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In the Ring with Joe Gans, Boxing's First African American Champion
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2012
On Sale: June 19, 2012
256 pages
ISBN: 0374280975
EAN: 9780374280970
Kindle: B007CLBW1G
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Many people came to Goldfield, Nevada, America’s last
gold-rush town, to seek their fortune. However, on a searing
summer day in September 1906, they came not to strike it
rich but to watch what would become the longest boxing match
of the twentieth century—between Joe Gans, the first African
American boxing champion, and “Battling” Nelson, a vicious
and dirty brawler. It was a match billed as the battle of
the races. In The Longest Fight, the longtime Washington
Post sports correspondent William Gildea tells the story of
this epic match, which would stretch to forty-two rounds and
last two hours and forty-eight minutes. A new rail line
brought spectators from around the country, dozens of
reporters came to file blow-by-blow accounts, and an
entrepreneurial crew’s film of the fight, shown in theaters
shortly afterward, endures to this day. The Longest Fight also recounts something much
greater—the longer battle that Gans fought against prejudice
as the premier black athlete of his time. It is a portrait
of life in black America at the turn of the twentieth
century, of what it was like to be the first black athlete
to successfully cross the nation’s gaping racial divide.
Gans was smart, witty, trim, and handsome—with one-punch
knockout power and groundbreaking defensive skills—and his
courage despite discrimination prefigured the strife faced
by many of America’s finest athletes, including Jesse Owens,
Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. Inside the ring and out, Gans took the first
steps for the African American athletes who would follow,
and yet his role in history was largely forgotten until now.
The Longest Fight is a reminder of the damage caused by the
bigotry that long outlived Gans, and the strength, courage,
and will of those who fought to rise above.
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