The ring loss in March was a hugely disappointing blow to Gans, but his troubles during the year 1900 were only beginning.
7
Fixed Fight in Chicago
The year 1900, which started with such promise for Joe Gans, would by its end see him as a scapegoat for the chicanery ingrained in pugilism and gambling. Few today remember or have even heard of the biggest boxing scandal in history, the 1900 “fixed fight” between Joe Gans and Terry McGovern that took place one cold December night in Chicago.
Sports betting and doping in recent years have resulted in a variety of scandals from point shaving in basketball to congressional inquiries in baseball. The “Black Sox scandal of 1919” lives in infamy for its cast of characters and the audacity and the manner in which the American public was scammed. Boxing has a rich tradition of controversy, but perhaps no single event caused as much furor and misunderstanding as the “Chicago fight fix of 1900,” which caused boxing to be outlawed in the state of Illinois for a quarter century, and nearly spelled finis to the manly art in the United States.
Chicago: Turn-of-the-Century Paradox
Rivaling Baltimore in the number of ways it epitomized Americana at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great city of Chicago, known variously as the Windy City, an epithet coined in the 1890s referring to its politicians, and the City of Big Shoulders, Carl Sandburg’s description evoking the city’s machismo, was bursting at its seams with immigrants. With three quarters of the metropolitan area’s population of “foreign stock” living in densely packed areas, what limited public services existed at the time were strained. Transportation for the masses generally meant two legs and a place to walk. City fathers promoted parks, open-air spaces, and recreation yards at schools for the otherwise cramped citizenry. Alleyways and streets in packed areas challenged any notion of sanitation. Brothels were permitted and about 8,000 saloons and inns provided drink and entertainment. The homeless slept and ate at police stations, which logged in 126,000 lodgers in 1900.1
The city was run by an elected mayor, Carter Henry Harrison, Jr., a democrat whose father was murdered while holding the same office in 1893, and a city council of republican majority composed of aldermen from 70 city wards. Mayor Harrison had no ax to grind against boxing if matches didn’t turn into brawls that threatened the peace, making his opinion clear when he spoke to representatives of the clergy that he personally “would have a boy brought up to play football and to box.”2 When ministers of a reformers group wanted to have the highly publicized Gans-McGovern fight cancelled, the clergy protested to the mayor by pointing to a law already on the books that prevented boxing in the city. The mayor responded simply “that the law had been enacted nearly forty years ago and always had been a dead letter.”3
As in other large cities at the time, crime was semi-officially tolerated. Drugs were not illegal, considering all the concoctions advertised in newspapers promising to remedy aches, agues, and infirmities of all types. The largest drug addiction at the time was to opium, and Chinese opium dens were plentiful and considered legal pleasure-doms. Police raids were formalities, and arrests were meant only to harass disorderly troublemakers and quell disturbances. For the most part, if people behaved themselves and didn’t cause problems, they were usually left alone. Boxing was considered a great entertainment and gambling was not frowned upon, unless a fight had been fixed by racketeers. But by the end of the year 1900, after the Gans-McGovern fight of December 13 and the public clamor that it drew—first from clergy and their “Reformers” and then from newspaper editors when they reported the bout as a fake—the mayor and city aldermen announced that boxing would be banished from Chicago.
For a city with a reputation as a historical Mecca for the mob and gangsters—Al Capone, the Saint Valentine’s day massacre, the bootleggers and others chased by Elliot Ness and the Untouchables—how ironic it is today that for the first part of the 20th century, leaders of the Windy City made ordinary public boxing matches quite illegal, in their efforts to protect the “moral fiber.” Grass-root associations developed to ensure the moral rectitude of the city. Chicago, although a future haven for gangsters, would also give birth in 1905 to the Rotary Club, which sought to encourage an ethical climate for Chicago business.4
Also known as “the Second City” for a time, Chicago vied with New York for attention in the latter part of the 19th century. In 1890, Chicago received worldwide publicity for beating out New York as host for the great Columbian Exposition, honoring the 400th anniversary of the European discovery of America. Attendance at the show in 1893 set a record for visitors at an exposition. Twenty-seven million people rolled into Chicago by train to see various new inventions and wonders of the world displayed in astounding architectural settings. This was an amazing number considering the population of the United States in 1890 was 63 million.5
At night, the great exhibition became a new wonder of the world, a “White City” where 93,000 incandescent lights illuminated the Neo-classical buildings covered in white stucco. The city was so white that Frederick Douglass protested: the exhibition did nothing to reflect the culture of the 8-million American blacks. (The only vestige of black culture was the Dahomey village depicting half-naked Africans.) Douglass was not the only protestor. Ida Wells brought her campaign against lynchings.
After paying a fifty-cent fee, visitors could enter the Court of Honor, where they would be entertained by “uplifting” classical music. But Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to be entertained by the conventional; they wanted to be thrilled. When most people raced past the Court of Honor to get to the Midway Plaisance, exhibition directors brought in John Philip Sousa to enliven the musical fare. Nothing, however, could compete with the Midway attractions (an idiom remaining today from the exhibition). (The Chicago Bears are sometimes known as the “Monsters of the Midway.”) There visitors could take a ride on George Washington Gale Ferris’ giant wheel, see performances by Little Eva, the “hoochie-coochie” girl, Harry Houdini, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, and boxing celebrity Gentleman Jim Corbett.
The exhibition featured entrepreneurs to entertainers, from inventors like Thomas Edison to architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, who became celebrities overnight. They inspired writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, who gave some thought to becoming a professional boxer after seeing Jim Corbett demonstrate his skills. So fascinated was he with the sport that the main character of his most ambitious novel, The Mucker, was a boxer. The Great Sandow, dressed as he was at the fair in his leopard costume, inspired Burroughs’ character Tarzan. And Chicagoan L. Frank Baum would transform, in 1900, the magnificent “white city” into the “emerald city,” creating the classic American fairy tale.
The year 1900 had been an incredibly busy one for Gans and a year of tumultuous activity in the sport of boxing. The amazing lightweight “Kid” McCoy was flattening the likes of Joe Choynski, who had knocked out Jack Johnson. McCoy did this with his famous “corkscrew punch,” a punch inspired by watching a cat snatch the life from a mouse. That feline predator would spin his paw in a corkscrew manner, which did not fail to KO the hapless rodent. (A derivative of McCoy’s corkscrew punch would later be called by Muhammad Ali “the anchor punch,” which he used to put Sonny Liston’s lights out in their second fight.) Bob Fitzsimmons had perfected his “tremendous belly clout” and “six-inch wallop” which had killed one man and left several others prostrate on ring aprons across the country.
Boxing an International Craze, but Reformers Wanted It Banned
Boxing was making news locally, nationally, and internationally. Church leaders and other social reformers ran boxing out of town in St. Louis. The papers reported that the game was almost dead there anyway since Al Neist, the Big Butcher, had died after a bout at the Fourteenth Street Theater the previous year. One of the local ring managers said he wasn’t worried because the in-coming administration looked favorably on the art of self-defense.6 The year 1900 also saw the heyday of the tabloid mur
der, starting with the tale of the star-crossed lovers Frankie and Johnnie. Frankie and Johnnie, written (or adapted from an earlier ballad) about the murder of Al Britt, also known as Johnny by his jealous wife Frances, known as Frankie.
Prizefighting was so popular that gates brought in vats of money to local athletic clubs, club managers and fight promoters. Gamblers also had high stakes in the fights—in the Gans-McGovern fight, $75,000 was expected to change hands. Whenever an upset went against the betting majority, gamers screamed foul. Kid McCoy and Corbett were accused of “jobbing” their Madison Square Garden fight. The fight was actually a brutal brawl with Corbett hammering the smaller McCoy, and rumor of the fix came from the wives of Gentleman Jim and the Kid. As Armond Fields states in his biography of Corbett, “Immediately following the contest, McCoy’s wife blew the entire issue beyond control. She publicly stated that she was filing for divorce and, while alleging extreme cruelty by her husband, also declared that the McCoy-Corbett bout had been fixed. That was all the tabloids needed to brandish headlines of ‘fix,’ ‘deception,’ and ‘greed’ for the next several days.”7 Mrs. Corbett also weighed in on the matter, “fully aware of Mrs. McCoy’s sensational declaration that the fight had been fixed, Vera had now captured headlines by denouncing Jim, confirming Mrs. McCoy’s accusation and adding a few spicy anecdotes of her own to the bubbling stew.”8
“Barbados” Joe Walcott, a dominant black welterweight of the time, had been forced to throw a fight for fear of his life. Nat Fleischer recalls that Walcott’s manager, Tom O’Rourke, personally told him that “Walcott didn’t dare to win that night. I got the tip ... he must lose ... if West had been stopped in the 12th round ... I’d probably been laying nice, peaceful and natural on the next slab.”9 Heavyweight contender Jack Root was accused of faking, and the Erne-McGovern fight was also considered a job. By year’s end, no one knew who was on the level. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “Jeffries, Corbett, McCoy, Maher, Walcott, Creedon, Lightweight Jack O’Brien, McFadden, West, Ryan, Root, Zeigler, Burns, Gans, Erne, and McGovern have all been accused of being mixed up in shady transactions.”10 But of all of the fighters accused of trickery, Gans bore the brunt of the scapegoating and would end the year as an outcast in boxing. These were the headlines in 1900, right up there with murder and political corruption.
Boxing was such a powerful and controversial phenomenon at the turn of the century that it was identified with a political movement on the other side of the globe. In 1900 a grassroots insurgency, which sought to maintain traditional Chinese values against the rising tide of Western influence and missionary zeal, spread through the northern provinces of China and threatened U.S. and other Western trade (including the lucrative opium trade) in Peking. Notorious for a rigorous martial arts training that to Westerners looked like something akin to boxing, the Chinese soldiers became known as the “Boxers” and their final siege of the foreign political legations in the Chinese capital was called the “Boxer Rebellion.”11 American servicemen, not to be out-trained by militias elsewhere in the world in the art of self-defense, were required to take classes in the “manly” sport.12
In America, another Gans fight, between Gans and McGovern, held center stage. According to author J. J. Johnston, “At the time, the two best boxers in America—unquestionably—were Joe Gans and featherweight champion Terry McGovern.”13 So popular were these two fighters that Herford had a choice of two venues for the fight. J.J. Groom, of the National Athletic Club of San Francisco, had offered either a purse of $5000 or 65 percent of the gross receipts. Perhaps Herford and Samuel Harris, McGovern’s manager, didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into when they selected the offer from the Tattersall’s Athletic Association in Chicago, which included both a purse of $7500 and 50 percent of the gross receipts.
A crowd of ten thousand—some estimates put the number as high as fifteen thousand—people entered the famed Chicago hippodrome to see featherweight champion Terry McGovern go at the famous lightweight wonder. McGovern was a great fighter. Nat Fleischer rated McGovern the greatest fighter ever to campaign at 126 pounds. In the two years prior to his fight with Gans, “Terrible” Terry McGovern had fought an amazing total of 32 bouts. To put that in perspective, Sugar Ray Leonard had 40 fights in his twenty-year career. Of McGovern’s 32 bouts, he won 25 by knockout, without losing any. He had knocked out such great fighters as George Dixon, Tony White, and Frank Erne, whom Gans had been chasing for a match. An even more impressive fact was that in just two years, he had knocked out 15 top professionals in three rounds or less. His image was heroic, of David and Goliath proportions. His fans believed he could take on the heavyweight champion and knock him out.
The Chicago contest was pegged as little man against big man, knockout artist vs. the expert, and, of course, white man vs. black. According to the Articles of Agreement for the fight, the men were to weigh 133 pounds or below at 7 P.M. on fight night, and Gans had to knock out McGovern within six rounds if he wanted to earn the winner’s purse, set at 65 percent of half of the gate receipts. If McGovern could last the six rounds, he would be declared the winner. (Six rounds was a perfect length for the new movie invention, and the fight would be filmed.)
It was the first time Gans fought in Chicago, and it was a fight like no other. Events surrounding the fight included a war of words between the reformers who wanted boxing abolished and the athletic exhibition, an unsettling mix of threats, arrest warrants, and counter threats. As a result, elaborate preparations were made by police and the fight crowd to properly choreograph the arrests of the pugilists. The original plan was for the fighters to be arrested and jailed, if necessary, after the fight for “disturbing the peace” if the boxing abolitionists successfully convinced the mayor to punish the offenders.
Threats of interference pitted a group of “crusading reformers,” led by Frank Hall, against the fight club’s boxing promoters. Hall wanted to have arrest warrants served days before the fight against the boxers and other principals to prevent the fight from going forward. In order to head off any actions from the reformer’s group, Lou Houseman, the fight manager for the club, had his own arrest warrants issued first. Houseman’s pre-emptive, more “friendly,” warrants were supposed to “protect them” by invalidating any warrants that could be served later by Hall or members of his group. (Houseman had a $3,000 investment in film equipment, and he wasn’t going to let a group of crusaders ruin his movie venture.) Management had McGovern placed under arrest on Tuesday prior to the fight while he was still in Milwaukee. Gans was staying in New York with his wife and friends and could not be reached or arrested. Both Gans and his manager would be served arrest warrants upon arriving in Chicago. The time-keeper Frank Kennedy was also notified of his forthcoming arrest by Hall’s people.14
It was a three-ring circus of arrest warrants and no one had yet entered the prize ring. The president of Tattersall’s Athletic Association attempted to serve arrest warrants on Hall’s primary Reformers to discover what they were actually after. By noon the day of the fight a committee of ministers, which included Frank Talmadge, an iconic evangelist whose popular Sunday lectures were serialized in newspapers across the country, appeared before the mayor to induce him to cancel his fight permit. The mayor refused. In the meantime, each fighter was kept under cover and placed, at least technically for the record, in the custody of a constable who remained with each of them at all times.
In a tragi-comedy of errors, the arrest warrants were served before the weigh-in—and the affair continued to go straight downhill for Gans. Later in the afternoon a bailiff appeared and all of the parties to the boxing match were required to post bail. At 7:00 P.M. Gans failed to meet the Articles of Agreement regarding the weight requirement. The weight forfeiture clause would not cancel the event, but it would affect the earnings. If the boxer weighed in above the 133-pound limit, then he could receive only half of his share of the purse at the end of the contest. Gans and McGovern weighed in at Malachy Hogan�
��s gym on Clark Street and greeted each other amicably. The scale was set to 133. McGovern, the featherweight, weighing closer to 124, stepped on the scale first and the bar never moved. It was Gans’ turn.
When Gans stepped on the platform the bar slapped the top of the scale and never moved, indicating that he was over the weight limit. When the scale was tipped to 134, the bar never inched down. Again the weight was shifted to 135 and the bar moved only slightly, hovering close to the top. Reporters jotted notes at the scene. Gans was “crestfallen” by the outcome and said that when he left Harry Forbes’ gym just prior to the weigh in, he was at 133. McGovern’s manager Sam Harris was quick to waive the weight forfeit question if McGovern were to win. If McGovern lost, however, the clause would be in full effect. Gans’ camp happily accepted the offer and the fighters sealed the deal with a cordial handshake.
“Well, goodbye Joe, I’ll see you later,”
“Goodbye Terry.”15
That night in Chicago the Gans-McGovern fight didn’t begin until 11:00 P.M. After four six-round preliminary bouts, new canvas was laid, and the movie-making device set in place. Thomas Edison’s new invention of moving pictures allowed promoters to replay the event at other venues and garner additional revenues. Boxing matches were the first live events to be captured in the “flickers,” as they were called. Six lights were turned on and four giant reflectors set around the ring. Because of the scorching heat generated by the light of equal to 200,000 candle power, the doors to the giant hall were thrown open and the cold December winds kept the spectators shivering the remainder of the night.
Joe Gans Page 9
