William Gildea - The Longest Fight

Joe Gans in August 1906, in Goldfield, Nevada, before his fight with Battling Nelson (The Gary Schultz Collection)

FOR MARY FRAN

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Theres always something more to the finding in the Library of Congress. Going there is about possibilities. You dont quite know where to look, what building to go to, what door to go through, what shelf to climb up to, what drawer to pull open, whom to ask. But then one day, quite by accident, you wander down a narrow carpeted hallway, and sitting behind a mahogany divider is research librarian Dave Kelly, and late in the conversation he casually says, Well, there is some film of Joe Gans . He believes its of a fight in 1906 with Battling Nelson. He tells me to go across the street and try the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, part of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, in the Madison Building, second floor.

Gans was the first African American boxing champion. Parts of his repertoire were copied by the likes of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, the young Muhammad Ali, and the young Mike Tyson. Gans, the lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908, perfected modern boxing; he was that significant a figure.

But his achievements in the ring are not foremost in this story. They frame the story. The heart of it is this: what it was like a century ago to be black in America, to be a black boxer, to be the first black athlete to successfully cross the nations gaping racial divide, to give early-twentieth-century African Americans hope, a word we hear so often today.

Some realms of Ganss story are wrapped in thick misthis parents, his childhood, his first love. Others are clear enough: The discrimination he faced as an African Americanas David Remnick has written, boxings subtext has always been Americas subtext, race; the crossover appeal he gained among whites that, in particular, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens would win three decades later to (understandably) a far greater degree, when they triumphed against a backdrop of Nazism; the inseparability of Ganss success in the ring and the constraints he faced, unfairness that sometimes waylaid him but never stopped him. The success and the discrimination are forever intertwined.

Still other parts of his life, it turns out, are recorded in amazing detail, such as the film of his fight to the finish with Battling Nelson in that time-stilled eternity under the blistering sun of the Nevada desert, in the twentieth centurys longest championship fight. The other fight goes on longer; its easier to change the language of a century ago, but it remains harder to win hearts. A century ago one could barely conceive of a black man establishing himself as the best in any walk of life, but heres one mans quest, hiding almost in plain sight, in two bulky gray canisters with the film inside.

In a darkened back room, a librarian cues them up, first one then the other, and it takes almost three hours to watch, just about the time it took for the fighters to fight, and thus are verified the blow-by-blow descriptions that newspapers printed in that era. Later, facing a computer, you combine the blur of Ganss life more than a century ago with him under the microscope of the film.

Battles had previously transpired: Napoleons, Alexanders, Hectors, Ramses, Jacobs with the angelbut here, for one of the first times, you can see whats happening and know how boxing came to mean big money: Gans and Nelson and their suffering, the men in the rings corners holding up umbrellas to shield the fighters from a desert afternoons unrelenting sun, spectators in the stands surrounding the ring. How did they reach there? By horse, mostly. Their shirts are white and pressed and they wear ties and hats with handkerchiefs draped down the back to protect their necks from the sun. The film jerks the context out of the people and the place and nails them to now.

PART ONE

If the Civil War had been fought to end slavery, then there was in the Reconstruction era, as the true political price of reunion emerged, a resurgence of racism, slavery replaced by legal racism and fierce continued suppression of the children of slaves In the new century, one of the great struggles played out would be that of black Americans struggling for full citizenship. And no arena would showcase this battle in a series of stunning and often bitterly divisive increments, or reflect the true talents of black America more clearly, than the world of sports.

David Halberstam, A Dynasty in the Making, introduction to ESPN SportsCentury, 1999

He had an unmarked face except for a modest scar above the outer corner of each eye and a small amount of puffiness below the leftremarkable for someone approaching, at minimum, his 187th professional prizefight. He was trim, with broad, sloping shoulders, but stood just 5 feet 6 inches and weighed about 140 pounds. A photograph of him taken in 1906 shows him shirtless, arms folded across his midsection, his upper body spectacularly muscled.

One August evening that year, Joe Gans rode a train deep into the Nevada desert. The newly built rail line extended south for twenty-six miles, the brief last leg of a trip that had taken him from San Franciscos East Bay up the mountains to Reno, then to a seemingly endless journey to Tonopah, Nevada, and on toward a mining boomtown called Goldfield. A group of settlers had named it three years earlier after prospectors had come upon yellowed rocks that held the promise of a great gold strike.

In thirteen years as a professional boxer, Gans had crossed the country several times by train. On different occasions he had traveled from the East Coast to fight in Oregon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. He had seen the desert. But it had never been his destination. And it never would have been except that he, like the prospectors aboard the train, was being lured across a wilderness of sand and sagebrush by a quest for wealth. They went for the gold. He went for the payday that came with defending his world lightweight championship. His glories in the ring notwithstanding, he was virtually broke.

The newspapers were predicting an epic encounter between him and Battling Nelson, a fighter succinctly and gruesomely described by Jack London as the abysmal brute. Gans and Nelson would meet on Labor Day afternoon, under the desert sun. There would be no scheduled end to the fight. It would be a fight to the finish, usually when one man dropped and stayed down until the count of ten. Fights with no prescribed end could feel, to a fighter, like an eternity. They left most scarred. More than once, a manager threw a towel into the ring because he had no doubt that the next blow would leave his fighter dead. Sometimes the towel landed too late.

Gans anticipated danger. It came with his business and his skin color. He was the first black American boxing champion, but that achievement brought him more peril than renown. The discrimination that black boxers faced reflected American life. In 1906 racial injustice was far worse than it had been three and a half decades earlier when Walt Whitman recognized the separation of races as one of the flaws that made the countrys future as dark as it is vast. Gans had received death threats throughout his career, and he wouldnt be surprised to hear from someone betting for or against him at Goldfield that he had better win or lose as directed or risk not getting out of town alive.