 Gans returned to his own kingdom in the lightweight division to face his fifth challenger, Battling Nelson, a strong slugger who appeared impervious to punishment. This contest was promoted as a remarkable national event by the extraordinary Tex Rickard. Rickard had won and lost money as a gambler during the Alaskan gold rush. Seven years in the gambling dens of Alaska had netted him $65,000 but he wanted to capitalize on the fact. Now he found himself in Goldfield, Nevada, and looking for another opportunity.The town was appropriately named. Gold had been struck there and one mine alone had produced more than $5,000,000 of gold-bearing ore in under three months. The more prominent citizens of this cowboy town met to discuss ways of further exploiting their fortune and drawing national attention to the place. Some of the ideas mooted were ludicrous: there would be a race-track for camels imported from the Sahara; there would be an artificial lake of beer; ten-dollar gold pieces would be thrown on to the town's streets from a hot-air balloon. Rickard, however, had no time for hot air and instead suggested a boxing match.The Goldfield Athletic Club was formed that very day. The men raised $50,000 to back a fight and appointed Rickard as treasurer and promoter. This promotion was plagued by problems. Most spectators were drawn to the heavyweights; but crowd-pulling Jim Jeffries had retired and his successor, Tommy Burns, was not a box-office attraction. The middleweights were largely dormant. Rickard discerned potential in the lightweights. Why should the exquisite Joe Gans not defend against a tough white contender? Black versus white? Boxer versus slugger?Gans was in trouble at the time. His crooked manager, Al Herford, had urged him to throw fights prior to his winning of the championship. As champion, Gans had just knocked out top contender Mike 'Twin' Sullivan, but his manager vanished with his purse. His record was superb. In 144 recorded fights so far, Gans had lost only five times, twice when he was young and inexperienced and thrice in obedience to the bidding of the money men and the manager. Now he was broke and therefore keen on Rickard's proffered deal. The Sullivan fight, on 19 January 1906, had been a tough one. As W S Farnsworth put it, Gans had had to be 'as nimble as a rubber ball'. Nevertheless, Sullivan damaged Gans's left eye. Gans retorted in the fifteenth round with a sensational combination climaxed by a classic right that stretched Sullivan out cold.On 18 May 1906, the man born as Joseph Gaines entered Madison Square Garden, New York City, for a non-title fight with contender Willie Lewis over six rounds. This was a most peculiar and somewhat unsatisfactory contest, described well by eye-witness W S Farnsworth:Well, if Lewis didn't weigh fifteen pounds more than Gans I can't tell a ham from a lemon ... Lewis won the fight with a left-hand jab. He didn't have Gans groggy. There never was a time when the black man was in distress ... (Lewis) was there to get the decision any way he could ... he was as cautious as an old woman crossing a busy street ... Gans ... missed Lewis at least a dozen times with rights that hardly went an inch from their mark ... there was that feeling throughout that Gans was the master ... Gans had the sting, but he couldn't locate the spot where he wanted the sting to land ... You never could tell when Gans was going to slip it over. One minute you'd think it was coming, the next you'd be sitting there wondering whether he'd gone back or not.Lewis was awarded the decision. It is hardly surprising that Gans rushed into the eager arms of Tex Rickard once he heard that his next defence would be fair and square.The first tough white contender approached by Rickard was Jimmy Britt, who claimed something called the 'white lightweight championship' and who was offered the unprecedented sum of $15,000. Gans had already fought Britt; on 31 October 1904 he had given him a fearful pasting, forcing him to fall out in the twentieth round. But the Britt camp had never heard of Tex Rickard: they dismissed him as a joker. So Rickard turned next to Battling Nelson, who had fought Britt twice, losing a twenty-round contest in 1904 on points, but coming back the following year to KO the 'white champion' in the eighteenth round of a scheduled forty-five round contest. When Battling Nelson beat Britt, Rickard wired him with an offer of $20,000, the largest sum ever offered a pugilist. Californian promoter, 'Sunny' Jim Coffroth tried to upstage Rickard by offering more to Gans. Rickard clinched his deal with a staggering $30,000 plus expenses, totalling $23,000 for Nelson and $10,000 for Gans. Rickard promptly placed $30,000 worth of newly minted, double-eagle gold pieces in the window of the local bank and proceeded to contact every press and news agency. This astute piece of business would net him $700,000.On 3 September 1906, some 8,000 fans, including 300 women, paid to see Gans v Nelson, at the arena Tex Rickard had erected. The Nelson camp had been giving Gans problems. They had insisted upon an 18-foot ring to cut down Gans's mobility and upon Gans having to make the weight minutes before the fight, which weakened the champion. Nevertheless Gans believed that he could beat Nelson.The career of Battling Nelson is the subject of the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that few tougher men ever entered the ring. It was said that his skull was three times as thick as that of any other fighter. His favourite punch was the notorious 'scissors hook' - his fist hit the kidneys at the back whilst his thumb squeezed them at the side. Re was a ruthless, dirty fighter who gave no quarter and asked none, often gouging eyes and shifting his knee into an opponent's groin as he broke his nose with an elbow.Prior to the fight against this ferocious man, Gans received a telegram from his mother: 'Joe, the eyes of the world are on you. Everybody says you ought to win. Peter Jackson will tell me the news. You bring back the bacon.' Then he entered the ring for a fight to the finish. The spectators certainly received value for money in the longest contest in boxing history under Queensberry Rules for a world championship. The first ten rounds were all Gans as he slickly outboxed his crude challenger, but he couldn't put him away. Nelson wanted to win the title or die on that broiling hot day. Punches could be bounced off him hour after hour and he refused to go down. In the eleventh round, he swamped Gans's skills with his rough-house tactics. A tiring Gans boxed on the retreat as Nelson swarmed forward.Nelson found that he couldn't break Gans in half. Gans absorbed his best punches, caught his second wind and came back to bloody Nelson. By round thirty, Gans was way ahead on points yet Nelson still refused to fold. In the thirty-third round, Gans misjudged a punch which landed on the top of Nelson's thick skull and he broke his right hand. Even so, and fighting one-handed, Gans managed to make Nelson look like a clumsy clot. By the forty-first round, Nelson was reduced to harmless cuffing and harmful but inept endeavours at eye-gouging. The forty-second opened with Nelson com-mencing a furious assault upon Gans's testicles. Referee George Siler warned the desperately frustrated slugger, who took no notice and promptly belted Gans in the groin once again. Siler promptly disqualified Nelson, who was really in no condition to continue.'You bring back the bacon,' his mother had told Gans. He wired back the message: 'Mammy, your boy is bringing home the bacon with lots of gravy on it.' The gravy train continued to roll. On 6 September 1907, in San Francisco, Gans executed an immaculate knockout of Jimmy Britt, who this time quit in his corner and claimed a broken right wrist at the end of the sixth round.Unfortunately, serious trouble lay ahead. Gans had destroyed his body in trying to make the 133-pound weight limit and had already contracted tuberculosis. This rendered him in no condition to face Battling Nelson again, but he needed the money and did so in Colma, California, 4 July 1908. The younger and healthier Nelson bulldozed his way through every stylish move of Gans. It was a spectacular fight of brains against brawn, of skill against strength and of age against youth. Gans, the 3-I favourite, was leading easily after six rounds, but his pain-racked, consumptive body could not endure the hot and heavy pace set by Nelson. Whatever Gans did, Nelson took the punches and continued to bore inward, slugging Gans to the canvas nine times and halting him in the seventeenth round. A third encounter, on 9 September 1908, again in Colma, saw Nelson put away a visibly sick Gans, who this time ran out of gas in the twenty-first round. He died in the following year.Gans's memory remained an inspiration to 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 still labouring to learn in the gyms a generation and 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 a victim of the prejudice of his times - yet few could live up to the standards he set for the future.It would be difficult to find a harder man than Battling Nelson. 'The Durable Dane'was born in Copenhagen on 5 June 1882. During his extraordinary career, he gave new meaning to the word 'tough'. He did not seem to care whether he was hit or not. One is reminded of the words of Jake LaMotta, a great middleweight king of the 1940s, upon whom Martin Scorcese's film starring Robert De Niro was accurately based: 'I fought as though I didn't deserve to live.''How that man could take it!' Bert Sugar observed, adding that Nelson had 'the disposition of a junkyard dog'. Nelson was twice disqualified officially but Sugar rightly remarked that 'he could just as easily have been ruled out in twenty fights'. Famed novelist, Jack London, author of White Fang, Call of the Wild and that painfully visionary science fiction epic, Star Rover, called Nelson 'The Abysmal Brute'. Gilbert Odd praised Nelson's 'abnormal toughness and stamina' and his 'vicious short-range blows, particularly to the body'.The man born as Oscar Matthew Nielson had toughened his muscles by axing packed ice for the Chicago meat markets. He looked for a better living when he turned professional boxer in 1896. Soon enough he earned a reputation for the sort of body punching that could make a strong man urinate blood for a week. His left hook was usually targeted on either the liver or the kidney and was followed by his thumb. As Gilbert Odd remarked: 'The thin gloves of his day enabled him to pinch his unfortunate opponent the moment his left hook landed.'Nelson proceeded to mug the leading lightweights of his time. When he fractured his left arm in the midst of a fifteen-round bout, he still went on to win it on points, muttering afterwards that this injury had 'made me somewhat cautious and kept me from winning by a knockout'. He first came to national sporting attention with an extraordinary contest against Christy Williams in Hot Springs, Arkansas, 26 December 1902. Nelson was floored seven times. Williams was down forty-two times and halted in the seventeenth round. Further attention was gathered by Nelson's fight with tough contender Aureho Herrera at Butte, Montana, on 5 September 1904. Herrera's right hit Nelson so hard in the fifth round that it looked like a backflip as the 'Durable Dane' shot backwards with his eyes spinning, leading some spectators to speculate that he might be dead. How wrong they were! Nelson came back to life, climbed off the canvas and pressured Herrera to win the decision in twenty fierce rounds.After an impressive eighteen-round KO of Jimmy Britt, during which he took everything that his opponent had to throw, then iced him with a right to the jaw, Nelson challenged the great Joe Gans and, as described, lost and fouled out in the forty-second round. He returned two years later, in 1908, to KO Gans in the seventeenth and take his title.Nelson was not quite as crude as some have alleged. His victory over a consumptive Joe Gans may have been his greatest public crowning but he had been punching out the best men of his time. In Philadelphia 1905, for example, he had battled one of the slickest boxers of the era, world featherweight champion Abe Attell. Nelson bulled through Attell's early shots to outpunch him, and the final bell to end this six-round No Decision contest must have come as sweet relief to Attell.Nelson confirmed his right to wear the lightweight crown when, as already described, he knocked out the increasingly ailing Gans in their third encounter, battering him to the canvas in the twenty-first round, then successfully defended his title twice in 1909. Next he signed to defend against a man as tough, vicious and unscrupulous as himself, Ad Wolgast, 'The Michigan Wildcat'. On 2 February 1910, Nelson and Wolgast met m a fight to the finish in which blatant fouls were permitted.It was the dirtiest fight ever held for a world championship under the Queensberry Rules, which both men disgraced in an obscene orgy of eye-gouging, rabbit-punching, elbow-thwacking, and ball-busting. The bout was bloody and brutal. Eventually Wolgast, who was younger by six years, started to swarm all over Nelson. By the thirty-ninth round, both Nelson's eyes were closed and he could barely raise his arms. Referee Ed Smith warned Nelson 5 corner that he was one round away from stopping the fight. Nelson came out swinging in the fortieth round. 'He was easy to avoid, as usual,' W S Farnsworth wrote wryly. Wolgast countered with two hard right hand clips to the point of the jaw which left the dazed champion staggering helplessly. The referee quite properly called it at that juncture. 'What d'you think of that dumb referee?' Nelson gasped afterwards between bouts of vomiting. 'Huh! Stopping it when I would'a had him in another round ...' Nelson protested as blood flowed out of his mouth.Nelson was always inclined to let his toughness get ahead of his intelligence. As W O McGeehan wrote:For concentrated viciousness, prolonged past forty rounds, this was the most savage bout I have ever seen. Somewhere around the thirtieth round I think it was, Wolgast was dropped by a body blow and it looked like the end. But he was up in an instant, snarling and lashing at Nelson. After that it was Nelson, the Durable Dane, who showed signs of weakening and whose face began to look like a raw slab of steak. The features were obliterated and only the slit of one eye remained open ... it had become so cruel that even the most hardened ringsiders were calling upon the referee to stop it. Finally Eddie Smith stepped between the men and pushed Nelson to his corner. The Dane snarled at him, then tried to protest through his twisted and battered mouth. The only sound that came was one such as might have been made by an exhausted and terribly wounded wild animal...Surprisingly enough, the wives of Nelson and Wolgast had already become good friends and after this torturous contest, the men became friends too, though Nelson was never again the same fighter. His ruling inner conviction in his own invincibility had been destroyed. On 26 November 1910 in San Francisco, Great Britain's Owen Moran moved up from the featherweights to floor Nelson five times and give him a clean knockout in the eleventh round, the only time this ever occurred in the Battler's notable career.Despite this setback, Nelson did not hang up his gloves until 1923, though he did make an astonishing impromptu appearance at the Jack Dempsey-Jess Willard world heavyweight championship bout in Toledo, Ohio, 1919. The promoter of this post-war extravaganza was once again Tex Rickard, who had had a $100,000 stadium erected on the shores of Maumee Bay. He also sold concessions for cigarettes, chewing gum, chocolate, peanuts, opera glasses, cushions - and lemonade. Unfortunately, he sold the lemonade concession twice. 'Look, I sold you the pink lemonade concession,' he told an outraged vendor, 'and I clearly remember telling you that you weren't buying the rights to the yellow lemonade.' Bert Sugar takes up the story:Battling Nelson arrived, complete with ghost-writer, to theoretically cover the fight for the Chicago Daily News. Seeking cover from the sweltering heat, he took a running dive clad only in his underwear into a mirage that resembled a swimming pool. Unfortunately, Nelson, in his overheated state of mind, had mistaken the pink lemonade tank for the swimming oasis of his dreams. Upon hearing about Nelson's 'tank job', Rickard paid the pink lemonade concessionaire to dump the contaminated contents of his vat into Maumee Bay. But the concessionaire, already the brunt of one double cross, pulled one himself and doled out the pink eau de Battling Nelson, doubling his profits for the afternoon.Nelson was alone and broke when he died in Chicago on 7 February 1954. |
From: Lightning Strikes, by G. Suster, 1994
