Literary Notes

Published

13 years ago

July 10, 2012

images Joe Gans was relegated long ago to a seldom-visited corner of boxing history.

Knowledgeable fight fans know that Gans was the first American-born black champion and perhaps the most technically advanced fighter of his time. Between October 23, 1893, and March 12, 1909, he had 191 professional bouts, scored an even 100 knockouts, and (including newspaper decisions) lost only 12 times. Fifteen months after retiring from the ring, he died of tuberculosis, which had almost certainly hindered him late in his career.

Now, thanks to The Longest Fight by William Gildea (Farrar Straus and Giroux), 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 heart of the story, he writes, “is what it was like a century ago to be black in America, to be a black boxer, to be the first black athlete to successfully cross the nation’s gaping racial divide, to give early-twentieth-century African Americans hope.”

The book is keyed to the historic first fight between Gans and Battling Nelson, which took place in Goldfield, Nevada, on September 3, 1906. Gans was lightweight champion by virtue of having knocked out Frank Erne in one round four years earlier. At age thirty-one, he was past his prime. Nelson was twenty-four and peaking. Gans-Nelson was contracted as a fight to a finish. It was to continue until one of the combatants was counted out or quit on his stool.

There had been “mixed race” fights before Gans-Nelson, but never one of this magnitude. The bout attracted national attention. Arrangements were made for round-by-round summaries to be disseminated by telegraph throughout the country.

Gans was a gracious well-spoken man, gentle outside the ring, meticulous in appearance and partial to three-piece suits. Nelson was a thug. The champion, in contrast to his opponent, showed such good sportmanship in the days leading up to the fight (and during the fight itself) that a substantial number of white spectators found themselves openly rooting for him.

The bout lasted two hours forty-eight minutes, making it the longest championship fight of the twentieth century. It began in the Nevada desert at 3:23 PM under a broiling sun with temperatures in excess of one hundred degrees and ended at 6:11 PM.

Gans dominated for most of contest. The granite-jawed Nelson committed virtually every foul in the book while being beaten to a bloody pulp and was disqualified by referee George Siler for repeated deliberate low blows in the forty-second round. Most likely, the champion would have knocked his foe out earlier but for the fact that he broke his right hand in the thirty-third round.

Gans emerged from the Nelson fight as a national figure.

“People had begun to take boxing seriously, even though it was illegal in most places,” Gildea writes. “Its appeal was in its simplicity, its violence, and the glamourous figures it produced. Beating Nelson made Gans prominent in a way no other black athlete had been. Money followed the fame. White fighters suddenly realized that a black man could make them a good payday. Promoters vied to gain his attention. Newspaper editorial page writers, who had ignored not only black boxers but virtually the entire black American experience, gave space to Gans.”

After beating Nelson, Gans became the first black man in his home town of Baltimore to own an automobile; a bright red Matheson touring car with a canvas top that he parked outside a hotel and saloon named The Goldfield that he opened in 1907. A half-century later, emulating Gans, Sugar Ray Robinson would park his own fuchsia Cadillac convertible outside Sugar Ray’s Café in Harlem.

Gans also accepted an offer of $6,000 a month for a midwestern vaudeville tour. Putting that number in perspective, Ty Cobb was paid $4,800 for the entire 1908 season one year after he led the American League in hits, batting average, and RBIs.

Gans lost his championship in a rematch against Nelson on July 4, 1908. He receded further into the background with the ascendance of Jack Johnson to the heavyweight throne at the end of that year. But by then, the ripples from his life had spread throughout America.

In Gildea’s words, “Gans was the first African American, after horse racing’s early black jockeys and the cyclist Major Taylor, whose athletic ability even hinted at the possibility that sports could be a springboard for racial justice in American life.”

How good was Gans?

Bob Fitzsimmons called him “the cleverest fighter, big or little, that ever put on a glove.” And Sam Langford said of Joe Louis at his peak, “He can hit. He is fast and is no slouch at employing ring craft. He is the marvel of the age. I consider him another Gans.”

It should also be noted that Gans inspired people in many ways. Goldfield was America’s last mining boomtown. It was short on hotel accommodations, leaving thousands of fight fans to sleep in tents or on hard ground under the starry sky. But it had fifty-three saloons to keep them well-lubricated.

One of those saloons was owned by George Lewis Rickard, better known as “Tex”. It was Rickard who had first suggested to local businessmen that the publicity flowing from a major fight would attract investment capital to Goldfield for mining-related ventures.

Gans-Nelson was Rickard’s maiden voyage into big-time promoting. “I never knew what the fight game offered until then,” he acknowledged later. “I wasn’t a boxing expert. But what happened in the Gans-Nelson show made me think.”

In later years, Rickard would promote the first five fights in boxing history with gates in excess of $1,000,000; build Jack Dempsey into a superstar before the term existed; head a group that financed construction of a new Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets in Manhattan; and play a key role in making New York City the boxing capitol of the world.

* * *

Al Bernstein has been calling fights on television, most often as an expert analyst, for more than thirty years. The job requires an understanding of the sweet science and the ability to communicate well. But the most successful analysts have an additional quality. Viewers think that it would be fun to sit next to them on a sofa and watch a fight on television.

Al Bernstein: 30 Years, 30 Undeniable Truths about Boxing, Sports, and TV (Diversion books) reads like a conversation on the sofa. It’s a collection of recollections and anecdotes about Al’s life and the sport he loves. There’s a moving section about Connie Bernstein’s long battle with cancer and the strength of the marriage that she and Al share. And there are portraits of boxers, from legendary greats to four-round club fighters.

In one of my favorite anecdotes, Bernstein recounts how he and Charley Steiner covered the weigh-in for Mike Tyson’s 1995 comeback bout against Peter McNeeley. Al was on-camera and told his ESPN audience, “Let’s see if we can hear from former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson. Mike, can we talk to you now?”

“No fucking way,” Tyson answered.

Bernstein reflected on the moment and said calmly, “I’ll take that as a ‘no’. Back to you, Charley.”

“After more than two decades of trying to explain Tyson’s chaotic behavior,” Bernstein writes, “we are left with the simple explanation – he’s a nut.”

In the most interesting passage in the book, Al recalls hall-of-fame announcer Don Dunphy telling him, “The best advice I can give you as a sportscaster is to remember, when you are on the air, it’s not about you.”

Bernstein then casts aside his non-confrontational persona and declares, “The majority of sportscasters working today believe it is always about them. Amazingly, they do so with the endorsement and even encouragement of their networks and their producers. We live in a time when most networks value argument over discussion, opinion over information, and loudness over intelligence. While I don’t take myself too seriously, I take sportscasting very seriously. My claim that sportcasting has changed dramatically (not for the better) is not some idle statement or sentimental bromide about ‘the good old days.’ It’s a well-considered assessment of my profession. I am hardly known as a combative personality. I have steadfastly refused to criticize my colleagues over the years, so writing this is out of character for me. I hope that my reputation will give my words in this chapter even more meaning.”

“We have seen many major boxing matches,” Bernstein continues, “where three broadcasters are debating amongst themselves something only vaguely related to the match we are all watching. This debate has been known to extend for almost an entire three-minute round, while the action in the ring goes virtually unnoticed. An offshoot of this is the use of opinion to replace analysis. ‘Analyst’ is the title of the person sitting next to the host or play-by-play announcer. The title is not ‘opinion giver.’ Opinions may be part of some type of analysis, but pure opinion is never to be confused with analysis. Using opinion under the guise of calling it analysis is often the sign that a color commentator is too lazy to do the homework necessary to provide real analysis. Anyone can have an opinion on anything. Analysis is using knowledge of an athlete or team to explain something that has just happened or foreshadow something that might happen. Being considered an expert does not give you the right to do nothing but blurt out opinions to viewers. More than that is required from an analyst of a sporting event.”

Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His newest book (And the New: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing) will be published later this summer by the University of Arkansas Press.

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke

Published

13 hours ago

May 9, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: Top Rank and San Diego Smoke

Years ago, I worked at a newsstand in the Beverly Hills area. It was a 24-hour a day version and the people that dropped by were very colorful and unique.

One elderly woman Eva, who bordered on homeless but pridefully wore lipstick, would stop by the newsstand weekly to purchase a pack of menthol cigarettes. On one occasion, she asked if I had ever been to San Diego?

I answered “yes, many times.”

She countered “you need to watch out for San Diego Smoke.”

This Saturday, Top Rank brings its brand of prizefighting to San Diego or what could be called San Diego Smoke. Leading the fight card is Mexico’s Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1, 32 KOs) defending the WBO super feather title against undefeated Filipino Charly Suarez (18-0, 10 KOs) at Pechanga Arena. ESPN will televise.

This is Navarrete’s fourth defense of the super feather title.

The last time Navarrete stepped in the boxing ring he needed six rounds to dismantle the very capable Oscar Valdez in their rematch. One thing about Mexico City’s Navarrete is he always brings “the smoke.”

Also, on the same card is Fontana, California’s Raymond Muratalla (22-0, 17 KOs) vying for the interim IBF lightweight title against Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (20-1, 12 KOs) on the co-main event.

Abdullaev has only fought once before in the USA and was handily defeated by Devin Haney back in 2019. But that was six years ago and since then he has knocked off various contenders.

Muratalla is a slick fighting lightweight who trains at the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy now in Moreno Valley, Calif. It’s a virtual boot camp with many of the top fighters on the West Coast available to spar on a daily basis. If you need someone bigger or smaller, stronger or faster someone can match those needs.

When you have that kind of preparation available, it’s tough to beat. Still, you have to fight the fight. You never know what can happen inside the prize ring.

Another fighter to watch is Perla Bazaldua, 19, a young and very talented female fighter out of the Los Angeles area. She is trained by Manny Robles who is building a small army of top female fighters.

Bazaldua (1-0, 1 KO) meets Mona Ward (0-1) in a super flyweight match on the preliminary portion of the Top Rank card. Top Rank does not sign many female fighters so you know that they believe in her talent.

Others on the Top Rank card in San Diego include Giovani Santillan, Andres Cortes, Albert Gonzalez, Sebastian Gonzalez and others.

They all will bring a lot of smoke to San Diego.

Probox TV

A strong card led by Erickson “The Hammer” Lubin (26-2, 18 KOs) facing Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0, 6 KOs) in a super welterweight clash between southpaws takes place on Saturday at Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida. PROBOX TV will stream the fight card.

Ardreal has rocketed up the standings and now faces veteran Lubin whose only losses came against world titlists Sebastian Fundora and Jermell Charlo. It’s a great match to decide who deserves a world title fight next.

Another juicy match pits Argentina’s Nazarena Romero (14-0-2) against Mexico’s Mayelli Flores (12-1-1) in a female super bantamweight contest.

Nottingham, England

Anthony Cacace (23-1, 8 KOs) defends the IBO super featherweight title against Leigh Wood (28-3, 17 KOs) in Wood’s hometown on Saturday at Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, England. DAZN will stream the Queensberry Promotions card.

Ireland’s Cacace seems to have the odds against him. But he is no stranger to dancing in the enemy’s lair or on foreign territory. He formerly defeated Josh Warrington in London and Joe Cordina in Riyadh in IBO title defenses.

Lampley at Wild Card

Boxing telecaster Jim Lampley will be signing his new book It Happened! at the Wild Card Boxing gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Saturday, May 10, beginning at 2 p.m. Lampley has been a large part of many of the greatest boxing events in the past 40 years. He and Freddie Roach will be at the signing.

Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)

Sat. DAZN 11 a.m. Anthony Cacace (23-1) vs Leigh Wood (28-3).

Sat. PROBOX.tv 3 p.m. Erickson Lubin (26-2) vs Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0).

Sat. ESPN 7 p.m. Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1) vs Charly Suarez (18-0); Raymond Muratalla (22-0) vs Zaur Abdullaev (20-1).

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Stephen-Breadman-Edwards-An-Unlikely-Boxing-Coach-with-a-Panoramic-View-of-the-Sport

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.

It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.

In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.

Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.

It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.

“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.

Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.

Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.

Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.

We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.

Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”

But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.

“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”

Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.

Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”

If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38^th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.

Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”

Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.

Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.

On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.

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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Published

3 days ago

May 6, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-(mostly)-Ugly-A-Weeend-Boxing-Recap-and-More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.

In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.

Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.

CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.

****

Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.

Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”

And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.

Joey Archer

Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer

Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.

Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.

Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.

In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.

When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.

Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.

May he rest in peace.

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