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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Gene Tunney had four children. One of them, Jay Tunney, has written an intriguing book.

The Prizefighter and the Playwright details the relationship between the former heavyweight champion and the Nobel-prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw. It would be more accurately titled The Prizefighter, the Heiress, and the Playwright, since Tunney’s courtship of and marriage to Polly Lauder is given equal play.

Tunney was born in 1897 and turned pro at age eighteen. The only loss in his 77-bout career came at the hands of Harry Greb. Thereafter, he defeated Greb twice and emerged victorious over Jack Dempsey in two of the most-storied heavyweight championship fights of all time. He retired from ring in 1928 and stayed retired; the first man to achieve that dual distinction.

“What is boxing?” Tunney once asked before answering his own question: “The ability to coordinate mind and muscle at a critical moment; that is all.” But in a more reflective vein, he added, “The prize ring is a terrifying place. You’re on a platform glaring with bright light. All around, you see the dim expanse of the crowd. Faces nearby are clearly lighted by the glare. You see expressions of frantic excitement, emotions produced by sympathetic reaction, fear, the lust for battle, rage, gloating, savagery, mouths open and yelling. You hear the roar. It’s the howl of the mob for blood.”

Tunney never graduated from high school. But he read prolifically to pass the boredom of training camp and as a road to self-improvement. His tastes leaned toward the classical. That became fodder for the sporting press prior to his 1926 challenge of Dempsey.

A reporter named Brian Bell was assigned by the Associated Press to interview Tunney at his training camp in Speculator, New York. Instead of writing the typical pre-fight piece, he crafted an in-depth feature story about a fighter who read classical works.

Bell’s article ran in newspapers across the country. But rather than lift opinions of the challlenger, it subjected him to derision.

Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News opined, “I think Tunney has hurt his own game with his cultural nonsense. It is a fine thing that he has educated himself to the point where he no longer says ‘dese’ and ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ and where he can tell one book from another and indicate some familiarity with their contents. But the man who steps into the ring with Dempsey with nothing but his hands as weapons needs to be a fighter and nothing but. He will have to have a natural viciousness and nastiness well up in him that will transcend rules and reason, that will make him want to commit murder with his two hands. I don’t think that Master Tunney, who likes first editions and works of art, has it in him.”

Writers were sent to quiz Tunney on his knowledge of the classics in the hope of tripping him up.

A Chicago policeman named Mike Trant, who hung out with Dempsey, famously told the champion, “The fight’s in the bag, Jack. The [expletive lost in the haze of history] is up there reading a book.”

Jay Tunney writes, “Once he realized he was being made a laughingstock, Gene agonized over it, worrying that he was too sensitive, yet unable to put it behind him. In telling the truth, in trying to be himself, he had been held up to ridicule.”

Later, the fighter himself noted, “It never occurred to me that a habit of reading could be seen as a stunt or a joke. Wasn’t reading something we wanted to champion?”

But to a degree, Tunney poured fuel on the fire. He maintained that he spent the day after winning the title from Dempsey studying Meditations by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. And according to his son, the fighter claimed he was late leaving the rented house that he lived in prior to the second Dempsey bout because he was re-reading the last two chapters of Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham.

“Sorry,” Gene reportedly said. “I lost track of time. Had to finish Maugham, you know; the last few pages. It’s his best.”

Whatever he did or didn’t read, Tunney faced his greatest ring challenge later that night. He was knocked down in the  seventh round and climbed off the canvas to prevail in boxing’s historic “long count” fight.

“A knockdown is a fighter’s ultimate crisis,” Jay Tunney writes; “the instant in battle when he has to prove he’s a general in the ring. Whether a boxer can physically and mentally handle those seconds on the canvas determines not only who wins the fight but often marks the rest of his career.”

Tunney began actively courting Polly Lauder after beating Dempsey for the second time. He was thirty years old, one of seven children born into a poor Irish-Catholic family in New York. She was ten years younger and had grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, surrounded by maids, butlers, cooks, gardeners, chauffeurs, and governesses.

Lauder was a society girl, an heiress. Percy Rockefeller lived on the estate next door. Tunney’s mother was of a class that would have been hired to scrub the floors in the Lauder home. When Mary Tunney first saw the mansion that Polly lived in, she told her son that she was glad she didn’t have to clean it.

Tunney’s engagement to Polly Lauder was announced on August 8, 1928, two weeks after his last fight and one week after he officially retired from boxing. They were married in Rome on October 3rd of that year.

“His old friends thought he was a snob for marrying rich and moving uptown with the Protestant Yankees,” Jay Tunney notes. “Some of the uptown crowd felt he should go back to the docks. He was near the golden circle of America’s power establishment, but also outside of it; a man between two worlds and part of neither one.”

Be that as it may; the marriage lasted until Tunney’s death in 1978 and appears to have been a happy one. Polly lived till the remarkable age of one hundred.

After Tunney retired from boxing, he lived what his son calls “a lifetime of grappling with balancing his past ring celebrity against his personal interests of reading, music, the arts, and, later, business. Boxing was his key to meeting the people he wanted to meet.”

George Bernard Shaw was interested in boxing and had sparred a bit as a young man. “There is no sport,” he wrote, “which brings out the difference in character more dramatically than boxing.” Indeed, Shaw’s first published novel – Cashel Byron’s Profession (published in 1886) – centered on a boxer who wins a championship and courts a young aristocratic woman.

Furthering the coincidental parallels between Cashel Byron and Tunney, Shaw had written in that book, “The prizefighter is no more what the spectators imagine him to be than the lady with the wand and the star in the pantomime is really a fairy queen.”

Tunney had approached Shaw through the playwright’s agent in October 1926 to inquire about playing the lead in a proposed stage version of Cashel Byron’s Profession. Shaw declined to pursue the project. They met for the first time in December 1928 at a luncheon hosted by Shaw at his London home. A vacation in Brioni (a cluster of Islands in the Adriatic Sea) the following year solidified their friendship, although the vacation was tinged with unwanted drama. An infected abscess on Polly’s appendix turned gangrenous and brought her to the edge of death.

The former champion and the playwright enjoyed their relationship. For Tunney, it also validated his self-image and intellectual view of himself.

“I think of Shaw as the most considerate person I have ever known,” he said years later. “He was helpful, directing me on questions of literature, music, art, thought. He was patient with me. No period of my life was more valuable than the long walks we took together on Brioni. It was like a matriculation in a cosmic school. He was the teacher; I was the pupil.”

Shaw, for his part, fondly recalled a film of the second Tunney-Dempsey fight that he had watched and noted. “I never saw anything so wonderful as Tunney’s dance round the ring when he got up with Dempsey rushing after him and slogging wildly until Gene suddenly stopped and countered with a biff that made poor Jack believe he was going to die.”

Yet Shaw’s fondness for Tunney stopped short of uncritical admiration. In 1932, the former champion authored his autobiography (A Man Must Fight) and proudly presented a copy to his intellectual mentor. Shaw read the book and responded wth a letter that read in part, “Just as one prayer meeting is very like another, one fight is very like another. At a certain point, I wanted to skip to Dempsey.”

Jay Tunney writes nicely and he understands boxing (which he calls “the most punishing and individual of all sporting contests”). He’s on solid ground when he highlights the courage that the public demands of fighters and “the conditioned grace of an athlete.” In his hands, the Tunney-Lauder courtship and marriage are lovingly recreated. And the book offers an interesting portrait of George Bernard Shaw, although too much of the Tunney-Shaw material is tedious social-diary trivia.

The book draws heavily on interviews, letters, photographs, and other documentation within the Tunney family; material that has been unavailable to other writers. That’s a strength, but it also raises questions of credibilty.

The Prizefighter and the Playwright is a son’s homage to his parents. It gives the impression that Gene and Polly Tunney lived a fairy tale life.

As previously noted, the Tunneys had four children (the eldest of whom served as a United States Senator from 1965 to 1977). There is no mention in the book of their daughter, Joan Tunney Wilkinson, who was committed to a facility for the criminally insane after murdering her husband in 1970. Depending on which contemporaneous newspaper account one reads, the victim’s head was shattered by a club or severed by a meat cleaver.

It would appear as though some demons lurked in the happy Tunney home.

That said; it’s fitting to close on a positive note.

After Tunney’s death, Jim Murray wrote, “He was the best advertisement his sport ever had. He could outbox, outthink, outspeed any fighter of his day.”

And summing up, Jay Tunney says of his father, “He was fighting for a life beyond the ring. He was fighting to be a respectable gentleman. He had grown up believing in his imagination and aspiring to be someone more than what was expected for him.”

Thomas Hauser can be reached by email at thauser@rcn.com. His most recent book (“Waiting For Carver Boyd”) was published by JR Books and can be purchased at http://www.amazon.co.uk/ or http://www.abebooks.com.
Hauser says that Waiting for Carver Boyd is “the best pure boxing writing I’ve ever done.”

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