On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Six motion picture cameramen were on hand to capture the moment. Johnson was dressed as only he could dress: straw hat, exquisite tailored gray suit, blinding-white soft-collared shirt, bright polka-dot tie, gleaming patent-leather shoes…“There were four bands. Hundreds of people.”

  At least this is Johnson’s account, from his “cheerfully fabulist” autobiography In the Ring and Out.

  Like many ageing ex-champions, Johnson continued to seek the spotlight that, in his biographer’s words, “gave his life meaning.” He contracted to appear in a vaudeville company in which, as he boasted, “all the performers except myself were white.” He was hired (and very well paid) as a sparring partner for the cocky young Argentine heavyweight Luis Angel Firpo, and soon fired for playing to the crowds gathered in the gym. He toured the boondocks in degrading burlesque revues that called for him, the wellspoken Jack Johnson, to tell jokes in stage-darky dialect. He began drinking heavily. Lucille divorced him but, out of a seemingly endless supply of white women, a third wife, Irene Pineau, almost immediately materialized. At the age of fifty-seven, grudgingly impressed with the boxing skills of the young Joe Louis, Johnson offered to help make a champion of him but was viciously rebuffed by Louis’s manager:

  “He cursed Johnson out,” Louis recalled, “told him how he’d held up the progress of the Negro people for years with his attitude, how he was a low-down, no-good nigger and told him he wasn’t welcome in my camp any longer.”

  To retaliate, Johnson would bet heavily on Max Schmeling to beat Louis in their first fight and, after Schmeling won, boasted so openly of his winnings that he had to be rescued by (white) policemen from a crowd of angry Negroes.

  For the remainder of his life Johnson would ply his trade as the ex-first-Negro-heavyweight champion, with diminishing rewards. Well into his sixties he sparred with young boxers, shadow-boxed for whatever public would pay to see him, and impersonated himself in a cellar sideshow off Times Square called Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus. A nightmare end for Jack Johnson, or so it would seem:

  To see Johnson in person, visitors had to pay a quarter…Yellowing newspaper clippings from Johnson’s career were taped to a booth in which a bored hawker sat making change without looking up…Visitors pushed through a little turnstile, made their way down a flight of stairs, and took their seats in the dank, dimly lit cellar. One dreary act followed another—a sword-swallower, a trick dog, a half-man-half-woman…

  Johnson stepped smoothly onstage, wearing a blue beret, a blue tie, and a worn but sharply cut suit. He held a glass of red wine with a straw in it. He smiled and asked his visitors what they would like to know.

  It’s true that Joe Louis was a public relations dream, a gifted athlete who acquiesced, as Jack Johnson could never have done, to being made into a “good Negro”—i.e., marketable to a white public; yet in the way of one of those cruelly ironic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, Louis would find himself in the afterlife of his championship impersonating “Joe Louis” as a greeter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas: more deeply in debt than Johnson, deeper in despair and sicker.10 Despite Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus, Johnson seems to have remained supremely himself to the very end: he would die at the age of sixty-eight in an automobile crash outside Raleigh, North Carolina, at the wheel of his high-powered Lincoln Zephyr, reportedly speeding at more than seventy miles an hour. The reason for Johnson’s speeding is said to have been indignation that, at a diner, he’d been told he could only eat at the rear.

  As the philosopher is susceptible to sometimes disappearing into such abstraction that his subject can seem nugatory—quite literally “nothing”—so the historian at his most generous can assemble so many facts, details, quotations that the reader becomes lost in a plethora of “somethings.” Since Unforgivable Blackness is likely to be the definitive biography of Jack Johnson, the absence of a chronology of Johnson’s fact-filled life is unfortunate. Often, in medias res, it’s difficult to figure out the year without consulting the index, to determine when a newspaper article appeared. Most readers of a boxing biography can be assumed to have more than a passing interest in boxing, yet Ward doesn’t include a record of his subject’s boxing career, a frustrating and inexplicable omission. (In sharply abbreviated form, Johnson’s record is 113 fights: 79 wins, 12 draws, 8 losses, 14 no decisions. Compare Jack Dempsey with 80 fights: 61 wins, 7 draws, 7 losses, 5 no decisions, and 1 no contest; Joe Louis with 70 fights: 67 wins, 3 losses; Muhammad Ali with 61 fights: 56 wins, 5 losses.) Also, the biography ends somewhat too abruptly with Johnson’s death and funeral: we feel the need for an epilogue to provide an overview of Johnson’s legacy, historic and mythic. No sport is more mindful of its iconic past than boxing and at a time when even the outlaw figure of Sonny Liston is being revalued, Johnson merits this consideration.

  In any case, Unforgivable Blackness is a significant achievement. Geoffrey Ward provides an utterly convincing and frequently hearttrending portrait of Jack Johnson, “the man with the golden smile,” for whom the ideal representation would be the Janus-face of simultaneous comedy and tragedy.

  NOTES

  1. After Johnson lost the heavyweight title to Jess Willard in 1915, the title would be held by white boxers until 1937, when twenty-three-year-old Joe Louis became champion. The shrewd (white) managers of Joe Louis, who made his pro boxing debut in 1934 when the thorny memory of Jack Johnson still rankled in the public’s memory, drew up a list of specific rules for Louis: he was never to have his picture taken with a white woman; he was never to go into a nightclub alone; he would be involved in no “soft” fights, and no “fixed” fights; he was never to gloat over a fallen opponent; he was to “live clean and fight clean.” Arguably a greater heavyweight than Jack Johnson, certainly one with a more impressive record of victories over worthy opponents, Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis became an American sports success of immense natural talent shaped and controlled by marketing strategies. Though Louis ended his career humiliated and broken, owing back taxes on even the “income” of two purses he’d naively donated to the war effort in the early 1940s, addicted to cocaine, and plagued by the paranoid, but not inaccurate, suspicion that the FBI had him under surveillance, yet in public memory he continues to occupy a mythic identity as the “good” American Negro heavyweight champion who beat the “Nazi” Max Schmeling in 1938. Though ironic in terms of Louis’s personal life, that of the exploited Negro athlete, this entry from the Encyclopedia of Boxing is accurate: “[Louis’s] exemplary behavior both in and out of the ring sharply raised the prestige of black boxers.”

  2. Since Muhammad Ali has become a totemic figure in the pantheon of American folk heroes, no one wishes to recall how in the 1960s and 1970s, a convert to the Nation of Islam(“Black Muslims” in the white press) and an outspoken critic of American culture, Ali was regularly booed at fights and chided, if not vilified, in print. TV commentators and numerous publications including the New York Times refused to call him anything other than “Casius Clay.” On his part, Ali was a vehement black racist who believed in the subjection of Muslim women to Muslim men and an absolute division of the races: “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman…[If a Muslim woman consorts with white men] then she dies. Kill her, too.” (Playboy interview, November 1975.)

  3. In an era in which title fights were scheduled for twenty rounds, the fight with Burns was stopped abruptly in the fourteenth round when Sydney police officers, agitated that the Negro challenger was winning, entered the ring. Burns would afterward protest that, if the police hadn’t interfered, “I might even have won because the big nigger was tiring fast.” [p. 127] Contemporary title fights are twelve rounds. (Most fights are eight or ten rounds and all are closely monitored by ringside physicians, unheard-of in Jack Johnson’s time.)

  4. See Gerald Early, “The Black Intellectual and the Sport of Prizefighting”: “Against black opponents the white yokels were not even really fighters; they were more like preservers o
f the white public’s need to see Tricksters pay a price for their disorder.” (Speech and Power, Vol. 1, 1992, edited by Gerald Early.) Ali is the supreme heavyweight Trickster even as, paradoxically, no one has been more purely devoted to boxing:

  [Ali] forced us to reimagine the ways an athlete moves through time and space; even in his waning years, he waged a battle against stylistic norms. As a youth he held his hands too low, and yanked his head straight back from blows (an amateurish move, the traditionalists grumbled) yet he so accelerated the pace of heavyweight fighting that scarcely anyone could keep up with him. With extraordinary self-consciousness, Ali relished the difficulty his dancing around and back created not only for his opponent, but also for ringside cameramen trying to keep him in the frame. As he aged, he sought the opposite extreme in posture and pacing: immobile along the ropes, head down and hands held low, he slowed the pace of major fights to an excruciating point, exhausting his foes…Ali was always the expert parodist, whether through his cartoonlike nicknames for his opponents’ styles (“The Rabbit,” “The Octopus,” “The Washerwoman”), or through his exaggerated mirrorings of his foe…These moves gave Ali the illusion of omnipotence, even when he had to struggle.

  —RONALD LEVAO, “Reading the Fights,”

  Raritan, spring 1986

  5. Johnson had no Negro Trickster predecessors but of course he had Negro predecessors in the literal sense, foremost among them the West Indian-born heavyweight Peter Jackson (1861-1901). Jackson was the best Negro boxer of his era and very likely would have beaten John L. Sullivan if Sullivan, an avowed white racist, had granted him a title fight. (Sullivan was the reigning “Prize Ring” champion from 1882 to 1892, when boxers still fought bare-knuckled.) Even after Jackson fought James Corbett to a draw in a four-hour, sixty-one-round fight, Sullivan refused to fight him. Previously, Sullivan had refused to fight another leading Negro contender named George Godfrey. White champions commonly “drew the color line” against Negros out of a fear that, like Tommy Burns, they would be humiliated in the ring. Until the rise of Joe Louis in the 1930s, a white champion like Jack Dempsey could avoid Negro boxers through an entire career. For this reason, the history of boxing before Louis is not an authentic history. As Peter Jackson was the “shadow” champion during the reign of John L. Sullivan so the Negro Harry Wills was the “shadow” champion during the reign of Jack Dempsey. In his widely publicized pursuit of Tommy Burns, in which he enlisted the white press on his behalf, Jack Johnson broke the mold of Negro boxers like Jackson who behaved with public deference to whites. Johnson would have perceived that being a “good” Negro would get him no further than Jackson and Godfrey: being a “white man’s Negro” wasn’t for him. Negro athletes like Peter Jackson were extolled by such Negro leaders as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass; the Negro historian James Weldon Johnson compared Peter Jackson favorably to Jack Johnson, noting that Jackson’s deportment in public and chivalry in the ring had brought him the compliment from white sportswriters that he was a “white colored man.” [Quoted in King of the World by David Remnick, P. 277]

  6. White journalists were continually being surprised by Jack Johnson the “complex, mercurial man behind the grin.” [p. 187] A Baltimore American reporter notes, in 1910:

  …once in his private quarters the negro became a changed man. He ordered one of his assistants to load the phonograph, and for an hour the hotel was filled with the strains of operatic music, vocal selections rendered by Caruso and others…Not once did a “ragtime” piece appear…In another corner there stood an immense bass viol. Somebody asked casually who played it, and Johnson said, “I do. Like to hear me?” [p. 187]

  Another observer notes that Johnson is “no stranger in the world of books and writers”:

  He browsed through books on all subjects—fiction, science, art, history; he has read them in three languages—English, French, and Spanish. He is conversant with works of Shakespeare…When discussing books and the names of Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo are mentioned, Johnson becomes more alert than ever, for these are two of his favorite writers…While his schooling was interrupted before he reached high school, he has nevertheless attained an education of thoroughgoing character…He is a musician of no mean ability, his favorite instrument being the bass viol, which he plays in a talented manner.

  —quoted in JERVIS ANDERSON, “Black Heavies,” in Speech and Power Vol. 1

  7.The remark is Dempsey’s. For a detailed description of this famous fight see A Flame of Pure Desire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring’20’s by Roger Kahn, p. 399.

  8.Though Johnson seems to have acknowledged immediately after the fight that he’d legitimately lost (“I met a young big boy and he wore me down. I didn’t dream there was a man alive who could go fifteen rounds with me once I started after him” [p. 380]), he would afterward claim that he’d thrown the fight in a deal that would have allowed him to return to the United States without having to serve a prison sentence (for his 1913 conviction of having violated the Mann Act). The deal evidently fell through, since Johnson had to serve his sentence, and the mystery of the fight remains open to speculation. If Johnson was intending to lose, he put up a convincing fight for more than twenty rounds in the blistering Havana, Cuba, sunshine, before visibly tiring and losing his strength. The famous photograph of Johnson lying on his back on the canvas at the end of the twenty-sixth round [as if languidly lifting his gloved hand to shield his eyes from blinding sunshine] does have a fraudulent look to it, however. (Though Sonny Liston eerily replicated this scene in 1965, in the first round of his infamous rematch with heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, knocked out by an infamous “shadow punch” that hardly looks powerful enough to have cost him the fight, Liston probably had not intended a postmodernist reference to his great predecessor.)

  9. Seven decades later, in a Catskill training camp overseen by the legendary trainer Cus D’Amato, the sixteen-year-old Mike Tyson took note:

  Tyson marveled at Jack Johnson, the most famous of black heavyweight champions, who caught punches with his open glove, talked to people in the stands during the fight, and laughed in the faces of his hapless opponents…He found out that among the fighters of the 1920s gold teeth were a status symbol, and had two of his upper front teeth capped in gold.

  —Mike Tyson: Money, Myth and Betrayal by MONTIETH ILLINGWORTH (1991), pp. 5-56

  10. The pathos of Joe Louis’s later life is belied by the tone of his ghost-written memoir, My Life (1978), in which the ravages of Louis’s ill health, mental instability, and financial distress are adroitly glossed over. Though only in his early sixties, Louis has become an elderly, addled mascot in the employ of a gambling casino:

  Yeah, I’m comfortable in Vegas. Don’t have to get dressed up…just wear a sport shirt, of course, most times it’s silk, cowboy hat or baseball cap, slacks, sometimes my cowboy boots…I see all my old friends when they come to entertain. Frank Sinatra and me go back a long time.

  —Joe Louis: My Life (1978), p. 261

  THE AVENGER

  JOE LOUIS VS. MAX SCHMELING

  Boxing is the most pitiless of sports, as it can be the most dazzling, theatrical and emblematic. Where race and nationalism are involved, as in the famous Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight fights of 1936 and 1938, two of the most widely publicized boxing matches in history, the emblematic aspect of the sport can assume epic proportions. When the second fight, of June 1938, pitting the twenty-four-year-old American Negro titleholder, Louis, against the thirty-two-year-old Schmeling, the Nazis’ star athlete, was fought at Yankee Stadium, the contest was as much between the United States and Nazi Germany as between two superbly skilled athletes. There were almost seventy thousand spectators and an estimated one hundred million radio listeners throughout the world: “the largest audience in history for anything.”

  David Margolick, the author of such diverse works of nonfiction as Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, At the Bar: The Passions and Peccadilloes of American Lawyer
s, and Undue Influence: The Epic Battle Over the Johnson & Johnson Fortune, is clearly disadvantaged in retelling so familiar a sports tale. The Louis-Schmeling fights, with their extraordinary political/cultural significance, have been analyzed more than any other boxing matches in history; the paired fights have become staples of ESPN Classic; there have been TV documentaries on Louis and Schmeling as iconic representatives of their nations in the years preceding World War II, inevitably covering the same historical ground. The most poignant and engaging of recent books to examine the role of Joe Louis in the politicized epic drama is Donald McRae’s Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (2003).

  What Margolick has accomplished in Beyond Glory is to provide an exhaustively researched background to the Louis-Schmeling rivalry that includes sympathetic portraits of both Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; an examination of racism at home and anti-Semitism in Germany; a look at the predominant role of Jews in professional boxing in the United States; and, interlarded through the text, opinions by just about anyone, from boxing experts and sportswriters to celebrities and ordinary, anonymous citizens, who might have had something to say about Louis or Schmeling that found its way into print, valuable or otherwise. Less cultural criticism than Margolick’s artfully focused Strange Fruit, Beyond Glory is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.

  “Too good to be true, and absolutely true…the most beautiful fighting machine that I have ever seen”: so Ernest Hemingway famously wrote of Joe Louis after the twenty-one-year-old’s savage victory over the ex-heavyweight champion Max Baer in 1935. Louis’s distinctive ring style, like the politely inexpressive public persona cultivated for him by his canny managers, gave the impression of robotlike precision, the more lethal for being seemingly without emotion. “Joe Louis ain’t no natural killer,” Louis’s trainer remarked. “He’s a manufactured killer.” In both Louis-Schmeling fights, with their singularly different outcomes—Louis was ignominiously knocked out by Schmeling in the twelfth round of the first fight; in the rematch, Louis knocked Schmeling out in a spectacular feat of boxing, in the first round—the young black heavyweight was as impressive for the devastating accuracy of his fists as for his economical footwork and the power of his combination punches. A “small” heavyweight by contemporary, post-Sonny Liston standards at 6 feet 1 ¾ inches, with a reach of 76 inches and, in 1936, weighing 198 pounds, Louis had disproportionately large hands and powerfully muscled wrists, forearms and legs; in his celebrated early fights, available on film, he more resembles a twenty-first-century middleweight than a heavyweight. You can see how, in the 1936 match with Schmeling, Louis’s inexperience cost him the fight: the German boxer had scrutinized films of Louis’s fights and discovered a habitual weakness in his defense, an unconscious lowering of his left glove after throwing a punch. (In more colloquial terms, the Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock, heavyweight champion from 1935 to 1937, thought Louis was “a sucker for a right hand; every time he jabbed he leaned way over and stuck his kisser out there, just begging to be socked.”) By the time of the mediahyped rematch on June 22, 1938—“Joe Louis versus Adolf Hitler Day”—Louis had been trained not to make that mistake, with devastating results for his older opponent. The victory of the American “Brown Bomber” over the German “altar to manliness” was so decisive that even the suspicious German press, after examining fight films, could not contest it.