Francis White

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Francis White was, perhaps, one of the more shocking of early Fight victors. He was a weaker man than most of the other fighters, but an exceedingly well-educated one. The White family, scholars by tradition, were British, and Francis had been expected to follow in their footsteps. Trained in the art of observation due to his hobby of birdwatching, he was also adept at the gentlemanly skills of boxing and fencing, albeit only as an amateur. His manliness, however, was challenged in the year 1853 by an Irish brickworker, Tristan Macquerie, who was a veteran of the first three Fights, albeit never a high-ranking one.

Stung by the accusation, the young Francis challenged Tristan to any contest he desired...and the brickworker, looking to teach the man a lesson, chose to send his foe to the next Fight. Francis readily accepted, not even knowing what he was getting into. He continued his studies unawares until the month of the 1854 Fight, when he went to the Crandall Farm, and discovered he would have to fight 2,999 other men.

Determined, however, to win, he immediately set about observing them, putting the skills learned from his long years of watching avian fauna to the test, and discovered that many men had exploitable weaknesses. Using this knowledge and his natural charisma to gather a small cadre of fighters to his side, he eliminated several fighters on Day One who survived the initial scrum. On Day Two, he chose to grant his turkey to his fifteen-man 'army,' using the time to observe them and the other survivors. By the end of the meal and the year's Entertainment, he had formulated a plan. Sending his men against various opponents that night, he whittled down his foes and his own men, until, on the dawn of Day 3, five men still stood in the Acres: Francis, Edwin Rose, Tristan (whom Francis had made of point of keeping in the Fight) and two Maine-born factory workers whose names are lost to history. Utilizing Rose's love of food, Francis distracted him with a watermelon and then defeated him with a quick strike to the back of the neck, causing him to choke on the watermelon and fall unconscious, although he survived. In the meantime, one of the factory workers had fallen to his fellow, who was defeated by Tristan. Francis, in his memoirs (the source of all the information provided above), states that the two stood for ten minutes, facing each other, before Francis asked, "Do you, sir, retract your comment?" The Irish brickworker declined to, making a statement that Francis was "too mortified to record here, beyond stating that it involved the marital relations of my mother." Francis sighed, took a stance directly from the Marquis of Queensbury's famous rules...and utilized a weakness he had seen earlier in the day: Tristran had a bad knee from the first day. As the brickworker overconfidently charged, Francis neatly sidestepped, delivering a powerful blow to the knee, and as his foe fell to the ground in pain, he began to tap dance on the man's back, punctuating every step with a word, which he describes thusly: "'Do' tap 'you,' tap 'sir,' tap 'and' tap 'I' tap 'use' tap 'the' tap 'word' tap 'loosely,' tap 'retract' tap 'your' tap 'comment?' tap."

Between the pain in his leg and the man dancing painfully on his back, it was all Tristan could do to say 'yes' before collapsing. The injuries to his back were, as Francis was a full-grown man, if not overmuscled, great, and it was not until the move to the Acres that Tristan was able to rejoin the fight. Francis White was declared the Champion, and he proudly returned to England and his studies, eventually becoming a professor of natural science and biology at Oxford and publishing his memoirs ten years later, entitled "The Experiences and Tribulations of a Gentleman." He became mildly famous in his home for his avid support of the theories of Charles Darwin, later in life, and his standing challenge to any other men that thought him not manly to face him in combat. His reputation ensured he was never taken up on this, and he died quietly in bed in the year 1934.

[edit] Record

• 1854 - Champion, Last Man Standing