By Pete Ehrmann Special to OnMilwaukee.com Published Dec 05, 2010 at 9:07 AM

The best Christmas present Gus Christie ever got was the worst beating he ever took in a boxing ring.

The 5-foot-10, 164-pound Milwaukee star had no business fighting Billy Miske on Dec. 27, 1918, at the Elite Rink on 10th and National, and not just because the 6-foot "St. Paul Thunderbolt" was a legitimate heavyweight contender who had 22 pounds on Christie.

Christie had gone up against even bigger guys in his 12-year ring career and more than held his own. A year earlier he was still swinging at the end of his 15-round bout with 224-pound Tom McMahon -- who had a victory over then-heavyweight champ Jess Willard -- and even had McMahon on the deck when the last bell rang, even though Christie had gone into the match with a right hand broken in his last fight three days earlier and then broke the left one belting McMahon.

He'd also had beaten light heavyweight champions Jack Dillon and Battling Levinsky, and always gave the great middleweight champion Harry Greb -- considered by many ring historians the scariest fighter ever -- hell when they fought. "Why do I always have to be at my best when I meet you?" Greb once asked him.

When Christie beat the bigger Zulu Kid in Brooklyn in 1916, the Washington Post said the latter's size advantage was "offset by (Christie's) very considerable advantage in brains." That's usually how it went, and the ultimate proof of that came in 1912 when somebody tried to get the talented Milwaukee German blacklisted by putting out the word before Christie's fight against George Coogan in Indianapolis that Christie was a negro.

In those days when black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was the most hated and polarizing figure around, nothing was more certain to kill a boxing career in its tracks.

"I don't know where they got that stuff," fumed Christie's manager, Teddy Murphy, "but believe me, I wired back that Gus was all white."

Christie -- often referred to by local newspapers as "Unser Goos" -- was born July 1, 1891 and lived on Bremen Street, kitty-korner from another great local middleweight named Bob Moha, with whom he split two fights. As a boy he taught swimming in the Milwaukee River near North Avenue, and learned to fight to avoid being victimized by the "Teutonia Indians" and "Bloody 64s," the preeminent street gangs of the era.

"The better you were at fighting, the more they were on your side," Christie recalled years later. "They all wanted to be on the side of the toughest guy."

All of 95-pounds, the tough Christie was steered to the Milwaukee Athletic Club and started fighting amateur bouts. He got $40 for his first pro fight, and figured "boxing was an easy way to make money."

It wasn't easy and it wasn't lucrative. In the second of Christie's 11 fights against Jack Dillon, in Milwaukee on Nov. 3, 1913, he was knocked down in the first round. The next thing he remembered was walking on Wisconsin Ave. and having someone tell him what a great comeback he'd made in the later rounds. The fight had gone the distance, 10 rounds, and Christie had no memory of fighting the nine that came after the knockdown.

"In boxing you have to start with a body built to stand abuse," Christie said, "and then develop it by exercise. When I started fighting I used to run up to 18 miles, and then work for two hours in a gym. You need to be in the best possible shape to take the punishment you get around the head and body."

For fighting the gigantic McMahon in Dayton, Ohio, Gus was supposed to get $750; but by the time he got to the promoter's office to collect after having his broken hands doctored, the promoter had skipped with all the proceeds.

Christie liked to talk about his 1917 fight with Harry Greb in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for Greb's claim to the middleweight championship. Gus lost the decision, and ended up getting just $50 for the match because the gate receipts from the minuscule crowd amounted to just around $200.

"My expenses were $65," Christie recollected. "I went home with a $15 loss and a beating."

He didn't get many beatings in the 100-plus pro fights that made him as famous around the world as Milwaukee beer; but by the time he fought Miske, Christie was totally blind in one eye and the other one didn't see too well.

He kept that to himself because he was just 27, and figured he was actually just starting to get the hang of the boxing game. Miske's size was no matter to him. "The bigger they are, the harder they fall" was the mantra guys like Christie used, though in his case it was more like the bigger they were, the easier it was to see them.

"(Christie) stated that the only handicap he will have is stepping over Miske's carcass when it is stretched out on the canvas," wrote Chet Koeppel in the Milwaukee Sentinel the day of the fight.

But it was Christie who went down in the third round of the uneven fight. In the fifth, wrote Sam Levy in The Milwaukee Journal, "groups of fans, unable to gaze at the helpless sight which Christie represented, left their ringside seats and retired to the rear of the arena."

By the tenth round Christie's face was raw hamburger, and when Miske knocked him down again with a full minute left in the round, Walter Liginger, chairman of the state boxing commission, ordered that the bell be rung because, like everybody else in the house, he knew Christie would finish the fight or die trying.

It went into the books as a technical knockout -- the only one ever recorded against the local fighter.

"Gus Christie is a terrible looking sight," reported Chet Koeppel in the next morning's Sentinel. "It was the worst beating Christie ever received in a ring or anywhere else and his face is battered practically out of shape."

But that wasn't the worst of it. Not long after the fight, Christie's half-good eye went dark, and only emergency surgery saved his sight. He never fought again, and later counted the Miske bout as the "luckiest thing that ever happened to me," because if he had beaten Miske the plan was for Christie to fight Jack Dempsey, who in 1919 almost killed Jess Willard to become heavyweight champion.

Unser Goos, who died in 1970, never regretted boxing. "I had so much fun," he said. "I saw the world and met a million people. The things I saw and did and the people I met, I never would have if I hadn't boxed."

In his post-ring years he was the popular athletic director at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, where he'd had his first amateur fight as a 95-pounder. "I'm just as good today as I was then," he said in 1958. "I can still lick the 95-pounders."

The "St. Paul Thunderbolt" should've been so lucky. Miske fought Dempsey for the title in 1920 and was knocked out in three. But he was already suffering from terminal kidney failure. In November 1923, the broke Miske literally came off his deathbed to knock out Bill Brennan and earn enough money to provide Christmas presents for his family. He died at 29 on Jan. 1, 1924.

Pete Ehrmann Special to OnMilwaukee.com
Pete Ehrmann is a sports historian whose stories apear at OnMilwaukee.com. His speciality is boxing.