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THE BROWN BOMBER VS. HITLER'S PRIDE
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Echoes of Joe Louis:
Sports Titan of His Time
of TheColumnists.com
The recent worthy documentary about Joe Louis, “Joe Louis, America’s Hero Betrayed" by HBO piqued some personal memories growing up in the time of Joe Louis. And it spurred me to get around to reading a book I had been meaning to read for some time, David Margolick’s excellent “Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink,” published in 2005.
The second Louis-Schmeling fight, June 22, 1938, was a significant event for me because, at the age of nine, I was allowed to stay up as late as 10 PM for the first time so that I could listen to the radio broadcast of the fight. I listened with my father--and mother--to the inimitable Clem McCarthy rasping his description of the short-lived knockout of Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds (2:04) of the first round.
Louis and President Franklin Roosevelt--and the New York Giants, Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell-- were the dominant national figures of my youth. I was a rabid partisan of Louis to the extent of arguing heatedly with my Uncle Ted about Louis and former champion Jack Dempsey.
Uncle Ted condescended that Louis was good, but that I didn’t know about Dempsey, who was better. He said Dempsey would beat Louis any time they fought. As Louis continued to knock out most of his opponents , I would argue fervently for Louis and would wince as my uncle figuratively patted me on the head, excusing my fervor as the ignorance of youth.
Later I would look up their records as champions.
Dempsey won the heavyweight championship knocking out Jess Willard in 1919 and then defended his title only five times in the next six years before losing to Gene Tunney in 1926. He didn’t fight for the championship at all in 1922 and 1924.
Louis won the heavyweight championship knocking out James Braddock in 1937 and then defended the title 19 times--with 16 knockouts--in five years before going into the Army. The cynics called his campaign the “Bum of the Month” club, but he fought anybody who was out there. Dempsey among other things, didn’t fight Harry Wills, the outstanding Negro fighter of the time.
Even with all that I don’t think my dear uncle conceded.
I recall sitting one day with Muhammad Ali watching fight films provided by Jimmy Jacobs, the eminent boxing historian. As colleagues Bud Collins, John Crittenden and I watched, Ali animatedly threw punches at the images on the screen. He declared that he could beat Louis--“too slow”--and Dempsey--“too little”. He was impressed, though, by Tunney-“a good boxer”--and Rocky Marciano--“very strong, he might hurt me.”
On the HBO documentary Lester Rodney, the sports editor of the Daily Worker, who today, at 96, may be the only journalist alive who saw the second Louis-Schmeling fight, has an opinion. He says Louis would have beaten Ali because, he told me later, “Joe had the fastest hands anybody ever saw by a heavyweight.”
I am not sure. Billy Conn was beating Louis with speed in their 1941 bout. He would have won had he not gotten careless going for a knockout, and was knocked out in the 13th round. Ali, of course, was the fastest of all heavyweights; he called himself a “Sugar Ray Robinson of heavyweights.”
Margolick’s book records in exquisite detail the Louis-Schmeling relationship, from the hoopla surroundng their first fight in 1936 through the 1938 fight and their careers after that. He dutifully traces, as the documentary did, the sad ending of Louis as a fallen hero--broke, bedeviled by the government for taxes, halting, sick, a man who the years passed by, at one point ridiculed by Ali as an “Uncle Tom.”
Margolick brilliantly details Schmeling as a man who always got along, a budding star in the Weimar years in Germany, a friend and spokesman for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, a survivor who remained an idol in post-war Germany. He lived 67 years after that 1938 debacle, made rich by a Coca Cola distributorship given him by James Farley. He reached out to become a friend and benefactor of Louis, which helped remove the stain here of his Nazi past.
He died in 2005 at the age of 99, 24 years after Louis died in 1981 at the age of sixty-six.
Margolick fleshes out the 1938 bout that stands now as the most significant fight of the 20th century. Bigger than the two Dempsey-Tunney fights, bigger than the Rocky Graziano-Tony Zale epics, bigger than any of Ray Robinson’s memorable bouts or the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier classics.
The subtitle of the book, “World on the Brink” underscores the symbolism of the bout. It pitted the darling of the Nazis against a Negro who represented the hopes and fears of his race and of Jews and all who understood the evil of Hitler’s regime.
The documentary underscores that Louis in his time was a more significant figure to black people than Ali was to become when he defied authorities by refusing to go into the Army in support of a Vietnam War that divided the country. Tremendous celebrations in black neighborhoods marked all Louis’ big victories.
After Louis knocked out Schmeling, Margolick writes, “By one estimate 500,000 people crowded Harlem’s streets. All traffic on Seventh Avenue between 116th and 145th streets--“their Broadway” police chief Lewis Valentine called it--"halted, immobilized by pedestrians, snake-dancers and stranded cars…” The Charleston Courier, a black newspaper, declared the fight “had generated the greatest show of Negro unity America had ever seen.”
It is hard to believe that even a colossal Super Bowl-like sporting event will ever match it.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted March 3, 2008.
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