Joe Gans Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1. A Marvel of the Ring

  2. Battle Royal

  3. Boxing in 1900 Baltimore

  4. Ghosts in the House

  5. Straight Hitting

  6. Saving an Eye, Losing a Title

  7. Fixed Fight in Chicago

  8. Long Road Back

  9. Bringing Home the Bacon

  10. Defending the Championship: A Gentleman and a Gladiator

  11. Stolen Title

  12. Boxing Moves West

  13. Forays at Welterweight

  14. Epic Battle in the Nevada Desert

  15. The White Plague

  16. A Dream Deferred, A Dream Realized

  17. Good Night, Sweet Prince: Fighting in the Shadow of Death

  18. The Old Master's Legacy

  19. In the Words of Peers and Scholars

  20. Final Rounds

  Epilogue: Boxing's Continued Popularity

  Appendix: Ring Record

  Chapter Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  Joe Gans

  A Biography of

  the First African American

  World Boxing Champion

  COLLEEN AYCOCK and

  MARK SCOTT

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Aycock, Colleen.

  Joe Gans : a biography of the first African American world boxing champion / Colleen Aycock and Mark Scott.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7864-3994-2

  1. Gans, Joe. 2. Boxers (Sports)—United States— Biography. 3. African American boxers—Biography. I. Scott, Mark. II. Title.

  GV1132.G33A93 2008

  796.83092—dc22[B] 2008038572

  British Library cataloguing data are available

  ©2008 Colleen Aycock and Mark Scott. All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  On the cover: Joe Gans, 1898 (From the supplement to

  The National Police Gazette, Vol. LXXIII, No. 1098)

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

  www.mcfarlandpub.com

  Acknowledgments

  Our deepest gratitude to the following people and institutions: Dave Wallace, Colleen’s husband, for his technical help and the many trips he made to Baltimore; Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the H.L. Mencken Collection and the wonderful staff in the Maryland Room and the newspaper archives at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland; Archivist Ryan Flahive of the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona; Francis P. O’Neill of the Maryland Historical Society; Karla Lund of Miles City, Montana; Stephanie Jacqueney and Daria Fessack of Madison Square Garden; Erin Tikovitsch of the Chicago History Museum; Jacquie Greff of Baltimore; Angela Haag, Allen Metscher and Eva La Rue of the Central Nevada Museum; Sgt. Micki Knight of Esmeralda County, Nevada; the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History; boxing historians, Monte Cox, Tracy Callis, Thomas Scharf, Harry Shaffer and Dan Somrack. Your research, your insights, and your valuable time made this project possible.

  Quotations from the writing of H. L. Mencken on Joe Gans used by permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of Mr. Mencken’s literary bequest to that library.

  Preface

  Here we take the bold and willing reader into the life and times of Joe Gans, the first black American sports champion and the greatest boxer who ever lived. When the idea of a biography about the man called the “Old Master” surfaced, we were surprised that one had not already been written.

  We had worked together in business and as co-authors in several offbeat fiction-writing ventures before we began research on this heartfelt subject. Both of us had a tremendous respect for the practitioners of the manly art. Mark achieved notice as a silver and golden glover in his younger days, and Colleen’s father was a professional fighter in the hardscrabble days of the Depression. The time in which Gans fought, the Gay Nineties and Ragtime eras, considered the golden age of pugilism by the old boxers, held a special allure for us.

  With the popularity of sport biographies, especially those of record-setting athletes, we wondered why there were no modern accounts of Joe Gans. Nat Fleischer, boxing historian emeritus and founder of The Ring magazine, had written in the 1930s an account of Gans along with other black boxers’ ring exploits in Black Dynamite, but so many questions about Gans’ life remained a mystery. When someone talks of “straight hitting” or “bringing home the bacon” they are using phrases coined by the Old Master, yet hardly anyone today recognizes his name. The questions we kept asking ourselves initially were: Why was this all-time great boxer always relegated to the footnotes of history? Why is Gans’ ring record so consistently misrepresented? And more importantly, what happened to make his story so invisible to the world today? With all the coverage of the great “fights of the century,” there is little recognition for the first one, the epic Goldfield battle.

  Gans’ memory seemed a ghost haunting the lore of the fistic world for generations, with his name only associated with the great fixed-fight scandal that caused the banning of boxing in Chicago for a quarter century. Yet the truly great fighters throughout history all remembered Gans with a sense of awe. Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, even “The Greatest” himself, Muhammad Ali, spoke in reverence of “the days of Joe Gans.” John L. Sullivan himself remarked how “Gans could lick them all on their best days.” A few months of initial research convinced us that bringing the incredible story of the Baltimore Marvel to light would benefit more than just boxing historians. His saga was an essential piece of Americana, and it deserved a better place in the annals of American history.

  Joe Gans was a member of the first generation of champion boxers under the Marquis of Queensberry rules (the era following the bare-knuckles melees inherited from “auld England”). Gans’ pugilistic career coincided with the heyday of more recognizable ring stars, such as John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries, and Kid McCoy, when the professional sport began in the late nineteenth century. Gans’ name is seldom mentioned with this illustrious group. He was a “colored” fighter, the first American-born black to hold a world title of any sort, and his road to recognition was arduous.

  We set Gans’ amazing life story in the context of American culture when boxing was the most popular sport and its champions were the rock stars of the age, appearing in the ring, on the vaudeville stage, and even as the first movie stars. (Edison’s first film was of a boxing match between two of Gans’ contemporaries.) At the turn of the century, prizefighting was the world’s richest sport. Gans’ championship contest in 1906 in Goldfield was promoted as the “Fight of the Century” with the largest purse of its time, a match with racial overtones that pitted the world’s best black boxer against a white champion. It was the longest gloved-championship bout in history, the longest ever captured by Edison’s new invention, the motion picture, and the match that accelerated Gans’ eventual decline in health. Yet few know anything about the famous fight that gave Tex Rickard his start (he was the promoter of “million-dollar-gate” fame who later turned Madison Square Garden into the boxing capital of the world).

  Gans was orphaned at the age of four, took a menial job at the Baltimore Harbor, and was discovered when a gambler witnessed his boxing prowess in a “battle royal,”
a popular, brutal racist spectacle of the age. He spent 18 years boxing, working his way up the professional ladder against tremendous obstacles in Jim Crow America. Fighting his way out of total poverty, he survived physical assaults, a stolen title, bankruptcy, and numerous, well-orchestrated attempts to destroy his reputation. Even at death’s doorstep, he fought to earn enough money to leave his family financially secure. With his purse from the “Greatest Fight of the Century” (which, because he was black, was less than that of the loser, who was white) he built the Goldfield Hotel in Baltimore, a precursor to the Cotton Club and the venue that gave the great Eubie Blake his musical start.

  We have researched the accounts of his fights from turn-of-the-nineteenth-century newspapers in the cities where he fought and early twentieth-century books mentioning these events for their eyewitness reportage. The actual on-the-scene dispatches telegraphed during each of Gans’ major fights are included in our book. We set these reports against the backdrop of the fin de siècle controversies that occasioned the Old Master’s life: such as when Gans lost the fixed fight in Chicago that caused boxing to be banned in the state of Illinois and nearly ended his career; or his struggle when his title was stolen through a flim-flam typical of the era; or the greatest fight of his career that mesmerized the entire world, the 42-round fight at Goldfield, Nevada.

  Because of Gans’ amazing physical abilities, the number of his knockouts, championship wins, and mastery in three weight divisions, along with his gentlemanly character, he was touted well into the 1940s as the “greatest boxer ever” and one of the world’s greatest athletes. Gans was the first athlete to break the color barrier and to destroy the myth about blacks and the “yellowstreak.” As a pioneer for civil rights, he paved the way for other twentieth century black heroes. Philosophers and preachers (founders of the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the NAACP) held him up as an example of what talented black men could achieve.

  The title of a biography printed recently on Sugar Ray Robinson calls Robinson the “First Celebrity Athlete.” Gans in his day was a world-renowned champion and celebrity. The general public may know a little about the history of boxing from movies such as Cinderella Man and documentaries such as Unforgivable Blackness, but few know the history of boxing in its golden age as Gans lived it, or his rags-to-riches story. Most people believe Jack Johnson to be the first black title-holder. But Gans was already considered the “Old Master” when Johnson selected Gans as his trainer for his famous fight in Reno against Great White Hope, Jim Jeffries (facts that Johnson biographers do not note). Gans was so seriously ill that he missed the fight and died one month afterwards. In telling Gans’ inspiring story, we want to set the record straight and restore his rightful place in history.

  A statue commemorates Gans today in Madison Square Garden. World famous artist George Bellows captured his right hook in a painting permanently displayed in the National Gallery, and Gans’ ring techniques are still being taught in the boxing gyms today. Yet few people, other than dedicated boxing fans, have ever heard his name. In this book we seek to re-establish Gans’ amazing legacy as the father of modern scientific boxing and the greatest fighter ever to lace on the gloves.

  Albeit tragic, Gans’ story is an American success story, and provides an insight into American history during an epoch when racism held dominion and the White Death of tuberculosis cut men down in the prime of their lives. It is impossible to understand the development of American character without knowing the man Joe Gans. It is our hope that this work will fill a void in the annals of sport and cultural history, in a time when prize fighters were the real-life heroes of the Wild West—the history of which lies hidden between the lines of old newspapers and has been passed down from generation to generation, mainly via word of mouth

  1

  A Marvel of the Ring

  Before Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray, or Joe Louis, even before Jack Johnson’s heavyweight reign inspired the “Great White Hope” hue and cry, there was the great Joe Gans. The first American born black to hold a world title, Gans paved the way for the many African-American sports champions of the twentieth century. In the Monumental City of Baltimore, during an epoch nestled between the American Civil War and the Great War of 1914, lived a gladiator whose equal the world has yet to see. He rose from nothing to become the greatest fighter ever to grace the ring, worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of immortal athletes. During his amazing career, Joe Gans was referred to reverentially by virtually all of the boxing community as the “Old Master.” Yet this splendid athlete, the first to raise his sport to the level of true artistry, is all but forgotten today. In 1904 the newspapers lightheartedly complained that Gans was more famous and received more press coverage than Booker T. Washington and the other black leaders of the time, but by the second half of the twentieth century, Gans was virtually unknown, invisible to history.

  During the years he reigned supreme in the world of boxing, he was perhaps the most famous athlete in the world. The great ebony warrior worked his way up the championship ladder, fighting for two decades during a golden age of boxing beginning in the Gay Nineties. The coming of the twentieth century was filled with promise, yet the decade still witnessed on average one lynching of American blacks every three days.1 Life expectancy for a black male at the time was 34 years, 14 years less than for a white male.2 Gans’ brilliant life lasted only 35 years. He died four years after the first great “Fight of the Century,” the story of which filled more news space in 1906 than the coverage of the San Francisco earthquake.

  That year would host several pivotal events in American life and mark a turning point in American culture. The California earthquake of April 18, 1906, the murder of the nation’s greatest architect, Stanford White, over the girl in the red velvet swing, and the Atlanta Race Riot, the largest in Atlanta history, grabbed the headlines. The Jungle and The Shame of the Cities, exposing the deplorable conditions of the factories and overcrowded slums, topped the best-sellers’ lists. Two brilliant thinkers with opposing views on how to achieve progress for black Americans were prominent in the world of ideas. Booker T. Washington espoused industrial education while W.E.B. Du Bois’ book The Souls of Black Folk presented a poignant longing for basic rights.

  Through his ring accomplishments, Gans put into action what others could only theorize. The articulation of the black quest for social equality reached large audiences through the pulpits, and the most authoritative sermons were published in newspapers and religious quarterlies. One of the most recognized and influential men of the cloth, the Reverend Francis J. Grimke of Washington, D.C., speaking in his famous discourse after the great “Fight of the Century” noted, “It is generally conceded ... that Booker T. Washington has done much good and will do much for the colored race for its uplifting, its education, for making its members citizens in a true sense of the word; but with all that, in the entire course of his life work he never did one-tenth to place the black man in the front rank as a gentleman as has been done by Joe Gans.”3 The famous fighter became more than a historic sports phenomenon that fateful year—he became a cultural icon.

  Joe Gans, the “Old Master.”

  On Labor Day 1906, despite a multitude of important events, the eyes and ears of the world were tuned to a boxing match in Goldfield, Nevada. An obscure promoter named Tex Rickard devised a scheme to help populate the nearly empty state of Nevada and infuse millions of dollars into the economy of the little known town of Goldfield. He would bring together a pit bull of a man, the Durable Dane, Battling Nelson, with a legendary ring warrior, the Old Master, Joe Gans.

  Before the fight the Durable Dane boasted, “There will be crepe in Coontown on Labor Day while the Danish descendants are celebrating.”4 American industrial and political royalty, as well as the wealthy citizenry of San Francisco, displaced by the earthquake from their accustomed entertainment venues, would brave temperatures of over 100 degrees in the blistering high-desert sun to watch the most anticipated mano a mano since Achil
les fought Hector the Trojan. The result captivated the nation in 1906.

  Gans was no stranger to the spotlight. He had climbed a steep mountain since losing one of the most controversial fights in the history of pugilism in 1900, in his first title bout against the great lightweight champion of the time, Frank Erne. For eleven rounds the two fighters lashed out with lightning combinations, blocked and moved gracefully, the ebb and flow favoring first Erne, then Gans, who seemed in control going into the fateful 12th round.

  In the years to come much would be written about the calamity that happened next and its far-reaching ramifications. About the Old Master one scribe would write, “His face carries the sorrow of his people, he has the saddest eyes.”5 Above his left eye could be seen the deep, wide scar from the wound he was about to receive.

  For many fighters of Gans’ day, their Sunday punch was really an elbow or head-butt. And so it was for Erne in this fight. Imagine the smooth upward arc of a professional bowler’s throw, only instead of rolling the ten-pound ball down the lane, he crashes it into your eye socket at high speed. That is what it was like for Gans when Erne fouled him with a head-butt in the 12th round. So badly mangled was his ocular that the ringside doctor had to work frantically to replace his eye in its socket. But the “unkindest cuts of all” came from the journalists and later historians: “Black boy doesn’t like the gaffe.” “Gans quits.”6 In recent times Gans would either have won the title on a foul or on points if the head-butt were ruled an accident. Instead, he was accused of cowardice when the fight was stopped. What had brought Gans so close to the top of the mountain, and why were some so eager to knock him back down? More importantly, how did he finally ascend to greatness?