Canada Lee

I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Canada Lee. A brand of jeans, a drink, or some kind of scarf?

In truth, Canada Lee was an amazing human being who in his just forty five years of life excelled in four entirely different callings: an accomplished musician, a world class jockey, a championship boxer, and a star of the screen and stage.

Born March 3, 1907, Lee was only seven when he began studying violin and piano with the composer and educator J. Rosamond Johnson. At age eleven he made his concert debut at the prestigious 1,100 seat Aeolian Hall in New York City. He was clearly destined for greatness.

But when he was fourteen, with no word of explanation, he put away his violin and left home to become a jockey. How good was he? In his first race he came second, in his second race he came first, and ultimately rode in the Kentucky Derby, in those days highly unusual for a black man, and a kid, at that.

But two years of that was enough for him, and at age sixteen he walked away from the horses and returned home. Unsure of what to do next, he listened to the advice of a friend who told him that he’d be a good boxer. He entered the ring where he won ninety of his one-hundred fights as an amateur, as well as the national amateur lightweight title. Having proved himself as an amateur, he turned professional and, according to New York Times records, fought some two hundred matches, losing only twenty-five of them. He was never knocked out, and was floored only three times in his career.

The ring, however, exacts its own high costs and Canada Lee was not to be spared. In one fight he took a crashing blow which detached the retina of an eye. Although he could have afforded the best medical treatment and would almost certainly have recovered, he avoided dealing with it because he thought that admitting to vision loss would impact his boxing career. His vision steadily began to deteriorate to the point of total blindness in that eye. Unsurprisingly, what he feared is what happened. At age twenty-six, the vision loss forced him to walk away from the ring with little more to show than the winnings of the last fight.

At this point, and without much joy, Canada Lee went back to music to make a living, putting together a small dance band that played in obscure venues. He opened his own dance club, The Jitterbug, which went out of business after six months.

Now what? At age twenty seven, his mother said, “Get a job.” So in the middle of the Great Depression, Canada Lee set out to get a job.

In those days, the YMCA offered an employment agency, and Canada Lee showed up to apply for a laborer position. The lineups were eternal, so he sat in a corner and watched a theatrical audition in progress. As life happens, the playwright recognized the former boxer and invited him to try out. He won a supporting role in Brother Mose, and with the troupe toured the boroughs of New York, playing in various public venues. Later that year, he was invited to play in the Theatre Union’s Stevedore playing Broadway, then touring Detroit and Chicago.

Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But it’s absolutely true. Look it up for yourself.

The next year, Lee encountered Orson Welles. Legend has it this occurred when Lee broke up a fight between Welles and a group of street punks outside a theatre where Lee was performing, but we’re not sure. What we do know is that Lee played Banquo in Welles’ African-American version of Macbeth, but only after Welles had led his team in practice again and again and again, for nearly a year.

Thereafter, Lee took the lead in Welles’ production of Native Son, and had lead roles in a variety of hit movies and plays, including Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and as boxing star Ben Chaplin in Polonsky’s Body and Soul.

As he became confident as an actor, Lee realized that this, at last, was what he was born to do. “All my life I’ve been on the verge of something. I’m almost becoming a concert violinist and I run away to the races. I’m almost a good jockey and I go overweight. I’m almost a champion prizefighter and my eyes go bad. Now I’ve got it, now I’ve got what I’m going to be.” Lee became the consummate professional, joyous and confidant. Now Giftings were sealed with passion.

Sadly, the story has an unhappy ending. Throughout his acting career, Lee stood up for racial equality and championed causes and social issues which put him on the wrong side of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Blacklisted as a “Communist”, Canada Lee’s career was effectively destroyed. Broken and in despair, he died at age forty-five, penniless.

Canada Lee’s life can be celebrated as an amazing story of bounteous Giftings, but it also gives us insight that Giftings alone don’t produce success. You can be really, really, really good at a number of things, gifted, to be sure. But it’s only when you find the Giftings that give you meaning, satisfaction, joy, and a sense of purpose that you learn to fly.

(Canada Lee was not named for the country. Rather, it seems that a boxing-ring announcer had trouble pronouncing Lee’s birth name, “Canegata”, so announced him as “Canada Lee”. The young boxer liked the sound of it and adopted it as his lifetime professional name.)