Beyond Glory: Joe Louis Vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink by David Margolick

Author:David Margolick
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Political Freedom & Security, Nationalism and sports, Social aspects, Max, Civil Rights, Boxing, Nationalism and sports - History, Schmeling, Sports & Recreation, Sociology of Sports, Joe, Political Science, Louis, Boxing - Social aspects - History, History, Discrimination & Race Relations, Sports rivalries - History, Sports rivalries, Social Science
ISBN: 9780375726194
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-10-10T23:13:17.711024+00:00

* Schmeling had originally planned to travel to America via the Hindenburg, arriving on May 7. But at Joe Jacobs’s insistence—Jacobs wanted him in New York when the boxing commission met on May 4 —he had departed earlier by boat. The dirigible, minus Schmeling, blew up as it arrived in New Jersey; thirty-six of the ninety-seven passengers and crew died. Among the dead was the heir to Schmeling’s ticket.

Banishing Jack Johnson’s Ghost

SHORTLY BEFORE THE LOUIS-BRADDOCK FIGHT, perhaps as he was about to board the train for Chicago, Grantland Rice talked to a redcap at Grand Central Terminal. “Joe Louis was a great fighter when he was tearing three chickens apart,” the man told him. “But now, he’s eating chicken en casserole, and I’m afraid he won’t do much. I’m afraid Joe’s gone soft.” Rice agreed. Strictly as a physical matter, Louis should win in five rounds, he believed. But mentally and psychologically Louis wasn’t even close to Braddock, and Braddock was no Aristotle. “The Schmeling fight almost wrecked Louis,” Rice warned. “When anyone throws a right now, Louis begins to duck before the punch starts.”

As the comic opera of the phantom fight played out in New York, Louis and Braddock quietly trained. Braddock was as he always had been: shopworn but scrappy, rusty but determined. The more interesting issue was which Louis would be on hand—the wunderkind or the busted phe-nom. The question hung over his camp in Kenosha like the smoke from the nearby car plants. The newsreels showed mobs of happy white children clustered around him. In twelve years of school, Roy Wilkins observed, those same youngsters would never learn a good thing about Negroes, but Joe Louis was real to them—a “living argument against the hypocrisy, meanness, and hatred of the color line in America.” Thousands of Chicago blacks hopped on special trains to watch Louis practice. One, a paraplegic who had not left his hospital in three years, arrived by ambulance and watched his hero while propped up on a stretcher.

Louis insisted he would not make the same mistakes he had made a year earlier, and that even if he did, Braddock was no Schmeling; it took Schmeling sixty swings to knock him out, he said, and Braddock was only half as strong. Already, Louis and his handlers were anticipating Schmeling. Louis said he wanted to fight him in the fall, and then quit; by then he’d be earning $10,000 annually from his properties, and that would be enough. He’d already rented the camp at Pompton Lakes, and after two weeks off, he planned to train for Schmeling for the rest of the summer.

But once again, the reports from Louis’s camp weren’t good. He looked lethargic. He was no longer hungry—a trap, some sportswriters believed, which black fighters were particularly prone to fall into—and had gone soft and flabby. He had too much to learn and too little time to learn it, or had learned too much and had too little time to unlearn it. The

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