Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  “I’M GOING TO SEE HEIFETZ,” one man tells another. “Oh, yeah?” the second man replies. “Who’s he fighting?”

  It is an old gag, but it captures the power and reach of boxing in the United States before World War II. Once, the fight game had been a sport of back rooms and lowlifes, gamblers and thugs. But in the Jazz Age it had become legal, respectable, glamorous, omnipresent. Its male, working-class constituency expanded to the wealthy, to intellectuals, to women— and in particular society women. Epic contests attracted tens of thousands of people and, in two instances, more than one hundred thousand. The kingdom called “Fistiana” reached into nearly every city, neighborhood, and town; each had its own arenas, boxing clubs, and favorites. On any given night in New York, fans could choose between a dozen fights in as many venues, pitting Irishmen against Jews against Italians against Poles. To the fighters, most of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, boxing was both a way to tout one’s origins and an avenue toward Americanization, or at least upward mobility. The world capital of Fistiana was Jacobs Beach, the block of West Forty-ninth Street just east of Madison Square Garden (then located on Eighth Avenue), where the managers, matchmakers, ticket sellers, trainers, and pugs congregated. The area was named for its reigning monarch, Mike Jacobs, the former ticket salesman who now ran boxing at Madison Square Garden. Fistiana had its own scribes, usually the best writers a paper had; floods and strikes, the journalist Heywood Broun once wrote, were for second stringers.

  The Depression had knocked some oomph out of professional boxing, as had the retirements of luminaries like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. The sport sputtered as a series of less glamorous champions, Schmeling among them, quickly came and went. But a heavyweight title fight was still the most lavish, anticipated spectacle in sports. Unlike baseball, football, hockey, golf, or tennis, it crossed all borders and classes. “Tonight’s the night,” the New York Post declared that afternoon, “when little shots rub elbows with big shots; clergymen discuss hooks and right crosses with gangsters and de-lovelies powder pert noses in $30 seats that their sweeties paid 100 bucks for.”

  If boxing brought classes together, it brought the races together, too. More than in almost any other segment of American life, fight crowds at heavyweight bouts had become integrated, at least since Joe Louis had come along, even if most blacks sat in the cheap seats. In the stadium, one black writer observed, the wall between the races was far thinner than in almost any church. And in the ring more than anywhere else, blacks had now come to believe they could be judged fairly. It hadn’t always been so. If a black man was too good, Damon Runyon once wrote, whites wouldn’t fight him, and if he was no good, well then, what good was he? Fights between blacks and whites were still rare enough—white boxers as recent and as eminent as Jack Dempsey had ducked all their black counterparts—to have a name: “mixed bouts.” Only a few years before Louis turned professional, a New York paper mistakenly called a white fighter black—and the fighter sued for libel.

  But Louis was too good a boxer, and too good for boxing, to keep down. He was a precise and devastating puncher with both hands, and as Runyon himself noted, “the public loves a puncher, white, black, yellow or green.” He invariably scored knockouts, clean and quick, ferocious and unequivocal. White America was vaguely embarrassed by its love of boxing, but black America felt few qualms; for blacks, boxing offered a breach in the ghetto wall. “Fame and money are still more likely to come to the Negro of brawn and skill and gameness who knocks men down for a count of ten seconds than to his fellow athlete, to the scientist, scholar, actor, doctor, artist, labor leader, statesman, preacher, business man, inventor or judge,” a landmark study of the time observed. The roped square, at least with Louis inside it, meant a square deal. “You can’t Jim Crow a left hook” was how another great black boxer, Henry Armstrong, had put it. Boxing also offered the black man revenge with impunity. “The ring,” Malcolm X was to write in his autobiography, “was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.”

  More had been written about Louis in the previous few years, Runyon speculated, than about anyone besides Charles A. Lindbergh. A midwestern professor asked his students to identify John L. Lewis, Joe Louis, and Sinclair Lewis; few had heard of the labor leader or the author, but nearly all knew the Brown Bomber. (So popular had he become that sports-writers had recently started calling the New York Yankees the “Bronx Bombers.”) Louis’s appeal was no accident. By temperament and design, he had tried to be everything the much-vilified, still-controversial previous black titleholder, Jack Johnson, was not: dignified, gentle, self-effacing, unthreatening. While whites sometimes patronized him—“a big, superbly built Negro youth, who was born to listen to jazz music, eat a lot of fried chicken, play ball with the gang on the corner and never do a lick of heavy work he could escape,” Bill Corum of the New York Evening Journal had written of him the previous year—they generally liked him, even below the Mason-Dixon Line. Once, southern exhibitors put Louis footage at the ends of newsreels, the easier to crop it out; now it was played, and applauded. One black columnist estimated as the Louis-Schmeling fight approached that two of three white southerners were pulling for Louis—partly, he admitted, because Schmeling was the most unpopular white man to take on a black man in the history of boxing. For Louis, then, much of the bigotry that afflicted America was briefly and selectively suspended. “There is not one iota of feeling that the Negro is an interloper, and that if we cannot have a white American at the top, the division is in the doldrums,” Nat Fleischer wrote in the pages of his hugely influential publication, Ring magazine, a month before the fight. “Louis is an American, and a darn good one at that.” As the sport’s most tireless champion, and a New Yorker, and a Jew, Fleischer certainly overstated things. But a surprising number of Americans shared his views.

  In black America, Louis was idolized as no one had ever been. Writers compared him to Booker T. Washington, the biblical David, and Jesus Christ. Black newspapers were filled with poems about him. Musicians composed songs about him. Preachers who had once deemed prizefighting crooked and unchristian extolled him from the pulpit; families hung pictures of him in their parlors. Even Jesse Owens, the only black athlete to rival him in fame and accomplishment, became in his exalted presence just another rabid fan. “Day by day, since their alleged emancipation, they have watched a picture of themselves being painted as lazy, stupid, and diseased,” Richard Wright wrote. To black America, he went on, Louis “symbolized the living refutation of the hatred spewed forth daily over radios, in newspapers, in movies and in books about their lives.” Louis let blacks everywhere think lofty and heretical thoughts; if he could shatter racial barriers, those barriers could not be so formidable. The sports pages put Louis’s reach at seventy-six inches. In fact, it was global. But for all this, black America was hedging its bets. Louis had burned them once, when he lost to Schmeling in 1936, and besides, the black community never took anything, particularly anything good, for granted. The Harlem that one black visitor encountered before the fight was quiet and fearful, as if everyone were in prayer.

  After showers earlier in the day, the weather in the Bronx had cleared. By five o’clock, five thousand people were waiting to buy general admission tickets for $3.50 apiece; a redcap was first in line, a cook, second. As darkness began to fall, thousands made their way to the stadium, “in purring limousines, grinding cabs, and up from the subway slots in great spouting geysers of humanity,” wrote Bob Considine in the New York Mirror. From the window of her apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, Louis’s young bride could see the giant stadium and watch the enormous procession making its way there by car and by bus and on foot. She would be listening to the fight on the radio. Shortly before ten, the fighters entered the ring. The NBC broadcaster Clem McCarthy was at the microphone when the referee, Arthur Donovan, summoned the two fighters and their seconds. Donovan asked the contestants how they felt, reviewed the dangers of low blows, warned
their seconds not to step through the ropes while the fight was on. He then reminded the combatants of their responsibility, both to the crowd and to the unseen audience beyond, all of whom were expecting one of the greatest fights ever. “Now let’s go,” he concluded, “and may the best man win.”

  “The old slogan of boxing, ‘May the best man win,’ and she’s about to start, with this Yankee Stadium packed to the doors!” McCarthy exclaimed. “Joe Louis in his corner, prancing, and rubbing his feet in the resin, and Max Schmeling standing calmly … and they’re ready with the bell just about to ring.”

  And then the bell rang.

  Just Off the Boat

  FIVE YEARS EARLIER, on the morning of April 14, 1933, the North German Lloyd liner Bremen had steamed into New York Harbor, with Max Schmeling aboard. The setting was spectacular—the mighty vessel, after its five-day crossing, making its way toward the Statue of Liberty, with the towers of lower Manhattan beckoning—but scarcely more epic, at least in the world of sports, than the events about to unfold. Schmeling would soon attempt something that had never been done: to regain the heavyweight crown. And his prospects looked good; after all, many believed he should never have lost it.

  Schmeling, twenty-seven years old, had been coming to the United States for five years now, and the arrival ritual had grown routine. Meeting him aboard the ship would be the usual mob of fight reporters, who had commandeered a cutter to bring them there: all ten New York City newspapers had at least one boxing writer, as did the wire services, and there were emissaries from Boston, Philadelphia, Newark, and Chicago, to name just a few other cities with boxing correspondents of their own. Then there would be the photographers and newsreel boys, who would put Schmeling through the same staged scenes and make him utter the same wooden dialogue for the cameras. The previous June, Schmeling had lost the title to Jack Sharkey in a much-criticized decision. “We wuz robbed!” his fiery, outlandish manager, Joe Jacobs, had immortally declared afterward. But now Schmeling, with characteristic determination, had set out to win it back. And why not? He had already defied the odds three years earlier, when, in an equally disputed fight, he’d become the first European ever to win the heavyweight title.

  A personable sort, Schmeling had long since come to know most of the reporters by name. They were friendly, irreverent types—smart alecks—likely to ask an impertinent question or two, but not to be too persistent or obnoxious about it; whatever edge they had was certain to be dulled by the good German beer Schmeling always brought with him. The floating press conference would then pull into the pier, where he would be greeted by a mob of fight fans coming to show their support or simply to glimpse a celebrity. Schmeling could easily have been unpopular; he’d won the title under the most debatable circumstances, spoke English with a heavy accent, and came from a country with which America had been at war only fifteen years earlier. After he’d beaten Sharkey for the title, he’d dragged his feet on a promised rematch, offending Americans and Germans alike. But when he lost the crown he’d been a gentleman, picking up an aura of martyrdom. Though he revealed only so much of himself, there always appeared to be something endearingly earnest about him.

  And then there was the good fortune of his physical appearance. Schmeling looked uncannily like the man who epitomized boxing’s golden era, the legendarily hard-hitting and much-missed Jack Dempsey, who’d retired only a few years earlier after producing all five of boxing’s million-dollar “gates”—that is, fights where ticket sales went into seven figures. Schmeling had the same build, the same wavy, dark, slicked-down hair, the same heavy brows. Schmeling’s style in the ring, though, was not the slashing, overwhelmingly aggressive assault Dempsey favored but something cooler, slower, more methodical—“Teutonic,” as it was often described. And outside the ring he was as self-contained and calculating as Dempsey was gregarious.

  Dempsey was promoting Schmeling’s upcoming fight on June 8 in Yankee Stadium against a promising young California heavyweight named Max Baer, and was among those greeting Schmeling. The next day’s papers would be filled with pictures of the two men together, wearing nearly identical suits and topcoats, all but daring readers to tell them apart. At the pier the confusion had already begun; an excited young woman broke through the crowd, grabbed Dempsey’s hand, and tried to kiss it. “Oh, Max!” she cried. “You’re wonderful!” Accompanying Schmeling on the voyage, as always, was Max Machon, his longtime German trainer. And just as predictably, greeting him at the pier was Joe Jacobs, the ever-present cigar jutting out of his mouth.

  Schmeling tried to be boyish and lighthearted with the press, as if nothing had changed since his last visit to New York, the year before. Anyone bending over to inspect his lapel pin—“Athletic Club,” it said— got water spritzed into his eye. But Schmeling now faced more than the usual inquiries about the kind of shape he was in, how and where he planned to train, and the state of his punches. Three months earlier, Hitler had come to power in Germany. Almost instantly, life for Germany’s 600,000 Jews had changed profoundly, and terrifyingly. Already, they were being banished from universities, public schools, symphony orchestras, the legal and medical professions. Jewish-owned newspapers, soon to be confiscated by the government, had to chronicle the mighty flow of anti-Jewish enactments. In but a couple of months, the dark ages had descended upon the German-Jewish community. It was hard to know whether the storm would pass, and while many Jews quickly left, far more stayed. But it was sobering indeed when the Angriff declared that Germany’s Jews were done for, morally and commercially.

  Nowhere was their fate followed more closely than in New York, a city with two million Jews of its own, many of them passionate fight fans with deep ties to Europe. Three weeks before Schmeling’s arrival, 100,000 of them, including 20,000 Jewish veterans of World War I, had marched through the snow from the Lower East Side to city hall to protest events in Germany. Four days later, 22,000 of them rallied at Madison Square Garden, with 35,000 more on the streets outside. Such protests only fired up the Nazis further. By the time Schmeling boarded the Bremen, there had been a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, torchlight processions in support of the anti-Jewish measures, and paroxysms of violent anti-Semitism. “Hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured,” the Berlin correspondent of the New York Evening Post, H. R. Knickerbocker, reported shortly before Schmeling steamed in. “Thousands of Jews have fled. Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood.” Germany’s entire Jewish population, he wrote, was in a state of terror.

  New York, by contrast, must have seemed the picture of tranquillity to Schmeling when he arrived. But it had also grown less receptive to him, more wary. The goodwill he had built up in the United States, like the goodwill he had established with the Nazis, was impressive but thin, and would require delicacy and dexterity to preserve. Schmeling faced two fights in America. The first, in the ring, was hard enough: Baer was a furious puncher who had beaten one rival to death and very nearly killed another. But Schmeling also faced the formidable challenge of placating the American fight public without offending the regime back home, of mollifying Jews and Nazis simultaneously.

  TWELVE YEARS EARLIER, on July 2, 1921, fifteen-year-old Max Schmeling had stood outside a newspaper office in Cologne, following an account of Dempsey’s fight against the Frenchman Georges Carpentier as it came across the wire from the United States. He rooted for Dempsey, not just because he liked him, but because he wanted the heavyweight championship to remain in America long enough to go there and get it. Afterward, Schmeling spent some of his meager earnings repeatedly watching films of the fight in a local theater. He convinced his father, a navigator on the Hamburg-America Line, to pay for some boxing lessons. Then young Max bought some used gloves and hung them over his bed.

  Max Siegfried Adolph Otto Schmeling was born in Klein Luckow—a town in northern Germany eighty miles north of Berlin—on September 28, 1905, and grew up in Hamburg. He left school early and worked variou
sly at an advertising firm, as a pipe fitter, and as a strong man in the circus. He flirted with soccer, but found himself drawn to boxing. Interest in the sport, which had been illegal and underground in Germany before World War I, had recently exploded. German soldiers had learned it as prisoners of war in Britain, or from the Americans who occupied their country once the war was over. In Weimar Germany as in the United States, the sport became a great passion not just of the working classes but also of artists and intellectuals, who saw in it something pure and manly, elemental and elegant, timeless and modern. When he visited Germany in 1926, Nat Fleischer was astounded to see how the country had embraced the sport. Germany had forty thousand amateur boxers, he pointed out, and if only a dozen stars emerged, they could soon menace American hegemony.

  In Düsseldorf, then in Cologne, Schmeling spent most of his spare time in boxing clubs. It was in Cologne that he honed his distinctive style: methodical, scientific, and patient. He became well versed in the fundamentals of footwork, body movement, and defense; his style was to bide his time, study his opponent, and wait for openings rather than slug it out too early. His right was his money punch, his left, as someone later put it, merely something for holding his fork. Schmeling’s personal code was regimented: a careful diet, no alcohol or tobacco, regular hours. When he’d go to the Roxy-Bar (a favorite hangout for Berlin’s athletes and aesthetes), he’d always order fresh orange juice and “Café Hag”—that is, decaffeinated coffee. He was, as the German weekly Box-Sport once wrote, a Musterknabe—a prig. Nothing distracted him from his objective. One of his fights came only four days after he’d crashed his motorcycle, killing his fourteen-year-old sister. He won.

  Schmeling turned professional in 1924 and won nine of his first ten fights. But “professional” was a relative term: when Box-Sport’s editor, Arthur Bülow, became his manager, Schmeling had only nine cents in his pocket. Dempsey visited Cologne in 1925, and Schmeling was one of three local boxers who fought him in two-round exhibitions. Fleischer, too, saw Schmeling there, and immediately cabled the majordomo of American boxing, Tex Rickard of Madison Square Garden, about him. In August 1926, Schmeling won the German light heavyweight championship in less than a minute. The following January, Box-Sport called him “our greatest hope” and extolled his “cold, sure eye, technique, brain and general ability.” To his critics, Schmeling was almost too calculating; Box-Sport faulted him for what it called “an insufficient will to annihilate.” But that June, before a frenzied, ecstatic crowd in Dortmund, he beat a Belgian, Fernand Delarge, for the European light heavyweight championship. For a country still traumatized by losing a war and in the throes of political and economic upheaval, it was an epic event. Moments after he knocked out the Italian Michele Bonaglia in January 1928, eight thousand fans stood up and sang “Deutschland über Alles.”