When I was on the Kansas City Boxing Team we had a match with Ottawa, Ks. Our normal procedure was to weigh in, have a light lunch, then hang around the arena until the fights, which would generally start at 7 pm. When we got to Ottawa, we went into a coffee shop at an old hotel and were told the black boxers couldn’t sit in the dining room, they would have to eat in the kitchen.
At this particular match, I was the only white guy and the people who ran the restaurant wanted me to sit out in the dining room. However, I insisted on eating with the other boxers and went into the kitchen with them where they were sitting on an old wooden bench at a table reserved for the Negroes of the community.
Our next fight, we were in Wichita. This was a well publicized match held in a big auditorium and there was a full house. We weighed in and I was matched against a tough looking black fighter. Prior to my fight, one of the black fighters on Kansas City’s team came up to me and said, “Your boy thinks he’s pretty, so if you’ll keep hitting him in the face, he’ll go down.” I took my teammate’s advice, and kept jabbing him in the nose and face. Sure enough, in the second round he went down. After the referee counted him out, I walked over to where he was laying on the canvass and he spit out his mouthpiece, snarled, and said, “You got me this time, but I’m going to get you after the fights.”
We had our clothes on and were getting ready to leave the dressing room. I looked out, and there he was with his buddies. I told our coach, Bubbles Klice, who also was the boxing coach at Gateway Community Center in Kansas City, what was happening. He was reluctant to call the police, but got everyone together in the dressing room and told the other fighters that we had a problem. “They are after Hackley”, he said, “But remember who ate in the kitchen with us in Ottawa, so we are going to surround him and head for the cars.” And that we did. Eating that bowl of soup back in that old kitchen in Ottawa was one of my best decisions.
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