Beyond Glory Page 16

  LOUIS, SCHMELING, AND BRADDOCK were in play; the only question was who would fight whom when. “If Schmeling wants gold he can get it fighting Louis,” Mike Jacobs said. “If he wants glory, he can fight Braddock. Anyway, Louis can lick both of them.” In late September the Ford Motor Company offered to build a 100,000-seat stadium at the Michigan Fairgrounds for a Louis-Schmeling fight. But Schmeling appeared in no rush to fight anyone, perhaps because the money wasn’t right or his contract with Joe Jacobs was due to expire in December. Louis, on the other hand, would not remain idle. Mike Jacobs arranged three quick indoor fights: against Paolino Uzcudun in early December, followed by the Cuban heavyweight Isidoro Gastanaga in Havana on New Year’s Day and Charlie Retzlaff in Chicago two weeks later. None figured to be too taxing. Louis’s frantic pace swelled black hearts; in five months, he’d have fought more than Dempsey and Tunney had in all their time as champions.

  With characteristic diligence, Schmeling began studying Louis, but it was not easy; film of the Louis-Baer fight had been banned in Germany. The Nazis’ favorite boxing writer, Arno Hellmis of the Völkischer Beobachter, had to watch it in Basel, Switzerland, while Box-Sport sent a man to Katowice, Poland. This was odd, because to the Nazi press at least, the proscribed footage proved Louis was overrated. Box-Sport’ s correspondent described him as “an ambitious, determined fighter of mediocre technical ability, if also of undeniably large talent,” who’d beaten “a boxing corpse,” a “living punching bag.” There was no way he was a world champion, especially against the Schmeling of the second Hamas fight. According to “——s.” (presumably Hellmis) in the Angriff, when the fight film ended, everyone in the theater looked puzzled; Louis was not the “überboxer” they’d expected. Though his punches were “lightning-fast” and “incredibly hard,” he was a neophyte. “Max Schmeling, to the front!” he proclaimed. “You are just the right man to give this little Negro … a couple of rounds of boxing lessons.”

  Hellmis further described this overrated “loamface,” this “masterpiece of bluffing,” in the Völkischer Beobachter. Louis possessed the black man’s proverbial tough skull, he said, but he had beaten only has-beens; he was “custom-made for Schmeling.” Perhaps, as Schmeling later insisted, the Führer had misgivings about the German champion taking on a black man. But at this stage, at least, the two leading Nazi papers were actually urging such a fight. So was Box-Sport. “This Negro is no champion; the film has taught that with cruel clarity,” it stated. “Massa Louis from Detroit, the day you meet a true, class boxer for the first time in your young life—we’re waiting for that day.”

  Wherever he managed to watch the film, Schmeling was first struck by how nervous Baer had been and how poorly he had done. More important, he spotted a flaw in Louis’s technique: he dropped his left arm after jabbing, leaving himself open for a right cross. Amazed that no one had spotted this before, wanting to make sure it was true, Schmeling stayed for a second showing. It was just as Benny Leonard liked to say: To win, you gotta make another man do what you want him to do. And Louis was already doing it on his own. He could beat this Louis, Schmeling felt; he just had to get to him fast, before anyone else saw what he’d seen. So in early December 1935, Schmeling again boarded the Bremen for New York. His objective was to sign to fight either Louis or Braddock, to watch Louis fight Uzcudun, and to resolve Joe Jacobs’s status. The Nazis gave him an additional mission: to allay lingering American fears that the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936 would discriminate against blacks and Jews, and thereby to beat back the campaign in the States to boycott the Games. An assistant to the Reich sports minister asked Schmeling to “exert a positive influence on the right people,” while the president of the German Olympic Committee gave him a letter to carry to his American counterpart, Avery Brundage.

  It was Schmeling’s first trip to New York in eighteen months. Professionally, his stock had soared from the dark days of 1934. Having won his last three fights, Box-Sport maintained, he had become America’s “white hope,” its “knight in shining armor, the bulwark against the black danger,” and he was returning to the United States almost by popular demand. “They are not exactly altruistic, these people on the other side of the ocean, and they would hardly come back to Max Schmeling if they had another white boxer in their own country” on whom they could lean, it concluded. But for Germans in general the climate in New York had deteriorated. In late July, La Guardia had triggered a major diplomatic row when, responding to discrimination against American Jews in Germany, he refused to license a German-born masseur in New York. That La Guardia’s mother was at least part Jewish only further stoked the resulting rage of the German press. The Angriff denounced “New York’s Jewish Mayor” and his “wire pullers”—the German term, Drahtzieher, was one the Nazis invariably used to describe Jews—and called New York “world metropolis of Jewry.” A few days later, with the Bremen about to depart for Europe, some 1,500 protesters staged an anti-Nazi rally at the pier; some managed to take down the swastika from the ship’s bow and hurl it into the Hudson River. The episodes sparked large pro-Nazi rallies in Yorkville, including two in one night, attracting six thousand people, many in Nazi-style uniforms. In September, a New York judge freed five of the six men arrested in the Bremen mêlée, equating their protest with the Boston Tea Party. Then, only two weeks before Schmeling arrived, ten thousand people marched against American participation in the Olympics.

  Even if Schmeling deserved a title shot, Parker wrote, giving him one would insult the Garden’s many Jewish patrons. The Daily News characterized Schmeling’s welcome as “ten degrees colder than the weather”; with his excessive demands for his next fight and the political situation, it said, his popularity had waned almost to nothing. Meeting with the boxing press, Schmeling seemed surprised at, and even offended by, suggestions that he was dropping Joe Jacobs, who, he insisted, could manage him as long as he liked. Once more, he steered clear of all Jewish talk, but said it would be “a joke” if America opted out of the Olympics. “I’d like to fight this Bomber,” he also said. “I think my style would bother him.” His only fear, he added, was that someone might hit Louis with a lucky punch before he could get at him, thereby ruining a million-dollar gate. “A million and a half,” Jacobs interjected. “The first time I get him alone,” Gal-lico wrote of his friend Schmeling, “I must find out what Der Fuehrer would think, and say, if the No. 1 Nazi pugilist were subjected to public indignities at the hands of our famous Untermensch from the canebrakes of Alabama.”

  Schmeling faithfully discharged his mission to the Olympic committee. According to Schmeling’s memoirs, Brundage came up to his room in the Commodore Hotel—the same venue where the AAU was debating a resolution to boycott the Games—to receive the letter he carried from the German Olympic Committee, and asked for assurances that black and Jewish athletes would be treated fairly in Berlin, which Schmeling promptly made. It is unlikely that Brundage, a Hitler sympathizer and leader of the isolationist America First movement who was determined to see Americans participate in the Berlin Olympics, pressed Schmeling too hard on anything. In any case, because the committee rejected a boycott by only two and a half votes, Schmeling’s input may well have been decisive. “In retrospect, it was incredibly naïve of me to guarantee things that were completely beyond my control,” Schmeling later wrote.

  Louis faced four challenges in his fight with Uzcudun, which was set for December 13. The first, pronouncing his name, was something he never managed to do; he settled for “Upside Down.” The second was reaching him with a punch. Baer, Levinsky, Carnera, Schmeling—all had fought Uzcudun, but none had knocked him down, largely because they could not penetrate his turtlelike defense. The third was beating him more quickly and decisively than Schmeling had in his three tries. The fourth lay in disproving the canard that marriage ruined a fighter.*

  Schmeling came to Pompton Lakes on December 8, and sat near ringside as Louis sparred. Again, he was not impressed. “See how he stands in
front, and open,” he told Gallico. “A quick right hand and you haff got him…. He leaves so many openings…. See, now he looks even amateurish…. Yah, I sink I haff a good chance with him. I do not know if I can win, but I am not scared.” Gallico was struck by Schmeling’s calm. “I can report faithfully that he did not change color, blanch, or head for the exits,” he wrote. To others, too, he denigrated Louis. JOE LOUIS LOOKS LIKE JOE PALOOKA IN (PUBLIC) OPINION OF SCHMELING, the Herald Tribune proclaimed. Gallico, whose long relationship with Schmeling gave him freer rein to bring up sore subjects, asked him whether Hitler would allow him to fight Louis. Schmeling laughed; the Führer, he said, had more serious things to think about. Politics had not infused sports to such an extent, he insisted, and besides, Germany needed hard currency.

  On December 9, Schmeling signed a new two-year contract with Joe Jacobs. During that time, he might get a crack at the crown, but it wouldn’t happen right away; Braddock wasn’t interested. A champion had to cash in when he could, Braddock explained, and Schmeling wasn’t worth much, certainly not as much as Louis. He and Joe Gould had just come back from a western swing, Braddock said, and “all we heard was Louis.” Besides, they remembered Schmeling’s reaction when they’d tried to get him to fight Braddock. “Well, we’re asking now, ‘Who is Schmeling?’” Gould said. “What right has he to come over here and demand a championship bout?” The New York boxing commission felt the same way, decreeing that Schmeling could not fight Braddock without facing Louis first. So on December 10, Schmeling signed to fight Louis in June 1936. For his part, Louis agreed that once his three pending fights were behind him, he would not fight again until then. The next day, Mike Jacobs signed up Louis for another five years, locking him in through 1940. Louis had boasted periodically about retiring once he’d won the title and made his million, but Uncle Mike was not about to let that happen. “I’ve got him sewed up like a sweater,” he said.

  On the night of December 13, 1935, boxing’s good old days, which Louis had already brought back to the summertime fights in New York’s stadiums, returned indoors to Madison Square Garden. Limousines disgorged men in high hats and women in furs who joined the masses at the turnstiles. The crowd of 19,945 was the Garden’s largest in six years. It was all a tribute to Louis’s incandescence, for as the dearth of betting indicated, everyone knew who would win. So many celebrities were on hand that night that, as the Herald Tribune put it, it was easier to list who wasn’t there—like Hitler, Stalin, and the Dionne quintuplets. Schmeling got some boos when introduced, but they were mostly drowned out by cheers. When Louis’s turn came, Harry Balogh left out his usual plea for tolerance; “through as gentlemanly conduct as ever shown by any fighter,” one writer theorized, Louis had already “earned the respect and well wishes of every boxing customer in the country.” Louis looked youthful, clean-cut, innocent; Uzcudun was unshaven, hairy-chested, ferocious. He crossed himself while awaiting the bell. God must have been looking the other way.

  There was little action in the first three rounds, as the Basque covered up in his usual fashion and Louis probed for openings. Louis repeatedly jabbed with his left, affording Schmeling ample opportunity to study it. Louis had to get past his opponent’s elbows but couldn’t be careless: Why break a hand in a penny-ante bout when a bonanza beckoned? By the third round, some fans began to jeer. But it was just a waiting game; sooner or later Uzcudun would grow overconfident or impatient or sloppy, and open himself up, at least for an instant, and Louis would make his move. Everyone knew it was coming. The only question was when, and how devastating it would be. The tension was unbearable. Two minutes and thirty-two seconds into the fourth round, it happened. Louis saw his opening, and shot his right at Paolino’s jaw.

  It was one of those rare times when a fight was won on a single extraordinary punch—a punch, Gallico wrote, that “hurt everyone sitting within 15 rows of the ring.” Damon Runyon called it “the swiftest and most explosive” he had ever seen; the referee, Arthur Donovan, called it the hardest. Louis himself said he was scared stiff when it landed—he had never hit anyone like that. Paolino, a tooth suddenly peeking through his hemorrhaging cheek, fell like someone who had been shot, landing on the canvas—for the first time in his career—with a resounding thud. In the Garden, there was a vast, dim roar, as though, as one eyewitness heard it, someone had dropped piles of lumber from a great height.

  At the count of eight, Uzcudun pulled himself up, struck a fighting pose, and motioned for Louis to continue. Louis complied, throwing a few more punches before the fight was called. “I no queet!” Uzcudun screamed as he was dragged away. In his dressing room afterward, Louis was asked whether Uzcudun had dropped his hands before the fateful blow. “He dropped his chin,” he replied. Louis was more interested in whether he’d hurt his opponent. “I don’t want to kill anybody in this business,” he later said. After half an hour under a cold shower, Uzcudun finally took a few steps on his own. Then he fell flat on his face.

  Reporters who thought they had already expended all of their superlatives now reached for reinforcements. By any standard, the fight was a mismatch. But like many others, Richards Vidmer of the Herald Tribune felt he had just witnessed something transcendent.

  No mere words are adequate to paint the perfection of Joe Louis’s performance. When Caruso sang, when Pavlowa danced, when Kreisler plays his violin, there is no contest either.

  The skill that Louis possesses is something which never could be acquired. A fighter could be schooled for years and never obtain the rhythm of his reflexes, the speed of his hands or the timing of his blows. It is something natural, and I don’t believe a white man ever would be born with such physical syncopation, for there is something of the jungle in the way Louis fights; something smooth and silent and swift; something as decisive as death…. Joe Louis stands alone in the heavyweight world…. Yet the farther he goes, the cleaner he sweeps the field, the greater will be the crowds that clamor to see him fight. Those who have heard Paderewski play only want to hear him again; those who have seen the masterpieces of Rodin never quite quench their thirst for the beauty of his work; those who have read Shakespeare constantly reread his words and phrases. And Joe Louis is a master in his own line who has brought a real meaning to the science of boxing. They will want to see him fight again and again.

  This, I agree, is high praise and dangerous prediction, but it is my honest reaction and my sincere belief after the greatest performance of pugilism I ever viewed.

  One dissenter was James J. Braddock. Louis, he said to himself, was a sucker for a right hand; every time he jabbed he leaned way over and stuck his kisser out there, just begging to be socked. Schmeling felt the same way. He had studied Louis intently, just as he had set out to do. And the newspapermen studied Schmeling studying Louis. An Associated Press photographer trained his camera on Schmeling, recording his reactions over a series of four pictures: “Grins at Start”; “Let’s see what happens”; “Say, that guy can hit”; “M-mm—He’s gonna be tough.” One reporter thought he saw Schmeling suck in his breath and jerk when Louis’s fateful punch hit home. But whatever people were reading into his reactions, Schmeling himself was not just unperturbed, but pleased.

  Later, the myth developed that in a blinding epiphany that night, Schmeling had cracked Louis’s code. “I zee zomezings,” he supposedly said. In fact, both in watching the Baer fight on film and in studying Louis at Pompton Lakes, he had seen those same somethings before. Schmeling, Machon, and Joe Jacobs made their way out of the Garden, pushed through the crowd along Eighth Avenue to Forty-ninth Street, then crossed Broadway heading east. No one said anything until Schmeling suddenly blurted out, “I vill tell you something, Choe. I vill knock him oud.” Then, Jacobs later related, Schmeling drew both of them into the darkened front of a tailor’s shop and, as the fight crowd hurried by obliviously, showed them the moves he would use to do it. Schmeling explained as much to Gallico, who remained skeptical. “If Schmeling is as smart as I think he is,
he will go back to Germany, write a polite note to Mr. Mike Jacobs advising him that he has changed his mind and that he will not fight Mr. Louis,” he wrote. Uzcudun, who had now fought them both, thought Louis would kill the German. Even the perpetually pessimistic Al Monroe of the Defender now predicted that Louis would be champion within a year.

  Jack Dempsey agreed, announcing a global search for a new “white hope.” He said he was willing to spend $100,000 to find him, bring him to New York, and teach him how to fight. The French newspaper Paris Soir announced plans for a European search, too. Box-Sport saluted Dempsey’s campaign, calling it the “best indication that the race problem in the United States is still alive.” But it quite naturally irritated the black press, which had never forgiven Dempsey for dodging black boxers, along with the U.S. Army, during the Great War. “When did this ‘palooka’ appoint himself the defender of boxing, and incidentally, when did the United States come to mean so much to Dempsey, who was nowhere to be found when Americans fought in France in 1918?” the Courier asked. But Dempsey saw a need; Braddock had no chance against Louis, he believed, and Schmeling even less.

  “Do you know how long Max Schmeling will last with Joe?” Dempsey asked. “I’ll tell you now—less than one round!” But as Schmeling prepared to leave New York, his suitcase full of Louis films, he radiated confidence. “I have discovered that Louis can be hit by a right hand,” he said. “I will beat him. Wait until June. You see.” His trip to New York, he declared, “was what you would call a good investment.”

  * One Louis legend has it that after asking to feel Louis’s arm, Roosevelt told him, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.” The story, unreported at the time and misreported when it made its debut—their encounter was placed in 1938, not 1935 —may well be apocryphal; it’s dubious whether Roosevelt would have considered Germany so certain a foe at that point, let alone said so publicly.