Joe Gans

by Colleen Aycock

  Gans entered the ring at 3:15 with his seconds, Willie Keefe, Kid North, Alvie King and Anton La Grave. He was wearing a faded green bathrobe and a blue skullcap. With the park packed and the surrounding hills full of people looking like ants on a mound, announcer Billie Jordan introduced Gans as “the only lightweight champion of the world,” a bitter reminder to Britt that Gans had never given up the lightweight title.12 When he went to his corner, his seconds covered him in blankets as he shivered in the cool breeze. Then Jimmy Britt entered with his entourage.

  It was a one-sided match. San Francisco writer C. E. Van Loan wrote that at all times Gans was the master. Britt “seemed to be losing steadily from the moment the second round started. Jimmy was game throughout and he struck back like a Trojan in the rallies, but all things considered, he was like putty in the hands of the peer of all lightweights.”13 The papers reported that Gans’ wife sat in a box seat on the north side of the ring. During the second round when Gans landed a hard blow to Britt’s left eye, she could be heard, “That eye is gone. Shut it!”14

  Throughout his career, Joe Gans’ would attain a skill in the ring that was almost unbelievable, controlling his opponent to a sometimes comical degree. The San Francisco Examiner in 1907 would report on Gans’ fourth round, where he gave a great exhibition of clever defensive work.

  He had solved Britt’s style of fight and lost no time in going to close quarters. Britt rapped away with lefts and rights, but Joe ducked the swings, blocked the hooks, and twisted his midsection out of the way of the left rips. He had Britt dizzy inside of a minute and then, stepping in, shot the right fist to the point of the chin. Britt’s head went back and Gans prodded him with the short right uppercut, which took effect on the bridge of the nose. Britt let go a wild swing and Gans, who was in position to shoot the right to Britt’s unprotected jaw, drew back with a right fist and then held it, yelling at Brit instead.

  ‘Pow!’ he said, and the crowd laughed. Joe was turning the contest into burlesque. Had he been willing, he could have finished Britt with that one right cross and had he known how the fight was going to end he would have done so. Toward the end of the round Gans walked Britt to the ropes and delivered two lightning rights to the point of the chin. Britt was rocking when the bell rang and there was no more fight in him. He was bleeding at the mouth as he went to the corner and he was laboring in his breathing. During the minute of intermission Gans chatted with his seconds and kept a keen eye on Britt, over whom his seconds were working frantically.15

  In the fifth round, Britt broke a bone in his forearm and dislocated his wrist from jabbing it into Gans’ forearm blocks. Referee Jack Welch stopped the match and gave the win to Gans.

  Van Loan summarized the fight the next day in his editorial: “Joe Gans is still the old master of the gladiatorial college; the premier thumper of the lightweight division.... Joseph is still the past master of his bruising craft; the greatest ring general of the age and the cleanest, hardest hitter of all the lightweights now in the ring.”16 Gans’ victory was thrilling proof that he was the rightful bearer of the championship laurels. Yet after this fight, to the world, Gans became an enigma. He failed to attend events given in his honor and his close friends noted that he seemed sad even when he played cards.

  Thoroughly outclassed in his second fight with Gans, “Sir Edward” quit in the fifth round, claiming he would have won but for a broken bone. Drawing in the San Francisco Examiner, September 10, 1907.

  Gans remained on the West Coast and went down to Los Angeles toward the end of September to defend his title against George Memsic, aka “Jimmy Burns.” The crowds swarmed the star’s training camp at Baldwin’s ranch. Heavyweight Jim Jeffries paid him a visit, but Gans was not the same man as before. Was he made aware of his own delicate condition? Did he learn something of his sparring partner Herman Miller’s fragile condition, that he was suffering from the White Plague?

  As with the Britt fight at the beginning of the month, experience again proved victorious, for Gans was able to remain cool against the wild swings of his younger opponent. Writing for the Los Angeles Daily Times, Harry C. Carr said of Gans, he “might have smoked cigarettes during most of the fight last night.”17 He compared him to an “old matador” and Burns to a clumsy bull. When Memsic’s wild swings failed to connect, champion heavyweight Tommy Burns, working the contender’s corner and who was responsible for giving the young fighter his name, tried to unnerve Gans through taunts. But Gans was unmoved. Carr said that Gans could have murdered the lad if he had wanted. Carr’s description of the fight was almost comic: “Repeatedly, during the fiercest part of the fighting, Gans would reach out and simply hold his glove against the white boy’s sore face while Burns thrashed out madly—almost insanely—into the empty air.”18

  But by the end of the fight Carr’s depiction of Gans turned to a “sorrowful calm.” Carr described the sweaty white boy holding his arms against his face buried in a clench as though “curled against the negro’s breast for self protection, dreading the terrible fist that poised clinched to one side, waiting for [the fist to strike] like a snake.”19 He described Gans’ demeanor: “His face, during the maddest of the fighting, was curiously unangered. No clenched teeth; no frenzy of battle; not much tension; merely the puzzled, wrinkled look of the expert coming to the critical part of the operation. He wasn’t any more angry than a good matador should be while he waits, sword in hand, for the bull just to turn his head into the proper position.”20

  Through the looking glass of time it is often easy to see when a fighter should have hung up the gloves after a fight. Boxers who receive repeated head blows begin to slur their speech, albeit by slow degrees, after just a few years or less. The jarring of the brain must cease altogether if the man is to retain his mental faculties. But few realize when that moment to retire arrives.

  Who knows what Gans was thinking at his sparring partner’s retirement benefit on January 3, 1908, as he looked into the face of his long-time friend, knowing he was suffering with the same condition? Joe Gans and Al Herford gave a Boxing Carnival for middleweight Miller at Baltimore’s Germania Maennerchor Hall, where they both had fought so many previous battles. Abe Ulman sold pictures of Gans and Miller to help with the proceeds that would be used to send the ailing Miller to Denver for treatment. His last fight had been in Norfolk, Virginia, only two months earlier in November. At that fight he beat Australian Jimmy Ryan in four rounds weighing 170 pounds. At the benefit, he had dropped to 130. He watched and smiled at the battle royal that had been scheduled for him. But when the strong boxers began their work, he became too depressed and was asked to be carried away. Old friend Fred Sweigert refereed the events. Joe Gans fought Bart Blackburn, slapping down his punches, and when an opening occurred, Gans would only touch his opponent’s face, “showing conclusively how easy it would have been for him to have landed a probable knock-out blow.” Blackburn lay down for the symbolic count.21

  When Gans stepped upon the weight scale before his next title defense in San Francisco in May of 1908 against Rudy Unholz, reporters noticed how “drawn” his face looked in comparison to his opponent’s glow of health.22 During the match, the “Boer,” as Unholz was called, was able to land a few hard punches on Gans’ jaw. But once Gans figured out his style, he was able not only to hold Unholz at bay, but also to break through his guard, and with powerful punches close an eye and send him to the floor. Gans was declared the winner in the eleventh round.

  As often we see in life, a person’s greatest asset can create a liability in ways unforeseen. With the exception of the scar he wore over his left eye from the Erne fight, Gans’ brilliant boxing defense left his face unmarked and his gentlemanly way of speaking intact. His nose was not smashed against his face and neither ear was misshapen. As the old saying goes, “If they can’t hit you, they can’t hurt you.” A lord of the boxing ring is verily invincible if he can’t be hit. But while Gans’ reflexes were as sharp as they ever were, his endurance was no
longer what it used to be. Perhaps his great skills caused him to overlook the weakening of his body that would lead to his early death.

  Death in the Afternoon

  On the fourth of July 1908 Gans met Battling Nelson in Colma, California. The afternoon Joe Gans finally lost his lightweight crown was a blistering hot Independence Day. By all accounts Gans battered his challenger throughout the early rounds, building up a big lead under the hot sun. But Gans was fighting a man known for his endurance, and who according to the leading phrenologist of the day, had the thickest skull ever recorded.

  Back at the Goldfield, Joe’s hotel in Baltimore, the electric piano had been turned off, and the dining room was hushed. Three thousand people had gathered in front of the hotel on Lexington and Chestnut Streets to hear the returns from the Postal Telegraph Company. Men with megaphones shouted out the round-by-round returns inside the hotel and out on the streets.

  In the first five rounds Gans landed a fury of punishing blows on Nelson’s face, but the enduring Dane kept coming back into the fray. In the seventh round Nelson landed a brutal blow to Gans’ body which started to sap his strength. From then on it was Nelson’s fight to win as he pelted Gans’ body with terrible blows. In the twelfth round, Gans fell on three different occasions and took a count of nine. Gans gave it his all in the fourteenth round, slamming left and right short jabs into Nelson’s face, to no avail.

  As the 17th round started in the second Gans-Nelson fight, men can be seen still making side wagers, probably betting on when the end would come. Women in a variety of hats watch, as enthralled as the men in their white, round stove-tops.

  On film Gans resembles an ebony skeleton. His hands are incredibly fast as he throws his textbook combinations. He moves around “like he’s on wheels up there,” as Jack Johnson used to say. This is especially amazing considering he has been fighting the charging bull Bat Nelson for over an hour. Nelson’s charge is relentless. He is drenched in his own blood as the Old Master hits him with blow after blow, all the while perfect in his art.

  But this was not a day when art would prevail. Gans wears a frustrated, almost disgusted expression, as if thinking, “Of what is this Danish head made? Granite? Marble perchance?” The bout brings to mind the breath-held excitement of the Ali-Frazier classics, where even the staunchest of Ali fans admit that, for all his ring knowledge, physical assets, and boxing skill, he never succeeded in solving the jungle beat of Frazier’s Philadelphia thwack of a left hook. Ali, with his steel-belted radial abdomen, still ended up urinating blood for weeks after his Frazier fights.

  Gans’ internal organs were not protected in this fight by layers of muscles. His ribs were prominent and Nelson charged at them. He did not even try to hit the Old Master anywhere above the chest. Gans’ head was never hittable, as his guard was never out of place. His final minute as champion is a masterpiece, despite the exhaustion, the white death, and his unrelenting foe.

  Bat Nelson’s hook missed its mark time and again. After the bout he would say that all he ever wanted from boxing was to defeat Gans. His final years would be spent in a home for the mentally disabled, in no small part from the beatings he took from Gans.

  Every Ahab carries his spear with him out into the great blue frontier. Nelson’s was his left hook. Its viciousness cannot be exaggerated. And like a mako shark rising up from the deep waters of the Atlantic, smelling blood, Nelson’s hook started at ring-center, down near the floor, every ounce of weight and grim determination carried with it, to impale the emaciated champion. It literally looks on film as if Nelson’s arm is buried under Gans’ heart.

  A powerful blow to the solar plexus can short-circuit the nervous system as surely as a hard chop on the chin. In Ali’s fights against big bangers like Foreman and Frazier, he may lie on the ropes, but he always covers his chin with his gloves and the soft spot just below the sternum with his elbows. If Frazier had possessed an upper-cutting left hook, or a good straight right in addition to his short hooks, ring history may read differently.

  The film footage as shot is so fast that Gans is just a frail blur of motion fighting off a steaming, pale locomotive of an attacker in Nelson. Frame-by-frame, however, it is a thing of beauty comparable to the slow fall of autumnal leaves from a mighty oak. Even the Dane is, in his own way, perfect in his art. The object of that art is to chop down Gans with his threshing-blade left hook.

  The pace is frantic. Gans looks 30 pounds lighter than Bat Nelson. After an hour of fighting under the hot sun each second of the 17th round is a mini-drama in itself in a frame-by-frame analysis:

  Both men come out for the final round like crouching tigers, Nelson charging with his head behind his gloves, Gans slightly more upright.

  Frame 1—Gans’ left jab pierces Bat’s guard, smacks him on the forehead.

  Frame 2—Nelson absorbs the blow. Gans’ back muscles thinly cover his bones.

  Frame 3—Gans steps adroitly back, Nelson charges.

  Frames 4 thru 8—Gans pivots around the ring, Nelson charges.

  Frame 9—Gans is leaning back, onto his back foot.

  Frames 10 thru 13—Gans hits onrushing Nelson with textbook left hooks, spins to his left.

  Frames 14 thru 20—Nelson swings wildly with a left hook. Gans snaps short left hook to Nelson’s mouth.

  Frames 21 thru 30—Gans backs up as Nelson charges like a wild man.

  Frames 31 thru 34—Gans hits Nelson on the nose with a hook, Gans is, incredibly, out-hooking a left-hooker, though this is a dangerous ploy.

  Frames 35 thru 40—Fighters move off camera

  Frames 41 thru 43—Gans chops a right to Nelson’s chin, Nelson swings and misses, all the while Gans is moving his head so that Nelson misses

  Frames 44 thru 47—Gans ties up Nelson. Nelson hits Gans with a right below the belt

  Frames 48 thru 52—With his left shoulder in Gans’ chest Nelson shoves Gans backwards

  Frames 50 thru 58—Fighters break

  Frames 59 thru 60—Gans hits Nelson with a clean jab. Nelson misses with a wild left hook; a follow-up hook grazes Gans’ chin

  Frames 60 thru 63—Off-screen

  Frames 64 thru 66—Gans hits Nelson with a 1–2 punch

  Frames 67 thru 70—Off-screen

  Frames 71 thru 75—Gans hits charging Nelson with a hard right, then a left hook to the temple

  Frames 76 thru 85—Gans nails Bat with a right, then with perfect left hook. Gans’ accuracy is amazing. Nelson charges kamikaze style, missing with a left swing. Gans lands left hook and chopping right. Nelson lands a hook to Gans’ body; Gans winces as he lands a short left to Bat’s jaw in return.

  Frames 85 thru 100—They clinch then break

  Frames 101 thru 105—Gans lands jab then right. His left hook is smothered as Bat grabs him

  Frames 106 thru 110—Nelson misses with left hook.

  Frames 111 thru 115—Gans lands left jab followed by chopping right.

  Frames 116 thru 117—Gans lands left jab; Nelson misses two left hooks.

  Frames 118 thru 122—They clinch

  Frames 123 thru 126—Gans lands left jab. Two men stand in front of the camera, exchanging cash as they make a side bet.

  Frames 127 thru 130—Nelson misses left hook to head.

  Frames 131 thru 135—They clinch.

  Frames 136 thru 140—Gans lands left and right to Nelson’s head.

  Frames 141 thru 145—Nelson charges at Gans who lands a left hook to Bat’s jaw.

  Frames 146 thru 150—Nelson falls to his right knee and takes a one-count.

  Frames 151 thru 160—They clinch. Gans lands jab to nose, follows with hook to same spot. Gans hits Bat with right to body. Gans blocks two left hooks with his right elbow. All the while Gans is gliding around the ring with his feet at perfect 45-degree angles. He looks as if he were on ice skates or wheels. (Young fighters are often trained to move with rope tied to feet to achieve such balance.)

  Frames 161 thru 170—Gans pushes Nelson back.


  Frames 171 thru 175—Nelson charges, Gans lands a left jab.

  Frames 176 thru 180—Nelson lands a left hook to body

  Frames 181 thru 190—They go off screen

  Frames 191 thru 192—Gans lands two left jabs

  Frames 193 thru 195—Gans misses right to head

  Frames 196 thru 200—They clinch

  Frames 201 thru 203—Gans lands left-right

  Frames 204 thru 210—They clinch

  Frames 211 thru 215—Gans backs away and lands two left jabs. Nelson grazes Gans’ chin with left hook.

  Frames 216 thru 220—Gans lands two left jabs and a right uppercut.