“We Would Have Done Anything Not To Fight Each Other”
Two best friends sunk into each other’s arms, weeping in the locker room moments before the biggest fight of their lives. Though the teenagers had each beaten four grown men in five days to reach the Olympic final, both understood their next opponent in the tournament would be the toughest yet. But their tears were not from nerves or fear. Instead it was regret and the instinctive understanding that nothing would ever be the same between them. With the gold medal at stake, the two boys were minutes away from fighting each other.
Today the minimum age for a boxer to qualify for an Olympic competition is nineteen and each country is allowed to enter only one boxer in each weight category. But a hundred years ago there was no age minimum and two fighters per country could compete in the same weight class. And so it was that two adolescent American pals, 16-year-old Jackie Fields and 18-year-old Joe Salas, came to face each other in the featherweight final on this day a century ago at the 1924 Paris Olympics.
The boys had met in 1921 at the renowned Los Angeles Athletic Club, a haven for Jewish and Mexican Americans who were barred from living in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles at the time. But in a cruel irony, the LAAC excluded black people from becoming members.
The club’s head coach was George Blake, an ex-boxer who had trained aspiring fighters for over fifteen years. Regarded as an honest man and an excellent teacher, Blake was a boxing instructor at Camp Kearney during World War I and a well-respected referee in the pro game. He taught the science of the sport, focusing on proper technique, and both Fields and Salas, who became fast friends, thrived under Blake’s tutelage.
Fields was a tiny flyweight when he began to learn from Blake at the age of 13. When he became good enough to represent the club in amateur tournaments, the slick boxer fought as a bantamweight. Meanwhile, the power-punching Salas was the club’s premier featherweight. Emerging as the best boxing club in America, the LAAC sent seven boxers to the 1924 national championships in Boston, which also served as the U.S. Olympic Trials. Four of them would make the trip to Paris. Three would medal.
By the time of the May trials, young Fields could no longer make the bantamweight limit, so he entered as a featherweight on the opposite side of the bracket of his friend. While Salas won the national championship, Fields was bounced in the semifinals because of a combination of a broken hand and Harry Wallach’s southpaw stance. “I never fought a southpaw before,” Fields recalled. With the loss, Fields’s hopes of Olympic glory appeared to be dashed.
But there were powerful men watching in Boston. American Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, president of the Amateur Athletic Union W.C. Proust, and Spike Webb, head coach of the U.S. Olympic Boxing team, both took a favorable view of Fields and gave him the chance to make the team as an alternate.
In June, the USS America carried the U.S. Olympic team across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris with four featherweights aboard. Coach Webb could only enter two of them and name one alternate. So Fields sparred Patsy Ruffalo on the boat. “Unbeknown to each other, they let us work out to see who would eliminate the other alternate,” Fields remembered. “So, I must have eliminated him.”
Because of internal injuries, Ruffalo would be rushed off the boat to the hospital when it docked in Cherbourg, France. A middleweight alternate from the LAAC named Ad Allegrini forfeited his chance to participate in the Olympics when he heroically donated blood to the wounded Ruffalo.
Once in Paris, Fields learned that he would face Wallach again, this time in a box-off for the right to represent the U.S. in the Olympics. When the New Yorker had put up his guard in a southpaw stance in the trials, Fields was so confused he told Wallach, “Hey, turn around. You’re fighting wrong.” In Paris, the slightly more experienced Salas set out to teach his friend how to fight a lefty. Fields later said, “I must have looked better than Wallach, so they picked Joe Salas and me.”
The 1924 Olympic boxing competition was a bizarre whirlwind. The glass ceiling of the Vélodrome d’Hiver acted as the sun’s magnifying glass, creating sweltering conditions for the boxers inside. Referees stood helplessly outside the ring. Salas explained, “You did what you could to protect yourself because the referees weren’t right there to help out.” The resulting controversies caused chaos, which led to the occasional riot in the stands. But the two American featherweights boxed their way past four older opponents in five days.
When the time came for the two friends to face off for the gold medal on this day, July 20th, 1924, neither was anxious to face their pal. “We would have done anything not to fight each other,” Salas later declared.
With two Americans in the final, there was the question of which corner head coach Spike Webb would be in, and which one assistant coach Al Lacey would work. Fields believed Webb favored Salas to win. He claimed Webb said, “I’ll have to toss a coin. Heads I’ll go in Salas’s corner, tails Lacey, you go in Fields’s corner.” The perceived slight snapped Fields out of his distress over fighting his friend. “C’mon, Al,” he told Coach Lacey. “We’ll beat ’em. You come with me.”
During the three-round bout, both men boxed beautifully. Coach Webb later described the fight as “a remarkable exhibition of scientific boxing and clean, hard hitting.” That included the extra minute inexplicably added to the final round. “The decision of the judges went to Fields,” continued Webb, “and it met with the approval of the crowd, as Fields boxed like a master, while Salas also gave a wonderful account of himself.”
After the fight, Fields was allegedly so distraught at beating his friend he went back to the dressing room and cried. But he had won the gold medal. The 16-year-old became the youngest boxer ever to win an Olympic gold medal, a record that not only still stands, but one that will never be broken. “They handed me the gold medal, and then played the National Anthem,” Fields later remembered. “And I started to cry.”
No American featherweight would win an Olympic gold medal again until Meldrick Taylor did so sixty years later. Taylor is the only American 126-pounder to win gold since Fields.
By winning silver, Salas became the first Latino American to win an Olympic medal in any sport, a pioneering achievement that is sadly overlooked today. While he felt he deserved gold, Salas claimed, “There were no hard feelings.” History would prove otherwise.
Salas returned to Los Angeles a couple weeks ahead of Fields, who took a detour to visit his friends in Chicago, where he had grown up. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, Fields heard that Salas had accused him of head-butting in the final. Bad blood began to surface, and a rematch was set for September 18th. The rematch was so close that a fourth round was spontaneously ordered. Ultimately, Fields was given the verdict. Salas felt he had been robbed again. As a result, their relationship further deteriorated.
Fields and Salas then fought as professionals on May 8, 1925 in a bitter grudge match. George Blake had chosen to manage Salas’s career, believing Fields too young to turn pro, which only added to the bitterness between the two boys. The defending Olympic champion held a professional record of 2-0 while the defending national champion was 3-0. In the fight, Fields outboxed Salas over ten rounds to win the decision. They never spoke to one another ever again.
Sixty-two years later, Olympic gold medalist Jackie Fields died. Just eight days later, his former best friend Joe Salas followed. –David Harazduk
