King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Two good reads: Compelling bios of boxer Jack Johnson and jockey Jimmy Winkfield bring two of America's early black sports heroes to life.

Jan 6, 2005 | On those rare occasions when someone in my presence dismisses sports as trivial, I have a stock reply, just one tiny example of the many ways in which sports are not just not trivial, but vitally important: It is impossible to understand 20th century race relations in the United States without knowing about Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali.

Two good new books tell the stories of a pair of America's early black athletic stars, Johnson and Jimmy Winkfield, a jockey whose success just after the turn of the century marked the end of the black dominance of thoroughbred riding that had begun in slave days.

Johnson is by far the better-known figure. Even the most casual of sports fans could identify him as the first black heavyweight champion. Winkfield is virtually unknown. He won consecutive Kentucky Derbies and spent a long, colorful lifetime in racing on two continents, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone but racing history buffs who's ever heard his name.

"Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield" is TV newsman and thoroughbred historian Ed Hotaling's attempt to change that, and it's been successful enough that the New York Racing Association has named a race after Winkfield. The first Jimmy Winkfield Stakes will be run at Aqueduct on Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," by Geoffrey C. Ward, is a companion piece to a new Ken Burns documentary, but you'd never know it without reading the acknowledgments. It stands alone as a life of the enormous figure Jack Johnson was, and it does him justice.

Johnson and Winkfield were contemporaries, the strapping future boxer born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, and the tiny future jockey two years later in Chilesburg, Ky., just outside of the equine capital Lexington. They even shared a childhood hero, Isaac Murphy, the greatest jockey of his day and the highest-paid American athlete of the mid-1880s, black or white. The difference was that Winkfield knew Murphy, who lived in Lexington.

Deciding young that he wanted to emulate "Honest Ike," who lived like a king, Winkfield worked as a carriage driver, shoeshine boy, stable hand and exercise boy before making his riding debut at 18. The aggressive style that would soon be his trademark earned him a place finish -- and a one-year suspension!

Winkfield, the last of 17 children of a sharecropper, benefited from the relative racial tolerance of the Bluegrass. The Ku Klux Klan had a hard time getting a toehold in the area, Hotaling writes, because the rich white horse owners weren't about to let their black riders, trainers and grooms come to harm, and the importance of these mostly skilled blacks in the local economy led to a certain level of respect, even if it was grudging.

It wouldn't last. In the first decade of the new century, a combination of anti-gambling laws that closed most tracks and a takeover of the shrinking industry by white jockeys had made the black jockey extinct on these shores. Winkfield, in his prime, had been blackballed in 1903 after a dispute with an owner over money. Except for a brief return, he'd spend the rest of his jockeying career in Europe.

Next Page: Winkfield's Odyssey. Plus: Jack Johnson, a complex champion

• View blog reactions