Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  The boxing press quickly handicapped a Schmeling-Baer rematch. Damon Runyon thought Schmeling would be clobbered, and wondered why he’d do it; perhaps Hitler or Ondra was leaning on him, but more likely Schmeling just wanted the dough. But Grantland Rice had studied the fight pictures from Hamburg, and to him Schmeling looked as if “he were going to punch his way right off the printed page.” Politics promised to make the fight a windfall for its promoters. “A hard-hitting ‘Nordic’ meets Max Baer, a tall young Jew who laughs while he fights,” wrote Arthur Brisbane. “The meeting will settle nothing. Racial supremacy does not depend on the fist. But in New York City it ought to draw a crowd gigantic.” Gallico saw another attraction to the fight: pitting a German against a Jew in the United States on the eve of the Olympics would guarantee fairness for American athletes in Berlin. Not that it would be necessary; Nazi Jew bashing, he believed, had run its course. “As always occurs when religion is used as a political tool, the mob goes too far, and the dangerous conflagration ignited by the politicians gets out of hand and threatens to become a holocaust from which none escape,” he wrote. But Germany was now done with anti-Semitic hysteria; it had run its course, he asserted, and all good Germans regretted what had occurred. In any case, his friend Max had no use for such things. “Schmeling does not represent German officialdom and German politics, but German sport and warm-hearted German people,” he wrote. “He has been faithful and loyal to his Jewish manager, and no one has been able to make him change. It might be very helpful if petty politicians and agitators on both sides of the water would move out of the way and give the better instincts that lie in every race and every human being a chance.”

  Others saw Schmeling’s relationship with Jacobs very differently. They predicted Schmeling would never fight again in the States because, with extra taxes and Jacobs’s commission to worry about, it would be too expensive for him. There were reports that Schmeling had dropped Jacobs altogether. “Schmeling Gives Yussel the Ozone,” the Mirror claimed. To Schmeling, Parker wrote, “managers are only the means to the end, to be ruthlessly brushed aside when they have served their purpose to him…. Now that Jacobs has outlived his usefulness, Schmeling is making him walk the plank, too.” Years later, Schmeling said he never considered breaking with Jacobs. “I really need Joe Jacobs,” he said he told Hitler. “I owe all my success in America to him. Mr. Jacobs is competent, he is respectable and correct. And beyond that, you can’t get anywhere in New York without a local manager. Besides, loyalty is a German virtue.” He said Hitler made an angry gesture, then dismissed him. “Hitler’s message had been clear, and I understood its meaning,” he said.

  The story is implausible, and not only because Schmeling had said at the time that Hitler actually wanted him to keep Jacobs, or because, whatever else he was, Joe Jacobs was hardly “respectable” and “correct.” Having embraced Schmeling as enthusiastically and as publicly as the Nazis had, Jacobs and all, it is unlikely they would be pressuring him to drop Jacobs now. Whether implicitly or explicitly, unilaterally or jointly, Hitler and Schmeling had surely long since settled on Jacobs’s proper status: he was simply the cost of doing business in New York. Without him, Schmeling would have been sunk. For a regime strapped for cash and legitimacy, eager for triumphs of any kind, ordering Schmeling to fire Jacobs would have been self-defeating. So Schmeling had done the next best thing: he’d emasculated him. And Jacobs took it because Schmeling was his former—and, now, perhaps his future—heavyweight champion.

  The Nazis also compromised on Max Baer. Whatever its legitimacy, Baer’s Jewishness led to his condemnation in Germany; The Prizefighter and the Lady, a romantic comedy in which he’d starred, had been banned there. In the most virulently anti-Semitic circles, another match against him, especially on German soil, would be an abomination. The Fränkische Tageszeitung acknowledged the appeal of “the Swastika vs. the Star of David,” but wanted the fight to take place outside the Fatherland. Some things, though, trumped even anti-Semitism. The Nazis had already let Schmeling fight Baer once, and, after all, Baer was the champ; for Schmeling to regain the crown, he’d have to take him on. That assumed, of course, that Baer could get past Jimmy Braddock, the journeyman boxer then in the midst of an improbable run at the title. Braddock had been matched with Baer only after Schmeling himself had refused to fight him. “Who iss Chim Braddock?” Schmeling had remarked at the time. “I haff neffer heardt of Chim Braddock.”

  But however he fared against Baer, Braddock was not the up-and-coming boxer whom people on both sides of the Atlantic were starting to notice. As the German press charted Schmeling’s resurgence, it also carried its first, sketchy reports about another American boxer making a name for himself. It referred to him variously as “The Negro mixed-breed [Negermischling] from Alabama,” the “half-black” (Halbneger), or “Joe Clay Face.” “Within a short period of time his right hand has become highly respected by all leading heavyweights,” Box-Sport reported matter-of-factly in February 1935. It was true. And Joe Louis was only getting started.

  * Rothenburg remained in boxing in Nazi Germany only by proving that he was the product of his mother’s extramarital affair with a “German-blooded pub owner,” and was not her Jewish husband’s biological son.

  A Star Rises in the Midwest

  THERE ARE MANY LEGENDS about how Joe Louis Barrow became just Joe Louis. One is that as a boy in Detroit, Louis didn’t want his mother to know he was spending the money she’d given him for violin lessons on boxing. Another is that Louis took such a beating in his first amateur bout that he wanted to spare his family any embarrassment. Another credits a ring announcer, who asked Louis his name but introduced him before Louis could get it all out, or his manager, who thought that the “Barrow” made his name too long. Still one more says Louis ran out of space when filling out an application for an amateur boxing show. In Louis’s first few years of celebrity, every part of his story was retold, elaborated upon, embellished, or invented. But the facts of his youth are fairly straightforward.

  He was born on May 13, 1914, in the Buckalew Mountains of east-central Alabama, five miles from the small town of Lafayette, the seventh of eight children of a sharecropper named Monroe Barrow and his wife, Lillie Reece Barrow. His parents were big people—his father was over six feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred pounds—and Louis arrived big, too: eleven pounds at birth. Shortly thereafter, Louis’s father was sent to a state mental institution, where he was thought to have died, and Louis’s mother was left to work the farm and raise her family. Before long she married Pat Brooks, a widower with a large brood of his own. The combined families eked out a minimal existence, with the children haphazardly attending primitive schools. Louis did not talk much until he was six, and when he did, he stammered. For youngsters who didn’t know any better, it was a gentle and racially benign existence, in the settled way of the segregated South.

  When Louis was twelve, his family joined the historic northward migration of blacks. They landed in Detroit, where Louis saw his first trolleys, flushed his first toilet, turned on his first electric lights. But within a few years, as the Depression came and took hold, his stepfather lost his job in one of the car plants. The family went on relief and, sometimes, went hungry. Louis attended school with smaller, younger children with whom he shared little; his speech impediment made him withdraw still more. At fourteen, he went to a vocational school. “This boy should be able to do something with his hands,” one of his instructors said. Louis felt the same thing, though not quite in the same way. “All my life my hands felt important to me,” he later said. “They felt big, strong, and they seemed to want to do something special.” Louis earned spare change—and developed his physique—by delivering ice, hauling sixty-pound blocks up several flights of stairs. Convinced that musical talent ran in the family and that it could earn Joe a living, Lillie Brooks gave him a cheap violin and fifty cents a week for lessons. But the instrument felt funny in those big hands, and in his rough neighbor
hood it brought him additional ridicule. Athletics came much more naturally. He loved baseball; he was a good hitter and once said he’d have stuck with it had there been more opportunities for blacks. (He ducked football because, as one contemporary writer put it, “the white boys make it too tough on a colored lad.”) Instead, he fell into boxing.

  In the spring of 1932, when he was eighteen years old, Louis had his first amateur match. His opponent, Johnny Miler, who was to fight for the United States Olympic team later that year, knocked him down seven times. Discouraged, Louis avoided the gym for a time and took a job at Ford’s River Rouge plant, pushing truck bodies around on a conveyor belt. But he soon returned to the ring and, having learned to use both of his hands, racked up thirteen straight knockouts. In February 1933 he won the local Golden Gloves tournament as a light heavyweight. “Lewis,” the Detroit Free Press observed, was a terrific puncher. (Younger children quickly came to idolize Louis; one, Walker Smith, who insisted on carrying his bags, would become Sugar Ray Robinson.) Several losses in amateur matches followed, but in one of them he impressed a Detroit man named John Roxborough. Roxborough, whose line of work was ostensibly real estate, in fact ran Detroit’s numbers racket, making him one of the black community’s wealthiest and best-connected figures. The “insurance broker” he brought in as his partner on the Louis account, Julian Black, had a similar position, and similar status, in Chicago, though he was known to be a far icier character and Louis never got nearly so close to him. Roxborough bought him clothes and supplies and his first pair of new, professional gloves. Childless, he invited Louis to live with him and his wife. He gave him an allowance, five dollars every Saturday night. And he began instructing him in some of the fundamentals, like how to wash his ears, comb his hair, and hold a fork.*

  In February 1934 Louis again captured the Detroit Golden Gloves. The next month, before twenty thousand fans in Chicago, what one paper called “the Detroit colored lad with the frozen face” won the national Golden Gloves in the 175-pound class. In the course of this tournament, Louis made two incongruous but crucial allies: the Chicago Tribune, pillar of conservative, midwestern white America, which sponsored the competition; and the Chicago Defender, one of the oldest and most influential of the weekly newspapers that covered, and helped sustain, America’s separate and completely unequal black community. With paternal, almost proprietary pride, Tribune writers documented Louis’s every step up the ladder. Arch Ward, the veteran Tribune sports columnist who had recently created baseball’s All-Star Game, sent Louis travel money so he could participate in one tournament. In its own way, the Defender later said, the Tribune did more to recognize black athletes than did the NAACP. The Defender printed what was probably the first newspaper picture of Louis, and by April 1934 it was touting him as the greatest amateur fighter anywhere. The following week in St. Louis, Louis became the AAU light heavyweight champion. It was the first time mixed bouts had ever been held in that city, whose ballparks were still segregated. By mid-1934, Louis wanted to turn professional. He was tired of working for Ford, and was having trouble finding anyone willing to fight him for nothing. Louis’s handlers, who were to collect half his earnings, then took him to see a trainer in Chicago named Jack Blackburn. Blackburn, then in his early fifties, had been one of the toughest, smartest, and wiliest fighters of his generation, and one of the best black boxers ever. A compact man, he’d fought hundreds of bouts, often against much bigger men, and usually won. Not all of Blackburn’s fights had been in the ring. One earned him a manslaughter conviction, for which he spent several years in prison. Another left him with a large knife scar across his left cheek. Hard living and heavy drinking, along with severe arthritis, had slowed him down, though he still took on promising young boxers. But when Roxborough told him he’d found a potential champion, Blackburn was skeptical—not because of Louis himself, but because of his race.

  From the sport’s earliest days, there had always been great black boxers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, blacks dominated several weight categories and threatened in others, enough to raise alarms in Jim Crow America. “The coloreds are on average better natural boxers than the average whites because they have a much sharper eye while fighting and recognize very quickly every danger as well as the strong sides of the pale face,” Tom O’Rourke, a boxing veteran who had managed several black fighters, once wrote. “They are faster and more agile, and they have good legs and twice as hard a head and body and finally, their endurance and fighting spirit is generally better and greater than ours.”

  For a time boxing’s most precious jewel, the heavyweight championship, was safe. But that changed once Jack Johnson came along. Johnson, a black man from Galveston, Texas, had to go abroad to win the crown, beating Tommy Burns in Australia in 1908. His second American title defense—on July 4, 1910, in Reno, against James Jeffries, the former champion who’d been lured out of retirement as the “Great White Hope”—had been to blacks a triumph second only to Emancipation, but had led to race riots and lynchings throughout the country that left dozens dead. Johnson’s behavior in and out of the ring—taunting his opponents, gloating over his victories, fraternizing with and marrying white women of low reputation—made an incendiary situation worse, scandalizing white and black America alike. Prosecuted on a trumped-up morals charge, “Lil’ Arthur,” as Johnson was also known, fled to Europe for a time, and ultimately lost his title to Jess Willard in a much-disputed fight in Havana in 1915. Eventually Johnson returned to America and served a brief term in prison. But his shadow lingered. Tex Rickard, who promoted the Willard fight and later took over boxing promotions at Madison Square Garden, vowed there would never be another black heavyweight champion. Even had he not, no one had much of an appetite for one.

  Nearly twenty years after Johnson’s reign, America remained traumatized by it. Rickard had kept his promise: whether or not Dempsey had been tempted to fight the black contender Harry Wills in the 1920s, Rickard wouldn’t let him. Their prospects limited, many of the most talented black fighters came to sorry ends. Sam Langford, the so-called Boston Tar Baby, ended his days legally blind and living on welfare. Kid Chocolate, a Cuban-born featherweight, squandered his fortune. Battling Siki, the onetime light heavyweight champion, died after being shot twice in the back. Joe Gans, a lightweight and the first native-born American black to win a title, died of tuberculosis before he was forty. “A colored fighter never knows how old he is, and nobody cares,” he once said.

  In the early 1930s, with American life almost entirely segregated, lynchings still relatively commonplace, and blacks mired in perpetual poverty made even worse by the Depression, the prospects of most black athletes remained dim. “When the colored brother is capable in sports… he is usually too capable for his own good,” Paul Gallico wrote. “When we needed him for the track team or the boxing squad, for football or to take part in the Olympic Games, he is a full-fledged citizen, our dearly beloved equal, and a true American. At other times he remains just plain nigger, and we’d rather he weren’t around.” In professional boxing, where fame and riches abounded, the situation was surely the cruelest. The black boxer, Gallico went on, “is generally a magnificent physical specimen, powerful, wiry, hard, and not nearly so sensible to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull, and good hands. He is crafty and tricky and, contrary to public opinion, as game as the white man when the cards are not stacked against him.” But that was the problem— they almost always were. “The Negro is regarded as pure cattle to be exploited, swindled, and burgled for their own profits and never, if possible, for his,” Gallico wrote. “He is after all only a nigger, and so the ordinary rules of conduct applied to white fighters, which are in themselves none too sweet, don’t go.” Even the praise they occasionally got was disparaging. “The reason they fight so well is that their somewhat primitive brains and their muscles act with one impulse,” one sportswriter observed.

  Blacks saw things the same way, only from closer up. “Negro f
ighters are used merely to build up ‘white hopes,’” E. B. Rea wrote in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, another leading black weekly, in 1934. “Their activities are confined to fake and fraudulent bouts through unscrupulous managers and promoters who are more eager to replenish their inflated purses than to make Negro champions.” Things would change, wrote another black columnist, only when white promoters thought some outlandish black fighter could lift lagging attendance. “We’ve got to wait until somebody can produce a half-clown and half-gorilla to arouse the interest of our pale face brothers,” he wrote.