Beyond Glory Page 18

  With that surely in mind, Schmeling skipped a planned detour to the Kentucky Derby and went right into training. His camp would be at the Napanoch Country Club, a small, remote resort in the Catskills about a hundred miles north of New York. Schmeling had preferred Speculator, the Adirondack hamlet where Baer had trained for Louis, but Mike Jacobs wanted him closer; that way, reporters would be more likely to speak with him, and to suggest he could actually win. Joe Jacobs, who selected the place, figured that having Schmeling stay in a Jewish-owned resort might mollify Jewish fight fans. Though it was prohibitively far from corned beef sandwiches and chorus girls, Jacobs pretended to like the sylvan setting. “This is the life,” he declared as a fire crackled behind him. “The country is the joint for me.”

  Schmeling arrived in Napanoch on April 30, and formally opened his camp a week later. It was 1,400 feet above sea level and he enjoyed the cool nights. His living quarters were higher still. He had dinner with the local district attorney and threw out the first pitch at a local baseball game, all to ingratiate himself with the community. An electrician set up a radio wire, through which half-hour reports on Schmeling’s activities would be broadcast to New York on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. (There’d be reports from Louis’s camp on Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.) Also on hand was Arno Hellmis. That Nazi Germany’s most important sportswriter was on the story (even though he’d had to pay his own way there) was another sign that it was by no means being buried.

  Just as Schmeling settled into one upstate New York hamlet, Louis set out for another: Lafayetteville, forty-four miles to the northeast. On the day Louis decamped, Schmeling was on the radio, describing how he’d win. “I know a way, but I better not tell it,” he told the interviewer. “Who knows but what he might be listening in?” In fact Louis was, not that he learned much. “I couldn’t understand him most of the time,” he said afterward. “He talks kinda funny, like a foreigner, I guess. Well, he is a foreigner, sure enough.”

  There was no boxing in Lafayetteville, only jogging and chopping hardwood. After about a week there, Louis headed for his real training camp, in Lakewood, New Jersey. A resort town near the shore sixty miles south of New York, Lakewood had been a part of boxing history before; Jim Corbett had trained there, as had Schmeling. Roxborough liked its dry climate and thought its pure air, scented with pine and salt, would guarantee Louis some sleep (though why that should ever have been a concern with Louis wasn’t clear). Roxborough also liked the cachet: the Rockefellers and the Goulds had places nearby. LAKEWOOD, THE TRAINING CAMP OF JOE LOUIS, THE NEXT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD, the signs strung over the highways leading into town soon proclaimed. For the next five weeks, the main thoroughfare of what had always been a lily-white resort was transformed into what the local paper called “a vest pocket edition of Lenox Avenue.”

  The center of it all was the Stanley Hotel, the rambling caravansary where Louis would train. The hotel’s owner, one Harry Cohen, hoped to make Louis’s training a long-term industry, and cut down a grove of pines to build an outdoor stadium for three thousand people. There was also to be a bandstand and a nightly floor show, but only after Louis had left the premises. For Louis and his team, Cohen found a furnished mansion two blocks away belonging to a Jewish man wanting to contribute to the cause; according to one black paper, the man was “not only a great admirer of the Brown Bomber, but wants to see Joe give Schmeling, the Nazi man, a good trouncing.”

  When a columnist from nearby Asbury Park returned from Lakewood on May 12, he carried “visions of Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers combined circuses floating before his eyes.” “Gaily colored strips of bunting and screaming banners bearing the name of Joe Louis in letters which reach out and knock you on the noggin fly from every gable of the rambling hotel,” he wrote. In the lobby, near a chair that was hot-wired to give unsuspecting visitors a jolt, was a nearly lifesize portrait of Louis draped with American flags and boxing gloves, bearing the legend “Our Next Champion.” Outside was a huge tent with a “40-foot chromium refreshment bar.” “It may be that Mr. Cohen has decided to get Joe’s mind off a little thing like a fight, and enable him to enjoy the lighter side of life,” the columnist wrote.

  On May 13, Mike Jacobs threw a breakfast for the boxing writers at Lindy’s, then formed an eight-car caravan to the camp. It was Louis’s birthday, and Braddock was also on hand; in honor of his visit, the hotel had thoughtfully removed the sign in the lobby proclaiming Louis the champion-in-waiting. Louis, who’d fought Carnera at 196 and Baer at about 200, planned to fight Schmeling at 204. But he had come to town weighing 214, and he hit 216 that day even before getting to the cake. In every sense, as he turned twenty-two years old, Joe Louis had a lot to lose. He greeted the governor of New Jersey, Harold Hoffman, and horsed around with Braddock, who found himself in the bizarre posture of a champion challenging a challenger. “What’s the matter with you, fella, are you trying to duck me?” Braddock asked theatrically. “As soon as I smack down this Schmeling, I’m your man,” Louis replied. (No matter how one rendered his words, everyone agreed on how Louis actually pronounced “Schmeling”: “Smellin’,” he called him.)

  Louis also received his personal copy of Edward Van Every’s new biography of him. Louis hagiography had become a staple of the “race press,” but here was something truly unprecedented: sainthood conferred by a white reporter from one of New York’s most staid newspapers, the Sun. The book had a lyrical, almost biblical tone, describing Louis as a “Black Moses” in its very first line, and calling his story “something in the nature of a miracle.” The rest of the press now dissected Louis as never before, and not always so reverentially. “You notice his mouth first,” wrote Jimmy Cannon in the New York American. “It is a red capital O. It is a soft doughnut stuck on his moon-face, and it does not go with his narrow and shifty eyes.” W. W. Edgar of the Detroit Free Press, who had followed him from the outset, explained that Louis could read a bit, but could write only his name. Once, a fan asked for an inscription to “my friend,” and Louis could not spell the second word. The Hearst papers were the harshest, calling him “Mike Jacobs’ pet pickaninny” and rendering his remarks in the most primitive dialect. In “Joe Louis Takes His June Exams,” a Hearst cartoonist showed a schoolmaster labeled “Old Man Experience” questioning man-child Louis as his classmates—Schmeling, Dempsey, and John L. Sullivan, among others—sat at their desks. “Joseph, make me up a sentence with the word ‘defeat’ in it,” he asks. “Sho!” Louis replies. “I pops ’em on de chin an’ dey drags ’em out by de feet!!”*

  But others sensed a growing maturity and confidence in Louis. “In his native, untrained way he is an interesting, amusing talker,” said Joe Williams. Southern reporters also described him sympathetically, albeit in the idiom of their day. “These are good colored folks,” wrote a columnist from Charlotte. “Money and fame hasn’t changed them. They are satisfied to be among their own people, and I can give them no higher recommendation.” Sometimes Louis wasn’t allowed to show his smarts. When a reporter for a Communist youth magazine asked him his views of the Scottsboro case, Roxborough pulled the writer aside. “Don’t think Joe isn’t intelligent,” he said. “He feels these things keenly. But he’s a prizefighter right now. He’s got to think of the nation as a whole; and he can’t afford to alienate anybody.”

  In a fifteen-part series, Damon Runyon meticulously deconstructed Louis’s boxing technique. Louis was not the greatest puncher ever, he wrote, but probably the greatest ever with both hands. He had “perfect coordination of mind and muscle,” an uncanny sense for what opponents were about to do, plus a knack for hiding what he was about to do himself. He was incredibly accurate. His physique was perfect for punching: long arms like whiplashes and muscles so “silky” that he looked lackadaisical until he started to fight, when his arms became “snaky” and his legs like steel springs. He had disproportionately big hands, and his wrists and forearms were enormously powerful. He had per
fect balance; hitting from his heels, he quadrupled his punching power. And he had a textbook temperament: cold, methodical, unflappable, unhurried. Runyon found only a couple of dissenters. One, eighty-four-year-old Tom O’Rourke, said John L. Sullivan would have beaten Louis with a straight right.

  Louis began his workouts. Sparring partners earned $25 per round, though Mushky Jackson, the Mike Jacobs factotum running the operation, considered paying them by the minute to keep them on their feet. Louis went through them fast; among those who’d quickly had enough was future heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott. A band supplied the music at ringside. Louis entered the ring to trumpet fanfares. After some brutal exchanges the sounds of “I’m Sorry I Made You Cry” or “Let’s Call It a Day” filled the air. As the sparring went on, spectators maintained a steady dialogue with Louis, sometimes shouting so robustly that the announcer had to ask them to stop.

  As the crowds grew—four thousand people showed up one Sunday, paying $1.10 a head—the actual business of boxing became almost secondary. Everywhere, street merchants hawked Joe Louis pins, Joe Louis rings, Joe Louis charms, Joe Louis medallions, Joe Louis keys, Joe Louis statues, Joe Louis flashlights, Joe Louis pictures, Joe Louis pennants. “An enterprising salesman could catch Joe Louis perspiration in cologne bottles and peddle it at two bucks an ounce,” Ralph Matthews joked. The hordes, overwhelmingly black, came from Atlantic City, As-bury Park, and, mostly, Harlem, and temporarily transformed a Jim Crow town. “Park Avenue has its Newport, but now Harlem has its Lake-wood,” the Courier announced. Black reporters arrived in droves; so eager was the man from the Houston Informer to get there that he was arrested for speeding near the camp. “The whole atmosphere here is a revelation,” wrote Roi Ottley of the Amsterdam News. “Residents and tradesmen have the glad hand out when Negroes approach…. Some cynic reminded me that to be in New Jersey is the same as being in Georgia … but at the moment this feeling has been completely dispelled. Money is a persuasive talker…. And Joe is bringing hoards of it to this village.”

  The transformation was especially notable at the previously all-white Stanley Hotel. “Now the place is as genuinely democratic and impartial to everyone as heaven is expected to be when (and if) we ever get there,” the Norfolk Journal and Guide said. But the changes only went so far. While white reporters slept and entertained themselves upstairs, their black counterparts were relegated to the basement, and were barred from sitting on the front porch or in the lobby. “The only thing they give the Race freely [at the hotel] is bills and they come large and fast,” complained Al Monroe, who, with the backing of the Defender’s publisher, refused the second-class accommodations.

  Marva’s arrival on May 16 only enhanced the glamour. “As she walks the streets, women and men, alike, stop to watch her glide by,” the Amsterdam News wrote in wonder. “Murmurs of admiration follow in her wake.” Society columns in the black press offered regular updates on her wardrobe and her marriage. The lovebirds’ every public moment together was monitored, though not everyone was pleased about her presence. “With her around all Louis wanted to do was to indulge in mumbling sweet nothings,” said the Richmond Planet. His great passion in Lakewood wasn’t boxing or his marriage, though, but golf. Watching Tony Manero win the U.S. Open at nearby Baltusrol had inspired him, and after a dozen rounds he was shooting in the low nineties. He played the game so often that the local country club awarded him a trophy. When his managers hid his car keys to keep him from escaping to Yankee Stadium for a ball game, he slipped off and played eighteen holes of golf instead. After breakfast one morning, he sneaked out to shoot another round, forcing his frantic management to have to go find, and then fetch, him.

  Before long the adulation, frivolity, and warm weather started getting to Louis. His timing was off; his punches were anemic; he appeared lethargic and indifferent. Stupid, lifeless, and “exhibitionistically frivolous,” Jimmy Cannon wrote. Physically and mentally, Louis had grown fat. “Hunger is the fighter’s friend,” Cannon explained. “Success and plenty are his enemies. Instead of the relentless kid fighting for his life, Joe is now a guy fighting for more money in the bank, another car, another suit, another day in the sun over Lakewood.” “His admirers say not to worry,” wrote Runyon. “They say he must be in the pink because he’s Joe Louis, and that, anyway, no matter how he looks or what he does he is bound to flatten Max Schmeling.” Maybe Schmeling didn’t know Louis was ordained to knock him out, Runyon mused. But in the world of professional boxing, where everything was hyped and newspapers doubled as boxing promoters, who knew what or whom to believe? Louis could deliberately be dogging it to build up the gate. Having made the “grave error of looking too dangerous” one day, the Daily News observed, Louis “caught the ticket-selling spirit” by letting himself be pummeled the next. Despite reports that he had “housemaid’s knee, leaping dandruff and hurry-up halitosis,” Louis was actually “sharper than a Bowie knife,” the News’s Jack Miley claimed.

  For his publicity operations, Mike Jacobs employed six former sports-writers, well versed in all of the angles. One of his veteran flacks, Jersey Jones, had been assigned to Pompton Lakes, and complained about the suicide mission he’d been given. “I’ve got to make Louis look bad,” he griped. “Get that! I’ve got to make him look bad so the public will think Schmeling’s got a chance against him. The greatest young heavyweight of all time, and my job is to sell him to the public as a bum!” To the Daily Worker, the jeremiads were just “plain ordinary anti-Negro propaganda.” Collyer’s Eye saw the news from Lakewood as an attempt to juggle the odds. Bundles of black money, including from gamblers in Detroit and Philadelphia, were being placed on Schmeling, it said; by betting on the German and then throwing the fight, Louis and his backers could make themselves a lot more money, although it conceded there were problems with that thesis, unique in its customarily sordid world: “Throughout his brief professional career, Louis has always refused to do business, even carry an opponent.” Besides, it said, it would “seem like insanity” to throw the title when it was within reach. Some black sportswriters rushed to the Bomber’s defense—insisting, as one put it, that Louis’s timing remained “as accurate and as rhythmical as a Beethoven sonata.” “If you’ve got the stuff, lay it on Joe and lay it on heavy,” another urged.

  Publicly, Louis’s camp wasn’t worried. “Its attitude seems to be that at his worst, Shufflin’ Joe still is a far better fighter than Max Schmeling at his best,” a reporter from Newark wrote. Now that Louis had a reputation, Blackburn told the press, there was no need for him to flatten everyone in training. Louis’s handlers started talking of breaking Dempsey’s record for brevity: nineteen seconds, against Fred Fulton in 1918. Schmeling’s claims about discovering a weakness in Louis’s technique was foolishness, they said. Louis himself appeared utterly unconcerned. Taking on Schmeling, one black columnist said, was for Louis “the same as if he were a janitor who had agreed to scrub some floors for a price.” The Louis team was already thinking about Braddock—in 1937, when he’d have a clean financial slate and the tax bite would be much smaller than in a year in which he’d already fought one lucrative bout. “We don’t have to rush him,” said Julian Black. “He’s going to be good for a mighty long time.”

  Privately, though, there was some concern; Jersey Jones’s facetious comments turned out to be not so far off the mark. “Chappie, what’s wrong with your fighter?” the trainer Ray Arcel, who was in camp one day, asked Blackburn. “He’s on his honeymoon, and she’s here with him,” Blackburn grumbled. Two weeks before the fight, Marva was finally banished to Harlem. The press criticism now got to Louis. He started bearing down before he was ready, losing weight in the blistering heat that he was then unable to put back on. Walter White sensed none of this when he visited Lakewood, but the signs were there; he tried to talk boxing with Louis, but all Louis wanted to discuss was baseball. “Gosh, how worried he is about Schmeling!” White mockingly wrote Roxborough afterward.*

  Schmelin
g’s mission at Napanoch was to get the legs that had failed him so badly in the Baer fight back into peak condition, so that he could move quickly. And he had to build up his endurance so he could outlast Louis. This meant lots of running; Machon later estimated that the two of them ran more than six hundred miles around the hilly terrain. He also had to take lots of jabs, so that when the time came he could get close enough to Louis to penetrate his flawed defense. He brought much of his food with him, including German sausage, German cheese, German bread, and even German mineral water; American water, he believed, helped account for his American losses. Just about his only indulgence was movies, which he would see in nearby Ellenville. Schmeling wasn’t out to dazzle anyone; only twice did he throw his right with full force. Though his crowds didn’t rival Louis’s, Schmeling also had his following; the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung printed detailed directions to the place by car or train.

  While others were busy writing him off, Schmeling had his program all mapped out. He would beat Louis, go back home on one of German’s zeppelins, then return a few weeks later to begin training for the title fight with Braddock. That would mean missing part of the Berlin Olympics, but that’s how it would have to be. Already, he’d arranged to leave his equipment in Napanoch. In early June, Schmeling told Liberty magazine he’d win, and how. “A good right hand will beat Louis,” he wrote. “I feel certain that when he shoots his left I can cross my right over it and score.” His victory would come sometime after the third round, he said, and would be by knockout. Eventually, he grew tired of discussing Louis’s technique. “Why don’t you ask Louis what he plans to do?” he retorted. “That don’t do any good,” quipped Joe Jacobs. “Louis only grunts or yawns or goes to sleep.” Schmeling laughed heartily.

  On June 4, Mike Jacobs came by Napanoch with a contract binding Schmeling to fight Braddock if he beat Louis. Jacobs was merely covering all contingencies, but Schmeling and Joe Jacobs saw portents in it. “So!” Schmeling declared. “I see you give me a chance to win, after all.” To the Angriff, it meant that Schmeling was the favorite. That’s certainly how Schmeling felt. “If confidence were music, Schmeling would be the whole Philharmonic,” wrote Jack Miley of the Daily News. Some nonetheless detected the ravages of time in the nearly thirty-one-year-old Schmeling. To Anthony Marenghi of the Newark Star Eagle, “fistic senility” hung over him; he’d become “an old third baseman stumbling in for a bunt.” Al Monroe thought Schmeling wouldn’t last two rounds. “Today he seems so vitally alive,” Richards Vidmer observed in mid-June. “What will he seem a week from today when his fine, strong, bronzed body has been bruised and battered and covered with vicious welts where the lightning of a Dark Angel has struck?”