Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Legend has it that Gould pulled out because of what happened when someone from Goebbels’s office asked him to state his demands. He listed them—$400,000 in cash in a London bank, all expenses paid, an American referee—and all were readily agreed to. “What else?” the Nazi official asked. “We want equal rights for the Jews,” was Gould’s response. And the German hung up. But this was presumably just Gould boasting to Leonard Lyons of the Post. The truth was surely that Gould, who once said he’d stage a fight in the Sahara if the money was right, was simply ransoming the title to the highest bidder, and in this auction, Mike Jacobs outbid Adolf Hitler. Gould, imprisoned during World War II for profiteering, had few scruples. He knew Jacobs knew that if Braddock lost to Schmeling, Germany could sit on the heavyweight crown for the best years of Louis’s career, whatever assurances to the contrary Schmeling now offered. So he and Jacobs struck an extraordinary deal: Braddock would fight Louis all right, but only if Gould and Braddock collected 20 percent of the net profits from all heavyweight title fights Jacobs promoted over the next decade. For Jacobs it was costly indeed; it also attested to Louis’s astronomical value. (Ultimately, the secret arrangement became known; twice, Gould took Jacobs to court to enforce it.) So Louis had his title fight— almost. With Hitler now out of the way, only Madison Square Garden, and the federal courts, could stop it.

  The Garden had steered clear of New York State’s courts, evidently convinced that anything involving Schmeling would not get a fair hearing there. It went first to Miami—“Joe Louis is colored and it was easier to get an injunction against him down there,” Gould theorized—and ultimately landed in federal court in Newark, where Gould’s best defense was that the boycott threatened to ruin the proposed fight. Not only were three out of every four fans at title fights Jews, Gould asserted, they sat in the most expensive seats. To prove it, Gould’s legal team canvassed the garment district, collecting signatures on prefabricated affidavits from executives at places such as Blessed Event Dresses and Maywine Frocks. All confirmed how they usually bought chunks of tickets but wouldn’t if Schmeling were on the card. The Garden countered that anti-Nazi sentiments were nothing new. And if they were so serious, how could the Louis-Schmeling fight have produced a $550,000 gate? For every Jew who spurned the contest, it predicted, an extra Irishman or German American would go. That the matter would end up in court disgusted a sports press still pretending that “the sports pages are for sports” and that lawyers should never be in the mix. But some felt the Garden was simply trying to preserve its authority; it, too, knew that a Braddock-Schmeling fight was a dog, and half hoped it wouldn’t have to stage it.

  America’s growing hostility made Schmeling an even greater hero at home, if that was possible. On April 15, a few days after boxing was made a mandatory part of physical education for all German boys thirteen and older—“The Führer doesn’t want soft mamma’s boys but real men,” the head of German boxing, Franz Metzner, explained—Schmeling refereed

  a boxing benefit at the Sportpalast in Berlin. The affair was sponsored jointly by the local government and Kraft durch Freude, the social club the Nazis organized for German workers, and benefited the Winterhilfs-werk. Before six thousand cheering fans, Schmeling was made “German Champion in All Classes,” a newly devised title he would hold until retirement. For Schmeling and the regime, all bygones were bygones; “the wonderful style of his victory over Louis has left behind anything in the past that might have been divisive,” one paper reported. “Max Schmeling has long deserved such a distinction, after having to make his way through a swamp of undeserved insults in earlier years,” Metzner told the crowd. “They never understood that this Max Schmeling wasn’t fighting for himself alone; rather he was also a pioneer for his Fatherland outside the borders of the homeland.” There were “storms of applause” when Schmeling collected his award.

  A few days earlier, Schmeling had talked with Goebbels about his troubles getting Braddock into the ring. “Braddock is a coward, and continually searching for new excuses,” Goebbels wrote afterward in his diary. “I advise Schmeling to publicly challenge him in an open letter, which must be very carefully formulated. That should work.” But Braddock was unapologetic. “I’m not going to sacrifice my family just to please some fighter who never in his ring career has done anything to please anybody but himself,” he said. Most Americans sympathized with that; despite its well-established loyalty to Louis, even the Daily Worker liked Braddock, “a longshoreman who proudly carries a union card” and “a really swell guy” who’d refused “to scab on the fans’ anti-Nazi boycott.” Only the black papers were unimpressed; Louis, they pointed out, was Braddock’s meal ticket. “Braddock looks upon Louis as his chance to cash in at least a half million smackers before being overtaken by age and defeat,” the Associated Negro Press said.

  In April 1937 heavyweight championship boxing became a three-ring circus. The world’s three top heavyweights all began training, but only two of them would actually square off. Braddock was in Grand Beach, Michigan. His camp was a characteristically down-to-earth, casual operation, with the titleholder eating and sleeping with his sparring partners and dispensing with bodyguards. “If the heavyweight champion can’t protect himself he must not be much of a champion,” Gould mused. Louis was in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he was welcomed after the local homeowners’ association in nearby Lake Geneva, composed mostly of wealthy Chicagoans with summer homes, objected to his training there. “The ugly monster of race prejudice … has come out in the open against Joe Louis and his handlers,” one black weekly reported. And Schmeling was in Speculator, New York, the picturesque town in the northern Adirondacks where Tunney had trained and Baer had communed with the trees before losing to Louis.

  In the wee hours of April 27, a delegation from the German boxing federation saw an unusually chipper Schmeling off into what Box-Sport called his “journey into the unknown.” By the morning of May 3 he was once more back in New York, but only after he’d dodged a hydrogen-filled bullet.* The next day, with what some thought were tears in his eyes, Schmeling pleaded with the commission to protect his fight with Braddock. It did nothing. The action then shifted to the United States District Court, where, nine days later, Judge Guy Fake ruled that Braddock was free to fight Louis. Unless an appeals court reversed, or the commission intervened, the fight in Chicago was on. In Germany honor always came first, a disgusted Box-Sport declared, but Mammon controlled American boxing. And cowardice. “I’ve told you again and again, don’t box against Schmeling,” Braddock’s manager scolded him in a cartoon appearing in a Berlin newspaper. “A broken word hurts a lot less than a broken jaw!”

  As Schmeling prepared for a fight that would almost surely never come to pass, the American press disparaged him mercilessly. Underlying the ridicule was disdain for Schmeling’s stereotypical German punctiliousness. He was training for “the shadow-boxing championship of the universe,” the Mirror said. When the Herald Tribunes Caswell Adams visited Schmeling in Speculator, he found him reading German studies of American society. “Evidently Max is trying to fathom these people who have ditched him,” Adams wrote. With almost comical dutifulness, Schmeling stuck to his regimen. He never drank coffee while training, for instance, but one morning there was nothing else to drink, and his host urged him to make an exception; what difference would it make? Schmeling demurred. “If I make excuses this time maybe I make them again another time,” he explained.

  The charade played out. Hellmis arrived to broadcast the fight that would not be held. Ticket sales exceeded all expectations, Parker wrote: someone actually bought one. In fact, by June 1 fifty-four tickets had been sold—“a fair indication of just how many curio collectors there are in this city.” (They got a bonus: Schmeling’s name was misspelled.) The Garden announced the undercard for the evening, which featured real-life heavyweights like Tony Galento and Jersey Joe Walcott. Meantime, lawyers for the Garden argued their appeal before a panel of three federal judges in Philade
lphia. Braddock, a “mediocre boxer” the Garden had lifted off the breadline, was morally obliged to keep his word, one of them argued.

  As fight day in New York approached, the hilarity only grew. There were imaginary interviews with Schmeling’s spectral opponent; the Daily Worker ran a head shot—a blank square—of “Kid Ghost.” Reporters talked of writing their stories in invisible ink, and filing them by Ouija board. A deaf-mute would do the play-by-play, for a broadcast going “ghost to ghost.” There were predictions, including one that Schmeling wouldn’t lay a glove on his adversary. “If the sports injustice weren’t so great, and if Max Schmeling, who really has entirely earned his shot at the crown, weren’t affected, one could laugh at these authentically American methods,” Box-Sport observed bitterly. “A cabaret is nothing compared to them.” Hitler and Goebbels followed events closely. “With the Führer this afternoon,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on May 27. “Question if we, ourselves, in the event that Braddock chickens out, should declare Schmeling world champion. I say yes to it. The Americans are the most corrupt people on earth.”

  Schmeling followed his traditional prefight routine. On June 1 he broke camp, drove to New York, and checked in to the Commodore. On the eve of the fight, he gave a radio interview to Hellmis. “This fight for the fight has maybe been harder than the fight for the world championship itself,” he told the German audience. “You, Max Schmeling, we wish that you’ll keep calm in this struggle,” Hellmis replied. “That justice will prevail, we already know. And also that the name of the uncrowned champion of the world still is Max Schmeling!” Schmeling thanked him, and sent his best wishes to his fans back home. “If I have to wait three years, eventually I’ll bring the world heavyweight championship back to Germany!” he pledged. The taping complete, Schmeling followed another of his prefight rituals: going to the movies. This time it was Kid Galahad, with Edward G. Robinson as a pugnacious fight manager modeled, some said, after Joe Jacobs.

  At ten o’clock on the night of June 3, when the bell had been scheduled to sound, Schmeling would be “the most popular man in America,” Hellmis wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter. He added that “those representing Schmeling’s interests in America”—he couldn’t bring himself to say “Joe Jacobs”—hoped that when the boxing commissioners met earlier in the day, they would strip Braddock of his title and forbid Louis to fight him. He concluded with a rant about American prejudice against Nazi Germany, ridiculing press reports suggesting “bodies of shot Jews [lying] in heaps in the tunnels of the Berlin subway” and castigating America’s self-image as “the freest country in the world.” (Hellmis, who had already lionized Schmeling in newspapers and magazines, on radio, and in film, would soon add a book to the canon. Titled Max Schmeling: The Story of a Fighter, it opened as Hellmis’s ship headed homeward after the Louis fight, when Hellmis realized he was destined to compose “a singular song of praise” to the victor. It seemed to matter little that his victory was over “a block of wood of a primitive negro, who can’t even read or write, with the exception of his name, and who when he hears the word ‘Lincoln,’ associates with it a beautifully varnished, shiny chrome automobile.”)

  By the day of the fight, the appeals court still had not ruled. “The greatest injustice in the history of sports,” the 12 Uhr-Blatt called Schmeling’s fate. It was already a day of high drama: that morning in France, the Duke of Windsor was marrying the woman he loved. His timing had originally irked Joe Jacobs—“We set our date last winter and here [he] comes along and grabs it for his wedding. It ain’t right. It’ll kill our publicity”— but now Edward and Mrs. Simpson could have the day to themselves. New York had a spectacle of its own: “the most titanic farce ever connected with boxing.” Schmeling, characteristically, showed up for the weigh-in, at the State Building in lower Manhattan, five minutes early, and his superb condition impressed the examining physician. Fighters in the preliminary bouts also got weighed. “This here business is sorta nutty, ain’t it?” one of them remarked. It was raining; someone quipped that the bad weather could affect the gate.

  Everyone then proceeded to a fifth-floor auditorium, where the boxing commission pronounced sentence on Braddock and Gould. Each was fined $1,000, and Braddock was suspended in New York until he fought Schmeling. That meant, of course, that he could still fight Louis in three weeks’ time, and after that, who would care whether he was suspended? It was, wrote Frank Graham in the Sun, “the consummation of as complete a rooking as any one ever received in sport.” Schmeling stormed back to his hotel, leaving Jacobs—Parker called him Schmeling’s “phantom manager”—and Machon to speak for him. When the press caught up with him, they saw something they had never seen before: the quintessential control freak out of control. “Bitterness is strictly a new act with Schmeling,” Davis Walsh wrote. “Heretofore, he has been evasive, urbane, uninformative and slightly patronizing.” “Who cares about being suspended in New York?” Schmeling thundered. “Dempsey was suspended. I was suspended before. Is that a punishment for a world champion who chickens out? What is the decision—noddings! They make a joke of the title. The championship, it is a joke. And your commission is a bigger joke. I cannot help it that I beat your Joe Louis. Louis will be your champion June 23, and I knocked Louis out. Can you figure that?” On a desk nearby was a newspaper picture of Braddock taking a shower, captioned “Chubby Champion.” Schmeling grabbed it, crumpled it up, threw it on the floor, and kicked it. “That’s your champion,” he growled. “For two years he has not fought. Bah.” Schmeling paused. “It’s all my fault,” he finally said. “That’s what I get for knocking out Joe Louis.”

  Mike Jacobs quickly tried to mollify Schmeling by promising him a bout against the winner of the Chicago fight, and Louis offered the same thing. But Schmeling would not commit himself to anything. That afternoon he was to be interviewed by NBC. The session, for which he was to receive $1,500, had been entirely scripted; Joe Jacobs and Nat Fleischer, both of whom were also incensed by what the commission had done, wrote a text for Schmeling that was essentially a toned-down version of his tantrum that afternoon. But NBC refused to let him read it over the air. The network prepared a more anodyne script, which Schmeling spurned.

  On the night of June 3, newspapers were swamped with phone calls from people thinking a fight was really taking place. Dutifully, mockingly, a few intrepid reporters ventured into the rain and across the Queensboro Bridge to the Garden Bowl, just to describe the nothingness there. As one made his way, he heard shouting, applause, and music in the distance, but it was only a WPA circus in the next lot. “The sense of justice in every civilized man will rise up against this comedy,” the Völkischer Beobachter declared. One Berlin newspaper blamed New York’s Jewish governor, Herbert Lehman, for the whole fiasco, claiming he’d bought off the boxing commission. A cartoon in the 8 Uhr-Blatt of Nuremberg showed Braddock cowering in an outhouse, his gloves hanging forlornly on the door. “Severe diarrhea?” one man standing nearby asks. “No, Mister,” another replies. “He’s just scared of Schmeling!”

  Schmeling would not be among those watching Louis and Braddock in Chicago. Instead, he boarded the Europa for Germany on June 5 in what Grantland Rice called “the Mt. Everest of all dudgeons.” “Schmeling being given the run-around by Braddock,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The pig is too cowardly to take to the ring. Really American!” The German press was prohibited from pondering a Louis-Schmeling rematch because it would diminish the fury the Nazis hoped to stoke. The press “must continue to write in the sharpest manner about these American sports methods,” Goebbels instructed. Madison Square Garden did pick up one vote from the United States Court of Appeals; Braddock had been “seduced from the path of contract duty by sordid money making promoters,” one judge wrote. But he was overruled by the other two, and it was all academic anyway; the ruling came five days after Schmeling had left for Europe, with a strategic stop in London en route.

  Months earlier, a Berlin paper had suggested that having
been shafted by the Americans, Schmeling could fight a European like Tommy Farr, a Welshman, for the real world championship. A few days after the phantom fight, the führer of German boxing, Franz Metzner, informed one of Hitler’s aides that he was going to London to take in the fight between Walter Neusel and Farr—the favorite—on June 15, and that while there, he would begin arranging for what he oxymoronically called a “world championship of the old world,” pitting Farr against Schmeling. Joachim von Ribbentrop, then the German ambassador to Britain, was already on the case, and said the English had shown “the greatest interest” in the idea. Metzner told a currency official that Hitler had asked him to organize such a fight “as a counterweight against the American methods of deception.”

  Farr won the bout, with Schmeling watching alongside Ribbentrop. Already buoyed by his reception in Britain—“The incredible enthusiasm with which the fair Englishmen received him has washed away all the anger about New York’s boxing swindlers,” one German paper reported— he now had the Nazis’ top boxing official trying to arrange for him an alternative championship. In fact, the Nazis were already portraying him as the de facto world champion, the true world champion, the “moral” world champion, and when he returned to Berlin he was greeted accordingly. A week later, Metzner wrote to officials of the International Boxing Union, the British Boxing Board of Control, and their counterparts in Belgium, Spain, and Italy, urging them to break “the arrogant monopoly” of American boxing. By the end of June, Metzner reported to Tschammer und Osten that the BBBC had fallen in behind the scheme and that the IBU would soon follow suit. “The European front of unity against American gangsterism was able to be established,” he exulted.