Joe Gans would realize his dream in the face of life’s most merciless adversities: poor health, lack of opportunity, and a bullying system that seemed to want nothing more than to crush the spirit. Born into Reconstruction America and orphaned at the age of four, he grew up with nothing more to look forward to in life than shucking oysters at the Baltimore Harbor. When black men were lucky to have any job at all, he would one day sit among the most famous athletes in the world, own a hotel that helped give birth to the Jazz Age, and even coin the hugely popular expression “bring home the bacon” when he telegraphed news of his greatest ring triumph to his beloved foster mother.7
Gans’ career began during his teens in a racist spectacle called a battle royal where up to ten young blacks were thrown into a ring (often blindfolded) and made to beat each other senseless until only one remained standing. These battles were of such brutality that they were outlawed in the Roman Empire, where feeding Christians to the lions was considered appropriate entertainment for the entire family. Yet from these inauspicious beginnings arose the world’s greatest fighter.
Why was Gans such a marvel of the ring? Throughout this book, we will compare Gans to the other greats of boxing in terms of ring skills, accomplishments, and historical significance. Gans not only dominated the lightweight division in the early 1900s, he fought much bigger men and handled them easily. On a routine basis he would fight ring greats such as Sam Langford (a dominant light heavyweight of that time), in addition to defending his lightweight laurels. Langford was so impressed by Gans that thirty years later he would maintain that the lightweight champion was the best fighter ever to enter the ring.
A good boxer’s hand and footwork comprise a highly calibrated and sophisticated balletic art in which every move by the opponent brings a quick and clever counter. Boxers work in milliseconds and every inch of height and pound of weight is critically important when the opponents are evenly matched in skill. If a 133-pound Joe Gans could fight the heavier top professionals of his day on equivalent terms, it was because of his superior skill.
Sugar Ray Robinson, a tall 160-pounder, wilted when he moved up in weight to 175 pounds to challenge the mediocre titlist Joey Maxim. Robinson is generally regarded as the greatest fighter ever, but in fact he was easy to hit compared to Gans. Even Jack Johnson, recognized by many as the greatest defensive fighter in history, often tipped his hat to friend and mentor Gans, saying that Gans’ footwork gave the impression that he was on wheels in the ring. Johnson would arrange to have Gans train him for his famous bout in Reno with Jim Jeffries, feeling himself lucky, although he generally disdained trainers.
Gans fought for an incredible 18 years, until the age of 34, against the best fighters of his day, ducking no one. Because of racial prejudice it was difficult for him to get fights with many of the best white fighters at the time. When boxing matches were moved out of public domain and into private clubs, black spectators and many black fighters were prevented from attending most fights. But with determination and perseverance and after twelve years of fighting, Gans was in a position to make the reigning titleholder accept his challenge. After he won the lightweight crown from Erne in 1902, Gans defended it regularly, a practice other titleholders were reluctant to follow. When a world boxing title is at stake, the challenger throws everything in his soul into the fray, so high are the stakes. In Gans’ day the stakes were even higher than they are today because there were fewer world boxing titles. Gans always took on the top challengers and never had his opponents cherry-picked for him. Yet even after meeting and defeating all challengers, he still had his title taken away, and he had to win it back under the blistering Nevada sun after agreeing to incredibly dangerous and unfair conditions.
In Gans’ era, civilization was just encroaching on the Wild West. As Muhammad Ali himself stated in his autobiography, The Greatest, “I used to hang around the gym and hear the pros talk about famous old fighters and their feats [dating back to the days of Joe Gans], and it sounded more exciting and daring to me than any tales of the Wild West.”8 By the 1940s, Gans’ fellow Baltimorean, H. L. Mencken, one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century, would lament in championing Gans’ memory, “Joe Gans himself, though he was probably the greatest boxer who ever lived and unquestionably one of the gamest, is mentioned only rarely by the sporting writers.”9
In the movie The Joe Louis Story, the Jack Blackburn character mentions Joe Gans numerous times when teaching the young Louis the tricks of boxing. Blackburn clearly regarded Gans as history’s greatest fighter. Gans was a true marvel of the ring. His punches, footwork, and movements were flawless. Gans was always in a position to block and counter punches. Louis sought to copy his style, but never succeeded in perfecting the Old Master’s artistry, especially with respect to defense. Some today may criticize the way Gans kept his hands low. But fighters in his day, one must remember, had to conserve energy because they fought “finish fights,” usually lasting longer than 20 rounds or until one or the other was knocked out. Gans’ title-fight win against Battling Nelson, on Labor Day, September 3, 1906, was the longest ever filmed. “The Fight of the Century” lasted a historic 42 rounds.10 Across America, fight fans gathered at railroad stations or newspaper offices to listen to announcers with megaphones shouting round-by-round telegraph bulletins coming in from the “wires.” Gans’ victory was one many feared would instigate uncontrollable riots throughout the country. Instead, the referee was cheered when he gave the decision to Joe Gans.11
The 1930s witnessed a deterioration of Gans’ memory, beginning with a book that ostensibly sought to honor the great fighter. Here we set out to rehabilitate the legacy of the Old Master, and bring back to light not only Gans but also the Golden Age of the art of self-defense. Boxers at the beginning of the twentieth century embodied all that is sublime in the American dream, from rugged individualism to the burning desire to carve out a place in the sun for self and family. No one better exemplified this than Joe Gans, the Old Master.
2
Battle Royal
Shoved into the middle of the makeshift boxing ring, blindfolded and bloody-mouthed, a twelve-year-old boy flails at the darkness while multiple assailants rain blows upon his head and torso with all their might, kicking his shins and groin. The thick smoke of tobaccos from Havana to North Carolina fills his lungs as pain shoots like daggers through his body. He steps gingerly around the ring. The sound of gloves smacking against flesh and the jeers of the crowd direct his moves. On this night the boy decks two others, much older and heavier than himself, with his work-hardened knuckles and his self-taught, straight–arm punch. When the referee calls “winnah” and takes off the last blindfold, he knows he has won more than a week’s worth of harbor labor pay.
Such was the spectacle of the 1886 battle royal, the de facto boot camp for black boxers when Joe Gans had his first experience in the boxing ring. As winner, he left the stage that night, went home and proudly handed his mother a purse full of coins. It was, for him, the princely sum of five dollars.
The two greatest fighters of the early twentieth century, first Joe Gans, and then Jack Johnson, both got their starts in contests known as battle royals. Johnson would go on to provoke a generation of whites and bring forth a call for a “great white hope” to “wipe the golden smile from his face.”1 Gans would be declared “the greatest ring general and expert in the use of the human fist the world has ever known,” and then become an invisible man in the latter part of the twentieth century.2 Battle royals would eventually be outlawed.
Fifty years after Gans and Johnson reigned supreme, the memory of these “athletic events” was brought to mainstream American consciousness by Ralph Ellison in his first and only novel, Invisible Man. At that time, few other than boxing enthusiasts had ever heard of this racist form of entertainment and gambling event. Ellison’s vivid depiction of a battle royal became the classic symbolic antithesis of the “good fight.”
Joe Gans, and Jack J
ohnson a decade later, were able to rise above these humiliating exploitations of physical courage by parlaying their battle wins into careers. Ellison, however, paints a bleaker picture of one less fortunate. In his book the narrator is invited to an evening “smoker,” ostensibly to declaim his graduation speech. But when he arrives at the fashionable hotel, the superintendent of schools announces to the club’s august patrons: “’Bring up the shines, gentlemen! Bring up the little shines!’” The narrator says, “I could hear the bleary voices yelling insistently for the battle royal to begin.”3
The narrator is then pushed upstairs, blindfolded and thrown into a melee with nine similarly benighted boys. “My saliva became like hot bitter glue. A glove connected with my head, filling my mouth with warm blood. It was everywhere. I could not tell if the moisture I felt upon my body was sweat or blood. A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the floor. Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold.”4
Use of the blindfold at these bloody events was popular perhaps because it evoked the relationship a lynch-mob has with the victim. Hoods over a face during a lynching help to hide identities, dehumanizing the event. Ellison’s metaphors of blindness and invisibility could not have been any more appropriate for the America in which Gans would achieve fame.
At the time when Ellison penned this depiction, the popularity of the battle royal was in its decline. The event had been popular for a half century, most likely evolving from contests (part of a Sunday’s entertainment) held on large plantations prior to the Civil War. The melees provided a means of selecting and grooming young fighters for individual competitions later on with the slaves of other plantation owners. But by the late nineteenth century, why would men stoop to such lows in promoting these events, and why would men submit to such treatment? The simple answer—a quick buck. These chaotic events suited gambling interests and proved immensely profitable business pursuits and popular leisure entertainment to a particular social class during the Gay Nineties.
Boxing at the turn of the twentieth century was not just a sport; it became a fashionable “craze” that tipped the scales of traditional American values by putting athletics and moneymaking at odds with Victorian piety. Policymakers had to wrangle with new questions. Should the sport be of public or private interest; regulated or not? Was the vigorous sport beneficial or fundamentally unsafe, and who could participate? While not something everyone could do well, it was, nevertheless, something everyone could do. Even “enlightened” women in full corseted dress were encouraged, in the privacy of their homes, to engage in boxing exercises with other women. For them, it was considered a healthful activity. The public sport, dangerous and life-threatening, and associated as it was with other moral vices, was considered a man’s domain.
For two centuries along the Eastern Seaboard, especially in Maryland and Virginia, sport had meant horse racing and fox hunting with their aristocratic heritages. The populist spirit of the late nineteenth century called for a popular sport, and boxing appealed to all social classes. Football and lacrosse were also gaining favor at that time, but they were team sports played primarily at colleges. Individual sports such as racing were popular, but only a wealthy person owned a sporting horse or a motorcar. Both baseball and boxing cut across racial and economic divides, but boxing was by far the more popular and lucrative sport of the day because of the large purses. Top prizefighters could earn rewards of several thousand dollars. However, there were no training facilities and few opportunities, other than the streets, for youth interested in learning the art and achieving notoriety.
Potential boxers needed to attract attention. For black boxers in particular, one way of getting noticed was to sign up for a battle royal. The reality of limited educational and professional opportunities at the time meant that boxing offered someone like Gans the rare opportunity to fight his way out of poverty and attain “visibility.” Albeit a brutal competition, the purse for a battle of amateur fighters young or old was typically four or five dollars, a week’s wage for a grown laborer and perhaps a month’s pay for a working boy. Battle royals did more than just pay for the next meal, they could jump-start a professional career.
Biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, in his brilliant biography of Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness, tells how difficult it was for the young boxer to obtain a manager in the tightly knit white boxing community. Johnson broke into the fistic clan when he was finally noticed by Chicago referee George Siler in a battle royal in Springfield, Illinois, in 1899. (Siler would referee the infamous “Chicago fix” between Joe Gans and Terry McGovern in December of 1900.) Jack Johnson had been traveling from town to town hoping to use his boxing talent to pay for food and lodging, when he stopped in Springfield. There, Ward says, he “caught the eye of Johnny Conner, an ex-bantamweight who ran the Senate Bar, a favorite hangout of Illinois legislators. Connor put on boxing shows above his saloon twice a month.”5
Promoters invested serious money in boxing events and looked for ways to generate a good return on their investment. Fearing that his main card wouldn’t be very exciting, Connor needed to bank on staging a battle royal. Looking for black contenders, he invited Johnson to participate, promising him a meal, housing for the night and a dollar and a half if he won. On his trip back to Chicago, Siler commented to Jack Curley, “The big coon that won it looked pretty good to me.”6 Within a few weeks through word of mouth, Johnson had been noticed and was boxing John Haines, “the Klondike,” in Chicago. The battle royal must have seemed natural in the scheme of boxing events to Johnson because, even after he had made a name for himself as a heavyweight, he refereed a battle royal at the Broadway Theater in New York on December 16, 1909, knocking out one of the boys who accidentally hit him during the contest.7
Unlike with Johnson, who wrote about his boxing life, no extant autobiographies have surfaced for Joe Gans. What we know about his inauspicious beginnings we know only from interviews and the accounts told about him by various journalists.
One Baltimore night as the gay nineties approached, a young boy named Joseph Gant (his name would later be changed by the press) finished his shift of shucking oysters at the fish market, jumped on the back of the trolley designated for black patrons, and headed to the Monumental Theatre on Baltimore Street on the east bank of Jones Falls. The normal bill of fare was opera, vaudeville acts, and local prizefights. This particular evening Gans would apply for a spot on the battle royal, the preliminary bout guaranteed to boost attendance for a lackluster main event. When questioned by the theater’s manager, Gans admitted he had never been in a ring. After explaining the nature of the slugfest and that only the last one standing would be paid, James Lawrence Kernan accepted his application.8 It would be the first in a long string of successful fights.
Gans had heard the boastful talk of sailors and bets being wagered on brawlers around the harbor. Excitement surrounded him in the busy marketplace with impetuous set-tos in the streets and highly anticipated bouts occurring upstairs in the enclosed meeting-house above the stalls where he worked. Caleb Bond, owner of the fish market, reportedly recognized Gans’ enthusiasm for the sport and encouraged his participation by letting him wear a pair of gloves he kept at the stand.9 Recognizing Gans’ talent, his boss went so far as to buy a second pair of mitts to allow Gans to practice with contenders on the street.
At his first battle royal Gans proved himself a ring natural. His phenomenal stamina, agility, and powerful punch elevated him quickly above other boxers. Before he returned to win another battle, he studied the fighters from ringside, carefully analyzing their moves and figuring out what it would take to protect his body from the punishing blows. After winning his second battle royal, the young Gans was invited to participate in individual preliminary bouts. He never had a teacher. Gans learned from observation, studying, as he said, “the movements of such great boxers as Jack Dempsey and Jack McAuliffe.”10 He observed the local fights as a student, want
ing to learn whatever skills he could glean, to improve his odds of winning.
A battle royal held in 1919 on the quarter deck of a military troop transport. Such melees were so barbaric that they were outlawed in ancient Rome, but they were a stepping stone for pugilists in Gans’ day. Boxing “smokers” were popular entertainment on U.S. Navy ships during the first half of the twentieth century.
He addressed his sport with the objectivity of a scientist: hypothesizing, measuring and testing pugilistic form, power, and pace. In German, “Gans” means whole or complete. And there never lived a more complete fighter than Gans. Beginning with the battle royals, he developed the style that would make him the master of all ring men. His innate sixth sense in the ring, which he possibly developed from experiences blindfolded in the battle royals, would later cause opponents to say he knew what they were going to do before they themselves knew.
One aspect of the battle royal that survives to this day is the anonymity of one’s opponent. In the battle royals the fighters were often, but not always, blindfolded. In either case, with or without the benefit of sight, the event was chaotic and a boy was never fighting one specific opponent. This aspect of uncertainty continues today in Golden Gloves and other amateur tournaments, and even at “smokers,” in that the amateur boxer usually does not know whom he will fight until hours before the bout. The psychological preparation for these anonymous tussles is critically important. Around the nation today, boxing coaches prepare their young fighters by telling them, “Your opponent puts his shoes on one at a time, just like you do.” “Don’t worry who the judges are, let your left hook be your referee.” “Your job is to get in shape—it’s your opponents’ job to worry.”
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