Even if the Holy Spirit had not called blessed those who suffer, if every page of Scripture did not proclaim aloud the necessity of adversity, if we did not see that suffering is the normal destiny of those who are friends of God, we should still be convinced that it is of untold advantage to us. It is enough to know that the God who chose to suffer all the most horrible tortures the rage of man can invent rather than see us condemned to the slightest pain in the next life is the same God who prepares and offers us the chalice of bitterness we must drink in this world. A God who has so suffered to prevent us from suffering would not make us suffer today to give Himself cruel and pointless pleasure.
This centuries-old wisdom is as applicable today as it was the day it was written. There was Joseph, this little guy, who couldn’t comprehend why his mother would allow a stranger to do this painful thing to him. But Mom says, “I know that this is necessary, we’ve got to stop the bleeding and even though it hurts now, it’ll be good for you in the end.” Very often in life, God works with us in the same way, and, like Joseph, we’re getting the stitches we need for whatever problem we face, while crying out, “Why? Why? Why me?” Meanwhile God is saying to you, “Don’t worry, trust me, this passing trial is necessary for the health of your soul. It’s going to be okay.”
James J. Braddock had to endure his fair share of pain and discomfort too. He was born in the earlier part of the twentieth century in a place affectionately called Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. When he was a young boy his parents decided to move across the Hudson River to North Bergen, New Jersey in order to escape the harsh surroundings of the Irish ghetto. He was often found fighting on the streets and was eventually directed to the local boxing club where, by the age of sixteen, he fought his first amateur fight. He was a natural, and by the time he was twenty-one, he had won the Golden Gloves light middleweight crown two years in a row.
As a light-heavy weight, he found a way to knock out men twenty or thirty pounds heavier than himself. As a pro he continued his winning ways with twenty-six wins, seventeen by knock-out, and only three losses. His future seemed bright, but in 1930 his career began to unravel with a series of losses and a chronically broken right hand. The result of the stock market crash of 1929 and the impact of the Great Depression were now in full force and, like everyone else, Jimmy and his family were destitute.
One time after breaking his right hand in a fight, a doctor told him that it had not healed properly and it would need to be re-broken and set if he hoped to have full use of it again. With no money to pay for anything, much less the medical procedure, he accepted a fight with the sole purpose of re-breaking his hand so that it could then be set properly. But desperation pushed him to fight again before his hand was fully healed. This time, the break kept him from fighting, and he struggled to provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter for his family. He desperately searched for work of any kind and finally got some hours as a long shore man on the docks in Hoboken.
With his right hand still broken and in a cast he had to do all of the manual labor with his left hand. He did whatever it took to keep the lights on and the babies fed. All day long he would drive hooks into bags of grain or cotton and throw them onto carts with his left hand. When there was no work at the dock he would shovel snow, tend bar, haul garbage, or do whatever else he could find. But the hours were too few and far between to support his young family. Despite his injuries and lack of training and conditioning, he would take any fight he could get just to bring home a few dollars.
Between 1930 and 1933, he lost sixteen times and offers to fight virtually dried up as did the meager purses that accompanied them. He tried moving up to the heavy-weight class but things only seemed to get worse. James J. Braddock was washed-up at the age of twenty-seven.
Having always been self-sufficient, Jimmy was humbled to new depths when desperation drove him to apply for government relief money which would provide his family of five with $6.87 per week or $357.24 annually. Combined with the few extra dollars from whatever work he could find, his family barely survived. Things couldn’t have looked more bleak. Yet he never gave up. His undying love for his wife, Mae, and his children fueled his will to take the next step, and the next, and the next.
Finally in 1934 there was a glimmer of hope. A last minute cancellation sent fight promoters scrambling to find a fighter who had some name recognition but would be an easy opponent for their up-and-coming knock out artist, John “Corn” Griffin. At first they couldn’t find anyone willing to take the fight against the number two contender in the world on such short notice. However, James J. Braddock fit the bill nicely and with less than two days before the fight he was offered the bout. For $250 he jumped at the chance even though he hadn’t been in the ring since he re-injured his right hand nine months earlier.
As Divine Providence would have it, the Griffin fight was the undercard for the world heavy weight title fight between world champion, Primo Carnera and the number one contender, Max Baer. Jimmy’s hand had finally healed and to his surprise the work on the docks had made his weaker left hand as strong as his right.
As he entered the ring with Griffin the house was packed with people who had arrived early for the title bout which was to follow. Many of the fans remembered Jimmy but looked on with pity anticipating another humiliating defeat for him. But it was not to be. Three years of hunger and desperation were unleashed on the favorite. After being knocked down by Griffin in the first round, Jimmy came roaring back and dropped Griffin like a sack of potatoes in the third round with a powerful right cross. The fans were stunned and then erupted in jubilation for the underdog. Afterwards, Jimmy said to his trainer, Joe Gould, “I did that on hash, imagine what I could do with a couple of steaks in me!”
The surprisingly decisive victory did not greatly improve his circumstances. His $150 share of the purse only remained in his hands long enough to pay the delinquent electric and gas bills and to buy milk and a few things for the children to eat. It looked like he was back to where he was before the Griffin fight, desperately in need of money to support his family. The win, however, would prove helpful. Five months later, because of the stir that he caused with his surprise knock-out of Griffin, he was offered the chance to fight a budding superstar by the name of John Henry Lewis.
This was not the first time the two had met. Lewis had badly beaten Jimmy two years earlier in San Francisco and it was thought Braddock would be the ideal pushover for Lewis’s New York debut. Lewis had won his last ten fights and was looking to earn a shot at the world title. Braddock looking aged compared to the vibrant, youthful, Lewis, put on a show. He dropped Lewis in the fifth round and then went on to win the fight by a unanimous decision. The first thing he did with his share of the $750 purse was return to the government relief office and pay back every cent he was given. The little that remained he took home to Mae who carefully managed it to go as far as possible. Although she wished he didn’t box, she was grateful.
Four months after the Lewis fight Jimmy was back in the ring again, this time going against Art Lasky, one of the top challengers for the heavy weight title. Lasky was a mountain of a man at 6’4” and weighed fifteen pounds more than Jimmy. Despite the previous two upsets, Jimmy was still seen as a washed-up, ten to one, underdog. Lasky needed one more good fight to secure a title match with Max Baer, the reigning world champion, and he thought Jimmy would be a popular and easy road to the championship fight. In the first round Jimmy came out and broke Lasky’s nose. Despite several rounds of brutal head and body shots by Lasky, Jimmy weathered the storm and won in a fifteen round unanimous decision.
If this wasn’t miraculous enough, two of the other major contenders for the world crown were eliminated from contention during the same period. Max Schmeling, the German fighter, was the number one challenger that everyone in the boxing world wanted to see in a rematch against Max Baer for the title. Once again, Providence intervened and plans fell through, leaving Baer looking for a title defense match u
ntil the Schmeling match could be arranged. At this point James J. Braddock was the next legitimate challenger in line and the championship fight was scheduled with Max Baer for June 13, 1935. Upon learning that the contract had been signed, Baer said, “They just signed the poor guy’s death warrant.”
Baer not only outweighed Jimmy by fifteen or twenty pounds but had won the crown by destroying the former 6’6” 265 lb. world champion, Primo Carnera. Baer’s right hand punch was so devastating that he actually killed Frankie Campbell during a bout on August 25, 1930. Two years later Baer knocked out the 6’3” 215 pound Ernie Shaff who had received such a tremendous beating before going down that he died from a brain aneurism several months after their fight. No one believed that Jimmy had the slightest chance of defeating Max Baer. In fact, many people strongly believed that he would not leave the ring alive.
Braddock’s downward spiral may have begun with his loss to light-heavy weight champion, Tommy Loughran but now it seemed that Loughran would be his answer to fighting Baer. Jimmy had studied Loughran’s style and realized that he didn’t try to go for the big knockout punch against a stronger opponent. Instead he would keep moving by constantly circling and jabbing away from the other fighters dominant punch and then look for an opportunity to get in close. This is how Jimmy decided to fight Baer who was taking the fight lightly believing that Braddock was an old man clinging to a career that was long over.
What Baer didn’t realize is that Braddock had been forged in the fire of adversity and suffering for the past five years. It made him tougher and stronger than he had ever been and it also made him a favorite among the people. They saw him as an ordinary guy who had suffered through the great depression just like they did, where one out of every three people stood on a soup line daily. He wasn’t built like some freak of nature, he looked like them too. He was an average man, who never gave up, loved his wife and children, and gave people hope in a better tomorrow.
On the night Jimmy entered the ring with Max Baer all he could see was the hovel that Mae, the children, and he had lived in for the past five years. He said, “Whether it goes one round or three rounds or ten rounds, it will be a fight and a fight all the way. When you’ve been through what I’ve had to face in the last two years, a Max Baer or a Bengal tiger looks like a house pet. He might come at me with a cannon and a blackjack and he would still be a picnic compared to what I’ve had to face.” It was clear that Max Baer would have to kill him before he would lose this fight.
Baer weighed eighteen pounds more than his challenger, was four years younger, and had a three inch reach advantage. As much as the crowd was behind Jimmy the betting money was on Baer. The fight began with Baer clowning around, striking poses, and waving to popular figures in the front rows. Jimmy was all business and won the first three rounds on points. In the fourth, Baer staggered Jimmy as the bell ended and won the round. Baer fouled Jimmy in the fifth but he would have lost the round based on performance anyway. The sixth and seventh were Baer’s. He won the seventh round by momentarily wobbling Jimmy with a short powerful right hand punch to his jaw.
By now the entire crowd was in Jimmy’s corner. Their support only grew as Baer clowned around in the eighth and feigned being hurt by a missed right cross. Baer lost the ninth round for a low blow. Realizing he was now in serious trouble and the fight was slipping away from him, Baer unleashed a torrent of punches and easily won the tenth and eleventh rounds. He probably would have won the twelfth except for another foul that cost him the round. Jimmy came back strong in the thirteenth as the crowd was on their feet chanting “Braddock! Braddock! Braddock!” In desperation, Baer gave it all he had in the final two rounds but he could do nothing against the Loughran strategy that Jimmy used to perfection.
As the fight ended the crowd erupted again chanting Jimmy’s name. Everyone knew he had done what was thought impossible, he had won. The ring announcer said, “The winner and new…” the rest of it was drowned out by the deafening cheer of the crowd. He had done the impossible.
On January 21, 1938, after winning a fight with Tommy Farr, Jimmy said, “This is my farewell to boxing, a sport which owes me nothing, and to which I owe everything - the many friends I have made, and the means with which I have been able to provide for my family.” He went on to serve as a Lieutenant in the army during World War II followed by many years of hard work on the same docks that had help make him a champion. At the age of sixty-nine, he died peacefully in his sleep. He and Mae had spent forty-four years of marriage loving each other and raising their children in the same home they had bought almost forty years earlier. By all accounts, James J. Braddock was a good and virtuous man all of his life. Red Smith, one of America’s most popular sportswriters at the time wrote, “If death came easily, it was the only thing in his life that did.”
Considering the life and times of James J. Braddock might lead you to ask, “Why were my grandparents and their parents so tough. How were they able to survive such harsh lives, sometimes working two or three jobs? How did they take the pain and fatigue? And why do I seem to tire so easily?” Part of the answer can be found in the conveniences and luxuries of today. It wasn’t so long ago that most people spent their entire lives working for the basic necessities of life. Their days were spent in hard labor to provide enough food, clothing and shelter to keep their families safe and sound. The brief evenings before bed were filled with good conversation among family and friends. Few of them ever traveled beyond the place of their births and news from other parts of the country spread slowly from town to town.
Today we wonder what people did before there were channel changers? It’s hard to imagine that they actually got up and walked over to the television to change the channel manually. The more we sit around the more our muscles literally waste away, and often our minds along with them.
It won’t take long to see the inevitable muscular atrophy that comes from disuse. Soon you will need your own lift chair to help you sit and stand. Once the Lift-o-matic launches you onto your feet, you can shuffle outside to get some real work done while reclining on your rolling garden seat. In stark contrast, I can still see my eighty-six year old, Irish born, grandfather wearing his bibbed-overalls on a hot summer day while swinging a pick axe as he dug up a rocky patch of soil for his tomato garden in my parent’s backyard. Not everyone comes from such a poor and humble beginning or is born with such good health and longevity but certainly our growing dependence on conveniences only speeds up the process of becoming feeble and dependent.
Are you allowing trains, planes, and automobiles, paper plates and cups, microwaves, supermarkets, chainsaws, riding mowers, washers, dryers, wrinkle free clothes, elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and shopping on-line, only to name a few, to soften you up? With every push of a button and every joule of energy saved we are one step closer to becoming the bedridden grandparents in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Like Grandpa Joe we need to venture out from under the covers and learn to walk again. The less physical, mental and spiritual pain and discomfort we experience in our daily lives, the less we will be able to take it when it comes. And it always comes.
Children are not immune from this pain and discomfort. As a matter of fact they are more vulnerable to it because they have fewer resources than an adult and they will experience the adverse side effects of a softer life earlier than their harder working grandparents did. Children are atrophying before our eyes. They are losing muscle and gaining fat at a terrifying rate. They are becoming more self absorbed and slothful. They are not taught to be long suffering or to tolerate discomfort of any kind. It begins with little things like the philosophy that everyone gets a trophy, which doesn’t build virtue, nor the ability to suffer, nor the ability to be a gracious loser. Children are led to believe that everyone deserves a prize regardless of effort or performance.
Even the NFL has begun a program called Play60. Can you believe that we are at the point where we have to try to cajole children into being active f
or an hour a day! Limiting children’s TV and computer time would go a long way into reducing the number of couch potatoes. Children, not text messages, should be flying around the ball fields and playgrounds!
As much as we shy away from physical pain and discomfort, sometimes it is the easiest kind to endure. In the Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis wrote about letting go of spiritual and mental attachments that prevent us from being truly happy, eternally happy. We are able to see ourselves in the characters Lewis describes and we can imagine our own struggle to be free from the things that oppress us and prevent us from being happy. He provides us with an insight into the painful, and yet rewarding, process of letting go and allowing grace to transform us. The story begins with a man at a bus stop in what appears to be a small town in England. However, instead of a trip across town, he is shortly confronted with a choice about where he will spend eternity. When the bus finally reaches its destination somewhere between Heaven and hell, he observes other souls as they are confronted with the painful task of extinguishing their selfish desires. In this excerpt, one of these souls, or ghosts as Lewis describes them, is challenged to find a purpose sufficient to overcome the pain that he must undergo.
He is approached by a being who is radiating the most intense light and heat. On the shoulder of the ghost sits a red lizard with a whip like tail who is continually whispering destructive advice into the ear of the ghost. As the ghost attempts to leave he is asked by the angel why he is leaving so soon. The ghost explains that the lizard is causing too many problems and that he needs to take him back home.
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