Joe Gans

by Colleen Aycock

  Here is an account of his fight with Joe Choynski in San Francisco: Choynski went down once in the first round. In the second, McCoy went down four times, but the timekeeper’s gong ended the round 42 seconds too early. With a one minute, forty second rest between rounds, McCoy was fairly clearheaded coming out for the third. The newspapers called that round a “melee of two madmen.”16 When it ended, each was covered with blood and so was the canvas. As the gong sounded to end the third round—or just after, according to Choynski supporters—McCoy landed a vicious blow. Choynski dropped like a pole-axed steer.

  McCoy staggered out for the fourth round and could not see Choynski lying at his feet. The referee gave McCoy the fight. Enraged fans screamed “foul.” Most never noticed that one of their number had died in the excitement. This type of knockdown, drag-out brawl was typical circa 1900.

  Gans Paves the Way for Hammerin’ Hank Armstrong

  There is ample evidence that Gans could have been credited as a champion in three of the original six weight classes: featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight. This is significant in assessing his historical importance when comparing him to other greats. Holding three titles in the 1930s when there were only eight is the primary reason that Henry Armstrong usually finishes in the top three when discussing all-time great fighters. Like Armstrong, Gans bested three divisions, and was champion for a much longer period. Armstrong earned the nickname “perpetual motion” for his non-stop style, and it was a very appropriate nickname for the scrappy welterweight battler. In 1937 Henry Armstrong would make a splash by winning the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight championship, 3 of the 8 recognized world titles. Armstrong is usually rated as the second or third greatest fighter to ever live, based in large part on his holding the 3 titles.

  Armstrong campaigned at the same time Joe Louis was occupying the attention of the American public. He was really a natural welterweight for most of his career. The goal of going after three titles was mainly to gain publicity, and it worked famously.

  Armstrong was indeed a great fighter but it should be emphasized in assessing historical greatness that Gans could have easily held three titles. He was for many years recognized as the world’s best welterweight. He beat the incumbent welterweight champ in title matches twice in San Francisco. The first time was against Barbados Joe Walcott, whom Nat Fleischer, the premier boxing historian, rated the greatest welterweight ever to live. Although Gans clearly won the fight, he accepted the draw verdict in stride. “What’s the use of complaining?” he said.17 In fact he probably had no real interest in holding the welterweight crown, since all the money at that time was in the lightweight ranks.

  For most of the 20th century the welterweight division was mainly a rest stop for great lightweight and middleweight fighters. The name “welter” brings to mind an image of chaos but in fact some of the smoothest, most disciplined fighters in history did their best work at welterweight.

  Henry Armstrong defended his welterweight title 18 times in a two-year span. He never successfully defended either his lightweight or featherweight titles. Sugar Ray Robinson was known more for winning and losing championships than for defending them, but he did manage several defenses of his welterweight laurels in the late ’40s. Even Roberto Duran, the legendary lightweight champ with manos de piedra, hands of stone, had his most glorious moment when he dethroned Sugar Ray Leonard for the welterweight title.

  The lack of notoriety for the 147-pounders may have been nothing more than a matter of packaging and name recognition. Lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight are all self-explanatory. But few outside of boxing circles really know anything about welterweights.

  Despite the lack of recognition of welterweights, Gans also had some of his best fights in that category. Many boxing historians have perpetuated the erroneous notion that Gans gave up his lightweight crown when he fought welterweights in 1903 and ’04. The fact that he had been fighting against welterweights added grist to the mill.

  Gans even toyed with the idea of fighting a great light-heavyweight champion. Philadelphia Jack O’Brien had defeated one of Gans’ good friends, Bob Fitzsimmons. One of “the most novel challenges in the history of the prize ring” wrote the sports editor for the Philadelphia Enquirer on January 31, 1903, was offered by Gans to “Philadelphia” Jack O’Brien.18 With a 27-pound difference in weight, Gans challenged the world light-heavyweight title holder to a knock-out “handicap” in 6 rounds: O’Brien would win the entire purse if he could knock out Gans in 6-rounds; however if Gans remained conscious after 6 rounds, he would win the purse. It is said that O’Brien wanted to take on the challenge but he could not fight Gans at the time because he was nursing a broken right knuckle from his previous fight with Joe Grim.

  Beginning in the forties, with the Schick Friday Night Fights, the welterweights became a marquis division. Sugar Ray Robinson, Kid Gavilan, Carmen Basilio, and other greats painted masterpieces on the ring canvas at 147 pounds. In the early eighties, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran fought masterfully at welterweight. Today the welterweights share the limelight, but in Gans’ day it was a road-to-nowhere division.

  As he would prove in each of his outings at welterweight, Joe made the grade, an A-plus at this weight. In retrospect, had the money been in the welterweight division rather than in the lightweight, Joe’s rendezvous with the Grim Reaper may have been delayed until he reached old age. His forays at welterweight represent the good years athletically for Joe. Unfortunately, when he came back down to “make the weight” at 133 pounds in the 1906 Goldfield fight, his doom was sealed under the blistering Nevada sun.

  Although Gans never lost his lightweight title in the ring, his ventures in welterweight contributed to the situation in which it was taken from him in the public’s mind. Soon after his fight with Walcott (an all-time classic) the lightweight pretenders to the throne were claiming that Gans could no longer make the lightweight limit. The record books do not reflect just how financially bleak was the year 1905 for Joe Gans. A reader gets the impression that he was “coasting” as the lightweight champ or had moved up to welterweight, as is the common practice today.

  Gans’ travails are aptly mirrored in Charles E. Van Loan’s famous 1913 short story “One-Thirty-Three Ringside.”

  “...and there isn’t a welter in the country today that would draw a two-thousand-dollar house. I suppose we’ll have to go back to the six- and ten-round no-decision things, splitting the money even, and agreeing to box easy! Yah! A fine game, that is.”

  “I suppose you think you ought to grab this fight with Cline?”

  “Well,” said the business manager, “There’s more money losing to Cline—don’t get excited, kid: let me talk—than we could get by winning from a flock of pork-and-bean welters.”19

  The fact is that Gans, whom even the racist editors of his day were calling “the greatest to ever don the mitts,” was down-and-out financially in 1905, without a manager, barely able to support himself and his family. The exiled king of the lightweights finally found sanctuary in southern California, regaining the spotlight by defeating the taller and heavier Mike “Twin” Sullivan in a bout billed as a welterweight championship match.

  Gans’ forays at welterweight did not bring him the big purses. These would come against a great lightweight, the “Battling Dane,” beginning in the year 1906. Today a remnant surviving the Ragtime era, drawn from the year 1906, is the image of the “girl in the red velvet swing.” Evelyn Nesbitt, the famous New York stage actress, shocked and seduced the nation at the trial of her husband, who had killed Standford White, the great architect, in the rooftop theater at Madison Square Garden. Today, the Nesbitt affair stands out as a famous news event of that year, in part as the result of the popularity of the movie Ragtime. However, at the time, a lightweight boxing match to be held in Goldfield, Nevada, is what most captivated the American imagination. Before Gans could “bring home the bacon” to open the Goldfield Hotel in Baltimo
re, he would have to fight in Goldfield, Nevada, against one of the toughest men to ever walk the earth. Gans would have to fight the “Durable Dane.”

  14

  Epic Battle in

  the Nevada Desert

  The city of Goldfield, Nevada, haunts a stretch of high desert halfway between Reno and Las Vegas on Highway 95. Before its population climbed to its present number of 300, it was a ghost town, the kind that Ronald Reagan spun tales about on the television show Death Valley Days. In January of 1904 when prospectors discovered a belt of gold there, word of the “January Claim” spread, drawing speculators like a magnet. But it was a boxing match in 1906 that put the desert mining camp on the map and started the amazing fight-promoting career of George Lewis “Tex” Rickard, the Don King and Bob Arum of the early 20th century.

  Tex Rickard: Joe Gans Was His First Boxing Gold Mine

  In a swashbuckling feat of entrepreneurial initiative, Rickard, the larger-than-life Goldfield saloonkeeper, inadvertently launched his brilliant career in the fight business by arranging the first and grandest “Fight of the Century,” long before his promotion of the Dempsey-Tunney or Johnson-Jeffries fights. Speaking nostalgically about the event fifty years later, “Kid” Highley, one of Rickard’s early partners and wealthy townsmen, remarked, “There has never been anything like it.”1

  Rickard couldn’t have done better if he had resurrected Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis or Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and put them in a ring together in some place like Tijuana. It was a match of epic proportion, triggering the largest gold speculation since the Comstock Lode of 1871. The entire English-speaking world would wait anxiously to hear the live reports of the fight telegraphed from Goldfield, beginning at 3:00 P.M., Nevada time, Monday, September 3, 1906, Labor Day in America. The lightweight championship of the world would be determined in a gladiatorial fight to the finish between two of the world’s best: Oscar Mathew Nielson, known as “Battling” Nelson, of Hegewisch, Illinois, and Joe Gans of Baltimore. As the newspapers were clear to add, Gans was “colored,” making the colossal event more than a world title fight.

  Tex Rickard would go on to re-invent Madison Square Garden, turning it into the world’s boxing Mecca, and he would become the greatest impresario of the massively lucrative big-fight business before he died in 1929. Born in 1871 in Kansas City, Missouri, Rickard drifted to Texas as a youth, where he spent time running longhorns on the great cattle drives to Montana, earning an earthy reputation as a cowboy. At twenty-three, he became sheriff of Henrietta, Texas, and then moved on to Alaska, where he was given the nickname “Tex.” There in the Klondike, he discovered a business that would make him his first fortune when he set up a “gambling tent” near the strike at Nome and began serving the miners who trusted him more than they did the local bank with their gold. Later, Rickard’s hotel and saloon, The Northern, brought in a half-million dollar bonanza when he sold his partnership interest after four years.2

  Running through his money, Rickard traveled down to Nevada with the first “rush” to Goldfield. The mines around Goldfield produced $2,300,000 that first year, 1904. With his flair for harnessing grandness, Rickard set up the biggest saloon business in the history of the Old West to garner part of the astounding wealth by quenching the thirsts and the compulsive gambling appetites of the miners who became rich overnight. His gambling hall, with fourteen game tables to accommodate roulette, faro, blackjack and craps, was serviced by eighty bartenders. The doors never closed, and two or more floor bosses, one of whom was Virgil Earp (prior to his taking the job of deputy sheriff) and the other was sometimes Rickard himself, ran an orderly operation. In short time Rickard became one of the leading financiers in the state. Considered a “settler” of the area, he put down roots by building a respectable brick Victorian home, the first building of its kind in Goldfield.

  Like other Nevada mining camps where hopefuls flocked when silver or gold was discovered (e.g. 6,000 people came to Rhyolite in 1905), Goldfield grew up quickly, to a population of 8000 by 1906. But on April 18, 1906, five months before the Goldfield fight, an earthquake rocked San Francisco, the largest town and the banking center of the West. The resulting fire destroyed the city, burned bank records, and displaced over 250,000 people, immediately halting all types of service. The San Francisco Stock Exchange, the principal market for the Goldfield mining stocks, closed for over two months, creating a financial panic in the silver state. According to one memoir, “Every bank in Nevada closed down, just as every California bank did.... Nevada banks, as a rule, had cleared through San Francisco banks, and practically all of Nevada’s cash was tied up by the catastrophe.”3 Goldfield merchants and bankers were left with only the cash in their vaults. Desperate for new funds, mining brokers began selling stocks directly to eastern markets to avoid the disaster suffered by other ore-made cities in the fickle boom-and-bust mining economy.

  Owners of Goldfield’s financial establishments felt that a public attraction of some kind on a grand scale was needed to generate infusions of cash in Goldfield mining stocks. In addition to the fifty saloons, the town had four banks, a stock exchange of its own (the Goldfield Stock Exchange, including one established by a group of women when the men tried to exclude them from financial dealings), and more rascals selling worthless mining paper than any other western town. It was said that before the second rush ended, “the American public sank $150,000,000 into worthless mining properties in that state.”4

  When a committee of distinguished citizens was formed to brainstorm proposals, one gentleman suggested that a giant hole be dug along the main street and filled with free beer. Others thought a camel race would attract attention. The notion was actually practical because dromedaries were accessible from the prospectors who were using them at the time. The miners had captured the feral animals roaming the arid western deserts long after they were abandoned by the United States government. The beasts had been used to deliver mail from Texas to California when the southwestern territories were acquired after the War with Mexico.

  Rickard’s notion of a prizefight would have sounded implausible were it not for his infinite luck, not to mention his deep pockets. He was a trusted, jovial fellow with a powerful personality and wealth of “worldly” experience. But Rickard’s sole experience with the sport had been in meeting boxing aficionado Jack Kearns in Alaska (Kearns would later manage Jack Dempsey), overseeing a few miners’ brawls in his saloons, and attending a professional boxing match that same year, on May 26 in New York between Jimmy Britt and Terry McGovern. This fight made such an impression that the innovative Texan saw in a top-notched fight an opportunity to fuse the excitement of selling shares in gold-prospecting claims with the mystique and glory of the professional prize ring.

  An even more convincing argument for the entertainment was that Rickard was willing to back his idea with a personal investment of $30,000. Pooling their resources to a cool $50,000, a committee chartered the Goldfield Athletic Club and elected another well-known community member as its first president. In his biography of Tex Rickard, Charles Samuels describes the new club official. “Though head of the Sullivan Trust Company, whose bustling office was next door to The Northern, L.M. Sullivan was an almost illiterate lout, but apt at conniving and scheming.”5 Prior to coming to Goldfield, Sullivan ran a rooming house for sailors in Seattle. He became so noted for selling off his ragtag “guests” to boats headed for the Orient that he was known as “Shanghai Larry.” But in Goldfield, Larry’s newfound wealth in the trust business bought him a place of respect at the civic table. As president of the new Goldfield Athletic Club, Sullivan wanted no part of the hard work necessary to pull off an elaborate boxing event. He simply wanted to be in position to name himself as announcer and master of ceremonies at the big event.

  And so it was left to Rickard to organize the complex event and begin negotiations for the boxers and construction of an arena that would accommodate the thousands of fans the town anticipated. Without knowing
anything about the fight business, not even the going rate for big-purse events, Rickard’s instincts again proved correct. Gambling that high-priced tickets would offset the large purse and the costly initial investment, Rickard’s successful event ended up paying for itself several times over, creating a stampede to buy local mining stocks, and bringing a great deal of notoriety to the state.

  With ready cash to offer as a purse, and a stout reserve if need be, Rickard hoped to replicate the fight he had seen in New York. He first telegraphed an invitation to McGovern’s manager, Joe Humphreys. In the summer of 1906, both fighter and manager were out of work and penniless; but Humphreys, who never in his managerial days had ever heard of a $15,000 purse, read the offer by the unknown promoter as a hoax and disposed of the telegram—never mentioning it to McGovern. Undaunted by the lack of response, Rickard’s second choice for fighters turned out to be his lucky charm.

  Rickard Capitalizes on Lightweight Title Controversy

  The entrepreneur had stumbled into and was able to capitalize on the fact that in 1906 the lightweight title happened to be in dispute in San Francisco. Although Gans had won the title in 1902 when he knocked out Frank Erne in the first round and held better claim to the lightweight championship, by 1906 Battling Nelson was also claiming the title. During his reign, Gans had successfully defended his title against all challengers including Jimmy Britt in October of 1904. But in the fracas that ensued after that fight in 1904, Britt argued that he had won the title by claiming a better “showing.” By virtue of the fact that Gans had gone on to fight welterweights, Britt’s backers argued that Gans had abandoned the lightweight division. It should be noted here that Gans would fight and win handily against Britt during 1907 in San Francisco, but Britt’s phony title succession began in 1904 when he claimed the lightweight crown. By 1906, Nelson considered himself the champion by virtue of having knocked out Britt in the 18th round in September 1905 in Colma, California. With Gans unable to get fights because he “had long been rated as invincible against anyone, including heavyweights” and without a manager to speak for his interests, Nelson had become a very popular fighter in the lightweight division.6