Cinderella Man by Jeremy Schaap

Author:Jeremy Schaap
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11

Last One Up’s a Sissy

New York: Spring 1934

In the late fall of 1933, Max Baer told Harry Cross, one of his writer friends, that making The Prizefighter and the Lady had convinced him that Primo Carnera was no tougher an opponent than Chief Caribou. “It was all I could do to hold myself back,” Baer said, “when we were rehearsing for the bout in the pictures. Say, I’d like nothing better than to get rough with that fellow. Do I think I can beat him? I should say I could. I said I was going to knock out Schmeling, didn’t I? Well, I tell you the same thing about Carnera. He’s so big that it’s a cinch to hit him. I’d like to take one good smack at him.”

By this time the public was clamoring for a Baer-Carnera showdown. Baer was attracting an enormous following among Jewish fight fans, who were accustomed to seeing their fellow Jews excel in the ring but not in the heavyweight division. At their peak, in the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish fighters were champions in several other weight classifications. The lightweight champion Benny Leonard, Joe Gould’s childhood friend, was probably the greatest Jewish fighter ever. But Barney Ross was also brilliant. So were King Levinsky, Maxie Rosenbloom, and Joe Choynski. Bob Olin, Art Lasky, Ted “Kid” Lewis, Harry Lewis, Lew Tendler, Jackie “Kid” Berg, Leo Lomski, Yale Okun, and Louis “Kid” Kaplan also made an impact on the sport.

At one point during boxing’s golden age, Jews simultaneously held world titles in four weight classifications. Still, no Jewish fighter had ever captured the heavyweight championship, unless you include Daniel Mendoza. A Spanish-English Jew, Mendoza claimed the English bare-knuckle championship on November 12, 1794, when he defeated Bill Warr on Bexley Common. Unlike the fifteen men who had previously held the title, Mendoza used tactics similar to those employed by modern fighters. He ducked. He weaved. He counterpunched. “He was much above the intellectual level of his contemporaries,” Nat Fleischer once wrote.

There is a relatively little known addendum to the subject of Jewish heavyweights. Jack Dempsey’s paternal grandmother, born Rachel Solomon, was 100 percent Jewish, which by Talmudic standards made Dempsey’s father a Jew. Technically, one Jewish grandmother trumps one Jewish grandfather, and therefore Jack Dempsey could be considered more Jewish than Max Baer.

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