Many a boxer has been hailed as a man of steel because of his Rust Belt origins. But it wasn’t just hype when a ring announcer would trumpet: “And in this corner — Battling Nelson!”
In 1906, Oscar Matthew Nelson lost a 42-round fight when the referee disqualified him for fouling Joe Gans, the lightweight champion.
Two years later, he got his revenge by twice knocking out Gans. For an encore, he redeemed his promise to make Hegewisch, the gritty Chicago neighborhood where he lived, something more than a “jumping off place,” as the Tribune called it.
“I’ll put this town in shape, if I have to lay out cold the aldermen and all the prominent citizens,” Nelson had said on a march of his Hegewisch Improvement Association through the community’s dingy streets. A reporter accompanying him was struck by “the general hopeless and decaying aspect” of the isolated community on the Southeast Side.
But Nelson always kept in mind that he’d been Hegewisch’s boxing champion long before becoming the world champion.
In 1896, the Wallace circus, playing in nearby Hammond, offered a dollar to anyone who could go three rounds with its prizefighter. Nelson sidestepped his opponent’s punch and countered with one of his own.
“Wallace’s Ferocious Monster went down with a thump into the sawdust,” Nelson recalled in his autobiography, “Life, Battles and Career of Battling Nelson. “
That made Nelson a hero to his street-corner buddies but angered Ole Olson, who styled himself the pride of Hegewisch. Olson was Swedish. Nelson was Danish and had won this round of an ethnic grudge match.
“During the excitement over the knockout, the Swedes, angered over the defeat of their pride, started a war of extermination with us Danes,” Nelson wrote. “It was the dandiest battle royal I ever took part in and there was more good old fashioned excitement in Hegewisch that day than ever since.”
It was a place where immigrants lived in an uneasy truce with each other before moving on and making room for the next generation of newcomers.
Hegewisch’s draw was jobs. It sat in a swath of heavy industry along the bottom of Lake Michigan, stretching from South Chicago through northwest Indiana. Someone with little or no English could find work there.
Nelson’s father, having brought the family over from Denmark, was angered by his son’s street-fighting antics. They argued, and Nelson went out the door. He wandered through the West, working odd jobs and occasionally fighting professionally.
“I made up my mind when I left home that if I ever should be fortunate enough to become famous as a boxer, I would certainly never go back to my home town, Hegewisch,” Nelson wrote.
But returning home for a Christmas visit, Nelson reconciled with his father. They were in Dad’s Knight tavern when a barfly from Pullman was boasting about his neighborhood’s star boxer. Nelson’s father defended his son, calling him “a vonder” in his Danish-accented English, according to the Tribune.
Instead of turning his back on Hegewisch, Nelson touted it and invested his purses in local real estate. He replaced hovels with decent housing.
In 1913, Nelson proudly showed his bride-to-be the streets of his youth.
Fay King was an editorial cartoonist who met her future husband, who wrote and made vaudeville appearances between bouts, when she did a sketch for his book, “The Wonders of the Yellowstone National Park.”
When King and Nelson arrived at the Hegewisch railroad station, virtually the whole population was there. “We go into the ring for the marriage bells at 13 minutes after 1 o’clock,” Nelson announced.
The ceremony was performed in the Nelson family home. Newsreel cameras recorded it. A band played: “We Won’t Go Home Until Morning.”
So it sent shockwaves through the community when Fay afterward pronounced Hegewisch a “disease.”
“Never, even by the wildest stretch of imagination, has the little burg been classed as a garden spot,” the Tribune wrote, “but it has its esthetic side, and this with modern structures built and owned by Landlord Oscar Battling Nelson caused the men, women, and children to feel proud of their town.”
A messy divorce ensued. She said he’d blackmailed her by threatening to kill himself if she didn’t marry him. He said she wanted what the Tribune called a “Platonic” marriage.
In 1910, he lost his title in another marathon battle of somewhere around 40 rounds (accounts differ). The fight was ended by the referee when Nelson’s battered eyes left him stumbling around the ring.
His fighting style ensured him taking punishment even when he won. Some fighters are known as “scientific boxers.” They move in to throw a punch and quickly retreat.
Nelson moved in only one direction: straight ahead. He was willing to take a punch in order to throw a left hook, a right cross or an upper cut. There are various counts of his final record, but he won some 60 fights, 40 by knockout, while losing only about 20 and fighting to a draw in an equal number of bouts.
Jack London described Nelson in terms of socialism, of which the celebrated novelist was an apostle. When Nelson fought Jimmy Britt, in 1905, London saw the class warfare Marx predicted.
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“When Nelson stripped he looked like a proletarian that had known lean and hungry years of childhood,” London wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Britt looked the well-fed and prosperous bourgeoisie.”
By 1920, his fighting days were over, and Nelson was showing the wear and tear of his ring career. A court case suggests his siblings were either concerned about his mental lapses or wanted to profit from them. He accused his four brothers and a sister of falsely claiming to have inherited Hegewisch property worth $150,000 from their father.
“He avers that he, Battling Nelson, really owns the property and that several years before his father’s death he deeded it over to him merely that the elder man might conserve it for the boxer.”
He seems to have won in court. He was subsequently reported to be living on a $200,000 trust fund. In 1927, the Tribune reported: “He was declared sane in the psychopathic court, after a week under observation. Then he was discharged in Municipal court on charges that he had stolen films taken in 1910 when he lost his title to Ad Wolgast.”
In his post-boxing career, Nelson sorted mail at Chicago’s main post office. He also entertained hospitalized World War II veterans with stories of his fights.
Nelson lost money through bad investments, and he and his second wife lived in a shabby hotel at 620 N. State St. She died in December 1953. An Associated Press reporter noted that Nelson scarcely left his room, but “gets a great deal of cheer from a sad eyed Cocker Spaniel named Taffy.”
His brothers testified they couldn’t afford private care for him, and Nelson was committed to the Dunning state mental hospital as incurably senile. There he died on Feb. 7, 1954.
His funeral at a South Side chapel was paid for by the Veteran Boxers Association and his ex-wife. It was jammed with 300 people; 200 more stood outside, paying their respects to a man who wrote:
“Enthusiastic writers of late have been wont to call me ‘the Peerless Dane,’ ‘the Durable Dane’ etc. This is all very nice, but I am simply Battling Nelson of Hegewisch, Illinois, a champion boxer, that’s all.”
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