The Longest Fight (Hardcover) product details page

160;160;160;160; Joe Gans was the welterweight champion of the world8212;smart, trim, handsome, with a revered right hook. He was the first black man in Baltimore to own a car, and the saloon he owned was the first place in the city where blacks and whites mingled socially. And yet Gans8212;as interesting a sports hero as America has produced8212;is largely unknown today. The Longest Fight will change that.160;

160;160;160;160; The book centers on an epic boxing match held in September 1906 in Goldfield, Nevada: Gans versus the racist fighter Oscar 8220;Battling8221; Nelson, who was known to bite opponents. The promoter, the young Tex Rickard, played up the fight as a race war. A new rail line brought tens of thousands of spectators from San Francisco. Dozens of reporters came to file blow-by-blow accounts to their home cities. And a pair of entrepreneurs filmed the fight to show in theaters, closed-circuit style.

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160;160;160;160; William Gildea uses Gans8217;s achievements to give us a deeply affecting account of what it was like to be an African-American sports champion in the early twentieth century. And through it all Gans was a man of wit, style, and courage8212;an unforgettable precursor to Satchel Paige, Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson.