Twenty-five years ago, I was waiting my turn in the barber’s chair as four or five men sat around the barbershop and debated this question: “Who was the best fighter ever?”

Each man took his turn firing verbal roundhouses at it. Their argument, bobbing and weaving every which way, was one that no one ever wins. To win is impossible. For what yardstick can you use to measure Joe Louis against, say, Henry Armstrong, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Roberto Duran, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Muhammad Ali or “Pretty Boy” Floyd Mayweather?

You can’t find one, so why bother?

As I listened to these men argue loudly — the way black folk tend to argue — I never heard any one of them speak up on behalf of Jack Johnson. Their slight of Johnson didn’t exactly hit me like a left hook to the solar plexus. After all, none of the men in the barbershop that afternoon was older than 35. So outside of hearsay and myth, what could they really have known about Johnson?

Not much. And that’s the pity.

Even today, a much-acclaimed PBS documentary about his life later, he’d fare not a bit better in a barbershop debate. No black champion has been as discounted as Johnson — or as forgotten. No man in the sport endured as much racism and ridicule to achieve his success as he did, and no fighter from boxing’s yesteryear deserves to be remembered more than he does, not if history matters to us.

Indeed, history does matter to me, because Johnson was one of the first athletes of color I discovered as a boy in the 1960s.

Like Jesse Owens, Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson, Johnson is somebody that blacks nowadays ought to re-discover, for few pro athletes embody the soul of a people any better than Johnson.  In the face of death threats, he forged ahead unafraid of the thing that worries us overly much: what white people think of us.  Johnson never cared; he was too preoccupied with just being Jack Johnson.  That turned into a task too large for a battalion of men to handle.

In a white world that wanted to write all the rules, Johnson fit in the way Yao Ming would fit into a Yugo.  In some people’s minds, it might have seemed wiser if Johnson had at least tried. Since he didn’t, he found himself labeled an enigma, a man whom blacks and whites hoped would vanish like the Queen of Spades in three-card monte. But labeling Johnson an enigma is to disrespect people who march to their own bandleader.

We always stand poised to slap a tag on things that perplex us.  That can often look like an easier course than trying to find some understanding.  And perhaps, in Johnson’s case, no understanding could readily be found. No one might have even tried had Johnson not captured the grandest prize in sports: the heavyweight champion’s belt.

At the dawn of the 20th century, decades before fighters like Louis, Ali, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, no black man had ever worn the title around his waist, and white America wasn’t about to stand idle and let this symbol of its athletic superiority rest long around a black man’s belly.  Whites would bend and reshape their rules to keep their championship away from men like Johnson, Denver Ed Martin or Sam McVey.

But you have to admire Johnson, or any other man, for keeping his focus on a prize.  For two years, he chased Tommy Burns, badgering the Canadian into acting like a champion.  You can’t claim to be the best, Johnson told anybody who’d pay him any mind, if you haven’t beaten the best — him.

On Dec. 26, 1908, he finally got Burns inside the ring and proved his boasts were grounded in reality. Johnson, sneering in glee, punched Burns without pity from Round 1 to Round 14, and if his trainer had thrown in the towel and yelled “Stop the fight?” his cry would have been misunderstood.  The cops had to stop it.  For this was no fight, not in the boxing sense of the word.  The sports world had never seen as one-sided a championship match as this one.

Turn-of-the-century America, however, refused to accept this black Texan as its champion. As bigoted author Jack London wrote: “But one thing remains. (Retired champ James) Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face.”  What troubled white people like London most was how Johnson wore their title.  His grin, his arrogance and his insatiable hunger for the high life riled them, and his penchant for loving their women fanned their racism.  Their anger boiled over into racial violence and murder in cities across the United States, and it led to the first search for a “Great White Hope.”

And what did Johnson think of this search?

Not a thing.

By all accounts, Johnson had figured out how to live life on his terms, not on theirs. He never sided with convention, even though that might have been the predictable course. He argued gladly and openly with his detractors, black and white.  He once claimed that he’d made more than $1.5 million in the ring, and he bragged about how he’d spent his money foolishly on the horses, on a mouthful of gold teeth, on fast, flashy cars and on even faster, flashier flappers.

“There have been countless women in my life,” he once said. “They have participated in my triumphs and suffered with me in my moments of disappointments … they have praised me and loved me and they have hated and denounced me.”

Among those countless women, he slept with one who would prove his undoing.  Since white society couldn’t find its “Great White Hope” quickly enough, it did one thing that brothers everywhere are all too familiar with: It sicced the legal system on Johnson.

At the time, America had Jim Crow laws that discouraged black men from — how might I put it? — bedding white women.  These anti-miscegenation statutes were, in part, Draconian measures designed to maintain the remnants of slavery. Johnson, though, never let these laws sate his appetite for white flesh. Consequently, he found himself ensnared in their legal web, a former lover helping set the trap.  Rather than turn and twist in our injustice system, he fled to Europe.  He left behind few people to argue his side. His rainbow coalition of critics simply said good riddance, for they always viewed Arthur John “Jack” Johnson, the son of a slave, as the worse kind of niggah: loud, profane, unfit to wear a heavyweight champion’s belt.

But I’m not one of Johnson’s critics.  I’ll make no rash judgments about his condescending smile or his love of white flesh (he ain’t the lone brother who’s hit that spot).  I will point out that it took testicular fortitude to cross that racial divide in the early part of the 20^th century. Yet what I have come to admire most about the man is his unflagging desire to enjoy his life.

Against this backdrop of hatred, deceit and bigotry, Johnson remained steadfast in his love for his homeland.  He wouldn’t let white Americans rob him of that love.  They could take his money, his freedom and his livelihood, but they couldn’t take his self-styled principles. He returned to the United States even though he knew he’d face time behind bars. In coming home, Johnson proved he wasn’t the sort of man white people could saddle like a black stallion and ride wherever they wanted. His kind of inner strength is a rare quality in a man, and Johnson was a rarity. Yet he’d have been the same rarity even had he been born a Martian. But he is ours — someone for us to remember.

So I’d caution against dismissing Johnson as a grotesque parody of an athlete, a man of no real stature. For contrary to what his harshest critics might contend, he was more than a “happy darkie.” He was not a vaudeville sideshow with no redeeming social conscious, nor was he somebody with no proud legacy for other men of color to grab hold of.

As we dissect the man’s life, we don’t have to greet its excesses with high-fives, for that might be too unseemly. But we should be sage enough to embrace this strong, defiant black man for a trait that too few of his kinsmen possess: the willingness and the unshakable resolve to look into the white world’s eyes and not flinch.  To do that today is to show that we are black men who understand the cards the game of life has on the table.  It is a more winnable game, as Johnson, a self-defined man, demonstrated for his brethren of color, when we are the players shuffling the deck.

For that reason alone, we should be grateful to Jack Johnson, even as we sit around the barbershop and muse on what place, if any, to rank him on our list of great fighters.