Joe Gans

by Colleen Aycock

  As late as 1949 Henry Miller in his novel Sexus uses for dinner conversation the merits of Joe Gans and Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson obviously learned many a thing from Gans. Straight hitting, the stance with the feet always at 45-degree angles, and the emphasis on balance were all passed down from the Old Master. Jack Johnson’s uppercut that he learned from Gans is what he used to dominate the heavyweight division for years and gave rise to the call from American sportswriters for a great white hope to redeem the white race.

  Gans’ superior boxing skills gave specific proof in the argument for equality, and from his work came language that could be sent across the telegraph wires, delivered from the pulpits, and echoed among the masses. Gans was no less important as a symbolic example to the social-political times than he was to boxing history.

  Maybe shame is the answer to our original question as to why the great Joe Gans has been forgotten. Gans gave the lie to the stereotypes perpetrated about blacks in the early 20th century. With the passing of those generations who saw the marvel in action or read or heard about his accomplishments, just as with the razing of a building, it is easy to forget who lived there, the memory has vanished. It is only late in the 20th century that historians could look back and appreciate what Gans gave us.

  In Gerald Suster’s history of the lightweight division, Lightning Strikes written in 1994, he says of the Old Master, “Gans’ memory remained an inspiration for all who came after him. He showed his own people that a black man could be a distinguished and dignified world champion. He introduced moves that many boxers were laboring to learn a generation or more later. With the aid of Tex Rickard, he demonstrated conclusively that there were megabucks in the lightweight championship. His life was unfortunate and he was the victim of the prejudice of his times: yet few could live up to the standards he set for the future.”18

  Joe Gans was such a dignified artist of the ring that he won the love of millions of Americans, even after the scandal of Chicago had linked his name with the fake fight with Terry McGovern. In Gans’ own words, he was modest but in no way kow-towing or obsequious. In several interviews he promoted the virtues of “straight hitting,” “clean-living,” and “self-reliance.” He calmly but insistently encouraged white fighters “to drop this issue of drawing the color line.”

  Finally, the all-time greatest boxing writer, Nat Fleischer, though he exhibited the prejudices of his time, states in his book about Benny Leonard, Leonard the Magnificent, “Merely to be compared to the Baltimore Negro was the highest compliment that could be paid to Leonard, for Gans truly was what they called him—The Master.”19 And yet the master scholar did great harm to the legacy of Joe Gans. By blemishing Gans’ character as dishonest, Fleischer made him easy to relegate to the backwater of history, the scribe’s weighty assessment coloring a line of subsequent histories deferring to his preeminent word. By painting Gans as cowardly, Fleischer rendered a service to those who wished to forget the truth of the world in which Gans prospered despite tremendous odds against him.

  In this book we have presented the incredible accomplishments of Joe Gans, and cited several major literary works in which he apparently serves as a point of reference. A reader unfamiliar with boxing may fairly say at this point, “Surely you exaggerate the extent to which Gans has been forgotten.”

  In researching the book, Colleen made pilgrimages to the stomping grounds of the Old Master, hoping to find evidence of his memory. Our final chapter describes what she found.

  20

  Final Rounds

  In Gans’ day, a “distance fight” consisted usually of twenty rounds, rather than the fifteen fought in the film Rocky between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. Rocky’s seemingly impossible ambition was to be the first to “go the distance” with Creed. Gans in his day went twenty rounds and beyond in dozens of brutal contests, in addition to scoring his phenomenal knockouts. Sylvester Stallone’s film arrived in 1976, just in time for the celebration of the American bicentennial, and Rocky gave a charge of hope to all Americans in a very democratic way. The history of American film is replete with inspirational heroes of the boxing ring. Stallone’s film achievement celebrated Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. In this book on Gans, our research kept bringing us back to the marvels of Baltimore.

  From 1850 to the present, so many great artists and professionals have worked in Baltimore or called the city “home” that we cannot hope to list but a handful here. Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and James Cain of the literary world hailed from the Monumental City. Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, grew up there. Billie Holiday, as a child of Baltimore, grew up listening to Eubie Blake, whose career began at Joe Gans’ Goldfield Hotel in Baltimore.

  In 1910 when Gans’ train made his final trip from the West, people came to the stations in droves to honor the champ. And when he was laid to rest in Baltimore, people flocked by the thousands from the city and all parts of the country to have a final moment with the Old Master.

  Baltimore’s adoration of the Master knew no bounds. Gans had been an ambassador of goodwill for his hometown. Early in his career the newspapers consistently refer to him as “the Baltimorean.” Today it would be hard to find anyone who carries the banner of his or her city the way Gans did. And yet when Colleen visited his gravesite, no one could be found in the area who had ever heard of him. The graveyard was chained closed, overgrown with weeds, and dotted with plastic bags snagged on various thickets and headstones.

  Across the street from the cemetery a policeman sat in his car watching over the neighborhood. He too, had never heard of the man whose tombstone he could see if his eye had been trained on it. “Who’s he?” he asked politely at the mention of Joe Gans.

  Historic Mount Auburn Cemetery today, where Gans is buried. It was the first African American Cemetery in Baltimore (courtesy David W. Wallace, 2007).

  The name “Gans,” carved into the gravestone of Joseph Gans in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Baltimore, was recognized the world over when he died August 10, 1910. In 2005 the gravesite was restored by the Veteran Boxers Association of Baltimore. Carved into the stone after he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990 are the words: “World’s Lightweight Champion 1902–1904 1906–1908.” Even these well-meaning groups were misled as to Gans’ title reign. His tombstone shows that he was not the champion from 1904 to 1906, echoing the notion that he had lost the title and had to regain it in the 1906 Goldfield fight (courtesy David W. Wallace, 2007).

  “He” was a gentleman and a champion, a man who believed in a clean fight. He was no less than the greatest fighting machine who ever lived. The example Gans set by his embodiment of the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance still resonates today. One would think that Baltimore itself, Gans’ hometown and long known as the Monumental City, would be a paragon of respect for the Old Master. Yet for years Gans’ gravesite lay in an unkempt part of town, non-descript in a city known recently more for homicide and other crimes than for the majesty of its sports heroes. But even if Baltimore seems to have taken it on the chin in recent years, it remains the home of the Old Master.

  During most of his short lifetime money flowed through Gans’ hands. He was a gambler, enjoying his cards. Like many boxers who came from little means, he enjoyed looking his best. Winning boxers had the physiques and money to be able to wear whatever styles were popular at the time, expensive suits, shoes, even diamond-studded jewelry.

  Throughout his life, when he spoke to the press, Gans was articulate and incomparably kind, when most boxers described their counterparts in mean-spirited ways. Gans was consistently described as “modest” in the press. Unlike the flamboyant Johnson who flaunted his wealthy, pleasure-filled lifestyle, Gans was a gentleman inside and out of the ring.

  Gans won the sympathy of his fans and sportswriters when in the decline of life he absorbed punishment in the ring to insure financial stability for his family. He used his winnings to leave a powerful legacy in the Goldf
ield Hotel. Gans lived the American dream and epitomized American values, becoming a provider unafraid of hard work, and a success, rising from poverty and other setbacks by using his brain, his strength, and his determination. The authors consider Gans the greatest of all the American champions in a sense that encompasses more than just boxing. His efforts also paved the way for Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown of the football Cleveland Browns, and all of the great black professional athletes of today. Indeed, Muhammad Ali in his autobiography acknowledges his debt to the old masters of the ring, dating back to the days of Joe Gans.

  Gans achieved all of his great feats in the face of the Jim Crow segregation laws. These laws were named after a song by T.D. “Daddy” Rice, a comedian in the black-faced form of comedy in the nineteenth century. “Jump Jim Crow,” the song, was a key initial step in a tradition of popular music in the United States that was based on the mockery of Africans. With time Jim Crow became a term often used to refer to blacks, and from this the laws of racial segregation became known as Jim Crow laws. Lyrics from the song include such affronts to decency as: “I went down to de river, I didn’t mean to stay, But there I see so many girls, I couldn’t get away.”

  As seen by the frequent references to lynching of “negro rapists,” songs such as these kept the fear of “sexually ravenous blacks” at the forefront. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner during the week after the Goldfield fight asks, “What will be the End of the Dead-Earnest, Menacing Uprising of Atlanta to Crush Out with Guns, Ropes and Dogs, the Fearful Epidemic of Negro Crime Against Her Women?”1

  Against a national backdrop of racism, Baltimore in Gans’ time, and the Harlem renaissance of the ’20s, helped bring a dream of black pride to fruition. In the sadness of the Old Master’s death there was a golden moment when he returned to Baltimore and people were drawn for miles to bid him farewell. The moment was golden because all the townspeople: black, brown, and white came to celebrate the life of a people’s champion, not just the first American-born black champion.

  What if Joe Gans had not contracted tuberculosis and had lived a long life? He may have taken some of the public’s attention away from Jack Johnson’s provocative behavior. The easing of race tensions may have occurred much sooner with Gans emblematic of the black boxing champion, rather than Johnson with his golden smile or Ali with his Louisville lip. As with all tragedies, the question of what could have been will never be answered.

  After Gans’ death and during Johnson’s reign, lynchings and other violence against blacks increased. In Unforgivable Blackness, Ward describes how Johnson, the only black champion in the year 1910, became such a lightning rod for white anger because of his brazen style and his flaunting of affairs with white women. If Gans had still reigned in 1910, with his gentlemanly manner, might he have served as a kind of elder statesman of the black pugilists? Would white outrage at black boxing superiority have been tempered by a modest, active champion like Gans? Sadly we will only know of the racial divisiveness that came in the wake of Johnson’s title reign, which included continued segregation of the armed forces, the continued lynchings, and a host of other manifestations of racial persecution in the American twentieth century.

  It has been a great misfortune and loss to American history that Gans was all but forgotten after World War II, “invisible” to generations coming after Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, et al. Without Gans to lead the way, there would have been no straight-hitting boxing masters like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. The Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance would have never had the Goldfield Club as a model upon which to build.

  A little over a century ago, amid the manifest destinies, the crosses of gold, and flim-flam of the early days of the American 20th century, Joe Gans quietly developed the art of boxing and in the Goldfield Hotel helped provide for the future of American culture. His widow Martha kept the music alive and shared Gans’ remarkable legacy at the Goldfield. In 1912 she married Ford Dabney, composer, orchestra leader, and proprietor of the Ford Dabney Theater and the Chelsea in Washington, D.C. Dabney’s Syncopated Orchestra and his collaboration with Florenz Ziegfeld took the couple to New York. The Goldfield Hotel was eventually sold.

  Sadly indicative of a society that thought the place not worth preserving, the Goldfield Hotel was demolished in December 1960. It had become a run-down apartment building over a grocery store, torn down to make way for an industrial park.2 Gans mother’s home on Argyle Street, where he spent the last few agonizing days of his life, has also been demolished. The adjacent block of row houses on the same street, however, stand abandoned, boarded up, awaiting the demolition crew, a sight frequently photographed as an example of the demise of inner city Baltimore. Maybe today, with a different eye, we might see their beauty.

  In 1903, a year after Gans won the world lightweight championship, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The problem of this century is the color line.” Nowhere was the color line more pervasive and hard to overcome than in boxing. We hope that in future history courses on American blacks, the pioneering contributions of Gans in bridging the gap between the races will not be overlooked.

  The authors hope to have done our part to resurrect the legacy of the great Joe Gans. In 1902 the Baltimore Afro-American bemoaned the fact that Joe Gans got more publicity than Booker T. Washington. Today, only dedicated boxing fans know the story of Joe Gans. Baltimore itself has not received much positive recognition in recent years. May Baltimore reclaim its status as a robust center of sport and art, and home of the Old Master.

  In 1904 Joe Gans’ title was stolen through a concerted effort on the West Coast. It is possible that the final demise of Joe Gans’ reputation is largely attributable to Fleischer’s hard words in 1938 about his “quitting” against Frank Erne and throwing the fight to Terry McGovern.

  In Hard Road to Glory, Arthur Ashe is careful to denounce the throwing of a fight whenever he broaches the subject, because of the historical significance those who wrote before him placed on the fact. He writes of the Gans-McGovern fight, “Gans took a dive and lost in the second round to blows that observers declared would not harm an infant. It was obviously a fixed bout. He deserved the shame he felt, although he may have feared for his life just as Joe Walcott had before him.”3

  Later, Ashe writes of Jack Johnson’s fight against Jess Willard, “Most boxing historians believe Johnson did indeed tank the bout—a disgraceful performance from a world champion in any sport.”4 Johnson, hounded by authorities on trumped up Mann Act charges of “transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes,” had reasons similar to those of Walcott for his actions. It is a peculiar phenomenon that throwing a fight in American lore is considered much worse than almost any other kind of chicanery.

  Joe Gans died in the home that he provided for his mother in Baltimore on Argyle Street. Thousands of mourners came to pay their respects to the great champion during his last days. The block of row houses left on the street today awaits demolition (courtesy David W. Wallace, 2007).

  But somehow genius and artistry have charms to soothe the most savage, most virulent racism and cut through hypocrisy, even scapegoating. And if it was possible for Gans to rise from the wretchedness of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, take the fall for his crooked managers, live through the witch-hunt–like aftermath of the Chicago fight fix, regain his stolen title, and emerge a hero, what reason is there for anyone to think of impossibility?

  Epilogue:

  Boxing’s Continued Popularity

  Many years after George Foreman’s famous “Rumble in the Jungle” with Muhammad Ali, where big George lost his heavyweight crown, he was asked why he took such a risky fight as Ali. He replied, “One thing—five million dollars. Everyone should take a chance like that at least once in their lives.”1 So of course part of boxing’s allure is the potential of great riches. In few places other than the ring can a poor-born child make $5 million in one night.

  The authors are both among the staunchest
fans of boxing, one being a former amateur boxer and the other the daughter of a Depression-era professional fighter. We acknowledge that boxing is one athletic endeavor where, when performed as intended, the result can be damage to the human brain. A left jab from even a mediocre professional can easily break a nose, cut an eye, or fill a mouth with blood. In one night’s work the expert may have hundreds of such blows fired at his face like stabbing pistons. Once broken, a nose rarely sets back to its previous form, and loss of vision leaves a man to face the world in darkness. And yet every day throughout the world young men walk for miles, ride a bike or bus, or maybe a train with the hope of one day standing in ring center, fending off blows of a highly trained specialist in the destruction of the human face.

  These facts cause many to feel that the sport should be banned. But boxing only thrives, its adherents growing more determined, when attempts are made toward its prohibition. Why is this?

  In no other sport do the words, “self-reliance,” “hard work” and “perseverance” have such relevance. The drive to excel, to be the best one can be in the prize ring is not subverted by politicians or thwarted by inept teammates. A boxer’s achievement cannot be purloined by a hostile takeover, a crooked contract, or other misappropriation. The money fighters earn may be lost or stolen, but their accomplishments remain their own.