The Longest Fight by William Gildea

Author:William Gildea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The next day’s newspapers stripped banner headlines above their accounts of Gans’s victory: GOLDFIELD WITNESSES TERRIFIC RING BATTLE … GANS WINS ON A FOUL AFTER WHIPPING NELSON ON MERITS … GANS RETAINS TITLE AND GIVES WORLD ITS GREATEST FIGHT.

Most of the stories ran on page one or on the fronts of sports sections. The majority opinion was that Nelson should have been disqualified earlier than he had been. Siler said that for the sake of the paying customers he wanted the fighters to decide the ending, but that in the end he had no choice. “Every man in the arena saw that I overlooked many fouls on which I would have plenty of excuse to have stopped the fight with a decision for Gans,” he said.

Siler’s paper, the Chicago Daily Tribune, even referred to Gans as a “hero.”

R. A. Smyth of The San Francisco Call described the fight as “one of the most desperate engagements in the history of the ring.” He said that Nelson’s blood “took on a deep crimson in the garish light,” and that “his work showed an utter absence of science.” Gans, meanwhile, was “the Paderewski of the boxing glove.”

Edward Clarke, in a page one piece for The Call, said the fight was too gory for “some hundreds of women and a few children who were—the latter for the first time in ring history—admitted to an arena where only men should have been. It is a men’s game.”

A young prospector named Fred Sander described the fight as ghastly in a letter to his future wife, Charity, who was visiting in Wyoming: “I believe Nelson can stand more punishment than any man in the world … It was really too brutal to look at. I was glad it ended when it did, and the way it did, as they were both pretty badly beaten up.”

Even after his most celebrated victory, Gans was reminded that his skin color placed him among the most oppressed people in America. Newspapers casually stereotyped him. The San Francisco Chronicle said he was “so well muscled that he resembles a carving of the perfect man in ebony.” Other newspapers referred to him, in typical language, as a “nigger” or a “coon.”

The Salt Lake Herald published an unsigned poem based on “Casey at the Bat”:

In Franklin Lane, and Darktown, too, the sun is shining bright;

The Coons are laughing loudly and talking ’bout the fight;

They’re eating big and drinking deep—Oh, hear the darkies shout!

But there is no joy for white men—Battling Nelson’s down and out!

A few days later, the same Salt Lake paper ran a cartoon meant to show humorously the predicament of white fighters who had drawn the color line, but it depicted more vividly the reality that African Americans faced. The cartoonist drew Gans as a Sambo figure and depicted his speech in a racist patois: “Tell the gemmen ah’ have decided to draw the color line!” In the drawing, white title contenders hoping to fight the black champion try to camouflage their color.

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