Long before Jackie Robinson crossed baseball's color line, before Jack Johnson spawned a line of Great White Hopes desperate to take the heavyweight boxing crown back from a black man, Major Taylor was setting records and fighting bigotry in one of the most popular athletic arenas of the turn of the century. The "Extraordinary" in the title of this steady biography is not just spinning wheels.

Both a world and national champion, Taylor bicycled to glory on three continents. His name on the marquee meant added revenue and attendance. In Europe, he was a superstar, and treated like one. Yet he was mocked by fellow riders in America, shunned by his sport's establishment, and died forgotten and penniless in Chicago in 1932. Part of why Taylor should be remembered is the way he reacted to the hatred he had to ride against: "I always played the game fairly and tried my hardest," he wrote in his own autobiography, which Ritchie thoroughly mines, "although I was not always given a square deal or anything like it ... I only ask from them the same kind of treatment which I give and am willing to continue to give."

Ritchie does yeoman's service in reviving Taylor's story and giving it context with a carefully studied examination of what life was like for black Americans 100 years ago. More importantly, he reaches into the muck of the past and returns with a clear picture of an endangered species: the thoroughly decent human being. --Jeff Silverman


From Publishers Weekly
Ritchie (King of the Road, etc.) presents a moving biography of Marshall W. "Major" Taylor (1878-1932), a now nearly forgotten bicycle racer who was one of the world's premier athletes. Lionized in Europe and Australia, where he defeated reigning national champions, Taylor was the victim of racism at home in the U.S. He struggled throughout his 16-year racing career to earn a living in the sport. A quiet, deeply religious manhe lost income by refusing to race on Sundayshe was popular with the public but shunned by most of his white counterparts. Taylor's success on the racetrack, we're shown, was as much a tribute to his courage as to his enormous skill. After his athletic career ended his life was a series of personal and business setbacks; he died in a Chicago welfare hospital at age 53. Ritchie's sympathetic portrait should appeal to a broader audience than cycling enthusiastsit is the story of a genuine American hero. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Marshall W. "Major" Taylor was an American world champion at the turn of the century when bicycle racing was a major spectator sport in the United States. His virtual anonymity today, says the author, can be traced to the demise of bicycle racing in this country and to Taylor's being black. Drawing on Taylor's autobiography and news accounts of his feats, Ritchie has developed a compelling account of his upbringing, racing career, and life after racing. Dying penniless at the age of 53, a lifelong victim of Jim Crowism, Taylor was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. Later exhumed, his remains were interred at a more honorable site. Recommended. Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa CityCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Independent Publisher
He was the fastest cyclist in the world. But pedal swiftly as he could, he could not overtake the racism that ruled America. His country would cheer him wildly on the race tracks and praise him in the headlines, but few doors would open to him in restaurants and hotels, and the bureaucracy of professional cycling was always changing the rules to cheat him out of his place in history. For eleven years, Major Taylor was the tum-of-the-century's greatest black athlete. Today the pages of Andrew Ritchie's biography turn to reveal an all-but-forgotten American hero. Major Taylor is largely reportage, drawn from press clippings and Taylor's own writing, but it is exceptional in its probing depth and exhaustive detail, and endearing for its sympathetic portrait of this undaunted sportsman. It is sad to consider that Taylor himself made a similar, less successful attempt at immortality in an enormous autobiography. As no publishing house would take the manuscript, he was reduce to self-publishing and pedaling his book door-to-door until his dying day. But it was just this indomitable spirit, in the face of the greatest odds-the enormous prejudice during his career and the destitute years of his retirement-that most fully characterize Major Taylor. Some of the most exciting passages in Ritchie's book come in Europe, where Taylor was treated as royalty, where peasants lined the country roads to wave on "le negre volant," and aristocrats entertained the "Black Tornado" in the great halls. The French daily cycling papers reported extensively on Taylor's career and provide Ritchie with some of his best material, including many exceptional action photos that make this a stunning volume. Ritchie draws from Taylor's privileged childhood in Indianapolis as houseboy to a local bike manufacturer, as a daredevil and acrobat entertaining the town on his wheels, and as an exceptional sprinter with legs so much like the wind that one man bet a small fortune on Taylor's future as a champion in a sport closed to blacks. In Worcester, Massachusetts, where Taylor moved to realize his dream, the book takes on a brightness brought by northern freedom. Richie gives a rare and intriguing account of black life in New England. When "the Major" finally begins his national and world tours, gamering trophies, titles, money, and more, the story takes on a breakneck excitement that is true to the sport itself and that rivals any sports biography published to date. Taylor's first major event, the sixday race-a-thon on Madison Square Garden, graphically captures the glory and the gruesomeness of competitive cycling. The final European years, 19051910, disappoint as Ritchie seems to have exhausted either energy or material. Despite this textual void, the account is sustained as it covers Taylor's transition years from superstar to ordinary man. They are sad years, frustratingly fruitless, but very much a part of the Major Taylor story. Here was a man disciplined, devout, impeccable in every way, an athlete's athlete who captured the imagination of men, women, and children. Now, nearly one hundred years after his first championship win, Major Taylor would be proud to know he is once again an American hero.


Review
"Member of an oppressed race, hero in a nation with limited historical memory, this man, who had been so well known and whose life was so interesting, has been virtually forgotten. Ritchie's book admirably recaptures the story for us."--Elliott J. Gorn, Journal of American History


Review
"A fresh insight into the life of Major Taylor. It provides a fuller appreciation of the importance of cycling at the turn of the century when Major Taylor was literally the fastest man on earth."--Arthur Ashe


Book Description
World champion at 19... One of the first black athletes to become world champion in any sport... 1-mile record holder... American sprint champion in 1898, 1899, 1900... triumphant tours of Europe and Australia... Victories against all European champions...Until now a forgotten, shadowy figure, Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor is here revealed as one of the early sports world's most stylish, entertaining, and gentlemanly personalities. Born in 1878 in Indianapolis, the son of poor rural parents, Taylor worked in a bike shop until prominent bicycle racer "Birdie" Munger coached him for his first professional racing successes in 1896. Despite continuous bureaucratic--and, at times, physical--opposition, he won his first national championship two years later and became world champion in 1899 in Montreal. This beautifully illustrated, vividly narrated, and scrupulously researched biography recreates the life of a great international athlete at the turn of the century. Based on ten years of research--including extensive interviews with Major Taylor's 91-year old daughter--this is the dramatic story of a young black man who, against prodigious odds, rose to fame and stardom in the tempestuous world of international professional bicycle racing a century ago.


About the Author
Andrew Ritchie, a social and sports historian with a special interest in the early history of the bicycle and early photography, is the author of Bicyle Racing Records: A Statistical History of the Sport. A revised editon of his highly acclaimed social and technical history of cycling, The King of the Road, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins.

FROM THE PUBLISHER