By the late eighteen hundreds houses in the district could be purchased for a few hundred dollars. Attics atop the row houses were converted into upstairs living quarters and embellished to look more Victorian than Federal. Then, as now, the area was a mix of commercial and residential buildings. At night, the “novalux,” or hydrogen gaslight, illuminated the many taverns and their keepers’ residences on the upper levels. Much of this district would be saved from the destruction of the Great Fire of 1904 in Baltimore and also from an ill-advised network of freeways in the 1970s.10 And so, visitors to the historic district today can see the glory of its past much as Gans did. In such a city, Gans, like Muhammad Ali several generations later, was born with a better chance to assimilate into mainstream American culture than other blacks, thanks to the popularity of his chosen sport. This would prove vital as Gans navigated the treacherous waters of professional boxing.
Living in a racially mixed community with a tradition of self-sufficiency, Gans absorbed a culture that valued grit, determination, and hard work. The Douglass Institute, established for the purpose of promoting African-American causes in 1865, located at 11 (today 210) East Lexington Street, remained until 1890. Baltimore’s city fathers established a “colored occupational school” in 1868 near Orleans Street to instill the value of work in children of the new freed-men. Gans must have been keenly aware of his own fortunate adoption as he passed the “colored” orphans’ asylum on West Biddle Street. Gans’ father had given him to a caring woman in the late 1870s, whereas only a few years earlier, had his case come before the “orphans court,” he would have been indentured to a white tradesman in a new form of Reconstruction-era bondage.
As a young black male with minimal education, Gans worked near the historic harbor at the Broadway Market in a fish stall as an oyster shucker. Census reports at the time show that male African Americans recorded their occupations as laborers, shuckers, waiters, porters, and plasterers. A working black woman listed her occupation primarily as laundress, cook, or seamstress. The toil these jobs required and the health risks they posed at the turn of the century are almost inconceivable to Westerners today. Occupations which might sound a bit exotic to the modern ear remind us upon closer examination that the townspeople earned their living through backbreaking jobs as stevedores, grain-runners, hod-carriers, scrapers, draymen, and scow-men.
The great American melting pot was at high boil in the late nineteenth century, and Baltimore was one of the great entry ports, taking its place alongside New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Boats with names such as Hohenzollern, Narnberg, and Salier docked the first two weeks of November, 1890, telegraphing to newspapers back home their passenger lists to signal a safe arrival. These new, mostly Germanic, immigrants competed for the service jobs with the sons of the Monumental City.
Living among the grandeur of Baltimore, Gans was on the lookout for an opportunity to partake of the riches. Along Lexington were grand hotels and a plethora of shops. In the middle of the great boulevard was the Lexington Market, chartered in 1782 under private ownership, today rebuilt into one of the world’s largest markets. Visitors to Baltimore can see several of the historic supermarkets where some of the family-owned businesses go back four and five generations. Gans was lucky to have a stable job on the waterfront in a public market, an institution as old as the country.
Gans worked in what is now the oldest surviving of the public markets—The Broadway Market at 1640 Aliceanna Street. Located across from the Masonic Lodge in the center of Fells Point, it was known as the “fish market.” Chartered in 1784, the building Gans knew was re-built in 1864. The market, now without its second floor, has otherwise changed little in style or accommodations since the Civil War. The market served a seasoned crowd of sailors and immigrants who inhabited the area. The oyster business was one of the largest industries in the country, and Baltimore’s canned oysters were considered luxuries at America’s early tables.11 The year 1885 set a record for production, helping to lift African Americans out of poverty. Wagons from the harbor docks brought barrels full of oysters to the market and the nearby canneries, where able-bodied immigrant laborers worked elbow to elbow packing the cans. Streets absorbed the oyster shells, toughening the feet of shoeless children who walked to work. So abundant was the refuse over time that yards of new land crept into the bay.
The Broadway Market in 1890 sitting in the middle of the street resembled a church with a cupola overlooking the bay. Open-air stalls packed with fish, local vegetables, tobacco, and coffee faced the street. The second floor, the size of a barn, above the market stalls was used as a meeting hall for civic dealings and social affairs like boxing matches. Standing on a wooden shipping crate, Gans worked next to other men at a table in the fish stall. As a shucker, Gans worked with his face to the frigid winds blowing off the Chesapeake Bay with his shoulders hunched over the table. At a time when boxers routinely soaked their hands in brine to toughen their skin, Gans’ young hands were being fortified in the icy, dark, watery secretions from the oysters. Knifing open the mollusks without stabbing a numbed finger was harsh work during any season, but particularly cruel in the dead of Baltimore’s winters. Work was measured by how fast a person could shuck, and Gans was known to be a hard worker with strong, fast hands. Serious injuries occurred with great frequency. But from these harsh circumstances would be formed the pearl that was the boxing career of Joe Gans.
The Broadway Market, where Joe Gans worked as an oyster shucker, faces the waterfront on the Chesapeake Bay and occupies the center of historic Fells Point, Baltimore. The ground floor market stalls opened out to the streets with canvas awnings covering the fish and produce during the warmer seasons. The second floor was used for civic events, dances, and boxing matches. The Broadway is the oldest public market remaining in the city, dating back to its charter in 1784. Many stall numbers can still be seen along the curb (courtesy David W. Wallace, 2007).
Baltimore had achieved a name as a boxing center dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Yankee Sullivan was perhaps the best known early nineteenth-century boxer who walked the streets of Baltimore. He fought Tom Hyer, son of boxer Jacob Hyer. (Jacob Hyer fought in the “first organized fight” in the United States in 1816.)12 The contest between Yankee Sullivan and Tom Hyer at Rock Point, Maryland, on February 7, 1849, is considered the first recognized American championship fight.
By 1867, the Queensberry Code for boxing had been penned in England and adopted in America. Prior to these rules, fighters worked bare-fisted and resorted to whatever ring tricks could be imagined for downing an opponent. Vaudevillians and self-made “professors” of the sport toured various opera houses giving boxing demonstrations with great fanfare. The “Irish Strong Boy” from Boston, named John L. Sullivan, got his lucky break at one such performance. In Boston’s Dudley Street Opera House in 1877, heavyweight boxer Tom Scannel “skipped rope, shadowboxed, and sparred with partners chosen from the audience.”13 Urged on as town favorite, Sullivan was selected for a go with the performer. His reputation was sealed when he knocked the vaudevillian into the orchestra pit. Soon Sullivan was fighting professionally. In February 1882 Sullivan met popular champion Paddy Ryan for the bare-knuckle heavyweight championship and ascended the pugilistic throne in their famed Mississippi title fight. Sullivan became an American celebrity, a name recalled by most Americans, boxing fans and others, to this day.
The greatest battle of Sullivan’s reign was against the Baltimore heavyweight John “Jake” Kilrain in what was to be the last bare-knuckle championship fight. Kilrain was the most famous boxer from Baltimore before the 1890s.14 The gyms where he trained sported their own notoriety. His national appeal would soar when Richard Kyle Fox, editor of the National Police Gazette, a New York sporting tabloid recognized as an authority on train wrecks, crime, and boxing events, picked Kilrain in the Sullivan contest. As Robert Lipsyte and Peter Levine state in their discussion of John L. Sullivan and the Gazette’s coverage of the match
, “America’s icon of masculinity, like so many sports heroes to follow had begun to believe his own press clippings: that he was invincible, a raging beast beyond everyday morality.”15 In actuality, he had become an alcoholic, accused of drunken rages and spousal abuse. According to the Gazette, Kilrain was more worthy of the title because he was “respectable,” a sober, true “family man.” Nellie Bly, on the other hand, reporting for the New York World, was transfixed by Sullivan’s newly found goodness and decency before the fight.
In Kilrain’s corner at the famous battle in Richburg, Mississippi, on July 8, 1889, was none other than Bat Masterson, the famed deputy from Dodge City, who would later be third man in the ring with Joe Gans. Kilrain’s loss to Sullivan did not dampen the spirits of the Baltimore boxing fans. Details of Kilrain’s 75-round struggle took on heroic proportions in the Monumental City, where every schoolboy tried to emulate the bravery of the hometown idol on the streets. Only two years from the last, great bare-knuckle bout, Baltimore would premier its new boxing sensation, Joe Gans.
While the Broadway Market was the hub of economic activity, it was Fleet Street that was known for boxing, gambling and promoting. Kilrain trained at the corner of Fleet and Dallas streets. Gambler and boxing promoter Al Herford, credited with discovering Joe Gans, also had his establishment, restaurant, saloon, and gambling parlor on Fleet Street.
The accounts of Gans’ early fights after 1891, as recorded in the Baltimore Sun, show his rising star while at the same time allowing the reader to see, through the looking glass of history, what an incredible phenomenon boxing was in Baltimore at the turn of the century. In the newspaper, reports of the boxing matches are given multiple columns, and after popular matches, sometimes entire pages of coverage. Compare this with today, when most people do not even know the name of the heavyweight champion, much less the names of rising stars of the lighter weight classes.
Depictions of Baltimore today focus on the squalor and high crime rates to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine a magnificent metropolis, poised at the beginning of the twentieth century to join Paris and London among the well-springs of the arts and sciences. Recent television depictions overshadow the important cultural institutions that can still be experienced today. The Enoch-Pratt Free Library—the first free public library with branches, the Peale Museum—the first public museum in America, Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, the Catholic Cathedral, historic African-American churches, and Druid Park, built two years after Central Park, all contributed to Baltimore’s image at the turn of the century as a socially progressive and intellectual wonder of the New World. It was second president John Quincy Adams who, in 1827 after visiting the city’s memorials, bestowed the moniker “the Monumental City.”16 Baltimore erected the first monument to Columbus in 1792 and the first monument to George Washington (designed by Robert Mills with 228 steps to the top) in 1815. The statue of Scotland’s freedom-fighter William Wallace stands 40 feet tall on a rise in Druid Park. Not far from the boxing gyms, the park was a favorite outdoor destination. So with visions of grandeur around him, Gans began a true up-from-the-bootstrap voyage to stardom. From oyster shucker and the frenzied, barbaric battles royal to world-renowned athlete of gentlemanly status, the journey was achieved by Gans in a few short years.
The 1890s, and the time of Joe Gans’ ascension in the world of boxing, bridged the gap between bare-knuckle battlers and the first generation of gloved professionals. His rise also witnessed the shift from the Victorian Age to the ragtime era. Two sensational murder cases, one in 1892 and the other in 1906, served as bookends of sort for the two epochs. In 1892, according to lore, “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks....” Despite overwhelming evidence against her, the jury found her not guilty, in part because the jurors could not conceive of patricide in an upper-class family like that of Lizzie. How different it was from the 1906 saga of the “girl in the red swing,” where a murderer was shown leniency, as the public seemed almost to wink and nod at the shenanigans. Into this strange and sometimes macabre setting, where freak shows, cockfighting, and peep shows vied only with boxing for the attention of the newly invented moving pictures, entered Joe Gans and his larger-than-life, impresario manager Al Herford.
4
Ghosts in the House
In New York’s Madison Square Garden, tour guides tell of a ghost that reputedly haunts the most famous boxing venue in America.1 Is it there to redress some long forgotten injustice or just curious and benevolent, there to bid good luck to those who pass? The spirit who reportedly haunts the Garden is that of Joe Gans. Whether or not his ghost actually resides at Madison Square Garden, his life-sized likeness does appear there, in the form of a bronze statue, posed for all time.2 And boxers to this day, before entering the ring at the Garden, pay a respectful visit to Gans’ effigy as though they were in the presence of a boxing saint.
It is no wonder that superstition and religion are so much a part of boxing. In no other sport is a person so exposed in facing the danger and hostility of his opponent, and often the crowd as well. Waiting for the opening bell can seem like facing the gallows. Fighters often have to tap a deep well of courage and strength to emerge victorious. How else can one explain the endurance shown by a half-starved Joe Gans during 42 rounds under the blistering Nevada sun in 1906, or the incredible courage shown by Muhammad Ali in weathering the blows of two of history’s most murderous punchers, George Foreman and Joe Frazier, in Kinshasa and Manila?
Through the better part of Ali’s career, Drew “Bundini” Brown, a one-time shaman-at-large turned corner-man, was creating a new art that would put the modern-day motivational speaker to shame. Part preacher, part rap-star, Bundini presented himself to Ali in the early sixties and the two formed a life-long bond, as Bundini would verbally lift Ali time and again from such depressions as would accompany fighters in the ring. “Ghost in the house,” he would exhort Ali. “The ghost of Jack Johnson is watching.”3
Bundini, the one and only, was a true original. But he was not the first to speak of ghosts of the ring, and certainly not the first superstitious man in the world of fisticuffs. The great Benny Leonard, in a 1926 interview with Boxing Illustrated magazine, claimed that the ghost of Joe Gans had come to him in a dream in which the two master boxers sparred several rounds.4 If the ghost of Jack Johnson represented racial pride, the ghost of Joe Gans represented artistry and mastery of the ring. Anyone who has ever been in a boxing match knows how alone a person can feel when climbing up through the ropes and into the ring, awaiting the opening bell. Old time trainers would tell their charges, “Once you’re in that ring, your conditioning is the only thing you have.”
Whether or not one believes in ghosts, old fight trainers tell the story of Benny Leonard’s obsession with Joe Gans. Leonard claimed this experience gave him the mental confidence to believe he could beat any opponent. In the 1920s, Leonard was asked so often about whether he could have bested Gans that he snapped, “If you need to dig up a corpse to beat me, I must be pretty good.” It is quite believable that Leonard’s subconscious brought forth the ghost of the Old Master, real or imagined, in response to the constant questions from ring aficionados of his day.
Before his fights in the seventies, Ali would turn symbolically toward Mecca to pray. Latin fighters will cross their chests in a prayer to the Virgin Mary, all in the hope of assistance from the other world. From all accounts, Gans was a religious and spiritual man, and he also had a manager with a rather macabre good-luck charm.
A reporter for the Baltimore Sun noted that “Fighters and fighters’ managers are strongly superstitious.”5 In the pre-fight press to Gans’ first title fight with Erne in 1900, he noted that Gans took a “number of gewgaws along” that included a large American flag to be used in case he won. He also took his black silk belt, embroidered with small American flags and the initials “J.G.” But because he lost the bout in question, Gans never again took those items to any match away from home—he left the
m on the desk designated for his use at the athletic club. In 1906 when he fought Nelson in Goldfield, Gans brought along his tattered leather boxing shoes. Without a penny to his name to even get to the match in the first place, all he had was the five-year-old shoes. Yet when a wealthy gambler offered to replace them, Gans promptly refused. He felt he couldn’t afford not to wear his winning shoes into the match where his very life would be on the line.
While asserting that he didn’t believe in superstitions, Gans’ manager Al Herford felt compelled to acknowledge a strange coincidence before Gans’ winning bouts, one involving a corpse. Herford noticed that every time he took Gans away to a fight where they emerged victorious, the train they rode to the fight had a corpse in the baggage car. So when they boarded the train for the most important fight of Gans’ career, the championship bout with Frank Erne in Fort Erie, Canada, Herford looked for the corpse. Herford reported, “We did not have one when we started on this trip to Canada and I made remarks about it. Well, it was our lucky ride anyhow, for we ran over a man on the way up and killed him. Now, wasn’t that enough to make a gambler bet all he had?”6 The newspaper headline, “Train Killed Man and Herford Took it for Good Luck Charm,” helps to explain Herford the promoter and eerily foreshadows Gans’ final days. A trip west to Arizona years later in a desperate attempt to overcome his tuberculosis would fail, and Gans would spend his last days on a train trying to get home to Baltimore before he died. Part of boxing’s fascination has always been the proximity of death. All one need do is read the papers or watch the news to confirm the lurid human fascination with the Grim Reaper.
Joe Gans Page 4
