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  Joe Jacobs managed the press and, like Jersey Jones in Lakewood, he did not have an easy time of it. The “Reich sports idol” and his “spectacularly non-Aryan” manager, as The New Yorker described them, remained the oddest couple in sports. Their relationship had so deteriorated that when the Mirror described Jacobs as Schmeling’s manager, it put quotation marks around the term. Max Machon was really in charge, and got a larger commission than Jacobs did—a reported 18 percent, rather than 15⅓. Schmeling had all but stopped talking to Jacobs except in public, and then just for the sake of appearances. Jacobs did not live in Schmeling’s cottage, as Machon did; he had to call before going there.*

  But Jacobs nonetheless served Schmeling tirelessly, ingeniously, volubly. He planted stories compulsively, informing the world that Schmeling’s sparring partners were being fed steak, the better to withstand all those ferocious punches. He would hide the newspapers from Schmeling, so that he’d be spared all the dire prophesies. And he denigrated Louis at every opportunity. “I’m telling you something: That Louis has lost it,” he declared. “He’s going the way of all flesh, get me? He’s got plenty of money, and he’s tired of the grind. Why, he’s even cut out his road work to play golf every morning. Get a load of that, will ya? Golf!” Louis fought dirty, Jacobs said, throwing sneak punches that referees were afraid to call because of his “so-called greatness.” Louis was overrated, overconfident, and overpadded, wearing far more gauze and tape on his fists than the regulations allowed. “Them guys have been making a plaster cast of Louis’s mitts,” he shrieked to the boxing commissioners. The boxing commissioners responded, limiting Louis’s bandages.

  Jacobs kept at it because he still got a cut of Schmeling’s earnings, however diminished. But more, it was a kind of addiction. “It was he who made Schmeling a champion,” Joe Williams wrote. “Perhaps he still has a sculptor’s enthusiasm for his masterpiece.” A few years later, Williams described this stage of their relationship more brutally. “By now [Jacobs] knew he was dealing with a Grade A rat,” he wrote, “but in some indescribable, mystic manner he was able to ignore completely this part of the fighter. All he could see was the champ he had made.” Jacobs added a veteran boxing man called Doc Casey to the team because he believed he brought Schmeling good luck; Casey had refereed some of Louis’s early bouts and had previously worked in Schmeling’s corner. Another ring veteran, Tom O’Rourke, stopped by the camp. He had spotted the same flaw in Louis that Schmeling had, and urged Schmeling to cross with a right to Louis’s chin whenever Louis dropped his left hand. That, he told Schmeling, is what John L. Sullivan would have done.

  In early June the German consul in New York, Hans Borchers, stopped by Napanoch, and was asked whether Schmeling’s prestige in Nazi Germany would suffer were he to lose or if there was official unhappiness with him over his decision to fight a black man. He belittled both ideas. Borchers was a career diplomat, though, and it was unclear whether he spoke for the regime. The sportswriters covering Schmeling rarely broached politics. But near the end of camp, he was asked about a possible war between Germany and England or France. “Dere will be no war, not in dis generation,” he replied. “The German people do not wish it. Over here the Americans did not have any war. Yah, I know, maybe one hundred thousand dead. But in Germany it was millions dead and more wounded. A big shell costs $3,000. It iss better to spend that for homes. Do you think Germany would have voted 99 percent for Hitler if it wass to be for war?” To Champion of Youth, the Communist magazine, Schmeling distanced himself from Nazi racial attitudes. He grew upset when asked about statements in the German press that blacks were more cowardly than whites. “In sport, the Negro and white man are just the same,” he said. “The best man wins.” More than that, though, he would not say. “Schmeling evidenced great reluctance to answer our questions on the Nazi regime,” the reporter wrote. “We asked him if he felt it was true that the German race is superior to all others from a cultural and physical viewpoint. He seemed not to understand.”

  The most political element in Schmeling’s camp was Hellmis, who by now had become all but Schmeling’s official Nazi chronicler. A balding, ruddy-faced, and portly thirty-five-year-old veteran of World War I, Hellmis was a Nazi Party member in good standing, having joined around the time the Jews were eliminated from the German boxing community. He approached his work with patriotic fervor; his American counterparts quickly came to regard him with wariness and revulsion. “A sweaty hog of a man,” Jimmy Cannon called him. One night at the Stork Club in New York City, a German reporter in his cups told an American journalist that Hellmis was monitoring everyone, Schmeling included, making sure no one strayed from the party line. The next morning, the German reporter begged the American not to print what he’d said; he feared he’d be killed.

  In the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter and the Angriff, Hellmis reassured Germany about Schmeling. “He knows very well that it’s not going to be a stroll, yet he believes he can defeat the Negro because he wants to bring the world champion title back to Germany,” he later wrote. “The unanimous opinion of all of America, the sneering of the press, the doubts of his fellow countrymen, of his own training partners—nothing can jar his belief in himself!” He described what he viewed as the vulgar American-style publicity—“Reklame”—surrounding the fight. Hellmis conceded that having whipped up press interest to a degree unfathomable to Germans, Mike Jacobs was “a very smart boy.” Hellmis saw the matchup in starkly racial terms: Schmeling would have the loyalty of all whites at Yankee Stadium. While Schmeling felt the tight security around him unnecessary, it made perfect sense to Hellmis: “Some woolly head of a Negro” could always pour something into Max’s coffee. But such pejorative racial references were rare. With the Olympics looming, the German propaganda ministry, which by now had begun issuing written orders to the German press, instructed editors that racial questions were “absolutely not to be broached” in fight coverage. Neither Louis nor Schmeling was to be depicted as a representative of his race, not even if Schmeling won.

  Crowds continued to descend on Lakewood. After four thousand people showed up on June 7, Harry Cohen vowed to enlarge the arena for the final weekend. That Friday, Lucky Millander and his band jumped into the ring and played as a grinning Louis shadowboxed to the beat. The next day, Louis applauded enthusiastically as Ethel Waters sang “Stormy Weather” just for him. Louis predicted a knockout, but would not say when. “Well, it won’t go fifteen rounds,” he finally offered. “Maybe half that.” And despite the disquieting reports, 90 percent of black America believed the fight would end in the first round. Jack Johnson called for Louis in six, though, according to Collyer’s Eye, he also had “a nice piece of dough riding on Schmeling,” and he told Ring that at least two dozen fighters over the past forty-five years could have beaten Louis. Schmeling saw the article, and reviewed it closely with Machon.

  On the eve of the fight, black America was positively giddy. Even before the first punch it had won, simply because so much of white America—even in the South—was pulling for a black man. A newsman from Atlanta sized up the situation. “As between Schmeling the German and Joe Louis, the colored boy, southerners generally will quietly pull for Joe,” he wrote. To Ed Harris of the Philadelphia Tribune, the way in which whites were lining up behind Louis was little short of miraculous. “In the face of this one waits for the pyramids to crumble, the Statue of Liberty to truck around its base, the Empire State Building to start singing ‘Sidewalks of New York,’” he wrote. “Anything can happen now…. Brothers, the battle is over…. Soon you will be able to travel all over the Southland, marry women of other colors if you so desire, go any place and do anything.”

  Reporters vied with one another to capture just how bleak Schmeling’s prospects were. As much chance as a silk shirt in a Chinese laundry, someone wrote, or of an ice cube in a smelting furnace. Schmeling was likened to Bruno Hauptmann, the convicted Lindbergh kidnapper who two months earlier had gone to the electric chair.
Dan Parker urged Schmeling to practice his farewell wave to the crowd—a difficult maneuver, he conceded, for someone who usually used his right arm to heil Hitler. “One can only ask ourselves with what sauce, sorry … in which round will Max Schmeling be eaten,” said Robert Perrier in the French sports newspaper L’Auto, writing from Lakewood. If he were the German, he wrote, he would spend the day before the fight practicing his fall. “You have to know how to fall down in a ring, once that fatal punch lands,” he explained. “There is the pure and simple dive; there is, if you are looking for something luxurious, the angel jump; and finally, steeped in artistry, the gracious fall, like Pavlova’s swan. Max should study in depth the art of falling beautifully in front of the most prestigious boxer of all time. Poor Anny Ondra, so beautiful, so beautiful, how your pretty eyes will weep.” Why would fans lay down scarce Depression dollars for something so nasty, brutish, and short? Because, the Sun theorized, “a killing is still the best show on earth.” Some out-of-towners thought the fight frenzy a phenomenon peculiar to New York, which Elmer Ferguson of the Montreal Herald called the “City of Suckers.” “It is a city of hero-worshipping hicks,” he wrote. “It goes head over heels for strange things.”

  All of boxing’s brightest lights—Dempsey, Tunney, Baer, Braddock— lined up behind Louis. It would end before five, Dempsey said, and when it did, Joe Louis would be “greater than me or anybody else the game has ever had.” Betting was light; no one wanted Schmeling. “They won’t even bet he has black hair,” one bookie said. The only action was on the round of the knockout. The Mirror promised good seats to the fifty people submitting the most clever coda to the following ditty:

  What’s going to happen to Schmeling

  In the Joe Louis bout is hard telling

  Can YOU name the round

  When Max hits the ground?

  A few brave souls did pick Schmeling—some because of Louis’s over-confidence, some because of the German’s eerie self-assurance, some because, as George M. Cohan once said, “There is nothing so uncertain as a dead sure thing.” Fred Kirsch, a German boxing promoter who’d brought Schmeling to the United States with Arthur Bülow, said Schmeling would go down as the “man who came back.” George Raft and Marlene Dietrich also favored Schmeling. Some writers chose Schmeling, or at least wanted to. “Everyone knows Louis is going to win!” Willie Ratner’s editor at the Newark Evening News huffed when he read Ratner’s daring prediction. “What they want to know is how many rounds it will go! Rewrite it!” Gallico had been to the Winter Olympics in Germany, where he’d seen the dreadful but unstoppable power of “Nazi Aryan Pride.” “For Schmeling, a personal friend of Hitler and Goebbels, a quick knockout at the hands of the Negro would have made them look ridiculous,” he wrote. “Germans do not like to be made to look ridiculous.” Gallico called for Schmeling to knock out Louis around the tenth or twelfth round. His editors dumped the story in the trash.

  Everyone was going with Louis, but some confessed to misgivings. Grantland Rice thought Louis was due for a bad fight. To Hy Hurwitz of The Boston Globe, Louis was “too sure of himself for his own good.” “This guy Schmeling is no chump,” said Clark Gable. Some blacks also equivocated. Louis’s recent marriage, Schmeling’s scientific nature, odds long enough to lure unsavory elements into the mix, a distrust of auspicious things: all blended into what the Norfolk Journal and Guide called “an undercurrent of distant fear.” Blackburn privately confessed to some of the same qualms. “The trouble with Joe is that you newspapermen have made him think he can just walk out and punch any one over and that Schmeling is the softest pushover of the lot,” he said. “Joe’s likely to get hit on the chin with one of them Schmeling rights and what with his legs not being what they should be and his being only a two-year fighter—well, lots can happen that’s not so good.”

  “It is not our place to predict a defeat for our countryman, even if he were fighting a completely lost battle,” Box-Sport pronounced. “The concept of national sports representation is too important and noble.” Having said that, it noted that odds of ten to one for Louis weren’t unreasonable. Schmeling was past his prime and not good enough for Louis, the Westdeutscher Beobachter noted. Schmeling’s estranged manager, Arthur Bülow, made grim predictions to a couple of German papers. Louis, he said, was “fresher, younger, stronger, tougher, and more professionally ambitious” than Schmeling, who’d grown rusty and lost much of his power. “Most likely he’ll manage to simply run Max over,” he said, though he quickly added, “I’d be happy if things turn out differently.”

  Though his initial projections had come down, Uncle Mike was still saying that the gate couldn’t miss a million dollars. The Hearst papers reported long lines outside the ticket offices. Thousands of World War I veterans were said to be buying seats with their newly arrived bonuses; Jacobs talked of installing ten thousand more of them. In fact, Jacobs had headaches. He’d set the top ticket at $40, the highest ever for a nontitle fight and the first time since the Depression that anyone asked more than $25. At the New York Stock Exchange, $40 seats were said to be selling for $20; the World-Telegram reported that around the scalpers’ offices there hadn’t been such wholesale unloading since the troopships returned from France after World War I. “Possibly the town has come to the conclusion that, since Louis shapes up as invincible, it will be a lot more fun to stay at home, criticize the radio announcer, razz the fighters and try to stop the ladies from talking,” wrote Art Lea Mond in the Morning Telegraph.

  The Jewish boycott was another problem. It was a shadowy thing, scarcely mentioned in a largely unsympathetic New York press. The paper most likely to cover it, the Mirror, said little on the topic, though Dan Parker called talk of it “tripe.” Jewish fans would attend in droves, he wrote, just to see “one of Herr Hitler’s representatives treated like some of their kinsmen are in Herr’s land.” One had to read papers from the hinterlands to learn that letters were circulating, primarily in the largely Jewish garment industry, urging fans to stay home. “Why let a German take home our money?” one of them declared. “Listen to Louis knock out Schmeling on the radio.” “The boss told me if we wanted to help make money for this Nazi fighter we’d have to do it out of our own pockets,” a garment district employee said to an Indianapolis newspaper. “The biggest fight of all is now going on in the mind of every Jew in New York,” the London Daily Herald reported; every one of them had to weigh whether or not to go.

  “It’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” Joe Jacobs predictably griped from Napanoch. “Schmeling is training at a Jewish resort. Most of those who come in contact with him up here are Jews and he’s never been treated better in his life.” In fact, New York’s Jews were characteristically fragmented on the issue. Three of the city’s Yiddish daily newspapers—the Morgn-zhurnal, Der Tog, and the Forverts—asked for credentials for the fight. A rabbi from Brooklyn pledged to be at ringside with the minister of a black Baptist church to cheer Louis on—and there would be thousands of others like him.

  But most blacks remained too busy with their own grievances and too ambivalent about the Jews to make common cause with them, or to let politics stand in the way of an extravaganza. Some resented being asked to show so much solicitude toward another group in another country. “While condemning Hitler … let us remember that there is nothing that he is now doing to the Jews that has not been done by the United States on a longer, vaster and more brutal scale to its black citizens,” the Amsterdam News had written the year before. It figured that the fifteen thousand extra blacks attending the fight would make up for the fifteen thousand Jews who stayed away.

  The black weeklies mobilized. The Amsterdam News planned to hold the presses until after it was over. The Courier weighed the relative importance of two big stories—Louis vs. Schmeling and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the following week—and deployed its troops accordingly: eight reporters to the fight, three to the Democrats. Harlem’s better hotels were mostly filled, the pawnshop
s had been cleared of field glasses, the liquor stores had upped their stock, the larger restaurants had added waiters. According to one purveyor, on fight day Harlem ordered ten thousand chickens. Woolworth’s had stocked up on Louis photographs and books, and a legless man dragged himself up and down 125th Street selling postcards announcing the round in which Louis would win. At the Apollo Theater, beautiful dancers donned boxing gloves for a fight routine. Pictures of Louis peered out of every store window.

  Marva remained in Harlem. She had spoken with her husband nightly, and had no fears about the outcome, only about the potential cost. “Joe is so handsome,” she said. “I know he’ll win like he always does, but I get nervous for fear something will happen to his face … like cauliflower ears or a twisted nose.” Signs went up around Detroit promising that Louis would wire home his best wishes after the fight. Harlem would also have its customary revelries. “Stage parties, banquets and dances EVERYWHERE,” the Philadelphia Tribune predicted. Louis agreed to be the guest of honor at a Negro League baseball game in Newark the night after the fight. A movie theater in Buffalo announced plans to show films of the fight alongside Dempsey’s battles with Luis Angel Firpo, Georges Carpentier, and Gene Tunney, so that people could finally decide which fighter was the greatest.