The Terror of Terre Haute
Chicago, 1922: a metropolis rife with the trappings of 1920s culture. Skyscrapers and traffic. Shoppers, flappers, gangsters. Mass transit, art deco architecture, jazz, The Loop …
In the first three months of the year, Bud Taylor divided his time between Terre Haute and the mega-city 180 miles due north. In Chicago, his managers Kane and Long pitted him against the best available competition. More importantly, the co-managers hired Jack Blackburn to train Taylor and Sammy Mandell.
Blackburn had nearly reached age 40 and was winding down his own fight career of 20-plus years. He had been a talented boxer at various weights, back in the days when fights lasted as long as 40 rounds and a fighter would be lucky to clear $35 a bout. Blackburn’s specialty had been his left, which he used to jab and hook in flashes, and about which he would impart his wisdom to understudies Taylor, Mandell and later, Joe Louis.
Outside the ring, Blackburn liked to aim his lefts and rights to his own lips with bottles of beer, transforming an otherwise pleasant man--one who loved dogs, fishing and playing cards--into a belligerent drunk. Blackburn shot three people in 1909, one died, and he served four years of a 15-year prison sentence.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people were afraid of Blackburn. Even in street clothes, he looked menacing, a balding man with a weathered face marked with a knife-scar lengthy enough to impress a pirate--the remnant of a bar fight. But inside a roped ring, the man was in his element. Blackburn knew boxing and he taught it tactfully. For example, he avoided criticizing fighters in the presence of other fighters, instead taking them aside to confer.
Blackburn’s tutelage suited the promising young talent before him–and more the greener Taylor than Mandell. Bud had considered his left-hand punch merely a setup for his “sweetheart” right, but Blackburn laid the groundwork to change that thinking.
Eddie Long liked what he saw in the progress of his newest acquisition. “He’s title bound, that’s all there is to it …” he boasted about Taylor to a Terre Haute sportswriter early in 1922.
The grooming to place Taylor in such contention continued Jan. 13, 1922, against George Corbett, a south Chicago brawler. The fight took place inside what the newspapers referred to only as a “suburban arena,” its site undisclosed presumably to protect the principals from arrest.
Corbett was a popular fellow among the stockyards crowd, and Taylor heard the strains of a hostile audience as the pair volleyed in the early rounds. The bout met its abrupt end in the middle of the third round, when Taylor rocked Corbett with a punch that broke his jaw in three places. The injury disfigured Corbett’s face, but the wounded man gamely continued to flail away with his mouth open while the crowd yelled wildly. Boxing writer Ed Smith, refereeing the fight, saw that the front teeth of Corbett’s lower jaw had been smashed back into his palate. When Smith heard Corbett making what Smith later described as “inarticulate sounds,” Smith stopped the fight.
In those days, a broken jaw ended a fighter’s career. The injury forced Corbett to retire from the ring, the main source of his income. A month later, Corbett’s friends organized a benefit boxing exhibition/party for him in the visitation hall at 54th and Peoria streets, Chicago. The event raised $1,000 for the disabled fighter. Taylor traveled to Chicago to box in the exhibition, paying for his own way and that of a sparring partner, winning many friends by his kindness.
(Excerpt from 'The Terror of Terre Haute, Bud Taylor and the 1920s' by John D. Wright)
