At Madison Square Garden on Nov. 19, 1943, Sidney “Beau Jack” Walker faced Bob Montgomery in a rematch for the lightweight championship. Montgomery was a 4-to-1 favorite to retain his title.
Six months earlier, Montgomery had beaten Walker in a unanimous 15-round decision. In the crowd of 17,466 for the rematch were 20 Augusta National Golf Club members, including one of its founders, Clifford Roberts. The group had come to New York to support Walker, a former shoeshine boy at the club who had made it big as a lightweight champion. Since his first fight at Madison Square Garden in 1941 in a victory against Guillermo Puentes, these titans of the business, legal and amateur golf worlds had been coming to New York to support the 22-year-old boxer. His name was now synonymous with the club that had hosted the first Masters tournament in 1934.
Boxing didn’t make Walker a rich man or even a major celebrity like his contemporary Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of the world, who could trade on his stellar career in the ring and patriotism during World War II for lifelong hero status with the American public. To early members of Augusta National, Walker was both a symbol of the power of an emerging sports culture that made heroes of athletes and the racism and prejudices of a society that resisted equality for African Americans. Their homegrown hero could be all that he wanted to be in New York, but in the Deep South, the members of Augusta National did not defend his rights as a man.
Bobby Jones, the club’s co-founder who won all four of golf’s major tournaments in 1930, was one of Walker’s biggest cheerleaders at these fights. Grantland Rice, the famous sportswriter and Augusta National charter member, wrote with insight about the sport.
After Walker was defeated in his first fight against Montgomery on May 21, 1943, Rice said that the young boxer “will be the greatest fighter in history if they don’t try to teach him how to box.” For Rice, who wrote that the heavyweight champion Joe Louis had the “instinctive speed of the wild,” Black fighters were largely incapable of mastering the sweet science of boxing.
However, there is some truth to Rice’s analysis of Walker’s toughness in the ring. “People have to want to see you fight,” Walker once told a reporter. “When they learned about this boy from Georgia . . . they found out that I would fight every second of every round and never give up.”
This was a mentality that he discovered in the bowels of an Augusta hotel. During the early years of Augusta National, before there were cottages on the grounds, many members stayed at the Bon Aire Hotel in the city. Augusta National’s Black steward, Bowman Milligan, would organize a battle royal, which featured a half-dozen young Black boys fighting each other in a ring, for their entertainment. Wearing full-size boxing gloves, the boys would fight until the last man was standing.
Since the days of slavery, these battle royals had been popular amusements for white men. In Jackson County, Alabama, slave owners matched their slaves by size and placed bets. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, wrote in one of his memoirs that these fights were “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”
There is a vivid battle royal scene in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, where the leading white citizens gather in a hotel ballroom to witness young blindfolded Black men fight each other. “A glove smacked against my head. I pivoted, striking out stiffly as someone went past, and felt the jar ripple along the length of my arm to my shoulder,” said the narrator of the book, which became an international bestseller. “Then it seemed as though all nine of the boys had turned upon me at once.”
In Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner describes the battle royal as a “hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black faces on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad.” Ellison and Faulkner didn’t need to look far for this description. In the early 20th century, the battle royals were still featured events at fairs, carnivals and holiday celebrations. Of his battle royal passage, Ellison said, “the patterns were already there in society, so that all I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning.”
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Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, honed the rough and mean style that characterized his boxing as a teenager in battle royals around south Texas. In a match in Galveston, Johnson was forced to wear a Sambo mask and fight his brother-in-law. When the white promoter told him to fight harder or get a real beating, Johnson told him that he hit his brother-in-law so hard that he might get another beating when he got home.
Many Black fighters came to the sport through the battle royals, often like Johnson with little power to make their own choices, but there were some who had refused to participate in these dehumanizing exercises of white power. Henry Armstrong, who won titles in three weight classes, refused to sign up for battle royals in St. Louis, where black towels were wrapped around the contestants’ heads. “I wouldn’t go for that,” he said. “I was too proud.” Another fighter, Collis Phillips, a Black Southern boxer in the 1930s, said he “valued himself too highly” to engage in these battles.
In Atlanta, where Bobby Jones was raised and lived until his death in 1971, battle royals were warmup bouts to the city’s main boxing events. “It looks like a race riot,” said the Atlanta Constitution. “Some places call it a battle royal, but down here it’s a battle blind.” In 1906, Atlanta had been the site of a race riot that resulted in the deaths of at least 40 African Americans hundreds injured after the city’s newspapers reported four alleged sexual assaults on local white women.
As an agile and quick-footed 15-year-old, Walker viewed the battle royals as an opportunity to make money to help his grandmother feed his brother and sisters. Milligan recognized his potential as a fighter and hired him at the club. Ultimately, the group of 20 Augusta National members would form a syndicate to finance Walker’s boxing career with Milligan acting as the boxer’s manager and guardian until he turned 21. His backers from the club set up a reserve from his earnings to pay his taxes and an investment account.
In the title rematch, the judges gave the 5-foot-6, 135-pound Walker 11 of the 15 rounds for a unanimous victory over Montgomery to reclaim the lightweight championship. When Walker arrived at the Park Lane Hotel for the post-fight celebration, he was met with an embrace by Roberts, who had passed the hat around to the members to raise the $500 for him to leave Georgia to train in New York. Other backers crowded around him, shaking his hand and pouring on the affection befitting a champion who had regained his title.
For Amsterdam News columnist Dan Burley, who was there for the post-fight festivities at the hotel, the appearance of Walker’s white Augusta National backers made for an interesting social experiment. “Instead of ripping at the social structure of Augusta and the South, they obtained their objective by sponsoring their racial ward in the North where certain things can be done; things like fighting a white man in a ring,” Burley wrote. “Development of the viewpoint that brought these men to the side of an illiterate shoe shine boy could very well bring them to the side of other boys — our boys — and develop in truth the new tomorrow.”
These Augusta National members undoubtedly held paternalistic and racist ideas about African Americans. But holding these attitudes didn’t mean that Walker couldn’t be their sports hero.
When Jones came home to Atlanta after winning the first three legs of golf’s Grand Slam, he received a ticker tape parade through the streets of the city. The Black Elks band and 300 Black caddies led the parade. The caddies carried signs that said “Welcome Home Mr. Bobby” and “Welcome Home, Mr. Bob. You Sho’ Brought Back the Bacon.” Now in New York at Walker’s fights, Jones could celebrate the success of one of the club’s Black servants. Yet, Jones and his fraternity of white business and golf elites could have never imagined a world where Black people had equality with white people.
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In Roberts’ book, The Story of The Augusta National Golf Club, he recounts the club’s support of Walker with a sketch from the cartoonist, Billy DeBeck, who is best known for the Barney Google comic strip, which was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Debeck was perfect to create a sketch that caricatured Black people as buffoonish and servile. Sunshine was DeBeck’s most famous African American character. He was Barney Google’s simple-minded servant, whose favorite expression was “You sho am a smaht man, mistah Google.” In the sketch for Roberts’ book, DeBeck depicts Walker as an ape on stage carried by his Augusta National backers.
Walker had a record 21 fights in Madison Square Garden, where he fought Montgomery for a fourth time on Aug. 4, 1944. Five months earlier in March, Montgomery had regained the title in a split decision over Walker in their third fight, but now they were battling for something bigger than themselves. World War II was still a year from ending and these two Black men, both in the U.S Army, were fighting for the cause. There was no purse. The admission price was a war bond, starting at $25 for the least desirable seats to $100,000 for the best ones.
In a 10-round split decision, Walker rallied with a flourish of punches to take a close fight —bringing their record to 2-2 after their final bout. He’d relied on his deadly bolo punch with his powerful right hand. No title was at stake, but the fight, which drew hundreds of wounded veterans, raised $36 million in war bonds from 15,822 spectators.
“They fought to cleanse America of her color and race hates and prejudices,” the Pittsburgh Courier said in an editorial. “They fought to repudiate forever the damnable lie that there is a Master race. They fought to make America a true symbol of tolerance and goodwill. They fought for all the ideals dear to the hearts of downtrodden people everywhere.”
During World War II, Walker was one the biggest draws in pro boxing, a fighter with a stamina and determination that led him to 13 victories in 1942. Yet he would never reach these heights again in his career. He developed a bad knee and by the late 1940s he was a shadow of his former self. He retired at 34 in 1955 with an 83-24-5 record, including 40 knockouts.
As the Masters evolved into one of the most prestigious sports attractions, Walker clung to his roots at the club. Even during the height of his career, he made appearances at the club and took on some of his old duties as a clubhouse attendant, shining shoes and giving massages. For years after his boxing career ended, he shined shoes at the barbershop in the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, where he served famous entertainers such as crooner Frank Sinatra and singer Sammy Davis Jr., and worked as a restroom attendant. “Come and have your shoes shined by the former lightweight champion of the world,” read a sign outside the barbershop door.
In the 1980s, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith found Walker living very modestly in Miami and training fighters at the city’s Fifth Street gym. One of his children told Smith that his father played broke and that despite his manager ripping him off, he owned land and had other investments.
Walker didn’t ask for pity. For him, there was dignity in labor and a job well done. “It’s an honest job and a good living — and I met a lot of nice people,” he once said of shining shoes. In one photo at Augusta National, Walker, who died in 2000 at 78, is giving Masters champion Byron Nelson a shoeshine during the 1946 tournament. He has the look of a proud and dignified Black man.
It’s not the kind of image you see nowadays of Black excellence, but it shows all too well the tremendous effort that it took for Beau Jack to emerge from those battle royals at the Bon Aire Hotel to fashion a life that had to overcome invisibility and darkness.
