Joe Gans

by Colleen Aycock

  For later record books to identify Britt in 1904 as Gans’ title successor to the lightweight championship is to whitewash history, mistaking the “white” lightweight champions during the years 1904 through 1906 for the “world” lightweight continuous champion, Joe Gans.

  Gans did everything in his power following the fight with Britt to set the record straight. He left word with Ben Selig, a manager on the West Coast, to accept a rematch on his behalf at any time with Britt, but, drawing the color line, Britt refused to fight him during these years. By 1906 Gans had seen his title absconded and a new succession of lightweight title holders crowned. Because the white lightweights refused to fight him, he was forced to fight heavier men, men who would grant him fights. The consequence of the San Francisco coverage of the Britt fight was his absence in the ring during 1905. The Baltimore Sun reported on his September 15 fight with Mike “Twin” Sullivan that “Gans has not been seen in the ring in public since he met Britt, and many are anxious to see his form.”34 Even in his own hometown paper, Gans’ title was reduced to the “colored champion.”

  In an editorial turn-about, W. W. Naughton would call Gans the “Idol of Boxing” after Gans beat Mike “Twin” Sullivan for the welterweight title on January 15, 1906, and say there was no better man living to be found fighting at equal weights. Still frustrated by the situation with the lightweight fighters, in February of 1906 Gans decided to expose the truth of the details concerning the 1904 bout and his manager’s arrangements with Britt and his brother. Gans mistakenly believed that public reaction would be sympathetic, but the Britt establishment proceeded to tarnish Gans’ reputation further. Discussing the history of the 1904 fight and its consequence Gans explained, “Britt calls me a faker, but if I had the money and friends he had at our last meeting, I would never have faked as he did.... Britt was boosted as the real lightweight champion and I was called a ‘dub.’ Britt took my reputation into the ring with Nelson and Nelson took my reputation away from Britt, and now I can’t get a match with either of them, though the public now feels that I can lick them both.”35

  No one believed that Gans was innocent or that Britt was guilty, but history shows that manager Willus Britt five years later arranged the same type of “good showing” for his man Stanley Ketchel before he would let him go into the ring with the formidable Jack Johnson. As Gans said to the media, “It is a strange thing, but a fact, that a colored boxer and a white boy engaged in battling for money are two different mortals. A white boy is looked upon as an idol and is never under suspicion until he actually commits a mistake in the ring, whereas, a colored boy is not only under suspicion, but because he is a colored man is given the worst of it and must fight ‘to orders.’ If I hadn’t fought ‘to orders’ in the past I would not have been matched, and therefore could not have earned a livelihood with my fists. I merely make this statement, not as an excuse for what I have done in the past, because I have blotted that all out by my last victory, and from now on will always strive to win, not only for myself, but for my many friends and admirers.”36 Jimmy Britt continued to boycott Gans until the Old Master had beaten Nelson, and when they did meet, the pre-fight publicity would be vicious.

  Although California in the early twentieth century was progressive in many respects, equality among the races was not one of them. Gunboat Smith, during his interview for “In This Corner...,” had this to say about the famous Johnson-Jeffries fight that took place in Reno, Nevada, six years later: “If that fight would have come off in San Francisco, it was in the bag for Jeffries to win. I’m telling you this because I got that from good authority in San Francisco. Jeffries would have won. It was common gossip. They wouldn’t stand for a nigger to beat a white man in California.”37 There had been a concerted effort to make Gans risk his title in the Golden State. While the city of Fort Erie petitioned for the fight with a guaranteed purse of $6000, the managers did not accept the Canadian bid. Gans’ title defense would be in Britt’s hometown.

  Willie Ritchie, the lightweight champion from 1912 to 1914, said in his interview for “In This Corner...,” “Poor Gans had to do as he was told by the white managers. They were crooks, they framed fights, and being a negro the poor guy had to follow orders otherwise he would have starved to death. They wouldn’t give him any work.”38

  No doubt, the Britt fiasco of 1904 has contributed to the diminution of the Gans legacy. But once more the Old Master would rise from the ashes of a ruined reputation and career. The second rebirth of Gans’ career would come in the welterweight division in early 1906. From reading boxing history, one must keep in mind that the sport was for the most part illegal at the turn of the century. In an attempt to keep the popular and lucrative big fights in New York, boxing had been made legal there with the Horton Law beginning in 1896. Otherwise it was illegal in the United States until the Golden State welcomed it out West, where pugilism was relatively tame compared to the gunfights they were used to.

  The year 1905 would be a disaster for Gans. His split with Herford and the San Francisco boxing trust left him unable to make a living. His personal life was in a shambles, his wife having left him, seeming one step behind his earnings prospects.

  After his problems with “133 ringside,” it would be at the higher welterweight division where he would re-establish himself. In that weight category, some of the greatest fighters were plying their trades in the twentieth-century’s first decade.

  12

  Boxing Moves West

  At the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his lecture “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” advanced a homespun, less traditional explanation of American history and American character. He said that the “free” land of the American West drew Europeans back in time to a more primitive life, where they could throw off the shackles of tradition and, through freedom and self-reliance, experience the principles that forged the new democratic nation. The rugged life, in Turner’s opinion, encouraged individuality and developed intellectual characteristics of tough-minded strength, curiosity, and practicality. But with the encroachment of civilization and the Old West vanishing in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, how would Americans be able to return to a raw, primitive experience necessary to continue the shaping of their strong character and their egalitarian beliefs? Sports would, in part, answer this philosophical question.

  The Census Bureau had officially noted the end of the frontier wilderness by 1890. Only a few years earlier, the cowboys had driven herds of wild Spanish longhorns from South Texas through the Indian territories on the great cattle trails, first on the Chisholm and then on the Western Trail. By the nineties, the wranglers would meet up with the trains and ship their cattle by rail. Western outlaws such as Billy the Kid would be dead by 1881. The dime novel would recreate his story and others for nineteenth-century readers, and film would recreate the “Westerns” for the twentieth-century.

  The doorway to the American West was aptly portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s movies, in which he frequently filmed himself in doorways in Old West montages. In movies such as The Outlaw Josie Wales and Unforgiven, Eastwood is filmed at the doorway of shanty houses and saloons. To his back, glimpses of the untamed wilderness let the world know that he has recently returned from the great unknown. In front of him is civilization, with all of its glory and corruption.

  The gunslingers of the western movie genre were mostly myth built around a few hard-case men whose lives were nasty, brutish, short, and devoid of heroism. Billy the Kid and Jesse James were cold-blooded murderers who did not deserve the hero worship that they received. But their Robin Hood–like stories made sensational reads for the penny press. In his popular New York tabloid, The National Police Gazette, publisher Richard K. Fox reported the story of Billy the Kid’s exploits over several months in 1881, creating a folk legend for his readership which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. (Fox wrote proudly and perhaps erroneously in August of
1881 that the “Kid” was originally a New York “tough” from the Fourth Ward.) He published a fictional account of a “Billy LeRoy,” “King of American Highwaymen,” with an alias of “The Kid.”1 Many boxers in subsequent years would incorporate this moniker, giving rise to a plethora of “Kid” this-and-that.

  Publisher Fox would be equally smitten by the exploits of the prize-fighters, as the popularity of stories about gunslingers, gamblers, and saloons of the eighties gave way to the legendary warriors of the ring, and protectors of the law like Wyatt Earp who became pit bosses in gambling houses and referees in a profession on the cusp of illegality. Plying their trade with their fists under the Marquis of Queensberry rules, the early prizefighters were hard men who used their talents to test their “gameness” in the ultimate (and symbolically primitive) confrontation between men. With boxing legal only in a few western states after the turn of the century, San Francisco became a center for pugilism. Adventure called and Gans took his chances out West.

  Claustrophobia on the eastern American seaboard and a flood of immigration from Europe circa 1900 added to the ever-increasing lure of the New West. While the Old West became a modern metaphor for self-reliance and integrity in Turner’s famous essay, it was still looked upon by the eastern establishment circa 1900 as a Mecca for ruffians and ill breeding. Enormously popular entertainments for the middle class such as vaudeville and boxing were looked down upon by the upper crust of society. As the city politicians of the Midwest buckled under the moral crusade to shut down public boxing events, the sport became a forbidden fruit to be enjoyed in San Francisco. Gans made over a dozen long trips west. Aboard the great railways, he must have had feelings of infinite possibility in a future still wide open.

  Before the great railroads stretched across the continent, a trip to San Francisco took two months over land and one month by sea because the voyage meant a trip around South America. During the 1830s in Gans’ hometown of Baltimore was founded the first of the great passenger railroads, the Baltimore and Ohio. Eventually railroad tracks would carry Americans across the continent. Gans made many trips out of Baltimore by train to Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago.

  The rails also made it possible for the frontier spirit to be shipped east. By 1887 Buffalo Bill Cody brought over 100 Indians and trick riders and a bevy of bear, buffalo, elk and moose to his Wild West Shows. His four-part dramatic rendering of the great Western epochs of Turner’s famous thesis met rave reviews in New York. Act I set wild game and Indians in a primeval forest. Act II brought prairie schooners to the buffalo. Act III depicted the cattle ranch with real cowboys and cowgirls, and Act IV, the grand finale, had a mining camp blown to bits and pieces by a cyclone. Wild west shows continued to be popular for the next three decades. Madison Square Garden, magnificently redesigned by architect Stanford White in 1890, hosted the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Show in 1909. Its show illustrated the racial mix of the working western ranches with stars Bill Pickett, the black cowboy bulldogger, Tom Mix, the cow-runner from Mexico, and Will Rogers, the Cherokee lasso artist.

  Vaudeville actors, theater troupes, circus performers and others in the entertainment trade spent a good deal of time in railroad cars. On a trip across country, Union Pacific’s Overland Limited made it from Omaha to San Francisco in just under 72 hours. This was considered a very fast train. For Baltimore to Chicago, add two days, probably another day more for Chicago to Omaha, to account for any layover. It took Gans at least a week to get to ‘Frisco. Gans’ cross-country fight schedule caused him to spend a good deal of time in railroad cars.

  The story of the American railroads took its place alongside boxing as an essential piece of Americana. The Pullman porters, who succeeded in obtaining the first collective-bargaining agreement for African American workers, started the first black union. Pullman porter jobs were considered high status positions in the early to mid 1900s. The porters took care of the important travelers of the day, such as Joe Gans.

  As he rode out from the East towards San Francisco for the first time in December of 1896, he must have grasped his own special rendezvous with destiny. Equally anxious to travel and take his fighters to other, bigger (and “greener”) venues was Al Herford. The West was brewing boxers. Jim Jeffries, Jim Corbett’s sparring partner, would have his first professional bout in 1896. The cost of the cross-country trips for fighters coming from the East was borne by the fighters and deducted from their purses, usually before the 50/50 split with their managers.2

  Gans had already made a name for himself, having won sixty bouts before his first trip west, where he followed Bob Fitzsimmons for his bout with Tom Sharkey in California. With the help of introductions by Fitzsimmons, Herford hoped to convince promoters to secure a rematch with San Franciscan Dal Hawkins (Hawkins fought from featherweight to welterweight) to avenge Gans’ first loss in the ring, which had occurred two months earlier.3 While the rematch with Hawkins in California failed to materialize, Gans was able to display his skills to the western sporting crowd when he took on local boxer Charles Rochette. The San Francisco Examiner reported that the Easterners in the crowd had often seen Gans perform, and they were responsible for making Gans the two to one favorite of the betting crowd. He was so dominant and in control of the fight that the sports editor said the next day tongue-in-cheek, “A few more tame boxing contests such as were given at Woodward’s Pavilion last night will put an end to boxing in this city.”4 Gans spent the first two rounds fighting as usual, studying his opponent. The two mixed it up in the third round with spectators awed by how Gans could “dance” around the ring and corner the local boy to the ropes. Rochette had no hope but to fall into clinches. By the fourth, the dance was ended when Gans sent Rochette to the floor.

  San Francisco, like Goldfield, Nevada, was a child of the gold rush. It grew from a tiny hamlet of tents on the bay in 1848 to a boomtown in a few short years. A neighborhood in old San Francisco called “the Barbary Coast” began as a hangout for the rich during the Gold Rush of 1848 to 1859. The town would come to be known as a place of gambling, prostitution, and riotous nightlife. “The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind.... The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here.”5 Dance-halls, concert-saloons, and low gambling houses ruled the city. “Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.”6

  The 1870s and the Nevada Comstock Lode created a wild speculation in mining stocks and soon San Francisco would have the largest stock exchange in the West. San Francisco had another boom in the 1890s when it was virtually the only major city in the country where prizefighting was entirely legal. California and Nevada were familiar with public gunfights, and welcomed boxing as a relatively tame amusement. San Francisco’s Woodward Pavilion and Mechanics Pavilion hosted some of the best fighting the world has ever seen, especially in the lower weight classes. By 1900 there were four major athletic clubs vying as hosts for boxing events in San Francisco. From 1900 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 occurred a golden age of boxing in California.

  In the West young Gans would have met many adventurous souls. The line between community leader and flim-flam artist was not well drawn in the West that Gans would come to know. In fact, Gans’ San Francisco debut fight with Charles Rochette was overshadowed by the heavyweight bout, straight out of Wild-West lore, between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey. Wyatt Earp, legendary gunslinger and “upstanding” lawman that he was, appears time after time in the sports sections of the 1890s. He was famous for refereeing and betting on fights, at times in suspicious combination. For the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight, he managed to have himself appointed as referee of the contest, re
puted though he was of having a financial stake in Sharkey’s campaign for the heavyweight crown. The aftermath of the fight proved far more interesting than what occurred in the ring. Earp placed a stout wager on Sharkey, but much to Earp’s dismay, Fitz knocked him out. Undaunted, Earp declared Sharkey the winner by foul, and collected on his bet. Fitz publicly accused Earp of corruptly and feloniously awarding the verdict to Sharkey. After several heated exchanges in the San Francisco Gazette, Fitz dropped the matter, and proceeded to take the crown from Gentleman Jim in 1897 in the first fight ever to be filmed.7

  Joe Gans would have his own battle with a Western lawman turned referee when Bat Masterson became third man in the ring with Gans and George McFadden in Denver, October 2, 1900. The fight was wild—something quite expected in Colorado. Gans, by all accounts, out-punched (by some estimates 5 to 1), out-rushed, out-blocked, and otherwise out-pointed the man known as Elbows. To the outrage of 2,000 spectators who thought Gans the victor, Masterson called the fight a draw. So upset with the call, a man by the name of Red Gallagher jumped into the ring to challenge Masterson. The papers noted that “no blood was spilled” in the ensuing fracas, although the crowd screamed “robber” at Masterson.8

  Charismatic brawlers like Kid McCoy, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Gentleman Jim Corbett were covered in great detail in the San Francisco Examiner. Corbett had been a banker in San Francisco and for years the fight everybody wanted to see was Gentleman Jim versus Kid McCoy. In the buildup to Gans’ first fight with Frank Erne in 1900 one reporter mused that no other conceivable match-up could be its equal, with the exception of a Corbett-McCoy fight. Kid McCoy was showbiz, manifest destiny, and the American dream all rolled into one slick hustler and helluva fighter. McCoy and Corbett finally fought in 1904. McCoy was easily battered by the much bigger Corbett. The fact that the middleweight McCoy was even considered a match with the heavyweight is due mainly to the Kid’s chutzpah and flair for self-promotion.