White writers generally ridiculed the rumors, which, they hastened to point out, arose after every controversial fight. Only Collyer s Eye—whose jaundiced view of boxing was under ordinary circumstances probably closer to the mark than the see-no-evil stance of the mainstream press— suspected something sinister. “The mere fact that those back of the ‘Black Bomber’ are known mobsters and racketeers… who also control the picture rights… gave some credence or insistence to the hunt for the gentleman of color concealed in the metaphorical woodpile,” it said. Some black commentators quickly tired of the whole topic. “One thing I’m not going to write about is Joe Louis,” the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., declared in the Amsterdam News a few days after the fight. “In my office there is an unwritten and unposted sign calling upon all who enter to refrain from discussing last Friday’s debacle. The sooner it is forgotten, the better for all of us.” Gradually, the focus turned from what had befallen Louis to how he would pick himself up and whether the loss would rob him of his confidence and ferocity or would, instead, give him the only things—wisdom, seasoning, humility—he didn’t have already.
Jack Dempsey was among those who believed that Louis had become irreparably damaged goods. “Joe Louis will be licked by every bum in the country,” he said. “The Negro is all right in his place, but the prize ring is no place for him,” he said in Greensboro, North Carolina. Braddock, too, wrote Louis off. “Young or old, two hundred right hands on the kisser does something bad to you,” he said. Many felt that Louis now had the “Indian Sign”—a kind of hex or voodoo—on him. But others predicted he would be back, and how. “We think he will become a far greater fighter than ever, now that he has had his lessons, but he needed that,” said Damon Runyon. “He needed it to get him back to the schoolroom and his teachers.”
In the black community, there were some signs of disillusionment. Plans to star Louis in a motion picture to be shown in black theaters were dropped. “Negroes are now defiling the name of Louis and even accusing him of ‘selling out,’” the Atlanta Daily World reported. Roi Ottley wrote of a new expression on the streets—“Don’t be a Joe Louis”—and claimed the black public was deserting him for Jesse Owens. But votes of confidence were far more common. “I have nothing but pity and sympathy for Joe’s next rival,” wrote Ed Harris of the Philadelphia Tribune. “He’s going to get the hell beat out of him.” “Joe Louis is not through! My boy, Joe, will come through with flying colors,” Louis Armstrong declared. “Joe Louis We Are with You,” the makers of Murray’s Superior Hairdressing Pomade declared in advertisements in the black press. There were open letters to Louis, along with a new batch of encouraging poems. But perhaps the greatest expression of loyalty to Louis was disdain for Jack Johnson. Introduced before twenty-five thousand fans at a Negro League doubleheader in the Polo Grounds that fall, “the thunder of boos that followed must have rattled the very graves of Johnson’s ancestors,” wrote Roi Ottley in the Amsterdam News. “Jack Johnson played Joe Louis cheaply— and Harlem played him cheaply.”
The day after the fight, Mike Jacobs announced that Louis would return to New York in August, against an opponent still to be determined. Some, Schmeling among them, thought this too quick; Louis should take six months off after such a beating. But Louis’s handlers didn’t want him to have too much time to brood. When Louis came back to New York only two weeks after the fight, he was already in good cheer. “Guess I got a bit swell-headed, before and during the fight with Schmeling,” he said. “The swelling’s gone down considerable now.”
But Louis’s magnetism was undiminished. With the press of fans along West Forty-ninth Street he had difficulty entering Mike Jacobs’s office. Even the boatload of black athletes heading for Olympic glory in Berlin did not dim Louis’s luster. They were mostly college kids, after all, difficult for the black masses to embrace. And they were in track and field, a sport that held little appeal in black America, at least next to boxing. “A carload of Jesse Owenses, Ralph Metcalfes, Cornelius Johnsons and others could not attract as much attention as Joe Louis’s chauffeur,” the Afro-American observed. Two weeks later, Jacobs announced Louis’s next opponent: Jack Sharkey. Sharkey, who had lost the heavyweight crown three years earlier, was one of those fighters attempting a comeback to cash in on the renewed popularity Louis had brought to boxing. But he’d been only modestly successful, making him the perfect rival for a man on the rebound. Louis needed a knockout or his star would set.
But Louis’s next bout was no longer the biggest fight in the offing anymore. In late July, Madison Square Garden and Mike Jacobs agreed to team up for a Braddock-Schmeling showdown in September. It was a historic agreement, ending the Garden’s seventeen-year-long monopoly on heavyweight championship fights. With a boycott of Schmeling looming, though, Jacobs chose not to be involved, yielding his control for half the profits.
Under normal circumstances, staging a championship fight on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, would be suicidal. That the Garden would have even considered that possibility for the Braddock-Schmeling bout confirmed the feeling that with Schmeling involved, the Jews would stay away anyway. Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould, nixed the proposed date (his Jewish mother objected, he explained), and the fight was moved to September 24. With Germany consumed by the Olympics, no one there was giving boxing much thought, but the Völkischer Beobachter took note. “After a long, difficult, and unprecedentedly successful resurgence,” it said, Schmeling would soon “attempt to regain for Germany the world championship lost years ago because of an unjust decision against Jack Sharkey.”
A small crowd was only one of the problems Schmeling faced. In late July the boxing commission revoked Joe Jacobs’s license, for his repeated failure to produce his contract with Schmeling. The speculation was either that no such contract existed, or that it gave Jacobs such a pittance that he was too embarrassed to make it public. Managers generally got one-third of a boxer’s winnings, but according to one report, Jacobs collected half that, and only because Mike Jacobs had leaned on Schmeling. Yussel’s problem wasn’t his religion, it was said, but that he was dealing with someone whose credo was “Pfennig über Alles.” “Max Schmeling’s business conferences these days are 100 per cent Aryan,” wrote Dan Parker. During one meeting with Mike Jacobs, Parker claimed, Schmeling literally pushed Yussel away and ordered him to wait outside.
Schmeling planned to begin training in Napanoch in early August. Until then, he remained in Germany, enjoying his fame. On July 29 he visited the Olympic Village, where he was stormed by athletes, coaches, and officials. A dozen soldiers rescued him from his admirers “only with the greatest difficulty,” reported Box-Sport. At one point, he rushed over to Jesse Owens and grasped his hands. “I’ve heard lots about you!” he said. (Schmeling must have been shocked to learn that Owens had bet on him in the Louis fight.) Owens and his black teammates grew incensed at how the Nazis paraded Schmeling around that day; it was another reminder of how Louis’s shadow hung over all the black Olympians. “Inwardly, many of us were trying to atone for Joe’s loss,” he later said. Even when Owens won the 100-meter dash, Schmeling remained the center of attention; groups of Hitler Youth hounded him for autographs, forcing him to jump over a hedge and flee to the parking lot. The dean of British boxing writers, Trevor Wignall of the Daily Express, spotted Schmeling in one of the “exalted pews,” inaccessible to the press. “In rank and importance he did not seem to be much below Hitler and Goering,” he wrote.* But before long Schmeling was again aboard the Hindenburg, this time heading toward America. Ondra would soon follow, and after the fight the two planned to go to Hollywood—he as the new heavyweight champion, she as the film star America was about to discover. The day after he arrived, Schmeling visited Louis in Pompton Lakes, where he was training for the Sharkey fight. It was their first encounter since the knockout. “How you, Max?” Louis greeted him. “How was the zeppelin thing?”
Louis’s latest camp was as much reform school as tra
ining headquarters. Gone were the crowds, the jazz bands, the hawkers, the hangers-on. So was the golf. The signs outside read NO TRESPASSING rather than JOE LOUIS BOXES TODAY. “A tractable Joe Louis has replaced the spoiled child of Lakewood,” the Courier reported. “Jack Blackburn again has the upper hand and Louis is his willing pupil. The hero worshippers can’t tell him how good he is, but Jack can and does tell him how ‘lousy’ he is.” Roxbor-ough was satisfied. “Now you are watching the real Joe Louis, the Joe Louis he was before Lakewood,” he said. Or, as Blackburn put it, “Chappie heah got believin’ all you newspapah boys say ’bout him—that he ain’t human…. Mr. Schmeling learned him something.” Even Louis’s sleep had been restricted: no more than ten hours a day. Under the new regime there was nothing for Joe to do but talk about the upcoming fight, eat, spar, jab the bags, skip rope, and do roadwork and calisthenics. Louis’s handlers now kept his toothbrush, hairbrush, and towels under lock and key.
Sparring partners were to give it all they had, or be fired. But reports quickly surfaced that Louis wasn’t throwing his right with the same abandon, that his punches lacked their old sting and pep, that his sparring partners were tagging him, that he was sulking. “He has tried to cram ten years of boxing lessons into ten days of intensive training,” one reporter wrote. John Kieran of The New York Times thought Louis’s stupidity was now his greatest asset; since he didn’t “go in for thinking on an extensive scale,” he wouldn’t dwell on what Schmeling had done to him. Louis was a three-to-one favorite, but blacks remained apprehensive. There was very little betting on him, and ticket sales were modest. In the racially stark thinking of the time, Sharkey was thought to have a strange power over black fighters; he’d beaten Harry Wills, whom Jack Dempsey had ducked. Jack Johnson, for one, was going with Sharkey: “After they are through teaching him how to avoid a right he will be a sucker for something else,” he said. The fight generated little buzz. To Jimmy Powers of the Daily News, the principals were “a washed up old man and an overballyhooed colored boy.”
As the Louis-Sharkey fight approached, the Braddock-Schmeling fight receded. On August 12 Braddock, who was already in training, notified the commission that he’d hurt himself. The diagnosis varied: arthritis in various places; an injured pinkie (or left arm); a growth between two of his fingers. Whatever it was, it required surgery, or at least delay. Coming from the indestructible “Cinderella Man,” it all seemed dubious; everyone assumed Braddock was trying to get out of the fight, angling for a more lucrative match with Louis, and hadn’t known he was hurt until Joe Gould told him so. So on the afternoon of August 18, the New York boxing commission had two orders of business. At noon, Louis and Sharkey weighed in at the Hippodrome for their fight that night. Then, at the State Building downtown, seven doctors inspected Braddock’s hand, and promptly divided over whether he needed surgery. A “burlesque,” the News called the proceedings.
Yankee Stadium that night reflected Louis’s sharply diminished stature. Fewer than thirty thousand people showed up, a third of what Louis and Baer had drawn less than a year earlier. Black fans were conspicuously absent, as was Marva. When Schmeling, who was there to watch, stepped into the ring, he received pleasant applause, if only a perfunctory greeting from Louis. Balogh’s introduction had been stripped of superlatives; now Louis was simply Sharkey’s “very capable opponent.” But Louis still had faith in himself. When Roxborough warned him that he’d be asking Henry Ford for his old job back if he lost, Louis told him not to worry—the fight wouldn’t go three rounds.
“Schmeling was the luckiest man in the world,” Blackburn said shortly before the bell. “You’ll see.” “And everyone saw,” Vidmer wrote in the Herald Tribune. “They saw [Louis] look like the brown bomber again and not a man who was pawing about helplessly, hopelessly in a fog…. They saw Joe Louis leave no doubts as he pounded away with sledge-hammer hooks when there was time and lightning thrusts when there was only a brief opening. And they saw him keep diligently at work until he had completed his job.” Sharkey was down twice in the second round. In the third, a right sent him over the lower rope. He was up at eight, when a right and a left to the jaw put him away for good. “Joe’s mad at Schmeling, but Sharkey paid for it,” Blackburn said afterward. The few black fans on hand let out “one long sustained guttural chant of victory,” one that reflected both their renewed hope in Louis and, perhaps, their shame over ever having doubted him. To Al Monroe, it wasn’t the old Louis, but the real one; for whatever reason, “they” were letting Louis be Louis again. “Youth must be served,” Sharkey said afterward. “Louis will find that out. He’ll be thirty-four some day.” He predicted that Louis would easily beat Schmeling the next time around. Louis couldn’t wait. “I want Max Schmeling next,” he kept saying. As for Schmeling, he said Louis was “alright,” but that Sharkey had fought a “stupid” fight. Louis had made some new mistakes he hadn’t noticed before, Schmeling added. “I could beat him every time I fought him.”
Harlem was magically transformed. “Not fifteen minutes before,” wrote Ralph Matthews of the Baltimore Afro-American, “Harlem was as quiet as a convent at twilight…. Harlem was an apprehensive mother at the bedside of a dying child; Harlem was a huddled family in a cellar retreat waiting for an air attack by a squadron of bombing planes. Harlem was meek, trembling, and silent, and then—Joe knocked Sharkey out and Harlem became a seething inferno of uncontrolled joy.” Calls went out again for another crop of white hopes.*
On August 21, the boxing commission officially postponed the Braddock-Schmeling fight until June 1937. That would give Braddock’s hand, or whatever ailed him, plenty of time to heal. “I hope the twenty-one doctors can keep him alive until next summer,” Schmeling said sourly. Parker thought Schmeling wouldn’t get a chance even then. “By next June, some convenient excuse for sidetracking him will have been found and, if Louis stands up, he will get the shot,” he predicted. Mike Jacobs offered Schmeling $300,000 to fight Louis again before that. It was, he said, the fight the public, black and white, wanted. But Schmeling wasn’t buying. What he most wanted—“dreadfully and gnawingly,” Gallico wrote—was to be the first man ever to regain the crown. He’d fight Louis again, but only for twice what Jacobs was offering.
A day before a triumphant Jesse Owens returned from Berlin on the Queen Mary, Schmeling left angrily for Germany on the Bremen. Once more, there were protesters: a number of leftists, dressed in evening wear, had managed to board undetected and had occupied the cabin deck, some chaining themselves to the rail. “A Red Mob in Dinner Jackets,” one Berlin newspaper called them. Schmeling steered clear of the scuffling. The German papers blamed the “men in the background” (Hintermänner), that is, the Jews, for Schmeling’s fate, though Braddock, too, took his lumps. Even the black press felt sorry for Schmeling. Blacks knew all about runarounds, after all. But any pity evaporated two weeks later, when Schmeling’s account of the Louis fight, as told to Gallico, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. In it he reiterated his charge that Louis had fouled him on orders from his handlers; it was, he said, Louis’s only way to win. Louis said the accusation was bunk, and his circle was indignant, too. On September 17, Louis, Roxborough, and Black sued Schmeling, Gal-lico, and the magazine.
The Post called Gallico Schmeling’s “best friend among writers,” and that was certainly true. For years he had essentially been Schmeling’s mouthpiece; when he wasn’t writing stories under Schmeling’s name, he was advising or defending him or cheering him on. Shortly after he’d arrived in America, Schmeling had even asked Gallico to manage him. When questions arose about Schmeling’s politics, intelligence, or character, Gallico always vouched for him. But now, Schmeling insisted he had never told Gallico any of the incriminating things Gallico had him saying. “Maxie stepped out from under again, putting all the blame on his ghost writer with the moth-eaten gag: ‘I was misquoted,’” Parker wrote. Louis soon opted not to pursue the lawsuit. As one black paper later said, he “wanted a revenge that money co
uld not buy.”
On September 23 Louis brought his comeback to Philadelphia. His opponent, Al Ettore, had beaten Braddock five years earlier, but Louis faced greater peril from an exploding flashbulb at the weigh-in than from anything Ettore threw at him in the five rounds he managed to last. But Ettore was a local white boy, and the scene in Philadelphia offered more evidence of how raw the issue of race remained. “I suppose there were close to 500,000 Ettore fans along the sides after the fight and 499,000 spat into each passing car carrying Negro occupants,” one black reporter wrote. On October 9, Louis knocked out Jorge Brescia of Argentina in three rounds in the Hippodrome. A lull followed that fight, during which the Afro-American ran an alarming banner headline: JOE LOUIS UNDER KNIFE. (It turned out he had been circumcised.) He recovered quickly enough to stage an exhibition in New Orleans; the 7,200 fans on hand gave him a reception unlike anything the city had seen in years.
As Louis honed his skills, the scheme to bypass Schmeling intensified. As early as September, Damon Runyon reported plans to stage a Braddock-Louis fight in Atlantic City in February, four months before the scheduled Braddock-Schmeling fight. It would be a strange animal: a “no decision” contest, winnable only by knockout, with no title ostensibly at stake, though that of course was not how the world would view it. Dan Parker saw through the fog. “Now, one presumes, the plan is for Joe Louis to meet Braddock, win the title from him … and then fight Max Schmeling in a return bout next June, in which his chances of wiping out the one blot on his career will be greatly improved,” he wrote. By November, these plans were taking shape. They promised a windfall for Braddock, far more than he’d make fighting Schmeling. Louis would earn far less, but also collect far more: a chance to be de facto champion, and far sooner and easier than many people, particularly blacks, had ever anticipated.
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