Battling Nelson vs Joe Gans

In a remarkable promotion, Joe Gans retained the world lightweight championship at Goldfield, Nevada, on September 3, 1906, when Battling Nelson was disqualified for a low blow in the forty-second round. Referee George Siler acted immediately after Nelson struck Gans in the groin during a clinch, sending the champion to his knees and then upon his back. The fight lasted nearly two hours and eight minutes of actual fighting, and about two hours and forty-eight minutes with the intervals included. It remains the longest world championship contest conducted under the Marquis of Queensberry rules.

Tex Rickard promoted the fight at the Casino Amphitheatre, a wooden arena built in the Nevada mining town. The recorded attendance was 7,491, although contemporary estimates ran above 8,000, and the gate was reported at $69,715, then an exceptional sum. Women and children were among the spectators, and Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, sat at ringside. Nelson received approximately $22,500, twice Gans’s guaranteed purse, though the champion supplemented his earnings by backing himself. The strict weight terms also favoured the challenger. Both men were officially recorded at 132 pounds, but Gans was required to make the agreed limit at ringside while fully dressed. The severe reduction left him drawn before entering the ring beneath the afternoon sun.

Gans, the more accomplished boxer, established his superiority almost at once. He moved lightly around Nelson, drove the left jab into his face and stepped aside from the Dane’s forward rushes. Nelson was already bleeding by the second round but continued to advance, attempting to force Gans into close quarters. His method relied on physical pressure rather than speed. He punched to the body, leaned upon the champion and made frequent use of his head in the clinches. Siler warned him for rough work, but the attacks continued.

By the eighth round, Gans had administered the first count of the contest. He struck with greater accuracy, using Nelson’s advances to provide openings for counters, and repeatedly turned the challenger before moving back into open space. Nelson’s durability prevented an early finish. He accepted punches which would have stopped a less resistant man and continued coming forward, though he was losing the greater part of the rounds. In the tenth he had one of his better passages, bloodying Gans’s mouth with a series of blows, but the champion remained in command. After fifteen rounds, contemporary observers credited Nelson with no more than two.

The pace was maintained with little relief until after the twentieth. By then the heat and the prolonged exertion had begun to affect both men. Their footwork slowed, the clinches lengthened, and wrestling occupied a greater part of the rounds. Nelson remained the aggressor and occasionally reached the body, but Gans continued to score the cleaner blows. When the challenger missed and fell partly through the ropes during one exchange, Gans helped him back into the ring. Nelson responded by kicking him upon the shin, another incident in a contest increasingly marked by his roughness.

After thirty rounds the fighters had completed the equivalent of two modern 15-round championship contests. Nelson’s face had become badly swollen, his left eye was closed, and blood came from cuts around his features, as well as from his mouth, nose and ears. He was nevertheless still moving forward. Gans was exhausted but less severely marked, and his judgment of distance remained superior. He stood more often at close range as his legs tired, yet he continued to block, turn and counter the challenger.

In the thirty-third round Gans injured his right hand or wrist against Nelson’s head. He attempted to conceal the damage and thereafter relied increasingly upon his left. The injury removed much of his finishing power, but Nelson was too worn to take full advantage. The challenger pressed on through the thirty-fifth and later rounds, landing more frequently than he had at the beginning, although his work remained crude and much of it was done while holding. Gans answered with the jab and left hook, preserving a wide advantage while avoiding the prolonged exchanges Nelson sought.

Both men were sunburned, bruised and near exhaustion when the fortieth round began. Nelson’s continued advance was sustained by endurance rather than effective punching. Gans, fighting largely with one hand, still found the target more regularly. Early in the forty-second round he landed a firm left hook which Nelson absorbed. They then came together in another clinch. With his head against Gans’s shoulder and one arm low, Nelson struck beneath the belt several times before drawing back his right and delivering the blow which brought the champion down. Siler ordered Nelson to his corner and awarded the contest to Gans without beginning a count.

Most in attendance accepted the ruling. Nelson later denied committing an intentional foul, but ringside reports described the final punch as obvious, and some witnesses believed he chose disqualification rather than continue toward an inevitable defeat. His persistence had been considerable, but he had been outboxed and severely punished. Gans had overcome the weight-making ordeal, the desert heat, Nelson’s rough tactics and the loss of his right hand. The two men met twice more in 1908, when Nelson stopped a physically declining Gans in the seventeenth and twenty-first rounds. At Goldfield, however, Gans remained champion after one of the longest and most exacting contests in boxing history.

Joe Gans had everything going against him simply because of the colour of his skin. Because of this, I regard Joe Gans’s win over Battling Nelson as one of the finest displays of skill and endurance in boxing history. Gans had been forced to make a punishing ringside weight, yet he still outboxed Nelson for 42 rounds beneath the Nevada sun.

Nelson was immensely tough, but toughness and legality are different matters. He butted, wrestled and worked low while Gans used the jab, angles and accurate counters to cut him apart. Even after damaging his right hand in the later rounds, Gans remained the better fighter.

From the grainy old film, the final low blow looked deliberate to me. Nelson was exhausted, his face was badly damaged, and he knew he could not win by boxing. Referee George Siler was absolutely right to disqualify him. Nelson later stopped a declining Gans twice, but Goldfield showed them at their best: Nelson, the harder man to discourage; Gans, the vastly superior fighter.