“The gasps that went up in the night sky were the loudest and most incredulous ever heard,” Trevor Wignall later wrote. Most shocked of all, he thought, were the boxing commissioners and Mike Jacobs. But the face he remembered was Julian Black’s: he was shaking his head, as if “some idiot had played a joke on him.” Blackburn stuck a sponge in his mouth. Outside, on the streets of Harlem, a great moan was almost audible. In Yorkville, where people had initially been too pessimistic to get involved, there was jubilation.
Now the fickle loyalties of the fight crowd, and even of some of the reporters, began to shift—not so much because they no longer liked Louis or suddenly preferred Schmeling, but because they knew they could be witnessing one of the greatest upsets in athletic history, and they longed to see the deal done. They exhorted Schmeling to finish Louis off, but Schmeling had his plan, and he would not be rushed to please a crowd. Black fans pleaded with Louis to be Louis again. Maybe it had been a lucky punch, or maybe he had slipped, or maybe he’d now be aroused enough to stop the dillydallying. But the Panglosses were mostly in the cheap seats. Up close, one could see the damage from that single punch. “Those far back … cannot see the stupor in Joe’s eyes,” Damon Runyon wrote. “They don’t notice the dull, dead manner in which he lifts his legs across the ring.”
Louis staggered to his feet, blinking. When the two fighters came together again, Louis managed a clinch. Twenty seconds later the round mercifully ended. Donovan turned Louis toward his corner; he’d have fallen en route had Blackburn not rushed to his rescue and steered him to his stool. The trainer shoved ammonia under Louis’s nose and doused him with ice water. He shouted at Louis, but Louis didn’t seem to hear. “Now I got him,” Schmeling said matter-of-factly in his corner. Jacobs was jabbering with excitement, but Schmeling listened only to Machon, and Machon stayed cool. “So. Den übermensch haben wir jetzt in unserer Tasche. Nun vorsichtig!” he told him: “So, now we have the superman in our pocket. But be careful!”
“Jack Blackburn, for the first time that I’ve ever seen him, looks worried,” McCarthy told the radio audience, before passing the microphone to Hill, who began cramming in various public service announcements in case the fight came to an abrupt end. Hellmis lamented that Louis had been saved by the bell. As the fifth round began, Louis had to be pushed into the ring. “Schmeling has got all the confidence in the world,” McCarthy declared, as the German quickly connected again. “Louis is meeting the hardest right-hand punches that he has ever faced…. This is the only punch [Schmeling’s] got, but what a punch it is tonight.” Louis, by contrast, pawed more than punched, “following Schmeling like a hurt boy,” as McCarthy put it. At the end of the round, Schmeling struck Louis with another ferocious blow, worse even than the punch that had decked him before. Donovan said it landed precisely at the bell; Fleischer, three seconds after; Blackburn, ten seconds later. Blackburn was almost furious enough to go after Schmeling himself; now, Louis’s head might never clear. But the bell was hard to hear, and Schmeling, surely more than any other fighter, would hardly have risked everything with an illegal punch. Louis’s camp never formally complained; even now, they had to be beyond reproach. But they would remember.
In Louis’s clouded brain, all of Schmeling’s punches were blending into one. “I just remember one pop, a sort of sudden blaze of lights that turned loose in my head, and after that I felt as if I were trying to run through a field and kept running into things and falling over things,” he later said. He walked back to his corner, The Washington Post reported, “like a man on stilts with his kneecaps bending the wrong way with every other step he took.” A new wave of betting swept the stadium, with the smart money suddenly on Schmeling to win. “Der übermensch hat ja Gummibeine,” Machon told Schmeling: “The superman has rubber legs.” As the sixth round began, Louis was, as McCarthy saw him, “a dazed, tired, bewildered fighter.” Schmeling was hitting him almost at will. Louis’s famous deadpan had been replaced by a look of pain and surprise. He kept blinking, as if emerging from a bad dream. His jaw swelled, and his eyes kept tearing. “Finally, a blue, the color of lapis lazuli, rimmed his eyes brightly,” wrote Bill Cunningham of the Boston Post. “He was by this time a strange symphony of unusual colors.”
Hellmis, meanwhile, was having a private conversation with a friend, to which twenty or thirty million Germans happened to be listening. “That’s right, Max!” he said during the sixth. “Stay away. Keep a good distance and don’t get trapped! We have plenty of time. The bout’s over fifteen rounds, and we’ll catch Herr Louis again soon enough.” Then he remembered his audience. “Max Schmeling is now absolutely superior,” he said. “There’s no one in this stadium who would bet a cent on Louis’s victory any longer.” Louis soldiered on “with all the boxing instinct of his race,” he continued. “The Negro now has a nervous, childish smile on his young face. Doesn’t quite know what to do. That’s not how he had imagined it. That’s no helpless, beaten boxing geezer he’s facing there. It’s a fighter with heart and energy and in splendid condition. The Black Uhlan from the Rhine is here, and he’s showing the Americans that we know how to fight.” As the round ended, a black reporter looked over toward Louis’s mother. She was on her knees, praying.
Roxborough and the others worked frantically over Louis, cheering him up, sponging his face. At first, it was Louis who had been Clem McCarthy’s sleek and powerful Buick, cruising to glory; now Schmeling was in the driver’s seat. Louis rallied in the seventh, in part because, at Machon’s insistence, Schmeling had resolved to rest a round. Once again, the crowd seemed poised to shift its loyalties. Hellmis suspected that during the break Louis had been given drugs; how else could this completely beaten man storm out now as if nothing had happened? Louis threw the first of several low blows. “Der wird frech. Nehm’s ihm wieder ab,” Machon told Schmeling afterward: “He’s getting fresh. Take the play away from him.”
In the eighth, Schmeling was back on his usual, methodical course. A black man sitting in the bleachers couldn’t make out much, but this much he could see: Schmeling kept getting through with those rights. With one of them, the crowd rose and cheered so loudly that, once again, Hellmis could not hear what he was saying. He turned to his technician, an American, whose job it was to regulate the crowd noises, only to see that he was standing on his box of instruments, roaring at the top of his voice, “Go on, Maxieboy, kill that nigger, kill him!” Louis threw two more low blows, drawing a warning from Donovan and boos from the crowd. He then placed his hands briefly on Schmeling’s shoulders and shook his head, as if to apologize for things beyond his control.
By the start of the ninth round, it was clear that Louis couldn’t possibly last the distance. “A ship in a storm without a rudder or a mast—a punching bag hung up beneath the white arc lights for Schmeling to nail,” Grantland Rice wrote. Dempsey wondered what Schmeling was waiting for. The blacks in the crowd seemed dazed. The tenth round began a bit late; Louis was fumbling with his mouthpiece. He fouled again, then threw a right so lame that it made the normally sporting Schmeling—by now with nose red, left eye completely shut, lips swollen and rimmed with blood—laugh a grotesque laugh. Louis had become “a little heap of misery,” Hellmis told Germany. Donovan considered calling the fight; Schmeling couldn’t seem to put Louis away, even though he was winding up like a pitcher. Then Louis hit low again. Schmeling now concluded the fouls were no accident; Louis himself was honest and clean, he thought, but Louis also did what he was told. In fact, while in a clinch near Louis’s corner, he thought he heard Blackburn tell Louis to foul him. With boxers no longer disqualified for low blows—thanks to Schmeling’s “victory” over Sharkey, violators could only lose the round—such tactics were Louis’s only hope. Once, the German would have been happy to win on points; now he knew he had to knock Louis out.
So the fusillade began. Blackburn watched his creation, his livelihood, the closest thing he had to a son, disintegrate before his eyes. Whenever Louis was hit, Blackburn w
inced. Schmeling hit Louis with three consecutive rights. Louis fell on top of him, and Donovan had to pull him off. Schmeling then forced Louis onto the ropes and crushed him with another right to the chin. Donovan was about to stop the fight. But Louis’s arms had dropped and Schmeling had the clean shot he wanted. Already, Rice wrote, Louis had taken more punches in twelve rounds than Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, Johnson, and Tunney had absorbed in their entire careers. And now there was one more. It sent Louis sprawling into the ropes, then down to his knees, “like a tired child at bed-time prayer,” as Hype Igoe of the New York Evening Journal put it. A reporter dictating his story to the telegraph operator shouted, “And Louis is down again and this time it looks as if he will not get up.” Louis stayed there until the count of four, his hand on the middle rope. Then he lost his grip and toppled over, his face buried in the canvas. Donovan rushed Schmeling off to a neutral corner and picked up the count, raising his arm up and down with each successive digit. Louis looked to Blackburn. “Up, Chappie! Up, boy! Steady!” the old trainer shouted at him. Louis lifted his head a bit and shook it. It was, he later said, as if a train had run over Blackburn’s voice, thinning it out so he’d sounded like a ghost. And the numbers Donovan shouted reached him as if through water. At nine, Louis’s body convulsed. In another second it was over. More than forty thousand people had to make sure they weren’t dreaming.
Even with his rapid-fire horse-racing cadences, McCarthy could not keep up, and his oddly evenhanded commentary left the impression that Louis remained much more in contention than he really was. So when the end came, millions of listeners were more shocked than they should have been. “Louis is down! Louis is down!” McCarthy shouted. “Hanging to the ropes, hanging badly! He’s a very tired fighter! He is blinking his eyes, shaking his head! The count is… the fight is over! The fight is over and Schmeling is the winner! Louis is completely out!” As Harlemites listened to their radios, “there was a miserable, frightened look on their faces, an incredulous stare into space.” In Columbus, Georgia, cheers had gone up every time Schmeling hit Louis, and “a terrific burst of acclaim” erupted when Louis was counted out. In his Chicago café, Dempsey’s old manager, Jack Kearns, who’d won himself $30,000 by taking Schmeling at six to one, bought champagne for the house. And play could now resume at that minor league game in Newark, where distracted fielders had let so many fly balls drop in for hits that the umpire had finally called time so that the players could give the fight their undivided attention.
As McCarthy’s raspy message raced across America, Hellmis’s words, ebbing and flowing, thickening and thinning, descended upon Germany and much of the rest of Europe. “Schmeling is now fighting like he never fought before!” he said as the twelfth round heated up. “He’s literally thrashing the soul out of the Negro. The Negro steps back … shaking … can’t go on. There, he’s down! Schmeling has knocked him down! He doesn’t come back up. He can’t come back up. He’s shaking his head. He knows he’s finished. Aus [Out]! Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus! … Max Schmeling has won the greatest triumph of his entire glorious boxing career! He has badly knocked out Joe Louis, Loamface Joe Louis!”
All over the stadium, fans were on their feet. “For a fraction of a moment, the crowd seemed unable to cheer,” one reporter wrote. “Then a hysterical bellow broke out.” It was for the winner, but it was also, in a way, for themselves. “Sixty thousand people stood in glorious tribute to the man who had come back,” wrote Vidmer. “They stood shouting at the spectacle they never had hoped or expected to witness, thanking their good fortune for having come.” But the cheering was, like so much of the world around them, segregated, racially and even religiously. It was, wrote Roi Ottley of the Amsterdam News, “the white gentile section” that was cheering hysterically: the Jews were taking Louis’s loss as badly as the blacks were. And blacks took it in much the way Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier described:
You, yourself are still trembling and shaken from the excitement. The stunning knockdowns, the staggering, helpless man with the brown body trying for 11 long rounds. You have seen a man down limp and useless, his eyes glassy and swollen. You have seen the rich blood of your idol flowing from his nose, mouth and cuts about the face. The inevitable, it happens to all fighters, is now before you, but you refuse to believe it. It is a dream, a terrorizing nightmare, that you keep fighting off but find that it is impossible. The dream is too real. The roar of 70,000 people [sic], the photographers, the “ticky-tick” of the typewriter and that beaten brown body before you … is the proof! On this night, June 19, 1936, in Yankee Stadium, you have seen the greatest fistic upset the world has ever known. You have seen the perfect fighting machine, Joe Louis, beaten by a grim, determined German…. You will never forget the things you have seen. Never, as long as you live … will you forget.
“There lay Joe Louis in an abject heap …,” wrote Davis Walsh of the Hearst wire service, “his cold agate of an eye grown surprisingly softened and docile and a little piteous, like that of a brown setter which has been beaten beyond all natural dignity…. He did not glance up and, I think, would have done so unwillingly. Up there, as a matter of fact, was the white master, Max Schmeling, who would beat him down again if he mustered the will to rise.”
At ringside, Louis’s mother wore a look of disbelief. Marva hid her face in her hands and said, “He’s hurt. He’s hurt bad.” One report had her fainting when Louis went down, another fleeing. “Her face streaming with tears, her hair straggling, her little red shoes dirty and torn,” a reporter sitting with her wrote, Louis’s bride “dashed up the aisle like a wild animal. Gone was her make-up and pride: all she wanted to do was to comfort Joe in his hour of defeat.” Schmeling helped Black, Blackburn, and the others lift Louis up and carry him back to his corner. In the meantime, Joe Jacobs and Doc Casey had jumped ecstatically into the ring to embrace Schmeling, who was leaping up and down himself. Jacobs’s suspenders had popped and his pants began to fall; he was jumping, stuffing his shirt back into his trousers, kissing Schmeling, and throwing his hands up in the air all at once. Schmeling darted toward the ropes, reached into the crowd for “a blocky young man in a chocolate-brown suit,” and dragged him into the ring. It was James J. Braddock. Braddock, too, was a loser that night—surely there’d be no lucrative title defense against Louis now—but he was a good sport and celebrated with Schmeling.
Schmeling had “beaten his way back over the rough trail from Has-beenville,” Runyon wrote, and now, tens of thousands cheered him on. For him, and for Adolf Hitler, too, it was a total triumph—technical, physical, psychological. It was just as the Nazis had said—discipline, dedication, intelligence, courage, and will had prevailed over brute strength—and it was almost frightening. “We never saw a gamer fighter,” Joe Williams later wrote of Schmeling. “He was so game that he scared us. He was so game we looked at him … as a deadly, sinister, unhealthy thing.” Balogh lifted Schmeling’s arm and, his voice reverberating throughout the stadium, declared him the winner. Schmeling turned to the newspapermen in the press rows. “I guess I fooled you guys,” he shouted. He also waved to Hellmis, which to Hellmis meant he was greeting all Germany. Schmeling, Hellmis told his audience, had disproved one of boxing’s most venerable adages: “They never come back.” He apologized again to his audience: His voice had faded from having had to yell over the crowd. “Please don’t hold that against me,” he pleaded. “It was just too exciting to deliver a quiet, perfect radio report.” Schmeling was standing in the ring, giving what Hellmis, if no one else, saw as the Hitler salute. “And you can hear what’s going on,” he said. “They’re cheering. He’s the man of the day…. Here stands the greatest heavyweight of all times.”
McCarthy corralled Schmeling to his microphone. “Congratulations, Max. Congratulations, my boy,” McCarthy shouted. “This is the happiest day of my life!” Schmeling breathlessly replied, his head clear enough to switch to English, and to graciousness. “And I think I fought the toughest fellow
I ever met. And I still think Joe Louis is a very, very great prospect.” McCarthy asked Schmeling how early he thought he’d won. “Well, I had a hunch in the fourth round,” Schmeling said. McCarthy then asked the same thing of Joe Jacobs. “From the beginning!” Jacobs snapped. “Never thought he was going to lose!”
Louis, his robe over his shoulder, sat despondently in his corner for several minutes, peering into “a world full of pinwheels and skyrockets,” while Schmeling made his way to the dressing room. Louis had entered the ring young and virile and invincible, and now, barely an hour later, he had become “a grotesque Stepin’ Fetchit type of a tired Negro.” “Wrapped in his garish red and blue ring robe, his head completely [covered] in a huge bath towel, he was led stumblingly down the steps and to at least temporary oblivion,” wrote Bill Cunningham in the Boston Post. He collapsed while walking across the field, and had to be carried on a cop’s back the rest of the way. “There goes one of them supermen,” Braddock muttered. “Put this in your hat, pal: All fighters are born free and equal. And if one of them looks better, remember that a couple of good right-hand chops to the whiskers will soon bring him back to the rest of the field.” Yet Louis could claim one small victory. They had always said he couldn’t “take it.” Now, he had—“in vast and amazing plenitude.”
The crowds filed out of the stadium. One departing spectator told a young black boy outside that Louis had lost. “Don’t fool me, Mister,” the boy replied. “Our Joe can’t lose.” “They wouldn’t believe their eyes,” Marvel Cooke of the Amsterdam News wrote of the black fans at Yankee Stadium. “There was something terrible—something fascinating, too, in watching a great idol fall to the ground and break up in little pieces.” A defeat was just what Louis needed, she overheard one man say; now he’d know his weaknesses when he went for the championship. “We agreed with all he said,” she remarked, “but somehow we were thinking of Hitler celebrating Maxie’s victory in Germany, and that burned us up.” For many black children, that night marked the first time they had ever seen their parents cry.
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