The Deutscher Rundfunk had advertised a “Night of the Boxers,” with fight-related programming starting two hours before the opening bell. Anyone tuning in heard a hodgepodge of poems, announcements, music (some taken from the theatrical films Schmeling and Ondra had made), and jokes, along with an occasional interview. “We will broadcast the Louis-Schmeling fight from Yankee Stadium today at dawn,” someone would holler every fifteen minutes. “It is every German’s obligation to stay up tonight. Max will fight overseas with a Negro for the hegemony of the white race!” Many fans skipped the preliminaries and set their alarms for around the time Hellmis would come on from New York. A paper in Stuttgart reported “a true symphony of rattling alarm clocks” around three. During summers, people listened to radios with their windows open; the Viennese police were besieged with complaints from those unfortunates who were trying to sleep.
At around a quarter to eight New York time, Joe Jacobs fetched Schmeling at his hotel. “Good luck, Max!” the desk clerk shouted as they left. They made their way to the stadium, and into the dressing room. Just before Schmeling was summoned to the ring, Tom O’Rourke stopped by. “I know you can win, Max,” the old man told him. “You just have to be careful, and above all, use your head.” Then he keeled over and fell to the floor. In one of several similar versions of what followed, Schmeling took one look at his prostrate friend. “Tot,” he muttered—German for “dead”—and then, “cold as ice,” he headed for the ring. Along the way, what he felt wasn’t grief or fear or superstition but excitement: finally, he was about to learn if he’d sized up Louis correctly.
At ringside, Braddock, the incumbent but oddly inconsequential champion, sat next to J. Edgar Hoover. Fannie Brice sat with the sports-writers. In the third row, a gum-chewing Mayor La Guardia offered to write the Herald Tribune man’s story in exchange for his front-row seat. James A. Farley, the former boxing commissioner and now the Democratic Party chairman, was there. So was his Republican counterpart. So were David Sarnoff, Eddie Rickenbacker, Bernard Baruch, Irving Berlin, George Burns and Gracie Allen, George Raft, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, George Jessel, Joseph Pulitzer II, Toots Shor, Sherman Billingsley, Nelson Rockefeller, Rudy Vallee, Condé Nast, Thomas Dewey, Babe Ruth, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Sonny Whitney, George D. Widener, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt (Teddy’s son), and Jimmy Roosevelt (Franklin’s son). Just about the only black at ringside was Bill Robinson, wearing a plaid-on-plaid combination. Somewhere in the cheaper seats was Langston Hughes. A reporter from Macon, Georgia, looked overhead; an airplane circled in the sky, announcing in flashing red lights that fight films would be in theaters the next day. Maybe in New York, he mused; where he came from, a film of a black man fighting a white could never be shown.
The prefight frenzy had driven Marva to bed. But now she, along with two of her girlfriends, entered the stadium. She was wearing a red and gray outfit trimmed with a large, square, bloodred suede hat, red gloves, and red shoes. A loud cheer erupted as she smiled obligingly for fifty photographers. She then took her place in the fifth row, flanked by Mrs. Julian Black and Carl Van Vechten, the photographer. Marva expressed her disappointment that she wasn’t facing her husband’s corner. “I want to see him,” she said. Shortly before ten, the two fighters entered the ring. Schmeling, wearing his favorite spotted gray bathrobe over purple trunks, entered jauntily, a slight grin on his face. He was greeted with surprising warmth. With him was Joe Jacobs, startlingly (but only temporarily) without a cigar. An expressionless Louis followed, in his familiar shining dressing gown, blue silk trimmed in red, over black trunks. His brown body glistened under the intense lights, making him appear almost white.
Max Schmeling in 1927, a hero in Weimar Germany to fans and aesthetes alike.
The savior of boxing: Joe Louis on the eve of his New York debut, spring 1935.
For more than a decade, Schmeling was a constant presence on elegant ocean liners arriving in New York.
Schmeling (second from right) at his country house in Bad Saarow, Germany, in the early 1930s. When lightning set the place ablaze, he took special care to rescue the bust of Hitler inside.
One key to Schmeling’s popularity in the United States was his striking resemblance to the recently retired and much-missed Jack Dempsey. (Schmeling is on the left.)
Schmeling and his manager, Joe “Yussel the Muscle” Jacobs, early in their association, one of the most incongruous and politically fraught in the history of sports.
As Governor Franklin Roosevelt campaigns for the presidency in May 1932, he visits Schmeling then training in Kingston, New York for his rematch against Jack Sharkey. Eleanor Roosevelt is to the left of her husband, who spoke to Schmeling in German.
A fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in 1929 for the embattled Jews of Palestine, in which five Jewish boxers beat five Gentiles before 16,000 fervent fans, attests to the significant Jewish influence in the sport.
The New York Times took nearly a month to report that Nazi Germany had banned all Jews from every facet of German boxing, then placed the story on the back page of its sports section, beneath a banner headline on something it evidently deemed more important. Most other papers didn’t mention the news at all.
Yiddish-speaking organizers of an anti-Nazi rally in Manhattan in March 1933 knew how to reach their constituency, placing a notice—untranslated—on the front page of the New York Mirror’s sports section.
Outraging Nazis and Jews alike, Yussel the Muscle Jacobs—at right, cigar in hand—joins Schmeling and salutes Hitler after Schmeling knocked out Steve Hamas in Hamburg. The New York Daily News, March 22,1935.
Twenty-year-old Joe Louis, second from right, in the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament of 1934.
The young Louis was normally deadpan, but on occasion he betrayed the sweetness his fans detected in him anyway.
Louis with his trainer, Jack Blackburn. “I ain’t goner waste any of your time,” Louis promised him.
Louis with his mother, Lillie Barrows Brooks, in June 1935. Profiles of Louis invariably stressed his love for her, along with his clean living and religious faith.
With promoter Mike Jacobs, July 1936. Ignoring any racial barriers, “Uncle Mike” ushered Louis to the championship, while Louis made Jacobs the kingpin of “Jacobs Beach.”
With Jesse Owens, August 1935. Around the exalted Louis, wrote Shirley Povich of The Washington Post, Owens acted like “some flunky who knew his place.”
In May 1935, the New York Post conveyed the excitement as the city awaited Louis, who would fight Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium the following month.
The porters and railroad workers at Grand Central Terminal lifted Louis off his train when he arrived in New York for the first time, in May 1935. Other travelers that morning “had to carry their own baggage,” the New York Herald Tribune reported.
Joe and his bride, Marva Trotter Louis, stroll triumphantly through an adoring Harlem on September 25, 1935. The previous night, only a couple of hours after marrying Marva, Louis knocked out Max Baer before 95,000 fans at Yankee Stadium.
Visiting Louis as he trained for Paolino Uzcudun in December 1935, Schmeling checked out Louis’s fist, along with the flaw he thought he’d detected in Louis’s technique.
Louis walking away from Uzcudun, down and out for the first time in his career. Watching Louis box, wrote Richards Vidmer of the Herald Tribune, was like hearing Caruso sing or Fritz Kreisler play the violin.
On the eve of the first Louis-Schmeling fight, Ring magazine sized up the contestants.
Clem McCarthy, the NBC announcer. He missed some key punches, but immortalized an epoch.
Nat Fleischer, editor of Ring. In an era of intolerance, he championed the underdog, including a foreigner like Schmeling and a black man like Louis.
Arno Hellmis, the Nazi announcer. In victory, he was ecstatic and crystal-clear; in defeat, he was inconsolable and almost unintelligible.
Joe and Mike Jacobs flank Schmeling aboard the Bremen
in April 1936, as Schmeling arrived for the first Louis fight. For the Nazis, such fraternizing with Jews was a Rassenschande —a racial scandal—but business was also business.
Louis with black reporters in Lakewood, New Jersey, in the spring of 1936. Coverage of him in the black weeklies was lavish, lively, and loving.
The weigh-in for the first Louis-Schmeling fight, at the Hippodrome, June 18, 1936.
Marva at ringside before the first fight, June 19, 1936.
Louis in his corner just before the knockout, peering into “a world full of pinwheels and skyrockets.”
As a Berlin newspaper subsequently documented, Anny Ondra listened to her husband’s first fight with Louis at the home of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, as her hosts hovered protectively nearby.
As Arthur Donovan counts out Louis in the twelfth round, Schmeling exults. “The condemned man executed the warden,” wrote Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram.
Schmeling, a drenched Joe Jacobs at his side, walks triumphantly through his dressing room.
The nation’s only black daily newspaper neatly summarized reaction to the Schmeling fight.
Louis allowed no pictures after the fight, when his inflated face was likened to a loaf of bread, a coconut, a cantaloupe, and a watermelon. But a couple of days later, he looked like this.
The Chicago Defender saw diabolical manipulations behind Louis’s loss.
While much of New York mourned Schmeling’s stunning win, spirits were high in German Yorkville, on the city’s Upper East Side.
“Schmeling: ‘The happiest day of my life’”: front page, Berliner illustrierte Nachtausgabe, June 20, 1936
About to board the Hindenburg, June 23, 1936. On a cake labeled “K.O.,” the marshmal-low victor stood triumphantly over his prostrate, chocolate-covered foe.
“If they think I’m too old already, I at least have to make use of my ‘fatherly authority.’” Der Kicker, June 23, 1936
Those attuned to the nuances detected something amiss in Louis’s demeanor, a turbulence beneath his customary impassivity. He looked paler, meaner, edgier. Again and again, he rubbed his left glove against his neck. He appeared to be mouthing off to Blackburn. Once again, something about the way Schmeling looked at him seemed to unnerve Louis. His anxiety radiated to some of the blacks sitting in the crowd. “A sort of premonition seemed to hang over Yankee Stadium,” one black reporter later recalled. “There was that something that seemed to whisper out of the darkness, ‘Louis is not ready.’”
An NBC technician handed a microphone to Hellmis, who had been relegated, in what Box-Sport construed as a slap to German honor, to a makeshift nest of chairs and boxes in the twelfth row. He took some deep breaths to gain some composure. Holding the mike in one hand, he corralled Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey with the other. “I wish good health to all my friends in Germany,” Tunney said. “And I also hope that Schmeling will spend the evening in the best of health.” German fans might not have liked that last crack had they heard it; but it was hard to make out what anyone was saying amid the roars in the Bronx and all the scratches, crackles, and hisses picked up on the line between Poughkeep-sie (site of the General Electric transmitter) and Berlin.
The referee, Arthur Donovan, sprinkled the canvas with powered resin out of a yellow can. As the men put on their gloves, Harry Balogh introduced Dempsey, Tunney, Braddock, and other ring notables. Despite his now-customary plea for tolerance, he failed to introduce the three great black fighters present: Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, and Harry Wills. But that was a slight only blacks noticed. Then he got to the principals: Schmeling, striving to win back the title both for himself and for his Fatherland, and Louis, “one of the greatest heavyweights in the annals of Fistiana.” Louis got the bigger hand. “Let us cast aside all prejudism,” Balogh declared. “Let us say Ring the bell, let ’er go, and may the best man be the winner.’” The crowd roared back, part approvingly, part derisively.
Donovan gave his instructions. To one reporter, Louis seemed “sneeringly confident and patronizingly bored.” “He gave Max a fleeting glance, as much as to say, ‘You’ve got your nerve,’” he wrote. Schmeling studied the left side of Louis’s face, still boyishly smooth and perfectly intact, which, if he hit it as often and as hard as he hoped to, would quickly be pulverized. Soon, it was that electric moment before the bell. “Nervous conversation popped on all sides like firecrackers,” wrote James T. Farrell, who was covering the fight for The New Republic. Louis was in his corner, eyes darting; Schmeling sat imperturbably in his. Their seconds gave them last bits of advice. For Schmeling, it was to hit early, to win Louis’s respect, and to hit late, too, so that Louis would be too groggy to absorb whatever his seconds told him between rounds. For Louis, it was to take his time, to keep jabbing, to keep Schmeling off balance so that he couldn’t land his right. The lights went down everywhere but over the ring. At 10:06, the bell sounded.
Louis came out with “an almost insolent confidence.” He began jabbing Schmeling at will, until the German’s left eye quickly began to puff and discolor. But Louis was leaving himself open for a right cross, just as Schmeling had expected. Schmeling missed with his first one, but the crowd cheered; it was the first daring punch many of them had ever seen thrown at Louis. In the first clinch, Louis was “filling in”—throwing meaningless punches, often a sign of someone on edge. Sitting at ringside, Tunney thought he saw an old truism emerging: a boxer needed a year to adjust to marriage, and here was Louis, married but nine months. To Hellmis, the cheering was strictly racial: shrill screams from blacks and Mischlinge—people of mixed race—whites holding back, soaking in the drama. At the bell, both men returned to their corners confident. “This baby is easier than either Carnera or Baer,” Louis told Blackburn. Louis could hit, Schmeling acknowledged. But “he iss going to fall for it.”
Beforehand, Louis had bragged that he hadn’t felt a single blow in his last fourteen fights. This changed in the second round. Ignoring Blackburn, he came over with a left hook. That created an opening for Schmeling’s right, which landed squarely on Louis’s chin. Louis was dazed momentarily and fell into a clinch. The punch “sort of deadened everything—bounced off a nerve or somethin’,” he later said. “Now your fight is really on!” rasped McCarthy, who was scurrying to get in as many plugs for the sponsor, Buick, as he could; Louis fights, after all, always ended so quickly. Jabbing continuously, Louis won this round, as he had the first. But Schmeling was impressing people. As for Hellmis, who was clearly enthralled by New York, he filled in between rounds describing the skyline of the “fairy-tale city” before him, which would not have been visible from his seat.
As the third round got under way, Schmeling’s left eye was already closing. Though Louis had yet to unload, he was inflicting enormous punishment with left jabs; after one of them, Schmeling turned and spit blood from his split lip. But Hellmis remained optimistic. “Schmeling is delivering a wonderful fight,” he said. “Doesn’t respect the Negro at all. He is probably the first heavyweight since the rise of Joe Louis who is giving him a manly fight.” Some sensed the end was already near. Two black gamblers waved wads of cash, offering twenty to one that Schmeling would soon be knocked out. The German was so bloodied that one boxing commissioner was shouting to stop the fight. Even Hellmis knew that Schmeling had to do something soon. In fact, Schmeling had gotten through with another right. Many had missed it, but not in Schmeling’s corner. “You fetched him a pretty good one,” Machon told him after the bell. “I think I knock him out,” Schmeling replied. “I have him where I want him.”
Schmeling waited for his moment. Suddenly, in the fourth, he got through one hard right, and then another, and then the unimaginable happened. “Schmeling is backing away cautiously,” McCarthy croaked, “waiting for some opening that he wants … and … ahhhhh! Schmeling got over a right hand … high, on Louis’s jaw that made Louis rock his head! Schmeling has sent Louis down! Joe Louis is down!” Louis, who had not been on the canvas
in his entire professional career, was there now. Completely unaccustomed to working the count, he remained down for only two seconds. The mood in Yankee Stadium jolted into an entirely unfamiliar gear; with one punch all of boxing had been upended. Hats and papers came cascading down from the upper decks.
“Louis is struggling! Louis is struggling!” Hellmis exclaimed. “Louis is down…. Max knocked him down! Bravo Max! Bravo Max!” Hellmis apologized to his audience: he couldn’t hear himself above the din. “The Americans are literally ecstatic!” he declared. “They never saw Joe Louis down.” But the same was true in Germany; in a farming hamlet outside Magdeburg, people were jumping for joy as the first tractors pulled out of the village. For Hellmis and everyone else in the stadium it was hard to follow the action, as people stood up, or stood on their chairs, or stood in the aisles. Cries of “Down in front!” sounded plaintively, uselessly. “Joe, honey, get up! Get up!” Marva shouted, as people around her yelled, “Kill him, Max! Kill him!” Louis was transformed. He looked like a “young cub who had been roundly cuffed by a grizzly that he thought to be playful.” Even Schmeling seemed startled, standing agog rather than rushing in for the kill.
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