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Many people came to Goldfield, Nevada, America's last gold-rush town, to seek their fortune. However, on a searing summer day in September 1906, they came not to strike it rich but to watch what would become the longest boxing match of the twentieth century--between Joe Gans, the first African American boxing champion, and "Battling" Nelson, a vicious and dirty brawler. It was a match billed as the battle of the races.
In The Longest Fight, the longtime Washington Post sports correspondent William Gildea tells the story of this epic match, which would stretch to forty-two rounds and last two hours and forty-eight minutes. A new rail line brought spectators from around the country, dozens of reporters came to file blow-by-blow accounts, and an entrepreneurial crew's film of the fight, shown in theaters shortly afterward, endures to this day.
The Longest Fight also recounts something much greater--the longer battle that Gans fought against prejudice as the premier black athlete of his time. It is a portrait of life in black America at the turn of the twentieth century, of what it was like to be the first black athlete to successfully cross the nation's gaping racial divide. Gans was smart, witty, trim, and handsome--with one-punch knockout power and groundbreaking defensive skills--and his courage despite discrimination prefigured the strife faced by many of America's finest athletes, including Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali.
Inside the ring and out, Gans took the first steps for the African American athletes who would follow, and yet his role in history was largely forgotten until now. The Longest Fight is a reminder of the damage caused by the bigotry that long outlived Gans, and the strength, courage, and will of those who fought to rise above.
- Sales Rank: #944540 in Books
- Published on: 2012-06-19
- Released on: 2012-06-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.51" h x .92" w x 5.96" l, .85 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Review
A gem of a book . . . In lean prose, Gildea gives us a blow-by-blow account of Gans's career. He pivots from describing the fight to exploring his subject's life to examining the racism of the age and the contradictions of 'sportsmanship' that belittled blacks while making money off them. (The Washington Post Book World)
A biography of a champion who faced racial challenges at the turn of the 20th century that would presage those of a coming generation of athletic color-barrier breakers . . . Gildea makes a strong case for Gans as the pride of Black American before Johnson threw a punch. (The Boston Globe)
A memorable book about a time that should not be forgotten. (The Economist)
Knowledgeable fight fans know that Gans was the first American-born black champion and perhaps the most technically advanced fighter of his time . . . Now, thanks to The Longest Fight, by William Gildea, Gans comes to life again. The Longest Fight will enhance any reader's appreciation and understanding of Gans. Gildea crafts a sense of time and place and a moving personal portrait of his subject. (The Sweet Science)
With fascinating period detail and skillful writing, the author highlights his subject's considerable appeal and symbolic significance. (Kirkus Reviews)
Gildea gives full measure of Gans' remarkable accomplishments as an athlete--Gans fought 196 matches while Tyson, for example, fought 58--while also showing Gans' equally remarkable poise in the face of horrific prejudice, officially sanctioned or not, during his entire career. A strong title for any boxing collection. (Alan Moores, Booklist)
I vaguely knew the name Joe Gans, but Gildea introduces us to the man and the era, the early twentieth century. Gans was so good and so dignified that some white boxing fans of that time actually managed to get past their blatant prejudices and detect his humanity. Gildea has done masterful research and writing, recalling a gold-rush outpost in rural Nevada, where in 1906 Gans staged an epic fight-to-the-finish with Battling Nelson. The match itself is re-created excellently, but I liked even better the way Gildea presents the details of the time--what people ate, how they traveled, how whites and blacks interacted in daily life. (George Vecsey, author of Stan Musial: An Americal Life)
Before Jack Johnson, there was Joe Gans. William Gildea's deep knowledge of boxing, his wonderful storytelling skills, and his love of Baltimore and of unappreciated characters make The Longest Fight a terrific read. It's a championship book. (David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi)
William Gildea has written a touching tribute to a boxer from long ago who's largely been forgotten. Anybody who reads this fine book, though, will always remember Joe Gans. (Frank Deford, author of Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter)
William Gildea's The Longest Fight is a nifty and informative biography of one of the most important fighters of early-twentieth-century America: Joe Gans. A story of race, the sporting world, and masculinity in the Progressive Era, The Longest Fight will be of interest not only to boxing devotees but to students of African American studies, American studies, and American industrialism. (Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Washington University in St. Louis, and editor of The Muhammad Ali Reader)
About the Author
William Gildea was a writer for The Washington Post from 1965 through 2005. He has covered the Olympic Games (four times), the World Cup (four times), and about fifty championship or major fights, principally in Las Vegas. Many of his pieces have appeared in Best Sports Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Mary Fran.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE LONGEST FIGHT (Chapter 1)
He had an unmarked face except for a modest scar above the outer corner of each eye and a small amount of puffiness below the left—remarkable for someone approaching, at minimum, his 187th professional prizefight. He was trim, with broad, sloping shoulders, but stood just 5 feet 6½ inches and weighed about 140 pounds. A photograph of him taken in 1906 shows him shirtless, arms folded across his midsection, his upper body spectacularly muscled.
One August evening that year, Joe Gans rode a train deep into the Nevada desert. The newly built rail line extended south for twenty-six miles, the brief last leg of a trip that had taken him from San Francisco’s East Bay up the mountains to Reno, then to a seemingly endless journey to Tonopah, Nevada, and on toward a mining boomtown called Goldfield. A group of settlers had named it three years earlier after prospectors had come upon yellowed rocks that held the promise of a great gold strike.
In thirteen years as a professional boxer, Gans had crossed the country several times by train. On different occasions he had traveled from the East Coast to fight in Oregon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. He had seen the desert. But it had never been his destination. And it never would have been except that he, like the prospectors aboard the train, was being lured across a wilderness of sand and sagebrush by a quest for wealth. They went for the gold. He went for the payday that came with defending his world lightweight championship. His glories in the ring notwithstanding, he was virtually broke.
The newspapers were predicting an epic encounter between him and Battling Nelson, a fighter succinctly and gruesomely described by Jack London as “the abysmal brute.” Gans and Nelson would meet on Labor Day afternoon, under the desert sun. There would be no scheduled end to the fight. It would be a fight to the finish, usually when one man dropped and stayed down until the count of ten. Fights with no prescribed end could feel, to a fighter, like an eternity. They left most scarred. More than once, a manager threw a towel into the ring because he had no doubt that the next blow would leave his fighter dead. Sometimes the towel landed too late.
Gans anticipated danger. It came with his business and his skin color. He was the first black American boxing champion, but that achievement brought him more peril than renown. The discrimination that black boxers faced reflected American life. In 1906 racial injustice was far worse than it had been three and a half decades earlier when Walt Whitman recognized the separation of races as one of the flaws that made the country’s future “as dark as it is vast.” Gans had received death threats throughout his career, and he wouldn’t be surprised to hear from someone betting for or against him at Goldfield that he had better win or lose as directed or risk not getting out of town alive.
No entourage accompanied him aboard the Tonopah and Goldfield train. It wasn’t his style to make himself the center of attention, even if a black man dared to. He passed the time in thought, knowing that trouble was coming, merely unsure what form it would take. Only recently—quite belatedly, out of misplaced loyalty—had he fired his manager, Abraham Lincoln Herford, known as Al. For years, this burly, cigar-smoking white man had treated him as a serf, pocketing most of his earnings while posing as his best hope.
What little Herford left him, Gans gambled away. He was bad at picking winners at the racetrack, and he was a loser at cards and dice. He always kept enough money, however, to maintain a fine wardrobe. He wore three-piece suits with a handkerchief jutting from the breast pocket, white shirts with starched collars, a diamond stickpin, a loop of gold watch chain across his chest, and a derby when he stepped out at night. One of his outfits was especially celebratory: a pale green suit, Alice blue socks, and yellow shoes. Daytimes, he preferred turtleneck jerseys or sweaters, slacks, and a cap.
Appearances aside, Gans was as poor in 1906 as in 1896, when he emerged from his native Baltimore to seek the lightweight championship. If the heavyweight division was boxing’s most prestigious, the lightweight ranks were its most competitive. A boxer could make good money as a lightweight. The division was filled with great fighters, and almost every one was vicious and unforgiving. Nelson, born in Copenhagen and nicknamed “the Durable Dane,” was a brawler who could withstand the hardest punches. If knocked down, he could be counted on to get up and keep swinging as though he hadn’t been touched. He hit below the belt, he held and hit, and he gouged eyes. There wasn’t a dirty tactic that he hadn’t tried.
Like prospectors out for gold, Gans would work with his hands, and his work, like theirs, would take time. It might punish and discourage him. The desert fed discouragement. So did Nelson, who was twenty-four and in his fighting prime.
Gans was thirty-one. He had been boxing almost half his life, and there were indications that his best days in the ring had passed. As he sought a divorce the previous year, The Washington Post paraphrased his testimony in Baltimore’s Circuit Court No. 2, saying that even Gans himself believed “the zenith of his success had been reached and that he was now on the backward track … that he was about all in as a professional scrapper.”
Gans’s wife demanded $200 to cover her lawyer’s fee and $25 a week in alimony pending the outcome of his suit. Gans explained that he was not only broke but also in debt to Herford for thousands of dollars with little hope of repaying him. No one could say that he was exaggerating his decline as a boxer and his capacity for earning money in the future, including the presiding judge, who awarded Gans’s wife a customary $25 for her lawyer’s work and $5 a week in alimony pending the court’s decision.
Herford had a reputation for paying his fighters next to nothing.
Boxing was a bettor’s province, and for years Herford had raked in money by betting heavily on Gans—not only that he would win, but when he would win—in what round. He often arranged to have Gans go easy on white fighters, enabling them to last a respectable amount of time so as not to embarrass them too badly. Gans had the talent to score a knockout in the round Herford ordained—and bet on. When Herford let him fight without restrictions, he was practically invincible. In time, Herford found fewer and fewer takers for his bets; almost no one wanted to bet against Gans. So he persuaded Gans to lose intentionally. One effect of this was to take money out of the pockets of poor blacks who bet on Gans religiously—and the thought tormented him. Six months before his trip into the desert, he admitted his folly to a newspaper reporter and vowed to fight honestly every time. Leaving Herford behind, Gans headed to Goldfield nagged by regret.
THE LONGEST FIGHT Copyright © 2012 by William Gildea
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Best book on Gans
By John Davenport
This was a well written account of Joe Gans life. It was not filled with useless filler as I found with Colleen Ayock's biography. This book has a great narrative that shifts between coverage of perhaps most important fight and his life story. It keeps the reader entertained and is very well researched. I read it in 3 days. Which is saying something given my pickiness regarding styles of writing. Anyway I hope there will be more clear concise and entertainng books about old time boxers to enjoy.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
One Terrific Read !!!
By HE Grant
I've been a boxing fan for over forty years and there is very little that has been written in that period of time and before for that matter that I have not read. Boxing books tend to fall into categories .. some are simple thin recounts, some are sociological portraits of a man and his time and some are transport you into the man with a touch of poetry .. the outstanding "One Fight, One Night" about Louis and Galento a few years back was one .. this is another .. a terrific read and an outstanding job. I tried the other Gans bio recently and had to stop twenty pages in because I kept coming up against flat out incorrect facts .. just could not do it .. this I truly enjoyed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent read
By Steven Shedlin
Bill Gildea really captured the mood of the country and of the boxing world in the early 2oth century. Joe Gans was a very interesting man and I enjoyed learning about him and the era in which he lived. I highly recommend this book for sports fans and non sports fans alike.
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