Joe Gans

by Colleen Aycock

  Nelson, by way of variety, sent in a hard left to the jaw and Gans came back with two lefts to the jaw. Nelson’s left eye was here closed entirely.

  THIS LOOKED LIVELY.

  Round 40—They started in at a lively pace, Gans landing his left to the ear. Then they stopped.

  In a clinch Gans drove his left to the jaw. Nelson came back with a left uppercut to chin. The men did very little fighting.

  Gans got Nelson at arm’s length and took advantage of this concession by sending his left twice to the Dane’s face. Gans complained again about Nelson’s head, and sent Nelson’s head back with left uppercut to the jaw.

  After forty rounds the lengthening shadows of the boxers speak volumes even though the film of the fight is silent. Nelson totters like a bull the picador has stuck with forty lances. Gans the matador has been gored, fouled, and kicked, but is still waiting to deliver the coup de grace, a blow that will come at the beginning of the 42nd round that almosts decapitates Nelson.

  WHAT TIME IS IT?

  Round 41—They came up slowly and clinched. Gans asked Billy Nolan facetiously, “What time is it?” Then they resumed the clinching contest. Gans shot a straight right to mouth and Nelson rebuked him with two lefts to the stomach. Nelson whipped his left to face and the men ceased fighting entirely.

  Suddenly Nelson landed a hard left hook to the jaw and Gans fought him away, landing two lefts to the face and a right on the body. Both men wrestled wearily about the ring, and it was hard to tell which was the more tired of the two as the men went to their corners.

  THE FINAL FOUL.

  Round 42—Gans started the round with a straight left to the face and they clinched. As the men broke from a clinch Nelson deliberately struck Gans low and the colored man slowly sank to the floor. The blow was clearly observed by everyone in the arena and there was not a murmur of dissent from the spectators as the long-drawn-out battle was terminated.

  When it was all over, Gans requested Larry Sullivan to announce that he would meet Nelson again in two weeks to prove that he could win on something other than a foul. However, a rematch would be put off until much later.

  Referee Siler was cheered. Gans was carried out of the ring. Nelson was hissed at as he and his crew departed.

  In Hard Road to Glory, Arthur Ashe writes, “Gans’ victory caused the first serious outbreaks of racial violence against blacks as a result of a boxing match. Police reported incidents across the country attributed to the bout. William Conway, a black bar patron in Flushing, New York, had his skull fractured by three white customers. Anthony Roberts, a black doorman at the St. Urban Apartments on New York City’s Central Park West, told police he fought off two white attackers with a razor and a small pistol.”29

  The white establishment of San Francisco was so incensed by Sullivan’s management of Gans and Sullivan’s own buffoonery before the fight (he mispronounced several words, “areno” for “arena,” and mispronounced Tex Rickard “a man of great acclumuations”) that they would pull $100,000 worth of stock from the Sullivan Trust the day after the fight.

  The Old Master’s epic contest with Battling Nelson, the Durable Dane, was the longest title fight ever filmed. It would surpass every title bout before or since in terms of number of rounds, pure action, brilliant boxing, and incredible courage.

  Jim Riley was so smitten by the fight, and hoping that he could upstage the success at Goldfield, that he would promote Gans’ next fight on New Year’s Day at Tonopah. On New Year’s Eve before the fight, Shanghai Larry was at Riley’s saloon “roaring drunk” when he discovered Rickard at the bar. Still jealous over the recognition given to Rickard with his own managerial prowess ignored, Sullivan began barking insults at Rickard. The cool promoter was unaffected until Larry pulled out his gun. “A quick twist of the wrist and Rickard had the six-shooter out of Sullivan’s hands. He tossed the gun into a far corner of the place. Then, without a word to Sullivan, he turned his back again, picked up his drink from the bar, and downed it.”30

  Sullivan’s partner, George Graham Rice, was exposed as a fraud whose real name was Jacob Simon Herzig who had served two sentences in the slammer. Still sporting the name of Rice, he penned the popular exposé My Adventures with Your Money in 1911. Two decades later, after forty million dollars were swindled from unsuspecting investors in New York, he would be called the “Jackal of Wall Street.”31

  From the Goldfield launching pad, Tex Rickard went on to greater fame, which culminated in the million-dollar gate match between Dempsey and Tunney. When Rickard died in 1929, it was said it didn’t matter if the old gambler was going to heaven or hell, for he was sure to arrange a match with the other side soon after he arrived at either place.

  Goldfield mining stocks ballooned and then crashed. On May 25, 1907, Mr. George S. Nixon, the U.S. Senator from Nevada and partner in Goldfield Consolidated, gave a newspaper interview. When asked what he estimated the ultimate earnings of Goldfield Consolidated to be, he responded: “I believe I am conservative when I say that the property will be eventually earning $1,000,000 net monthly.”32 The minimum value, he estimated, would be $20 per stock. But within 18 months, Goldfield Consolidated was down to $3.50 in the markets. Wingfield and Nixon became multimillionaires as inside traders from their Goldfield operations.

  Gans, perhaps the only straight shooter in the whole affair, would use the money he received from the fight to build a hotel with doors that never closed back home in Baltimore, and in namesake tie it to this legendary epic battle. But the damage to his body from the over training and the savage fight would render his immune system so feeble that tuberculosis would consume him a short time later.

  Joe Gans, perfect in his art and easily the master of any other boxer, was no match for the white plague, the scourge of the first half of the twentieth century. Gans sacrificed himself in the ring on that torrid Labor Day in Nevada. Round after round, weakened by the weight loss forced upon him, he fought an indestructible character in the Durable Dane. Nelson, too, left the best part of himself in that ring. When he fought Gans two years later, he announced that he was ready to retire, that beating Gans was his life’s goal. There is a battle that constantly rages between health and disease, life and death. Some time during that long afternoon Joe Gans began losing that battle, as the death germs of tuberculosis took control of the Old Master’s body.

  15

  The White Plague

  And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He came like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of the revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the day. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, The Mask of Red Death

  Joe Gans’ victory over Battling Nelson marked the pinnacle of his illustrious career and also the beginning of the end for the Old Master. The long fingers of the White Plague were wrapping around his throat even as he rapped the steely skull of the Durable Dane. Gans, perfect in his art and easily the master of the fistic domain, would go down to defeat at the hands of tuberculosis.

  Plagues Past and Present

  It is estimated that in the 14th century the black (bubonic) plague, or “Black Death” as it was called, destroyed one quarter to two-thirds of the population of Europe. Later, the disease returned in what was called the “Great Plagues” in various countries until the seventeen hundreds. At the turn of each of the past three centuries in the western world, a different deadly pestilence descended upon the population. During each period, public health infrastructures were no match for the furies unleashed by disease.

  In 1800, yellow fever, a disease brought by an Asian mosquito, killed large numbers of Americans. The mosquito was imported into Baltimore by the clipper ships in their cargoes of opium from China and India, a trade that fed the popular opium dens, which thrived alongsid
e taverns in American cities. The disease proliferated in America when masses of Chinese laborers arrived to work the railroads. Quinine became a mainstay for a household’s medicine chest. When the power of U.S. ingenuity was harnessed, swamps were drained, and yellow fever and malaria in the western world were soon largely relegated to Rudyard Kipling novels and other tales of the Far East, as far as the American public was concerned.

  By 1900, the White Plague of tuberculosis, or “White Death,” had spread unfettered in the Eastern United States. Baltimore reported 10,679 deaths in 1900. An air-borne bacterial infection, its transmission mechanism was so poorly understood that it was often misdiagnosed as pneumonia, syphilis or even vampirism when the victim’s complexion turned an ashen white—the pallor cast by this slow, agonizing death. The high incidence of tuberculosis coincided with Bram Stoker’s publication of Dracula and the fascination with the cult of vampirism. But when the sufferer did not develop dementia or die immediately, doctors would attribute the malady to the vaguely defined “consumption.”

  Wafting through humid locations such as seaports with their densely populated tenements, the seeds of consumption were easily planted. Hence, the disease took a greater toll in minority populations and large cities, like Joe Gans’ hometown of Baltimore, than in rural areas. Local and state leaders began to take a concerted, “scientific” approach to public health, collecting demographic and social statistics to understand and thwart TB’s spread. Records indicated that morbidity and mortality for African American citizens was two to three times greater than records indicated for Caucasian Americans. Added to the fact that the disease was associated with unsanitary conditions, the doleful numbers provided another opportunity for racial denigration and separation. With the development of bacteria-fighting drugs, particularly streptomycin, the fear of TB would be replaced by complacency in the second half of the twentieth century.

  The white plague that took Gans still holds its dominion today. The best known plague of the present age, AIDS, is even today less of a killer than tuberculosis. One would suspect from the accumulation of press coverage that AIDS is the most infectious scourge in the world. But it is not. TB remains first, infecting one third of the world’s population. Successful eradication of the deadly bacteria depends upon antibiotics, and as bacteria mutate they become less responsive to existing drugs. A new strain of drug resistant tuberculosis has been identified on several continents, including America; and according to many bacteriologists, this new strain threatens a pandemic health disaster like no other since the bubonic plague.

  Edgar Allan Poe reminds readers what it is like to stand helplessly by as a loved one succumbs to an uncontrolled, unrelenting disease. His soul lashes out at the great unknown that takes his beautiful Annabel Lee:

  And this was the reason that, long ago,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  A wind blew out of a cloud by night

  Chilling my Annabel Lee;

  So that her high-born kinsman came

  And bore her away from me,

  To shut her up in a sepulchre

  In this kingdom by the sea.

  The “chill” of pneumonia, which was actually many times undiagnosed TB, took the lives of many famous poets and musicians. Chopin, Mozart, Keats, the Bronte sisters, Thoreau and Emerson all fell to the ravages of the disease. It was generally thought at the time that a person of an artistic nature or a “sickly” child was more susceptible to the malady. At the age of 12, the family physician thought that the frail future heavyweight Jack Johnson might be tubercular.1

  Frailty was no prerequisite for the disease. Even the most physically fit individuals such as boxers suffered, indicating that the white plague was indiscriminate, attacking a finely-tuned body with such a wasting effect as to make a thirty year old look sixty at the time of death. The great black heavyweight boxer from Australia Peter Jackson died of tuberculosis in 1901 at the age of forty. Baltimorean Edgar Allan Poe’s own early, and mysterious, death at forty, likely of consumption, would foreshadow the death of the young Joe Gans at 35 fifty years later in the same cramped neighborhood. Gans’ emaciated body would lay in final repose at his mother’s house only a few short blocks away from the Poe house.

  The bacteria that caused TB was identified in 1882. Robert Koch of Germany, who identified the bacteria, had also identified the bacteria that caused anthrax the decade before, establishing the “germ theory” for the cause of disease. Koch received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1905 for his work in tuberculosis. In the 1890s he experimented with dead bacteria for a possible vaccine but the disease did not respond to it. Charlatans took advantage of a lack of a cure, promoting various mysterious potions. One can only imagine what was contained in the medicine from a company in California advertising “tuberclecide!” One ad from the company read, “Even in its last stages, progress of the malady can be checked, the tubercle bacilli destroyed, and a complete cure effected. We have incontrovertible evidence of our success. Many Los Angeles and Southern California people have been rescued from an apparently hopeless stage of the dread disease.... Your Loved Ones May Be Saved From Their Impending Doom. Tuberclecide completely eliminates the Tuberculosis Germs from the human body. No hypodermics. No nostrums. Investigate our claims and begin treatment before it is too late. Treatment at home, surrounded by home comforts. We invite correspondence and will give full particulars by mail, or to all who will call at our offices. Tuberclecide Company, Los Angeles, Ca.”2

  Baltimore, with its world-famous Johns Hopkins University and a high concentration of the disease located near the premier institution, was at the forefront of tubercular research. Dr. William Osler of the Johns Hopkins Hospital founded the Laennec Society for the study of tuberculosis. In the winter of 1901, just a few years before Gans would contract the disease, Dr. Osler summed up the tragic situation regarding consumption, “What are we doing for the 10,000 consumptives in our midst? Not one thing that a modern civilized community should do. Plans were perfected some time ago by which two students were enabled to visit each case of consumption which applied for treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital dispensary, and what they found is a disgrace to a city of 500,000 inhabitants. Those people have not the slightest instruction as to the proper way to care for themselves; there is no law compelling a report to the Board of Health of cases of consumption, so that the authorities can inspect those cases; there is no provision for proper disinfection of the house after a death from consumption and if there were, the Health department hasn’t means to do it, and the conditions in this respect are indeed appalling.”3 Dr. Osler argued for notification, inspection, and education, but in 1902, his was a lonely voice.

  Boxing Was a Fertile Ground for Infection

  Widespread use of antiseptics existed in boxing training facilities, but solutions were not used primarily to clean and disinfect surfaces. Combinations of alcohol and witch hazel were used as rubbing compounds on the surfaces of the boxers’ bodies after their workouts, but seldom used on the sweaty tables where they had lain. Towels and sponges washed and rewashed bodies, and spit buckets were incubators for the germs. In some fights, during the one-minute rest break, some cornermen were ready with fresh water in their mouths to spray in the face of their charge. At the end of some brutal battles where both fighters put forth equally strong effort, it was not uncommon to see them kiss. After a bruising battle, it was considered common for a fighter to suffer with coughs and hemorrhages. Many fighters didn’t know or care whether they had contracted the disease, for even if diagnosed with consumption, they figured their finely tuned bodies were able to resist the disease. Fever, chills, and weight loss were the only symptoms indicating the disease had progressed. But then again these symptoms fit any number of ailments. In gambling lingo, the disease was a crap shoot.

  Personal health problems were the last thing on the mind of Joe Gans at the beginning of 1902. He was in peak condition, readying himself to fight tough opponents such as “Elbows” Mc
Fadden and waiting for his title fight February 10 with Frank Erne. Erne would meet Gans later in the year. Over the next few months, Gans’ body would be trained, inspected, measured, and weighed and those results would be seen by more eyes than a modern-day beauty contest. As the leading contender, his condition made good copy. On May 11, 1902, newspapers announced that Gans was in Buffalo with his manager and his two close seconds, fighters themselves—Young Peter Jackson and Herman Miller, and that he was in “fine” condition. After all, champions were paid to be in the best of condition. Little did Gans know that one day soon he would see his good friend and sparring partner Herman Miller waste away from the dreaded “pulmonary problem.”

  Amid all the publicity from Johns Hopkins regarding the state of TB in Baltimore in 1902, Governor John Walter Smith of Maryland was prompted to act. He appointed a Tuberculosis Commission “to investigate the prevalence, distribution and causes of human tuberculosis in the state of Maryland, to determine its relations to the public health and welfare and to devise ways and means for restricting and controlling said disease.”4 The first commission met on August 23, 1902, in Baltimore, comprised of university and state level health care specialists. Dr. Lillian Welch (Johns Hopkins Medical School was one of the first to appoint an equal number of women and men into their program) was thought extremely valuable for her ability to get at facts concerning the sociology and economics affecting the family. Every hospital, dispensary, or any institution having medical officers in the city, county, or state was required to give the commission access to documents regarding the disease. State records showed that 13 percent of the deaths that occurred in the state were related to the “White Death.” Yet these numbers were tremendously underreported because most deaths from TB were concealed. It is estimated that a more realistic number was at least double that reported.