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.
- Genre: Biography + Autobiography, Sports + Recreation
- Subgenre: Boxing, Sports
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Pages: 245
- Language: English
- Format: hardcover
- Release Date: June 19, 2012
- Date Published: June 19, 2012
- Author: William Gildea