Louis then set out for San Francisco, where he was to take on Donald “Reds” Barry, a man who claimed to specialize in beating black fighters. In Oakland, a bus carrying a black band led a twenty-five-car welcoming procession, and five hundred fans had to be turned away from the gym where he worked out. Two days before Schmeling knocked out Hamas in Hamburg, Louis knocked out Barry in three brutal rounds. (It would have been two, but Louis had promised a local sportswriter to end it in the third.) The real import of the fight came afterward. Looking to establish a beachhead in big-time boxing, Mike Jacobs of the newly launched Twentieth Century Sporting Club in New York called Louis’s dressing room, dangling a fight against Primo Carnera. At long last, Louis was poised for his New York debut. Joe Louis and Mike Jacobs were about to change the business of boxing.
Madison Square Garden, which had controlled boxing in New York since the days of Tex Rickard in the 1920s, had already been angling for Louis. In December 1934 it offered him a fight with James J. Braddock. The money was unlike anything Louis had seen—$10,000, plus 30 percent of the net receipts—but, at least according to fight lore, it would come with asterisks, which Jimmy Johnston, who ran boxing at the Garden, spelled out for Roxborough over the phone. “Well, you understand he’s a nigger, and he can’t win every time he goes in the ring,” Johnston told him. “So am I,” replied Roxborough. And he hung up. “He’s ready for New York, but New York ain’t ready for him,” Blackburn later remarked. Given the Garden’s monopoly on top matches, that would normally have sealed Louis’s fate. But the Garden grew tired of subsidizing Mrs. William Randolph Hearst’s pet charity, the “Milk Fund for Babies,” which had always skimmed off a percentage of the gate, and wanted to change the arrangement. The Hearst organization promptly decided to promote its own fights, and put Mike Jacobs in charge.
Jacobs—no relation to Joe—had always been selling something. As a boy, it was newspapers and sandwiches around Tammany Hall. Then it was peanuts on the tourist boats plying New York Harbor, as well as weak tea for seasickness. Then it was choice tickets—for baseball, football, the fights, wrestling, Broadway shows, opera. For Jacobs had a great gift: he always knew just how much people would pay. The cash Jacobs amassed helped bankroll the new Madison Square Garden, which opened on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street in November 1925. It was a small step for him to start promoting shows himself.
You could easily confuse “Uncle Mike” and Joe Jacobs, particularly if you weren’t Jewish or from New York. Both were in boxing, both grew up poor, both were street-smart and thick-skinned, both were colorful, both wrestled perpetually with their “store teeth.” (No article about Mike Jacobs was complete without a reference to them: to the rattling sounds they made, to his irritability whenever they didn’t fit right, to the number of pairs he went through.) But unlike Joe, Mike, sixteen years Joe’s senior, was gruff, profane, unsentimental, humorless, and cheap. Everyone liked Joe Jacobs, even those who knew he was a scoundrel; every man who walked into Mike Jacobs’s office a gentleman, someone once said, walked out calling him names. And Mike, unlike Joe, didn’t give a damn about boxing or boxers. For him, the real sport lay in staging a show, outwitting the other guy, putting fannies in seats. People paid so much for his tickets that he rarely set one aside for himself. Jacobs backed few losers, trusted no one, took nothing for granted, stiffed friends and colleagues as well as enemies, attended to the smallest details himself. Fight nights he could often be seen patrolling the stadium, or even hawking tickets.
With Rickard dead, Jacobs was the logical man for Hearst to call. With three powerful figures from the Hearst sports pages—Damon Runyon, Ed Frayne, and Bill Farnsworth—he formed the Twentieth Century Sporting Club and began looking for boxers. “Overnight, Jacobs will become the most powerful sports promoter in America,” Fleischer predicted in May 1935. And Fleischer hadn’t factored Joe Louis into the equation. Jacobs told Louis and his team that if they went with him, Louis could make a lot of money without ever having to do anything crooked; to a sport on life-support, he was perfect as is. Had there been any journalistic entity less likely to champion a black boxer than the reactionary Chicago Tribune, it would have been the racist Hearst papers. But with Louis promising a fortune in promotion and circulation, prejudice, or at least some of it, could be put aside. Before long, Mike Jacobs controlled boxing in New York, and the New York sportswriters had dubbed his world, “the pugilist-infested stretch” of Forty-ninth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, “Jacobs Beach.” And Mike Jacobs effectively controlled Joe Louis, too, even though promoters were not supposed to, collecting half the profits from Louis’s fights and reducing his ostensible managers, Rox-borough and Black, to figureheads and factotums. “It seems that their duties in the management of Louis are to open the mail that comes to the office, take care of the requests for autographed pictures of Louis, and such other arduous duties, which can be capably filled by a secretary earning a salary of $25.00 weekly,” one iconoclastic boxing publication observed.
When Louis stepped off the train from California at Michigan Central Station in Detroit on March 13, 1935, he had the aura of history about him. Five days later, Jacobs announced that Louis had signed for three fights in New York, beginning with Carnera in June. If Louis won all of them, he hoped, he could fight for the championship in September. Jacobs wanted the press to see his new acquisition, but wasn’t ready to bring him to New York just yet. So in late March he took twenty New York boxing writers aboard a luxury Pullman car to Detroit to watch Louis face a bruiser named Natie Brown. Other writers arrived from Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston. “New York is eager to see him go, and if he has what it takes, he probably will make more money than any Negro who ever tried on a boxing glove,” the Detroit Times reported. All Detroit pitched in for its favorite son; a local judge handling a legal dispute against Louis and his managers postponed a hearing until after the fight. “I don’t want him to have anything on his mind except the other fellow,” the judge explained.
Brown was a spoiler: he was hard to hit and harder still to knock down. In fact, the latter had never happened. But within seventy-three seconds of the opening bell, Brown was on the floor. The crowd rose in anticipation of an early finish, but he would not give Louis another clean shot, forcing him to settle for a decision. The Hearst writers could not contain their enthusiasm. “The greatest young heavyweight since the California days of the Manassa Mauler [Dempsey],” Ed Frayne, Jacobs’s partner, wrote in the New York American. But the other papers were more measured, praising Louis’s power but noting his inexperience, his inability to penetrate a tough defense, and his robotic movements. Fleischer urged all heavyweight contenders to take on Louis early, before he got better than he already was. But Bill McCormick of The Washington Post said he was good for everyone. “Every time he sweeps an opponent off his feet,” he wrote, Louis “helps put boxing back on its feet.”
The next day, Louis made the final payment on his mother’s new house. No facet of Louis’s image was more commented upon than that of the dutiful son, and nothing so contributed to that image as the eight-room home, costing $9,500, at 2100 McDougal Street in the Black Bottom section of Detroit. But while the house was ample, it was not ostentatious, and that was deliberate, too. “Listen, Son,” his mother declared in the first of several series of “as told to” stories to appear in American newspapers, “we don’t want any great big house away from the people we always lived with. We want a comfortable house, but not a great big showoff house.”
Louis was now national news, and stories about him and his family began appearing in glossy magazines. Perhaps the best that can be said about these portraits is that they were well intentioned. In Collier’s, Quentin Reynolds depicted Lillie Brooks as a kind of Hattie McDaniel, forever singin’, cookin’, and lovin’ly scoldin’ her good-for-nothin’ son for carin’ about nothin’ but eatin’, sleepin’, and fightin’. Biblical references appeared in these stories as often as did talk
of fatback and collard greens. The black press, in turn, faithfully tabulated all the nice things the white press said. The Defender toted up the number of newspapers in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia in which pictures of Louis had appeared, for blacks rarely were shown in their pages. SOLID SOUTH DECIDES JOE LOUIS MUST BE SOMEBODY, it proclaimed. Even the daily papers “along the Unterden Linden Strasse [sic] in Berlin,” it went on, were asking for Louis photographs.
When Louis met Roy Lazer in Chicago two weeks after the Brown fight, five thousand fans had to be turned away. The fight lasted three rounds, and Louis pocketed $12,000. Never had he seen a check with so many digits; one story had him sitting up all night on the train back to Detroit, staring at it. Baer had once more been at ringside, and had drawn a laugh by looking anxiously at Louis, then breaking into a trot, as if fleeing the ring. When it was all over, he grinned smugly, though as he gazed into the future, some wondered if his smile was sincere. Between April 22 and May 7, Louis squeezed in easy fights in Dayton, Ohio; Flint, Michigan; Peoria, Illinois; and Kalamazoo, Michigan. More than two thousand people showed up in Dayton for a glimpse of him, and that was all they got; the fight lasted one minute and fifteen seconds. The local boxing writer asked Louis what he would do if Baer knocked him down. “I’d get up,” he replied.
On May 13, 1935, on the eve of his first trip to New York, Joe Louis turned twenty-one. One of his sisters gave him a razor for his birthday, though he had not yet begun to shave. Louis spent that afternoon taking neighborhood children for rides in his car. At a local ballroom that night, three thousand people came to see him off and wish him well. Detroit’s mayor, Frank Couzens, gave him a set of golf clubs and a letter of introduction to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York. Before Louis departed, a black minister sidled up to him. “All the while you’re in training and while you’re in the ring, I’ll be prayin’ for you,” he said. “My whole congregation will be prayin’ for you.”
“And,” he whispered, “we’ll be bettin’ on you, too.”
* Mentioning the unsavory backgrounds of Louis’s backers was generally taboo in both the white and the “race” press. The New York Sun, for instance, called Roxborough a “clever Negro lawyer” and depicted him as elegant, discreet, and literate, adjectives the mainstream press rarely used to describe blacks. Occasionally, usually with a wink, there were hints of their real livelihoods. “Neither Roxborough nor Black are benefactors of the type ordinarily associated with U.S. racial-uplift campaigns,” was how Life magazine once put it. But Louis had no qualms about their line of work. “I figured this way: the fight game is a tough game,” he once explained. “They knew their way around. They could protect me from racket guys because they knew the angles.”
New York Falls in Love
A CARTOON IN THE NEW YORK POST on May 16, 1935, neatly captured the mood when Joe Louis made his long-awaited entrance into the big city. It showed a giant Louis standing astride the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, the words “18 Kayos in 24 Pro Fights” on his trunks, knocking off the tops of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings with his mighty left. It was titled “Big Brown Bomber Hits Town.”
Louis was poised to dominate boxing, but few New Yorkers had seen him throw a punch, or heard him say a word. He was a complete stranger to New York, which only added to his mystique. So when he stepped off the Wolverine and onto the concrete at Grand Central Terminal, the metropolis was ready to embrace him. It had, in fact, been waiting for someone like him for a long time.
“Travelers threading their way through Grand Central early yesterday morning had to carry their own baggage,” Caswell Adams wrote in the Herald Tribune. “The porters were too busy to bother about making any money. They were gazing at Joe Louis, their idol.” Actually, they did more than look—they picked him up and carried him across the threshold. In Harlem, Louis’s arrival seemed more like a homecoming than a maiden voyage. The upcoming fight against Carnera was causing more excitement there than anything since the halcyon days of Jack Johnson, declared the New York Age, which predicted that many a relief check would end up buying milk for Mrs. Hearst’s babies. Sure, the world’s championship was up for grabs two weeks before Louis was to fight, with Baer defending his title against Braddock, but as one black reporter put it, the Louis-Carnera battle overshadowed that “like the Empire State Building looms over a Harlem housetop.”
Louis was some eyeful that day at Grand Central, resplendent in a gray overcoat, white gloves, tan plaid suit, tan shirt, green tie, gray hat, and creamy tan shoes. Soon, he faced his first New York news conference. Would he take Carnera? Yes. How quickly? Won’t take no time. Got a girl? I just hit town. But his reception at the train station was minuscule compared to the luncheon later that day at Mike Jacobs’s office on West Forty-ninth Street. Jacobs could have sold a thousand tickets for that show; policemen had to be summoned to clear the traffic. Later, at the Renaissance Grill in Harlem, detectives accompanying Louis had their hands full keeping folks away from him; people clamoring for a pencil he’d dropped nearly caused a riot. Soon, they could see him at the Harlem Opera House, where the “New Knockout Sensation” was booked for a weeklong engagement. Louis’s show, which played to capacity crowds, consisted of a two-round sparring match, skipping rope, and punching the bag.
Louis appeared on Al Jolson’s radio program and was Jack Dempsey’s guest at Madison Square Garden. He met Mayor La Guardia. Then he gave his first real exhibition, at the Pioneer Gym on West Forty-fourth Street. Unable to afford the one-dollar admission, many fans from Harlem hung around outside; shortly before things got under way the price was halved, precipitating a stampede. A host of boxing old-timers showed up, including Tom O’Rourke, the fight manager who went back to bareknuckle days. Louis impressed them all with his footwork, counterpunching, and speed. “I’ve seen punches thrown this afternoon that I haven’t seen for years,” one veteran said. Louis and Blackburn also went to see Arthur Brisbane, the Hearst columnist and editor of the New York Mirror, who took an interest in boxing and racial matters. Brisbane wished Louis well, but reminded him that as a black fighter, he had two strikes against him. “We’re gonna have a lot of fun with that third strike,” Blackburn told Louis afterward.
Writers studying Louis were sizing up more than his punches. They saw him as a kind of specimen. Some, who bemoaned how the scrappy street urchins who had once dominated boxing had been replaced by synthetic types bred in gymnasiums and settlement houses, saw him as a throwback, a fighter who really liked to fight, even though he still hadn’t hit anyone as hard as he could. “I ain’t ever had to yet,” he explained. To others, he harkened back to a far more distant era. The Evening Journal called him “a throwback to the primeval savage.” The Sun scrutinized his face: “There never was such a dead pan. The eyes never light, not even when he smiles. That smile, too, is queer—just the drawing of the lips into a thin line. Never a change of thought, nor an impulse is reflected in those tawny orbs. Dead eyes; dead from freezing.”
Jack Johnson’s big fights had invariably been in remote places like Reno, Nevada, and Havana; not one had been in New York. The Louis-Carnera “mill” (to use one of Fleischer’s favorite words) would be the first noteworthy mixed bout in the city in nearly a decade. But the Herald Tribune predicted there’d be none of the racial hysteria that had stalked Johnson. Louis wasn’t addicted to any of Johnson’s “gaudy extravagances,” it noted, and the sporting fraternity no longer attached such importance to a prizefight. Besides, Carnera was hardly a hero to most serious fight fans. In fact, for most of his career, he was an object of ridicule and disgust. “This unfortunate pituitary case,” Gallico called him. “Freak” was the word most often used to describe the six-foot-seven-inch, 260-pound Italian, who’d been rescued from a circus. Many of his fights were presumed to be fixed, with Carnera getting only a negligible piece of the profits. Carnera was pathetic, but he was also courageous—“game,” to use the preferred term of the day. As long as he was champion,
he’d been the darling of the Italian Fascists, the closest thing Mussolini had to a Schmeling. In fact, Schmeling was really Hitler’s Carnera, for the Fascists had embraced professional boxing before the Nazis had, having boasted in 1933 that a “Blackshirt” had become heavyweight champion.
To Harlem, if to few other American locales in 1935, Mussolini seemed a far more immediate enemy than Hitler. His dagger was aimed at Ethiopia, one of the few African nations actually run by blacks and a source of enormous religious, historical, and political pride among African Americans. In his nationally syndicated column, which appeared locally in the New York World-Telegram, Westbrook Pegler warned of pitting an Italian against a black man in a part of New York in which blacks and Italians lived in such close proximity, calling it “the stupidest move in the history of a dumb, rapscallion industry”; only a few weeks earlier, he noted, Harlem had seen riots in which three people died. Making things more combustible, Carnera was controlled by an Italian mob and Louis was, at least ostensibly, controlled by a black mob. Dan Parker thought such warnings preposterous, but the fears resonated; Variety reported that with “the race angle intruding,” no film of the fight would be made, supposedly on orders from Washington. (Bootleg copies were in fact produced, and circulated widely.)
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