The Old Master

THE OLD MASTER Genre: Biopic, Sports Drama A teenage Joe Gans wins his first battle Royal, a brutal contest where nine boys enter the ring and fight until the last man standing. Al Hereford, a boxing manager, recognizes Joe's talent and goes to the fish market where Joe works and offers him a professional boxing contract. After compiling a record of 60-0 and gaining national prominence, Joe finally gets a title shot with Frank Erne, the lightweight champion, who doesn't draw the color line with black boxers. They fight the match at a furious pace. In the twelfth round, both boxers simultaneously step in and throw right leads, their skulls loudly cracking together. The blow knocks Joe's eye from its socket so that it dangles onto his cheek, dashing Joe's hopes and dreams of becoming champ. Al Hereford is as much a grifter and a gambler as he is a boxing manager. White boxers have choices, but black boxers must fight to their white managers' orders or they will not make a living with their hands. Al Hereford orders Joe to take a dive that results in Chicago banning pro boxing. For two years, Frank Erne refuses Joe a rematch, but the press pressures him to relent. Joe is a thinking boxer and figures out how to beat Frank Erne. On May 12, 1902, Joe knocks out Frank Erne in round one to become the first African American world champion. Two years later, Al Hereford orders Joe to take another dive and lose his belt to Jimmy Britt, but Joe refuses, so Al Hereford sets Joe up to steal his championship. Joe fires Al Hereford and reveals the Britt fix to the press. After a failed marriage, Joe meets the love of his life, Martha Davis, a black Baltimore school teacher that even the Jim Crow era press describes as a world-class beauty. She is a follower of W. E. B. Du Bois and leads Joe's involvement in the civil rights movement of their day. On September 3, 1906, Joe meets Battling Nelson for a fight to the finish in Goldfield, Nevada. Unlike Joe, Nelson is not a scientific boxer, but he is a physical phenomenon and a monster in the ring, for his resting heartbeat is forty-six, and he has the thickest skull ever measured by phrenologists. With superhuman stamina, he always moves forward, like a shark, and never gives an inch. Punches that would KO any other lightweight hardly faze him. Under the desert's blazing sun, they fight for forty-two rounds—the longest championship bout ever fought under the Marquis of Queensberry rules—in above one-hundred-degree temperatures. Joe battles as a master boxer and a gentleman, but Nelson is a bullish brawler that employs dirty tactics, as he spews racial slurs throughout the fight. More and more each round, Joe's fair play wins over the mostly white audience, as they boo and hiss Nelson's foul play. In round thirty-three, Joe breaks his right hand on Nelson's skull, so he must fight the next nine rounds with only his left and superior ring generalship. Beaten to a pulp and exhausted, Nelson deliberately fouls out in the forty-second round, so the ref disqualifies him as the angry crowd boos him. Only dozens of armed deputy sheriffs prevent his harm. As Joe leaves the ring, the white audience cheers him as a hero. Hundreds of white miners throng the train station to cheer Joe as he and Martha wave from the porch of the caboose. Joe reaches to open the door for Martha but pauses and violently hacks. She turns his hand and sees blood spatter on his handkerchief. The strain of training for and fighting such a long, tough fight has awakened his latent tuberculosis. With active TB, Joe fights nine more world-class opponents to secure his family's future before dying. On the Fourth of July 1908, with lungs so TB scared he could hardly draw a breath, Joe fights twenty rounds and loses his title to Battling Nelson, who could have never beaten him healthy. On August 10, 1910, Joe dies at the home of his beloved mother with Martha at his side. Nationwide, Jim Crow America mourns the Old Master's passing.