In defence of Tom Longboat^†

Abstract

Tom Longboat, an Onondaga from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, Canada was an outstanding runner during the decade before World War I. He won virtually every amateur race he entered in record time, and when a North American professional marathon circuit was created after the controversial 1908 Olympic Marathon, he became its first ‘world champion’. Longboat was exciting to watch – he could win from the front and win from behind and many of his races had heart-stopping finishes. The crowds loved him. When he won the Boston Marathon, Toronto city controller William Hubbard said that ‘I don't know anyone who has done more to help the Commissioner of Industries than this man Longboat’. City Council promised to pay him $500 when he retired from amateur racing. But he was a subject of controversy, too, and rumours abounded that he never trained and was rarely sober. After he retired and became a garbage collector, his story became ‘Rags to Riches to Rags’.

Abstract

In the late 1970s, I was commissioned to write a popular biography of Longboat. As a marathon runner myself, I could never accept that anyone could run so well untrained and hung over. The more I dug into his career, the more I realized that there was another side of the story – that Longboat had a strong sense of his own body, a sophisticated approach to training drawn from the Iroquois tradition of which he was just the most recent exemplar, and that he was determined to control his own life, even if it meant standing up to and then breaking away from the white sports promoters who tried to manage his career. This article, which sets out those findings, led to the rehabilitation of his legend. In 1985, the City of Toronto paid his children $10,000 in recognition of the $500 that was never paid.

Notes

^†Originally published in Canadian Journal of History of Sport 14, no. 1 (1983): 34–63.

^1. For details, see Kidd, Tom Longboat.

^2.Toronto Daily Star, March 15, 1907.

^3.Toronto Daily Star, August 20, 1908.

^4. T. Flanagan, Hamilton Spectator, March 28, 1910.

^5. Longboat's managers were Rosenthal (December 1906–March 1907), C.H. Ashley of the West End YMCA (March–June 1907), Tom Flanagan of the Irish Canadian Athletic Club (October 1907–January 1909), Pat Powers (January–June 1909) and Mintz (June 1909–spring of 1911). In 1911, Longboat bought back his contract and began to ‘manage’ himself (see also note 42).

^6.Hamilton Spectator, December 24, 1909.

^7.Hamilton Spectator, April 30, 1910.

^8. Alfred Shrubb to Major Ian Eisenhardt. February 6, 1951. Public Archieves of Canada.. Eisenhardt was preparing an educational filmstrip on Longboat. Shrubb continued: ‘This, of course, was well known but must not appear in the film. But at that he usually gave his best and was always a dangerous opponent in the stretch’. Shrubb was not above self-serving embellishment. He also claimed, ‘I was fortunate to win all the races (other than the marathon in Madison Square Gardens) from ten to 20 miles, but some of them were very close’. In fact, Longboat won four other races against Shrubb on 26 June 1909, 12 August 1911, 26 August 1911 and 8 June 1912, all in Toronto. In 11 races against each other, each man won 5 times. In the New York Marathon on 4 April 1909, both men dropped out.

^9.Hamilton Spectator, February 24, 1910.

^10.Montreal Herald, 11 November 1909. In T. Flanagan's Scrapbook. Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.

^11. F. Cronin, ‘The Rise and Fall of Tom Longboat’, Maclean's, February 4, 1956.

^12.Wise and Fisher, Canada's Sporting Heroes, 45–6.

^13.Livesay, Footprints in the Snow, 27.

^14.Toronto Daily Star, July 24, 1979.

^15.Littlechild, ‘Tom Longboat’, 51, 84, 107.

^16.Mills, Sociological Imagination, 37. Mills defined ideology as the dominant symbols and ideas in society, which ‘justify or oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within the arrangement of the powerful’. Ideological statements are partisan to class, race, sex or interest group, although this is usually concealed. I am using ‘ideology’ in this sense.

^17.Hamilton Spectator, April 30, 1907. Longboat most likely acquired his ideas about training on the reserve: the Iroquois had always been ardent distance runners (see Culin, Games of the North American Indians, 805; Nabokov and MacLean, ‘Ways of Native American’, 14). Bill Davis, a neighbour at Six Nations, placed second in the 1901 Boston Marathon.

^18. B. Pennington, ‘The Tom Longboat Story’, Toronto Telegram, January 27, 1965.

^19. ‘He would never thank you for a ride’, Montour recounted (interview with author, July 14, 1979).

^20. A. Sutton. Interview by W.A. Tweed. April 20, 1981.

^21. Newspaper accounts present two problems for a study of this kind. First, frequently they were wrong: the copy was hurriedly written, while even less time was taken for checking accuracy and typographical errors. Second, they did not always report the information they published, in the sense that journalists independently collected and prepared it with some tests for significance and objectivity, but merely passed along, as a kind of bulletin board, the announcements and interpretations of the most influential. The entrepreneurs who staged races visited, phoned and wired the newspapers to get favourable stories published. Sometimes the sports editors acknowledged these practices, but often they did not and I suspect that promoters' comments were often published verbatim. Bylines were rarely published, further complicating the process of determining authorship. Then as now (see Helgesen, ‘In Duran's Corner’, 88–90), athletes, entrepreneurs and even the writers often had reason to misrepresent an athlete's actual training. In these circumstances, I have approached all accounts with a scepticism informed by my own experience as a runner.

^22. The report of Shrubb's training, published on the same day, differed in two respects: he claimed to walk 12 miles and run 15 miles every day, and received two daily massages. I doubt Shrubb ever put in this mileage. So did the Toronto Daily Star, February 9, 1909. Shrubb's Long Distance Running and Training suggests that he never ran more than 40 miles a week, often less.

^23. In addition to the reports that preceded major races, the press also described him training when no specific races were scheduled. See, for example, Toronto Daily Star, December 5, 1909 and Hamilton Spectator, January 8, 1910.

^24. For example, Toronto Daily Star, January 14, 1909.

^25. For example, Toronto Daily Star, January 27, 1909.

^26.Shrubb, Long Distance Running, 65–6. The race strategy was Longboat's too. In the matched marathon in New York, Longboat ran at his own pace, allowing Shrubb to build up a lead of 8 laps at 15 miles. But then, Shrubb began to tire and Longboat caught him at 25 miles.

^27. Shrubb would have agreed: ‘Better go into the race half-trained than overtrained. For in the former case you will have fire and vigour, at least, and without these two qualities success is not to be looked for’ (Long Distance Running, 53).

^28.Weiler, ‘Idea of Sport’, 19.

^29.Ross, YMCA in Canada, 168–72.

^30.Weiler, ‘Idea of Sport’, 16–18.

^31.Hamilton Spectator, July 10, 1907.

^32.Hamilton Spectator, May 21, 1907.

^33. See especially, ‘Is Just Like Hogtown’, Hamilton Spectator, July 16, 1907; Toronto Daily News, July 16, 1907.

^34.Toronto Daily Star, January 11, 1909.

^35.Toronto Daily Star, January 5, 1909.

^36.Toronto Daily Star, January 4, 1909.

^37.Toronto Daily Star, December 28, 1909.

^38. See Toronto Daily Star, January 28, 1909.

^39.Globe, January 15, 1909.

^40. Two weeks previously, Flanagan had been the best man at Longboat's wedding.

^41.Toronto Daily Star, February 22, 1909.

^42. See Toronto Daily Star, February 20 and 25, 1909. Powers desperately sought to enforce his contract, which gave him half of Longboat's earnings (after training expenses). He went to Ottawa to try to get the Department of Indian Affairs to intervene and hired Flanagan to plead on his behalf – all to no avail. Longboat proved to be a shrewd and stubborn bargainer. Ultimately, he forced Powers to sell his contract to someone of Longboat's choosing – Mintz of Hamilton – at a significantly reduced price. Mintz always supported Longboat in his public controversies and left him free to do his own training.

^43.Toronto Daily Star, May 20, 1908.

^44.Cook, Fourth Olympiad, 68–84.

^45.National Archives of Canada, Official Report of the Manager, 5.

^46.Toronto Daily Star, August 20, 1908. Sellen's time was 26:21.2. Ten days later, Longboat lowered the record to 26:05.4 in the national championships.

^47. For example, Lou Marsh wired Toronto Daily Star, July 13, 1908: ‘Tom Flanagan writes to me from Killmallock … that Longboat was never better’.

^48.Hamilton Spectator, March 7, 1910 reported that Longboat had ‘typhoid fever’. On 1 April 1910, Toronto Daily Star reported that he had just recovered from a ‘severe cold’. After the race with Acoose, the Globe (March 28, 1910) added, ‘Longboat's trainers had no excuse for his defeat further than he was suffering from a slight cold which interferes with his breathing apparatus. The closeness of the atmosphere, coupled with the smoke which filled the building, bothered him greatly’.

^49.Globe, October 21, 1912. It was not unusual for other athletes to drop out of races with injuries. On 5 January 1910, Shrubb dropped out of a five-mile race against Fred Meadows with a sore leg. A few weeks later, he said he would not run on the boards again because they were too hard on his legs. Hamilton Spectator, January 26, 1910.

^50. Canadian mile champion John Tait once announced that he was taking six months complete rest on doctors' orders ‘because of the heavy strain that has been put on the popular athlete's heart’. Hamilton Spectator, August 23, 1910.

^51. The relationship between consumption and impairment is extremely complex for individuals and societies. That drinking does not necessarily produce drunkenness is recognized in all Canadian legislation affecting alcohol-related offences: to obtain a conviction, the police have to show that a specific amount of alcohol, generally correlated with impaired behaviour, has been consumed. In his superb study of drinking patterns in England, Harrison (Drink and the Victorians) has argued that consumption and sobriety can increase at the same time. But in Longboat's case, these considerations have never been made.

^52.Orton, Distance and Cross-Country, 21; Shrubb, Long Distance Running, 49. See also ‘Wine, Red Wine Makes Me Run – Dorando Pietri’, Toronto Daily Star, January 5, 1909.

^53.Evening Telegram, 1920, T. Flanagan's Scrapbook. Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, undated column.

^54.Lovesay, Kings of Distance.

^55.Christie, ‘Function of the Tavern’. Christie argued that the importance of the tavern as a sports centre began to decline well before the end of the nineteenth century, but Flanagan's own activities, and those of P.J. Mulqueen, who owned the Tremont House, indicated that some owners continued to stage sporting events.

^56.Canada, Revised Statutes of Canada 1906.

^57.Hamilton Spectator, May 19, 1910. Mintz sought to have the law applied evenly: if Longboat was guilty, he said, so are the innkeepers. But the vendor was charged in only one of Longboat's four arrests. In February 1910, T.A. Stewart, owner of the Queen's Hotel in Deseronto, was fined $50 for selling him a drink. Longboat was fined $5 (Hamilton Spectator, February 24, 1910).

^58.Weiler, ‘Idea of Sport’, 23.

^59.Mail and Empire, November 6, 1930. This article provides a fascinating glimpse at some of Longboat's beliefs. He recounted several examples of how medicine men helped him or his children recover from injury and illness, after ‘medical men’ (i.e. white doctors) had failed.

^60. This undated article clipping was mailed to me by Mrs F.H. Crighton, a sister of Julius Thomson, a rower on the 1908 Olympic team.

^61.Hamilton Spectator, December 9, 1947.

^62.Hamilton Spectator, February 9, 1910.

^63.Toronto Daily Star, February 16, 1912. Before the second Powderhall race, Longboat sent a handwritten postcard to the Star predicting a record. It is in the Star Library.

^64. Although Longboat dropped out of the Chicago Marathon in 1909, his appearance fee gave him more money than the winners (Toronto Daily Star, June 2, 1909). In his races against Shrubb, he insisted upon a $1000 minimum. Sometimes, as in Winnipeg on 11 November 1909, when a power failure killed the crowd, Shrub took a financial loss, but Longboat got $1000.

^65. Cited in Weiler, ‘Idea of Sport’, 27.

^66. Ironically, Longboat played a key, if unconscious, role in the CAAU's triumph over the AAF of Canada, which sought to establish open competition between amateurs and professionals. In 1908, the AAF Executive supported the American AAU's attempt to disqualify him from the Olympic Games. The patriotic outrage that erupted against it was an important factor in its sudden demise.

^67.Toronto Daily Star, April 20, 1907. By comparison, no such stipulation was made when the city honoured Bill Sherring with $400 in gold after he had won the Athens International Games marathon a year earlier. Toronto Daily Star, May 23, 1906.

^68. City of Toronto, Board of Control Communications, Min. 2416, 1907.

^69. Ibid.

^70. City of Toronto, Board of Control Minutes, November 26, 1908.

^71.Hamilton Spectator, December 15, 1909. He complained about not getting the grant for the rest of his life. See Evening Telegram, August 6, 1918 and Hamilton Spectator, December 9, 1947. In 1980, the City of Toronto paid Longboat's heirs $10,000 in recognition of the debt.

^72. City Treasurer's Annual Report, 1910.

^73. City of Toronto, Board of Control Communications, Min. 456, 1911.

^74. City Treasurer's Annual Report, 1912.

^75.News, May 17, 1910.

^76.Hamilton Spectator, May 18, 1910.

^77. Cronin, ‘Rise and Fall of Tom Longboat’. Longboat's first wife, Lauretta Maracle, remarried upon the false news of his death in France. Cronin suggested that she took a good deal of their assets. Upon his return, Longboat sued successfully for the furniture.

^78. My suggestion that Longboat chose to spend his capital on leisure is not to say that all native people, or even Onondaga, would have acted the same way in a similar situation. As the scholarly literature on the fur trade indicates, different native groups chose amounts of leisure vis-à-vis labour and trade at different times. For a useful history of native labour in the late nineteenth century, see Knight, Indians at Work.

^79.Globe and Mail, October 15, 1937.

^80.Mail and Empire, November 6, 1930.

^81. Interview, July 14, 1979. Longboat also kept up his contacts with the Hamilton sporting fraternity. He officiated at the annual Bay Race and sometimes donated a prize.

^82.Toronto Daily Star, April 20, 1907.

^83.Globe, December 28, 1908. These slurs are quoted verbatim in Eisenhardt's filmstrip, which was distributed by the National Film Board. He probably got it from Flanagan, a principal source, for it is in Flanagan's scrapbook. Longboat subsequently returned to the Longhouse religion, while Maracle emigrated to the USA and became a Mormon.

^84.Evening Telegram, 8 February 1909. Flanagan briefly served as Jack Johnson's manager in 1910 and subsequently took credit for the black boxer's championship. This racist doggerel was printed in the Telegram:

When Longboat chose twixt education

An running, as an occupation

He hesitated (half a second)

But school meant work, and racing beckoned

He said, All schooling is shinanigan

And straightway hitched himself to Flanagan.

Jack Johnson is a merry crittur

And found hard traning rather bitter

So hired a man to keep him working

And curb his tendency for shirking

He trained and trained and then began again

He hitched himself to Thomas Flanagan.

Undated clipping in Flanagan scrapbook, CSHF, Flanagan played an insignificant role in Johnson's career. In two autobiographies, Johnson mentions him but once: ‘Flannigan [sic] succeeded Little (whom Johnson fired) as acting manager’ shortly before the Jim Jeffries fight. (Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 183). Only one of Johnson's biographers mentions him – once. See Batchelor, Jack Johnson and His Times, 82. Johnson directed his own training: ‘I never maintained a particular chief trainer. I never left it to my trainers to devise methods nor did I look to them for instructions. I had worked out my own system which I believe surpasses all others, and my trainers and others were directed to follow this to the letter’ (Johnson, In the Ring and Out, 177).

^85.Toronto Daily Star, February 15, 1909.

^86. For example, when Longboat waved to the crowd in Buffalo, Marsh described him as ‘smiling like a coon in a watermellon patch’. Toronto Daily Star, January 4, 1909. He described Longboat's wife ‘as fat as butter’. Toronto Daily Star, January 25, 1909.

^87.Toronto Daily Star, July 19, 1909.

^88.Toronto Daily Star, July 30, 1907.

^89.Toronto Daily Star, April 5, 1909.

^90.Star Weekly, December 2, 1922.

^91.Toronto Daily Star, July 25, 1908.

^92. Prior to the race, the Canadian Press reported that Longboat looked very fit, but his legs were sore and his feet blistered, conditions consistent with hard training. Hamilton Spectator, July 23, 1908.

^93.Star Weekly, December 2, 1922. Wise and Fisher share this view. By 1922, Marsh and Flanagan had also forgotten their whereabouts during the Games. According to Toronto Daily Star, July 22, 1908, Longboat arrived in London from Ireland 3, not 10, days before the race.

^94.National Archives of Canada, Official Report of the Manager, 5.

^95.Toronto Daily Star, February 18, 1909.

^96.Hamilton Spectator, July 2, 1907.