One hundred three years ago this weekend, Downtown Milwaukee taverns ran out of champagne when Stanley Ketchel guzzled, sprayed and bathed himself in all the bubbly he could get his hands on.
Ketchel was the middleweight boxing champion of the world then. "By turns wild, lovable, treacherous and amiable, his dominant trait was violence," wrote Peter Walsh in his history of the middleweight division, "Men of Steel." "He brutalized opponents and sparring partners alike and took pleasure in cruel practical jokes. Such disdain for others endeared him to the fight mob; here was a man after their own heart, a firebrand who hit hard, drove fast, chased women and toted a gun. They called him the 'Michigan Assassin.'"
On June 4 of that year, Ketchel fought Billy Papke – "The Illinois Thunderbolt" – in the biggest athletic event ever held in Milwaukee to that time. Papke's reputation for ferocity equaled Ketchel's, and The Milwaukee Journal reported that the city was "fight mad all day," and predicted that the Hippodrome on W. Wells St. between N. 5th and 6th Sts. (now site of the Frontier Airlines Center) "will be jammed to the doors" for the middleweight championship contest.
Special trains brought boxing fans here from all over the country. Ketchel rooters sailed across Lake Michigan on a chartered boat from Grand Rapids, his hometown. When the Hippodrome box office opened that morning, lines of customers snaked for blocks on all sides. About 3,800 of them made it inside, paying up to $10 for a ticket. According to Frank Mulkern, one of the promoters, 8,000 more were turned away. A front-page cartoon in the Milwaukee Free Press newspaper that morning showed Papke and Ketchel standing against the local skyline, while off to the side a walking keg of beer labeled "Made Milwaukee Famous" says forlornly, "Guess I had better take a back seat."
When the fighters weighed in at 3 p.m. at a W. Water St. (now N. Plankinton Ave.) saloon called The Alamo, owned by an alderman named McCoy, extra police units were called in to disperse thousands of gawkers blocking traffic in the area.
For 10 days before the fight, Ketchel trained at a resort called the Speedway on what's now Lake Drive in Whitefish Bay. Reminiscing years later, Frank Mulkern said:
"Ketchel, I believe, was the handsomest animal that ever wore boxing gloves. Women flocked after him everywhere he went. Even when training for the Papke fight he was always trailed by the beauty of the town. How he thrilled them in his workouts! He made wrecks of sparring partners. Some of them had to wear umpires' chest protectors and football helmets for protection. At times when Ketchel would cut loose he would drop his sparring partners, regardless of how they were protected."
Maybe Ketchel didn't cut loose enough. Ben Smith, sports editor of the Milwaukee Post, recalled in 1941 that the champion was so weak from the effort to make the 154-pound weight limit (today it's 160) that Ketchel "drank almost a gallon of milk punch to regain his strength" for the fight.
It did the trick. The very first punch Ketchel threw, a right hand, knocked Papke down. "That took some of the steam out of me," the Thunderbolt admitted afterwards. "Had I been as careful as I ought to have been, Ketchel would not have slipped that over on me." After 10 pretty torrid rounds, Ketchel won the decision.
(In a rematch three months later in California, when the Ketchel reached out to shake hands at the opening bell, Papke clocked him with a right hand. Ketchel beat the count but never recovered, and Papke stopped him in the twelfth. There was no pre-fight handshake in the November rubber match. "You'll be shaking hands with the undertaker when this is over," snarled Ketchel. "I am going to cut you to pieces for 10 rounds and in the 11th I'll hit you so hard you won't get up." Which is how it went.)
"Milwaukee has seen some tough fights and some tough fighters," wrote George E. Phair in the Milwaukee Sentinel the next morning, "but never a fight as tough as last night's, nor a fighter as tough as Stanley Ketchel."
Returning to the Speedway afterwards, Ketchel ordered a bathtub full of champagne. A famous actress of the time was Anna Held, mistress of Broadway impresario Florence Ziegfeld. The story was that she dunked herself in gallons of fresh milk every day to condition her skin. "No French actress can show up a Yankee fighter like me," yelled Ketchel as he splashed in the fizz. "I'll spend $200 any time for a champagne bath."
That was nothing compared to the next night when Ketchel had his official victory party at the College Inn, on N. 2nd St. and Grand (now Wisconsin) Ave. There he blew an additional $2,700 -- more than most wage slaves made in a whole year -- of his $7,000 fight purse on more champagne. For a while he sat soaking his feet in a vat of it, and then got down to serious imbibing and hijinks.
More than 50 years later, a Milwaukeen named Doc O'Donnell, who was at the party that night, recalled the scene:
"You never saw so much champagne in your life. What wasn't consumed was sprayed and dashed all over the place. Ketchel alone must have taken four or five bottles, shaken them up, and directed them at whoever happened to come in. Everybody got into the spirit of it. The College Inn finally ran out of champagne and sent an SOS to every downtown place, John Koerner's, Joe Orstine's, Fat Lawler's, I know, for more. The party lasted until seven in the morning."
Other revelers made more traditional use of the free-flowing booze than Ketchel, and Sentinel sportswriter Phair must've gone repeatedly to that bottomless well. There is no other plausible explanation for his reaction when the man anointed by the Free Press as "the greatest piece of fighting machinery at his weight that the world has ever known" gave him a playful cuff on the noggin. The indignant Phair stood up, removed his coat and told Ketchel: "You may be the champion of the world, but I am champion of this joint and I am going to prove it. Come outside and fight it out!"
Fortunately for Phair, Ketchel just laughed it off. Phair went on to a long, prosperous life (and fame as a writer of baseball stories and verse), but Ketchel did not. On October 15, 1910, a man who claimed that the handsomest animal that ever wore boxing gloves had messed around with his wife shot the Michigan Assassin dead.
