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He believed that skill, not race, should determine if a boxer was good. However, if Cooney won, he would have become the first Caucasian world heavyweight champion since Swede Ingemar Johansson defeated Floyd Patterson 23 years earlier. Don King called Cooney "The Great White Hope."
The great white hope" is a reference to the white boxer who many white people hoped would finally defeat Johnson. William Warren Barbour , who won the American and Canadian amateur heavyweight championship in 1910 and 1911, respectively, was "Gentleman Jim" Corbett 's choice to be "the great white hope," but Barbour declined to take up the mantle.
The outcome of the fight triggered race riots that evening—the Fourth of July—all across the United States, from Texas and Colorado to New York and Washington, D.C., Johnson's victory over Jeffries had dashed white dreams of finding a "great white hope" to defeat him. Many whites felt humiliated by the defeat of Jeffries.
The Great White Hype, a 1996 U.S. boxing sports-comedy film; World White Heavyweight Championship, a boxing title in pretense from 1911 to 1914; The White Hope (disambiguation) Great White (disambiguation)
Writer Jack London coined the phrase "Great White Hope" to describe Jeffries in his attempt to win the heavyweight crown from African-American world champion Jack Johnson in 1910. [3] Jeffries came out of retirement for the fight, urged on by London and many others who wished to see a white man once again reign as heavyweight champion. [4]
3. Jack Jefferson in ‘The Great White Hope’ (1970) In “The Great White Hope,” Jones played a Black boxer facing off against all manner of racist hostility during the 1910s.
Johnson became the first black World Heavyweight champion in 1908 which made him unpopular with the predominantly white American boxing audiences. Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion came out of retirement to fight Johnson and was nicknamed the "Great White Hope".
The Great White Hope is a 1970 American biographical romantic drama film written and adapted from the 1967 Howard Sackler play of the same name. [3] [4] [5]The film was directed by Martin Ritt, starring James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Chester Morris, Hal Holbrook, Beah Richards and Moses Gunn.