As Joe Gans slumped on to the canvas, his leg stretched behind him, right shoulder leaning into the tension of the middle rope, he felt the hands of his trusted trainers Jerry and Jack beneath his arms. A storm of pain thrashed through his midriff. Referee, George Stiler, stood over him engulfed by his own hesitation in the shadow of his wide brimmed hat and the significance of the moment.
Gans’ foe, Oscar ‘Battling’ Nelson, was pointed toward a corner, his reputation for fouling snarling beside him.
It was the 42nd round of a punishing brawl and an unforgiving Nevada sun loomed high above. Beads of sweat gathered on every brow, from the wealthy attendees, the President’s son Kermit Roosevelt among them, to the miners who had trudged across deserts to be there in Goldfield.
A Mecca for those chasing a golden fortune, Goldfield was the fast growing town in Nevada and the setting for a battle of unfathomable human endurance.
Encouraged by Gans’ wily old trainers, Stiler admonished Nelson for the blow he’d just landed and disqualified the Chicago raised Dane for a low blow. The magnitude of the victory Gans had been awarded didn’t swirl into his thoughts. He sat in the shadows of his usefulness, the glare of the pitiless sun beating down on his exhausted limbs as the heated arguments about the blow that put him there raged above. A sea of white shirts beyond the ropes still gathered in mooted disbelief. They stood, they sat and they stood again. Those without hats cupping their hands over their eyes.
‘Goldbacks’ were exchanged between begrudging losers and sun-beaten victors. Most with the leathery hands of the West and some with veins fattened by the bash of shovels on the dry Goldfield soil that lay beyond the bowl of the hastily erected Arena. Trainers waved towels like sails, desperate to create a cool breath for their fighter while the promoter, Tex Rickard, jostled for peace.
The ache from Gans middle consumed him, the pain of the body blow that disqualified his opponent after more than 2 hours of hell, still surging through his torso like a scolding poison. He thought not of the purse he was promised or the Lightweight title he had won. A black American World Champion, the first. The savouring would wait. Fatigue drew at his senses. Gans felt as though his bones were melting beneath his skin, exhaustion called like a siren. His right hand long since broken. A body starved of meat and eggs to make the weight and then maintain it until the first bell, yielding to the trauma it endured as the perverse adrenaline of the fight ebbed away.
Pain dampened the noise of the 8,000 who had gathered to see ‘The Old Master’ battle with the flat-nosed brawler from Chicago. They had watched as the pair had beaten each other stationary. Gans could only hear the feint pulse of blood in his ears, alone in his agony.
By the end of the contest Gans and Nelson’s bodies had been pitched together like the A-frame timbers above the mine shafts in the distance, Gans in grubby knee length shorts, Nelson’s darker, twine tied about his waist. His mop of blond hair dyed black with sweat.
There was an immortality descending on both men, invisible to those present as they left their seats and headed to one of Goldfield’s 57 saloons. Nelson stood unrepentant, anger flooding in to his smudged features, swollen from the dominance of Gans’ jab and the cleverness of his attacks.
This was Labor Day, September 3rd, 1906 in Goldfield, Nevada.
The eternal home of the longest title fight under the Queensberry Rules and a moment of enormous social significance in a country still in pursuit of the land’s natural bounty and filled to the brim of its hat with people willing to risk everything to snatch a share.
The promoter, George ‘Tex’ Rickard who coined the phrase ‘Battle of the Century’ had drawn the two men to the town with the promise of a lucrative purse. $30,000 was shared between the pair. Nelson with the thicker cut, Gans clearing $11,000. Rickard used the success of the bout to become the face of boxing, the Police Gazette dubbed him “the new fight king” and The Rocky Mountain News described Rickard thus; “the genius who is engineering the big fight”. He would, in time, become the face of Madison Square Gardens and most famously promoted Jack Dempsey.
Aged 31 in 1906, Joe Gans was already considered the Old Master. Probably in the early grip of Tuberculosis as he fought with Nelson, he would succumb five years later aged just 36. He had lost his wife to the disease in 1897.
Widely considered to have invented much of what we recognise in modern day boxing, Gans was later credited as the ‘greatest fighter of all’ by Ring Editor Nat Fleischer. In a time before Sugar Rays and Pretty Boys, Joe Gans was a stand out technician.
Nelson would wait two years to exact his revenge, knocking out a fading Gans twice. Few could match Nelson’s intensity or stamina and he would maintain throughout his life that the blow that dropped Gans in 1906 was not a foul. Eventually Nelson lost the fortune his bravery earned and he passed away in February 1954, penniless and in an institution, a week after his second wife died.
120 years ago, the three men came together to create an event which continues to astound those drawn to boxing and all its mesmerising fables.
A story forged in black, white and gold.
BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK 
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