Starlight’ Rollins in the 20th round at Sydney Stadium. Jim Hall had come from nowhere and beat a bona fide Australian champion. Those who doubted the result were astonished two months later when Rollins, having demanded a rematch, was knocked out again, only this time in the fifth. Before the year was out, Jim Hall’s record was a litany of carnage: Jack Malloy, knocked out in the 15th round; Herbert Goddard in the fourth; Jack Slavin in the tenth; Herbert Goddard again, this time in the third, and in the third once more when Herbert was foolish enough to come back for another thrashing 21 days later; Eddie Welsh in the fifth; Pablo Fanque in the fourth . . .   

But it was Bob Fitzsimmons who was considered the fighter for Hall to beat. With a record of 24 wins – including one against a younger Hall – one draw and just four losses, Fitzsimmons was Jim Hall’s ticket to the United States, where purses were plentiful for fighters from the colonies. Jack ‘Nonpareil’ Dempsey, the Irish-American Middleweight Champion of the World, who had been beaten only three times in 65 bouts, was on notice that either Hall or Fitzsimmons would soon be sailing to take his title. Exactly which one of the two Australian fighters it would be was an even bet. 

A bout was arranged at Foley’s on 11 February, 1890 and what happened that night remains a mystery to this day. Fitzsimmons claimed that Hall had promised to pay him to take a dive, thus clearing Hall’s way to America to fight Dempsey. It’s an unlikely scenario – Fitzsimmons was proud and, like Hall, on his way up, as keen as any to have a shot at a world title. But Fitzsimmons was known through his career as unscrupulously honest and gentlemanly – in the early 1900s, while staying at the Hotel Windsor in Melbourne, Bob, drunk and rowdy, was knocked out by a hotel guest named Charles Salter after making a rude remark to some ladies, and it was a contrite Bob who knocked on Salter’s door in the morning to congratulate him for doing the right thing. Hall, who had no such gentlemanly record, swore to his dying day that he beat Fitzsimmons fair and square. What is known for sure is that Fitzsimmons went down for the count in the fourth round, and Hall was declared the winner. What is also certain – because Fitzsimmons never stopped bleating about it – was that he never received the £75 that Hall had allegedly promised him for hitting the canvas. Whatever the truth may be, it’s fair to conclude that Fitzsimmons was outfoxed by his opponent, the controversy leaving both victor and vanquished itching for a rematch, so as to show the world who was the better man. 

By all accounts, Jim Hall was an impressive physical specimen, a fact to which the Washington Post would dramatically attest: 

When in his prime, Hall was one of the handsomest athletes that ever stripped between the ropes. Over six feet in height, broad of shoulder, taper of waist, thin in the flank and beautifully proportioned, he might have stood for the ideal model of an ancient Grecian sculptor. His features were regular in outline and, like that other Adonis of the modern era, James J Corbett, bore scarcely a trace of the many battles in which he engaged. Jim Hall carried no ‘tin ears’, for the very good reason that his cleverness enabled him to avoid such disfigurement. A remarkably brilliant boxer, his cat-like grace and agility, combined with a thorough knowledge of ring craft and the ability to think and act at the same time, made him the perfect specimen of the brainy glove artist. 

Jim Hall was also a shocking drunk, incapable of keeping his temper from boiling over into violence and alcoholic rage. Everything had been set for him to sail to America to meet Jack Dempsey when, on the eve of his voyage, Jim decided to pass the hours farewelling friends and strangers alike at a local tavern. After drinking all day, Hall found himself in an argument with another patron. A fight broke out, the terrified drinker defending himself against the furious Hall in the only way he thought would be successful, by pulling a knife and lashing at the hands that flew toward him with cracking speed. Hall beat his assailant to a pulp, but not before the knife gashed his right hand wide open. Fleeing the law, Hall bolted for his boat, but his hand was bleeding so profusely the captain of the vessel would not allow him on board. Hall’s American invasion was thus postponed. 

While Hall was recuperating, Fitzsimmons seized the chance to leap into Hall’s ticket against Jack Dempsey, steaming to the United States with his story about his organised loss to Hall and the unpaid £75. On 14 January, 1891, Fitzsimmons took Hall’s place in the fight with Jack Dempsey for the middleweight title in New Orleans, shocking the nation by giving Dempsey a hiding, knocking him down no less than 13 times and begging the champion to quit before more damage was done. He finally convinced him with a knockout in the fifth round, Fitzsimmons carrying the bloodied ‘Nonpareil’ to his corner. 

Hall was furious at the news of Fitzsimmons’ victory, sobering up for long enough to take ship to America, where news of his imminent arrival was telegraphed to a nation still buzzing from the bruising Fitzsimmons had given the ‘unbeatable’ Dempsey. The Chicago Tribune announced the coming war on 24 January, 1891: 

Those who witnessed the Dempsey–Fitzsimmons fight at New Orleans are loath to believe that there is a middleweight in the world who can whip Fitzsimmons. Australia possesses such a marvel in the person of Jim Hall, who stopped the lanky Bob in three and a half rounds . . . He has whipped every middleweight of note in the colonies . . . Hall is now on the Pacific Ocean on his way to this country to earn, if possible, the title of middleweight champion of the world. While the fact he has defeated Fitzsimmons has been denied, all the Australian papers give him credit for the performance and it is, no doubt, correct. When he arrives in San Francisco he promises to make it interesting for aspiring middleweights. 

And make it interesting he did. On his first fight in San Francisco in February, 1891, Jim Hall knocked out middleweight Alec Greggains in the very first round, and later won on points against the well-regarded Tommy Ryan in Chicago, the Manitoba Daily Free Press reporting that ‘it was evident almost from the start that the Chicago man was outclassed by the big Australian’. 

Hall was immediately taken under the wing of Charles E ‘Parson’ Davies, a Chicago boxing luminary whose stable included black fighter Peter Jackson, whose colour was the only reason he wasn’t the heavyweight champion of the world, and James ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett, the reigning heavyweight champion who is credited today with having transformed boxing from a sophisticated brawl to a genuine fighter’s art. Davies was not a man to be trifled with – a well-connected Chicago hustler, at handshakes with the Windy City’s notorious underworld, he was perhaps one of the few people who might have been capable of keeping Hall’s constitutional recklessness on a leash. 

In just a few months, however, while touring Detroit with his fighter, Davies found Hall drunk one morning and angrily told him to go home and sleep it off. Hall didn’t take the advice, appearing later in the evening, drunker still, in a bar in which Davies was entertaining associates. A boisterous argument ensued, Davies keeping his cool while Jim Hall raged and abused, poking his finger into Davies’ chest and generally making a prize nuisance of himself. Frustrated by Davies’ composure, Hall threw a haymaker and Davies snatched a lemon knife from the bar and stabbed Hall in the neck, missing his jugular by millimetres, growling at the stunned Australian, ‘Next time I’ll make a sure job of it’. Hall responded by opening his shirt and daring Davies to plunge the knife into his heart, then accused the Chicagoan of cowardice as Davies escorted the drunk and bleeding fighter to the local hospital. It was the end of their association. 

On the rebound, Hall was taken in by the Manly Art Institute in downtown Beloit, Wisconsin, a tight boxing outfit run by trainer John Kline, who saw great potential under Hall’s wild demeanour. Both Kline and Hall knew all fights were meaningless unless Hall could be seen to beat Bob Fitzsimmons and put the simmering rivalry and the controversy of the Australian knockout to rest. Thus a showdown was scheduled for late in 1891 in St Paul in Minnesota, one newspaper reporting that 

the bad blood between the fighters is almost as much of an incentive as the big stakes (a whopping $12,000), and a sport who is in the confidence of both men said he believed that they would be willing to get together even if the stake money were withdrawn. 

Hall trained as hard for Kline as he had in his life, abstaining from booze, he told the newspapers, ‘except for the occasional touch of claret’. The nation geared up for what was being touted as ‘one of the fiercest battles ever fought by middleweights in this country’. But the enthusiasm was no match for the Governor of Minnesota, who hated boxing with a passion. On the day of the fight, he instructed four companies of National Guardsmen to surround the amphitheatre at St Paul to stop the fight from happening. 

It took Kline another twelve months to reschedule the fight, during which Jim Hall passed the time by drinking hard and brutalising a succession of boobs stupid enough to climb into the ring with him. He knocked out Bob Ferguson in Chicago in the fourth round, Owen Marley in the fourth at Dubuque, Iowa, and Joe Tansey in the fourth at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In Chicago, he downed Mike Boden in the fourth, Al Fish in the third just ten days later, and Jack King in the fourth a month after that. In April, 1892, Jim presided over a month-long slaughterhouse that – the quality of the fighters notwithstanding – has never been bested in the calendars of professional boxing history. Beginning in Ariel, Philadelphia, he knocked out three separate opponents within six days: Jack Flood in the very first round, Jack Houghey in the second two nights later, and Mick White within seconds of the opening bell three nights after that. A week and a half later, at Niblo’s Theater in New York City, Chris Cornell fell to the canvas unconscious before the end of the first round and, four days after that, in the same venue, Jerry Slattery was lucky to last the one and a half rounds that he did. 

Unable to find anyone of repute who seemed terribly interested in climbing through his ropes, and infuriated by newspaper reports of his ‘spectacular inactivity’, Hall sailed to London to fight Ted Pritchard for the British world middleweight championship. Jim knocked Pritchard out in the fourth round, returning to America with the British prize belt. 

But it was the fight against Fitzsimmons everyone was waiting for, the deep rooted hostility between the two fighters having been lugged out in the pages of the national newspapers for months. Fitzsimmons alerted punters to the ‘whipping’ he’d given Hall in the early days of the younger Australian’s career – along with gentle reminders of a certain outstanding £75 debt – while Hall branded Bob a ‘turncoat’ and a ‘traitor’, a reference to Fitzsimmons’ imminent naturalisation as an American citizen, a change of national allegiance that evidently rankled Hall. 

At last, ‘the most anticipated fight of recent memory’ was scheduled to take place in New Orleans on the night of March the 8th, 1893, for a purse of $40,000, the largest the American ring had ever seen. In the weeks leading up to the big night, the newspapers were unanimous about Hall’s ‘great shape’ for the bout, and many tipped Jim to win it. The opinion of the Chicago Daily was typical: 

It had been the general impression in this country that anybody who could hit Fitzsimmons could whip him, as many believe he will not stand punishment. This is, however, problematical . . . For all that, Hall will probably be returned the winner. He can punish anybody and knows Fitzsimmons’ weak points. He has the skill to reach them, too. 

Much of the credit for Hall’s standing was given to John Kline’s disciplined and rigorous training of the wayward pugilist, and the papers reported upon frightening wagers being laid by the nation’s top betting men, almost all in Hall’s favour. But Hall appeared to be ‘not in the best of shape’ when he arrived in New Orleans on the morning of 6 March, a somewhat sour mood noted by journalists as he alighted from his train. ‘Hall was not happy,’ wrote one reporter, ‘and he said so.’ 

On the morning of the fight, a curious notice appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, the short piece telling of how Hall had been seen to jump in a carriage after lunch and drive hastily away with fellow fighter and big drinker, Charlie Mitchell: 

Hall said they were only going to dinner and would return in a few minutes. Kline had Hall’s work laid out for him for the afternoon, commencing at 3pm, but in the absence of Hall the necessary training had to be postponed. Poor Kline walked around the hotel as restless as a newly-caged tiger, and watched the clock as the hours sped away . . . At seven o’clock this evening, Hall had not returned and Kline was still walking the floor wiping the perspiration from his brow . . .   

Rain pelted down on the night of 8 March, 1893, as 4000 people crowded into the Crescent City Club in New Orleans, Louisiana. Celebrities, politicians and the luminaries of the boxing world packed the auditorium; Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s one-time offsider, now a boxing aficionado and freelance sports writer, acted as timekeeper for the event. 

To some, Hall’s strut before the bell seemed arrogant – the cock-a-hoop swagger of a conqueror before the fight has been won or lost. Word got around that he’d asked the Crescent City Club officials to show him proof of the certified cheque that was to be presented to the victor. While it has never been suggested that Jim was drunk when he entered the ring that night, his adventures with Charlie Mitchell the previous evening had doubtless left him with a shocking hangover and, for Jim Hall, there had only ever been one remedy for the shakes and tremors, the anxieties of withdrawal. Hall knew that this was the fight of his life, the moment that would prove his bombast to be either based upon truth, or mere shouts from the shadow of a boxer who wished to be. He would have needed all the courage he could get. 

The bell rang for the opening of the first round, and it was Fitzsimmons who threw the first punches – two left upper-cuts from which Hall escaped unscathed. For two rounds the pair traded blows to the body and hits to the head, each winning punch immediately answered with an equally ferocious response. Fitzsimmons came out in round three as the aggressor, but then Hall landed two heavy lefts to Bob’s head, followed by a right upper-cut that made Bob grab for his opponent and hold on in a clinch at the end of the round. Hall appeared to have his man where he wanted him. 

Then began round four. Buoyed by his bashing of Bob in the closing seconds of the last round, Hall charged from his corner and straight into an arcing right-hand from Fitzsimmons, ‘a blow that will shine on the pages of the history of American pugilism’, according to the reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who was ringside. 

His praise went on: 

It was a right-hand swinging blow, full on Hall’s left jaw and low down where such blows count fast. Quick as a flash it caught Hall and literally lifted him up and backwards. He fell straight back as dead, out as ever a pugilist was. But for the felt beneath the canvas his head would have suffered as it struck the platform heavily. It was a terrific punch and for a few seconds Hall lay still and quiet and scarcely seemed to breathe. The crowd and Fitzsimmons thought he was dead. 

For a few minutes, all celebrations were on ice as Hall’s team worked furiously to revive him. No amount of water or the shaking of limbs brought any sign of life to the prone figure. It was a nervous Bob Fitzsimmons who came up with the correct prescription, dousing Jim’s face with whisky until the beaten Australian at last opened his eyes. Jim appeared to weep as he was dragged through the ropes, Bob Fitzsimmons waving an American flag high above his head as he marched victoriously around the ring. 

In his dressing room, Jim assumed the position of the loser with haste, bursting open bottles of wine as he sobbed to reporters, barely able to believe that he’d lost. 'If I should whip Fitzsimmons a dozen times now,' he cried, 'I could never recover my reputation. I don’t know what I will do now. I hadn’t figured on losing, and have made no preparation for the future.'

Eleven days after his loss to Fitzsimmons, newspapers reported on another beating Hall was to suffer, this time in New York. After being denied entry to a bar, a drunken Hall picked a fight with a cab driver who refused to ferry him to another drinking house. According to the Washington Post, Hall was ‘thrown down, kicked and pummeled by the enraged cabman until he cried for quarter’. 

Licking his wounds, Hall took a steamer to England, where he believed a successful London campaign might rejuvenate him for a triumphant return to America, so that he might put the past behind him. 

In London, he happened to discover a bar that was run by a former heavyweight champion of England, Jack ‘Paddy’ Slavin, who had relinquished his title the previous year. Slavin had been born in Australia, too – in Maitland, the same town from which Les Darcy would hail – and he could more than keep up with Hall when there was any drinking to be done. Slavin was generous with Hall, whose thirst was deeper than his own pockets, but all Hall saw in Slavin was an opportunity to repair his damaged standing – if he could defeat a heavyweight champion, the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Fitzsimmons might evaporate, and he could return to America to pick up where he had left off. He began showing up nightly in Slavin’s establishment, dressed to the nines in a silk hat and a flashy coat, toasting the bar to the day when Paddy Slavin would have the courage to meet him in the ring. Night after night, Slavin resisted, until the insults became too horrid to bear and Paddy finally agreed to a duel to be fought at the National Sporting Club in Covent Garden on the night of 29 May, 1893. 

The bookmakers backed Slavin at five-to-one, the heavyweight’s bulk tipped to triumph easily over Hall’s comparatively lithe frame. And for the first few rounds it appeared their expectations would be met, Slavin charging at Hall who bolted around the ring, seemingly desperate to escape. Newspaper reports tell of the assembled crowd ‘booing scornfully at Hall’s apparent cowardice’. The pursuit ended in the fourth round, when Hall suddenly turned and smacked Slavin square on the jaw, the former heavyweight champion tumbling into the ropes and down. Slavin recuperated, only to be floored by Hall again, who now seemed to have been playing possum all night. For the next three rounds Jim picked his friend to pieces, before finally slugging him down and out in the seventh.

Hall’s win caused such a sensation in London that the call went out for a rematch with Ted Pritchard, from whom Hall had taken the British middleweight title just a few months before. Hall put all doubt away by dispatching Pritchard with a savage knockout in the third on 13 June, 1893.

What should have heralded the beginning of a return to form for the brilliant but unruly boxer from Sydney was, in fact, the beginning of the end. Hall’s victories over Slavin and Pritchard made him an instant celebrity around London Town, and he became a permanent fixture in the late bars and early openers, getting into fights almost nightly, relying on the kindness of friends to bail him out of trouble when the sheen of celebrity began to wear thin. The word in boxing circles was that Jim Hall was a talent lost to himself, a drinker first and a boxer next, a loser who’d won a few, but that was all. 

He returned to America out of shape, cap in hand, his reputation as a defeated fighter only reinforced by news of his behaviour in England. No promoter or trainer was willing to touch him. Jim’s decline was rapid – his first two ranked fights of 1894 were against novices, Billy Woods and Henry Baker, both to whom he lost on points. In 1895 the only fights Jim Hall fought were with the law, a doctor from Louisville suing Jim for ‘maintaining guilty relations’ with his wife, and police arresting him for raising hell and assaulting patrons at a Cleveland Hotel. Joe Choynski, a fighter with a good record, agreed to fight Jim in Queens, New York, on 20 January, 1896, knocking Hall out in the 13th round. On 10 August, 1896, Jim was about to fight Steve O’Donnell in New York when he was arrested ringside for a massive debt of unpaid rent owed to his landlord and the fight was called off. 

The ghosts of old rumours seemed to rise from the dead when, in October of 1897, a bout with well-ranked Charles ‘Kid’ McCoy in Philadelphia was called off by the referee when it became patently obvious the fight had been rigged in Jim Hall’s favour. Two months later, Frank ‘Paddy’ Slavin took his revenge, knocking Hall out in the seventh round during a fight in Quebec. In March of 1899, Jim was let out of jail to fight Charles Lawler, Hall having been picked up the night before for public drunkenness, and it was said he was too sauced to know when he miraculously knocked Lawler out in the tenth. Hall’s last fight – his last roll of the dice – was for Joe Choynski’s light-heavyweight title in September. With only three months to go before the century, and an era, would be over, Jim was knocked out in the seventh, complaining that he wanted to ‘sleep in’ as his handlers tried to lift the dazed fighter from the canvas. 

Hall survived for a time on past glories, which lived on in the minds of the toughs and no-hopers of Chicago and Cleveland. But by the mid-1900s, he was a patient in a charity ward of a Chicago hospital. He was thrown out on the street when it was discovered he’d been sneaking into the Cook County morgue next door late at night, pinching jewellery and other valuables from unclaimed corpses to sell for drinking money. 

His last payout came from a Chicago surgeon named Rahde, to whom Hall sold his skeleton for $150, the good doctor assuming he’d be able to collect on the deal within a year or two. Within days Hall was back, having drunk all the money, and insisting the price was now double or nothing. When Rahde complained, Jim let fly with the final knockout of his career. 

On 11 March, 1913, newspapers reported that Jim Hall, ‘a former well-known pugilist’, had been found dying of tuberculosis in a hovel in Neenah, Wisconsin. Four days later, on the 15th of March, Jim died in the state sanitarium, the New York Times noting that it was ‘twenty years ago last Saturday that Hall was knocked out in the fourth round by Bob Fitzsimmons in New Orleans’. There ended the story of Jim Hall, a man who lost one fight, and so lost them all. 

In 2006, Wisconsin boxing historian Bill Schutte found Jim Hall’s grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Neenah, the plot marked with no headstone or plaque to tell of who lay below. An admirer of Jim’s had arranged for his burial in 1913, but had been careful to leave the grave unmarked, lest certain surgeons from Chicago came in search of Jim’s bones. 

With his own spare cash, Schutte purchased and then laid at the head of Jim’s grave a small headstone, a black granite block inscribed with the words: ‘Prizefighter’. 

From Australian Tragic by Jack Marx, published by Hachette Australia, priced at $35.

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