Louis had hoped to train for the Baer fight at the Sulphur Springs Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Dempsey and Tunney, among others, had once readied themselves, but the hotel was not interested in a black man’s business. Louis, the black press reported, had been stopped dead in his tracks by Jim Crow, white. So he landed back at Pompton Lakes. He tried to run a disciplined camp, closing the bar because drinkers “become pestiferous and interfere no little with my daily routines,” the Chicago Defender had him saying. But visitors still came. One Sunday, there were four thousand of them, three-quarters from Harlem. Three black teenagers took ten days to bicycle 750 miles from Detroit. After Louis declined to speak to some two hundred Baptist clergymen gathered in New York, the clergymen came down to see him. “If they can learn to put as many punches into their sermons as Joe Louis did in one round of the Levinsky fight, their congregations will be benefited immensely,” the Afro-American declared. Also stopping by were Walter White, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. “Joe Louis impressed me as a quiet, well-mannered boy who wants to be let alone because he has work to do,” Wilkins wrote afterward. When Louis wasn’t punching, he was reportedly studying history, math, geography, the New Testament, the life of Booker T. Washington, the Italo-African conflict, and etiquette.
Whites who studied Louis continued to offer conflicting images of nobility and animalism. Not since Othello, Esquire observed, had there been a black warrior with half his quiet power. “He lives like an animal, untouched by externals,” Gallico wrote. “Is he all instinct, all animal? Or have a hundred million years left a fold upon his brain?” Were a prizefight purely a matter of physicality, Gallico maintained, Louis would prevail. But Gallico was going with Baer, because Baer was more of a human being, with a human being’s impulse to win.
Others agreed in their own way that Louis was an entity apart. “The Ring Robot,” Edward Van Every of the Sun dubbed him, “… a thing of gears and pistons in human guise that has been brought to the shop for oiling and tuning up.” There was bafflement and resentment that Louis did not conform to type. “He can fight, sure,” one white fan complained. “But I like a colored fighter to have something more than that. I like those wild, happy-go-lucky, easy-come-easy-go kind of fighters. This Louis, he’s just a dumb, cold guy…. He don’t give you no kick.” Black writers countered that Louis was perfectly sociable with them. “Among ofays, who seem to bewilder him, he is strangely shy,” not the “laughing, mischievous boy” blacks saw, Roi Ottley wrote in the Amsterdam News. But even they complained sometimes of getting only nods and grunts; to one, six words from Louis marked a new personal high. Once, Louis walked out as Ralph Matthews of the Baltimore Afro-American asked him something, leaving the newsman alone with a statue. “The statue was a social sort of fellow by comparison,” Matthews wrote.
Baer, meantime, trained in Speculator, New York, a small lakeside hamlet in the Adirondacks that Tunney had made famous in the 1920s. The idea was to drag him as far away from the bright lights of Broadway as possible. But the strategy backfired: in the sticks, it turned out, there was little for Baer to do but think of Louis. Bucking Baer up, at least publicly, was Jack Dempsey, who had joined his entourage. Louis, Dempsey said, had only knocked out boxers with “paper chins.” It took four years to develop a first-class fighter, and Louis still hadn’t put in his time.
New York had had its share of big fights. Dempsey’s bout against Luis Angel Firpo in the Polo Grounds in 1923, immortalized by the painter George Bellows, had drawn eighty-two thousand people; the first Schmeling-Sharkey fight drew nearly that. But these were either before the stock market had crashed or before it had fully sunk in. Now, weeks before Louis and Baer were to square off, long lines formed outside Mike Jacobs’s ticket offices. A cable came from a ship at sea, ordering six ringside seats. Jacobs set aside one thousand press seats, the most ever. There was talk of the first million-dollar gate in eight years. “Joe Louis: Will This Black Moses Lead the Fight Business Back into Its Promised Land?” Fortune magazine asked. A meeting of the Buffalo school board had to be postponed because most of its members were going to New York. A notice went up in the offices of the Sleeping Car Porters: “All those who, because of their grandmothers’ illness or death or for any other important reason, require vacation, are asked to make this known at least three days before the Baer-Louis fight.”
On September 20 the “bride-elect” arrived in Harlem, along with five pieces of matching luggage stuffed with fifty new dresses, two silver fox furs, twenty-five nightgowns, five negligees, and various accessories. Chicago’s largest department stores and the smartest shops had vied for Marva’s business, and everyone, including people close to Roxborough and Black, had urged her to patronize places like Marshall Field’s or I. Magnin. But instead the “winsome lass” had taken her trade to Mae’s Dress Shoppe, owned and run by blacks, thereby setting what one black newspaper called “an example of fidelity to racial business institutions… which could bring shame to the cheeks of most of our racial leaders and saviors, to say nothing of their wives.” Marva installed herself in the first-floor apartment of a friend at 381 Edgecomb Avenue, the building where Duke Ellington lived, in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Word was that she would not see her husband-to-be until after the fight.
Harlem was more alive than ever. “New York was the delta, and towns, cities and the hinterlands like rivers flowing into a great sea were filtering their human cargo into its fold,” Billy Rowe wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier. Sure, some unbrotherly price gouging was going on, he admitted, but “Joe Louis only happens along once in a century.” “The entire colored population of greater New York and New Jersey, from page-boys, bell-hops, and boot-blacks to the colored money baron, from the colored chambermaid to the Creole diva, they are all already saving their dollars in order to witness the battle of the century, which will be repeated if Louis wins and Max Schmeling steps up,” Box-Sport reported. “Race consciousness, class differences, until now un-crossable boundaries and unwritten laws have all crumbled under the fists of this knock-out specialist. We hope that the ‘white blood’ and the spirit of the white race, despite all mixing, will prove to be the stronger and more vital.” But even Goebbels’s Angriff caught some of the excitement. The recent crisis in professional boxing was likely to get “a first-class funeral tonight,” it said on the eve of the fight.
By that point, choice seats were going for $200 or more. Restaurants and nightclubs had trouble changing all the hundred-dollar bills that out-of-towners had brought with them. “I haven’t seen bills like that since 1928,” one recipient claimed. “Maybe the Depression is over.” Hotel rooms were so scarce that people were parking near the stadium and sleeping in their cars. For two days straight, the New York Central Railroad broke records for incoming traffic. “Up to just a few months ago, no one believed the fistic game would ever again see the wild excitement and the terrific receipts of the fat days of the mid-twenties, when everybody had money,” Runyon wrote. “Then suddenly, out of the West came stalking a brown-skinned, sad-eyed, serious boy just turning his majority, with a strange genius for this strangest of sports… and lo! the roar of the fight crowd again echoed over the land.” Underlying the fervor was race. To Gallico, there was “something Roman” about throwing a Jew and a black man in the ring together.
Louis was the favorite, but as the fight approached, the odds fell a bit. Rumors persisted that Baer had thrown the Braddock fight. Some thought insiders had decreed that a black man had gone far enough. And skeptics like O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal still insisted Louis had beaten only “an array of palookas of purest ray serene.” Then the odds rose again, to two and a half to one, amid reports that Baer had hurt his hand. Roxbor-ough and Black demanded that a guard be posted around Baer to assure he did not receive any injections. Fleischer subsequently disclosed that Baer had in fact received a shot of “cocaine” shortly before entering the ring.*
For the weigh-in, five thou
sand people gathered outside the boxing commission’s offices in lower Manhattan, and mounted police had to disperse them to let Louis—who’d alighted from Duke Ellington’s car—get through. Pulling an old prizefighter’s dodge, Baer kept Louis waiting for an hour, just to rile him up. But Louis looked at the funnies—they didn’t make him smile, either—and took a nap. When Baer finally did arrive, wearing what a British reporter called “the loudest suit even Broadway had seen for years,” he was grinning. The doctors examined Louis. “If my heart ain’t just right, doctor, it’s because I ain’t et yet,” he told one of them. “You could fight twice,” one of the doctors replied. Baer, too, got a clean bill of health, bum hand and all. But Baer seemed tense, and one writer who had called for Louis in eight rounds promptly shaved three off his prediction.
The odds stabilized at eight to five. It was one of the biggest betting fights in history; Bill Robinson placed $10,000 on Louis, then had Shirley Temple rub some well-cooked salt into his hand for luck. At a Bowery flophouse, one man hocked his shoes for fifty cents to bet on Louis. In Brooklyn, a white woman and a black woman bet their respective relief checks. In Livermore, California, the farming and cattle town twenty miles east of Oakland where Baer grew up, residents wagered $12,000 on their favorite son. “To hell with the foreman,” one worker on relief told another as they waited in line for cheap seats. “We’ll tell him we were sick.” An elderly black cleaning woman who made three dollars a week said she had been saving for two months to buy herself a seat in the bleachers.
After the weigh-in, Louis went for a walk along the Harlem River, then to the sixth floor of 381 Edgecomb Avenue, upstairs from where Marva was staying, for a nap. Around seven, he got up, showered, put on a double-breasted suit, and went down to Marva’s quarters on the first floor. Two and a half hours remained before the fight—plenty of time, it turned out, to get married.
All day long, Louis and his handlers had denied there would be any wedding. But Marva told her fiancé she wanted to watch the fight as Mrs. Joe Louis. Blackburn believed the prospect of coming home to his bride would inspire Louis to work quickly. Around seven-thirty, a marriage license, with the names left blank, arrived from the city clerk’s office. Louis was joined by Marva, who’d negotiated her way between floors by a rear fire escape. She was wearing a white velvet gown with “real ermine” at the neck, along with white shoes and a corsage of gardenias and lilies of the valley. Officiating was the bride’s brother, a minister from Iowa. Two of Marva’s sisters attended her. Roxborough, Black, Blackburn, Mike Jacobs, and a few others were the guests. The service started at a quarter to eight, and was quickly over. After kissing the bride Louis begged off; he had a date, he explained, with a fellow named Max Baer. A few minutes past eight, someone stepped outside to tell the waiting throng the history that had just been made. People screamed with delight. A police emergency squad cleared the crowd, and at 8:10 Louis, wearing an olive green hat and topcoat, got into a car bound for Yankee Stadium. Half an hour later, as the first telegrams began to arrive, Marva followed her husband.
At the stadium, the demand for tickets could not be stanched “any more than you could take a broom and dam Niagara.” A Long Island horseman paid $400 apiece for a block of ringside seats. A cabdriver watched four passengers pay $2,000 for seats, then hand him a two-dollar bill for a $1.90 fare. From dinnertime on, the subways were jammed. It was a festive crowd, though there were complaints that no blacks were on the undercard, and picketers from the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League protested American participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Officially, the paid attendance was 83,462, an all-time record for a sporting event in New York, excluding horse racing. With free tickets, press passes, and employees, the turnstile count exceeded 90,000. And with police, firemen, inspectors, attendants, and gate-crashers thrown in, there were more than 95,000 there that memorable night. Even the dugouts were filled. Another 25,000 people stood outside, following the action by taxicab radios and roars. Including the sale of radio and movie rights, the gate squeezed past the hallowed million-dollar mark—the first time that had ever happened in a fight in which Jack Dempsey wasn’t on the card, and these were scarce Depression dollars at that. Louis would get $217,337, Baer $181,114. Some 35,000 of the fans were black, and they came early, more eager to share in the occasion than to impress anyone with late entries. By seven o’clock “the outer fringes of the stadium looked like Addis Ababa.”
Around the ring, which sat as usual on the outfield side of second base, were Governor Lehman, Mayor La Guardia, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sons, Bert Lahr, Al Jolson, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Condé Nast, Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant, Irving Berlin, James Cagney, and George Raft. Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington were also on hand. So were the white actors who played Amos and Andy, who, for the first time, were missing a broadcast. Jack Johnson was there, as was Carnera. Marva, dressed in green with a shoulder corsage of white gardenias, a fur collar, and a felt hat, sat in the twenty-fifth row. Millions listened as Edwin C. Hill, a voice familiar from newsreels, described what he called “the most amazing spectacle of modern times.” For all of the dignitaries on hand, what most impressed him was the large number of women—a throwback, he speculated, to prehistoric days. Everywhere, Hill went on, people were more interested in whether the “Jungle Man” would best the “Jester” than in the threat of war in Europe.
Baer panicked as he was summoned to the ring. Call off the fight! he declared in his dressing room: he was having chest pains, or a heart attack, or something. An incredulous Dempsey practically had to drag him into the ring. To Braddock, Baer looked like someone going to the electric chair. Louis sat impassively as Joe Humphreys, the longtime ring announcer who’d come of age before microphones got good, emerged from retirement to shout out one final set of introductions. He called Louis “the new sensational, pugilistic product” who, “although colored … stands out in the same class as with Jack Johnson and Sam Langford—the idol of his people.”
For the play-by-play, Hill yielded the radio microphone to Clem McCarthy, who was making his debut in a boxing match. NBC executives had been unhappy over prior fight broadcasts, and had held auditions for replacements, with aspirants going into gyms and barking out their calls. McCarthy, an experienced horse-racing announcer, had opted instead to read a script he’d written. At a time when so much of radio was scripted, it won the day. He sat on his typewriter so that his chin was level with the ring. Another mike was installed near the arc lights to pick up the punches and the din.
Shortly before the fight, the “Inquiring Reporter” of the Norfolk Journal and Guide asked for predictions. “I dreamed about the fight not long ago and Louis was hitting Max Baer so fast the man who was broadcasting could only say ‘Louis, Louis, Louis,’” one man replied. And that’s pretty much how it was. Baer groped, punched wildly, and looked so lost that Louis thought he was throwing the fight. Meanwhile, the Bomber picked Baer apart. Within moments, the outcome was clear. In the second round, Baer kept missing, while Louis landed a series of powerful punches. Baer’s face, Hill said, was “a bloody wreck.” In the third, Baer went down for the first time, and then the second time, in his career. A black man near ringside jumped to his feet. “Kill him, Joe! Kill him!” he shouted. “Please don’t do that,” someone in Louis’s corner turned around and told him. “We don’t want that sort ofthing. It will do the boy harm.” Dempsey put his hands over his face. “Over against the ropes, and there was a hard smash to the head, and Baer is down!” McCarthy shouted. At eight he was back up. He was down again when the bell saved him at three.
By the fourth round, even “the Negro who came here all the way from Alabama to sit on the back row in the far away centerfield bleachers” knew the end was near. Louis kept stabbing Baer with his left, and when that didn’t work, he cut through with a right. By one count, he missed only two punches all night. Finally, a blow sounding like a firecracker exploding under a can struck home and Baer tumbled. “Through it a
ll, the fleeting action of a second, a low rumble had started, the distant thunder of the gallery gods heralding a storm,” wrote Arch Ward of the Chicago Tribune. “It came on, outstripping any electrical eruption for speed, swelling into a wild roar as tier after tier of maddened humans caught it up until it broke in all its fury over the gleaming square…. Eighty-five thousand persons, gone suddenly mad with excitement, were desperately yelling encouragement to the sinking Baer or shouting cheer to the attacking Louis, all individuality lost in one hoarse, guttural rumble, as the shrill barks of many field pieces far off may be mistaken for the tremendous belching of one giant gun. It was bedlam, nothing less.”
Beyond Glory Page 14