By Eric Bottjer

We’ve been lied to about the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns fight, the historic match held the day after Christmas in Sydney, Australia, where Johnson became the first black man to win the world heavyweight championship, spurring a frantic search for a “Great White Hope.” For the last 60 years, our knowledge of the fight was based largely on the footage presented by Big Fights, Inc., specifically Jim Jacobs (best known as a young Mike Tyson’s co-manager), who found the footage that survives today.

Jacobs, who first showed the nearly 12 surviving minutes in England in 1962, released a Jack Johnson documentary in 1970 with his found Johnson-Burns footage, which showed the opening round and portions of various rounds leading to the fateful 14th. His film version ends with Burns seemingly on his way to the canvas. Jacobs explained the police forced the cameramen to stop, as it would have been too much for a white audience in 1908 to see a black man stand victorious over a white heavyweight champion.

His presentation was false. Jacobs never owned the opening rounds or the latter rounds. He never saw the ending (and neither have we). Where the Big Fights version stops, Burns never actually was knocked down. Jacobs is no longer with us, but fight film buffs speculate he fibbed about the content to create the illusion he had two important parts of the original film: the beginning and the end.

Even Ken Burns got it wrong. His fine PBC documentary on Johnson’s life, Unforgivable Blackness, shows what purports to be a portion of the opening round, where Johnson decks Burns. Which does happen in the fight (Burns is down four times during various parts of the match), but the knockdown shown is from the 7th round. And Big Fights’ version, which claims the film stops when Burns is on his way to the canvas – that also is a 7th-round clip.

The proof is on Youtube, released two days ago by film collector Carl Weingarten, who revealed the above, along with the fascinating story of the Johnson-Burns fight film and its journey to modern-day myth, on his YouTube page FightFilmsGuy (you can watch this mini-documentary here: Jack Johnson -vs- Tommy Burns 1908 | HD Documentary Lost Footage).

There is an appetite for old fight films on YouTube. Weingarten’s documentary hit 37,000 views in less than 48 hours. Weingarten’s version is a cleaner version of what you have seen in the past (if, in fact, you’ve ever watched Johnson-Burns clips). He’s cleaned up the footage he owns (the footage is from the same surviving reel of the fight others have shown at various times, such as Jacobs’ footage), a meticulous process that is much like cleaning up an old photograph.

Such work takes months. Weingarten used digital editing software on each frame, which maximizes contrast, lighting and sharpness, without using artificial intelligence for enhancements. The Johnson-Burns fight was shot on 35 mm film and the men doing the actual filming used hand-crank cameras, resulting in footage that sometimes looks spliced and off-speed (such filming resulted in 12-20 frames per second being shot – men had to hand-crank their cameras. Modern film is shot at 24 frames per second).

The original Johnson-Burns production was two hours, including pre-fight training footage, the entire fight and post-fight scenes of the boxers being paid. Johnson and Burns even shook hands for the camera afterward. It was the first fight film that featured footage outside the actual fight. The boxers were paid 10 percent on top of their purses (Burns added $3,000 to his total, Johnson $500) for promoter Hugh McIntosh to own the rights and distribute the film worldwide. The film was shown worldwide throughout 1909 and grossed about $70,000, split between McIntosh and the film production company.

There is another restored version of Johnson-Burns online which is definitely worth a gander, but this also has some artificial enhancements which might turn off some historians. Weingarten, a Bay Area professional musician with his own production company, is a purist. He has zoomed in at times, on his newly released version, but “there are no added effects,” he says.

Weingarten knew there was an untold story with the Johnson-Burns fight film when Jacobs’ version didn’t coincide with actual ringside fight reports. “The mythology was accepted and passed down,” he says. He noted that Jacobs documentary relied heavily on Johnson’s story of the fight. “He (Johnson) was an exaggerator, to say the least,” says Weingarten.

What’s wonderful about this new minidocumentary is that it corrects a false narrative of a historic fight. And it shows us a cleaner (and accurate) version of it. What’s even better is that we’ll see more vivid fight films in the future from ancient battles like Johnson-Burns. The technology that allows such film restoration improves by the day. The Johnson-Burns footage that you’ll see five years from now will be a much better version than what Weingarten released this week.

Weingarten’s FightFilmsGuy Youtube page has cleaned up versions of Johnson-Stanley Ketchel, Jack Dempsey-Luis Firpo, Ketchel-Billy Papke, Battling Siki-Georges Carpienter and various other old-time matches. More modern films include Joe Frazier-Jerry Quarry 1 and Sugar Ray Robinson-Joey Archer. He has 78 films up on his page with more to come – Weingarten has been a film collector for 50 years.