Schmeling had already cabled Joe Jacobs, who was in Chicago for the other championship fight, and declared that he was done with America. Jacobs was asked if he thought Schmeling was serious. “You can bet all the tea in China he is,” replied Jacobs, who saw his meal ticket floating away before his very eyes. “When he makes up his mind on something it stays made up.”
* Schmeling had originally planned to travel to America via the Hindenburg, arriving on May 7. But at Joe Jacobs’s insistence—Jacobs wanted him in New York when the boxing commission met on May 4 —he had departed earlier by boat. The dirigible, minus Schmeling, blew up as it arrived in New Jersey; thirty-six of the ninety-seven passengers and crew died. Among the dead was the heir to Schmeling’s ticket.
Banishing Jack Johnson’s Ghost
SHORTLY BEFORE THE LOUIS-BRADDOCK FIGHT, perhaps as he was about to board the train for Chicago, Grantland Rice talked to a redcap at Grand Central Terminal. “Joe Louis was a great fighter when he was tearing three chickens apart,” the man told him. “But now, he’s eating chicken en casserole, and I’m afraid he won’t do much. I’m afraid Joe’s gone soft.” Rice agreed. Strictly as a physical matter, Louis should win in five rounds, he believed. But mentally and psychologically Louis wasn’t even close to Braddock, and Braddock was no Aristotle. “The Schmeling fight almost wrecked Louis,” Rice warned. “When anyone throws a right now, Louis begins to duck before the punch starts.”
As the comic opera of the phantom fight played out in New York, Louis and Braddock quietly trained. Braddock was as he always had been: shopworn but scrappy, rusty but determined. The more interesting issue was which Louis would be on hand—the wunderkind or the busted phe-nom. The question hung over his camp in Kenosha like the smoke from the nearby car plants. The newsreels showed mobs of happy white children clustered around him. In twelve years of school, Roy Wilkins observed, those same youngsters would never learn a good thing about Negroes, but Joe Louis was real to them—a “living argument against the hypocrisy, meanness, and hatred of the color line in America.” Thousands of Chicago blacks hopped on special trains to watch Louis practice. One, a paraplegic who had not left his hospital in three years, arrived by ambulance and watched his hero while propped up on a stretcher.
Louis insisted he would not make the same mistakes he had made a year earlier, and that even if he did, Braddock was no Schmeling; it took Schmeling sixty swings to knock him out, he said, and Braddock was only half as strong. Already, Louis and his handlers were anticipating Schmeling. Louis said he wanted to fight him in the fall, and then quit; by then he’d be earning $10,000 annually from his properties, and that would be enough. He’d already rented the camp at Pompton Lakes, and after two weeks off, he planned to train for Schmeling for the rest of the summer.
But once again, the reports from Louis’s camp weren’t good. He looked lethargic. He was no longer hungry—a trap, some sportswriters believed, which black fighters were particularly prone to fall into—and had gone soft and flabby. He had too much to learn and too little time to learn it, or had learned too much and had too little time to unlearn it. The Louis of old would have no trouble with Braddock, but the Louis of Kenosha was “just a cheap and sleazy road company of the original production,” Jack Miley wrote in the Daily News. His handlers had tried instilling fanciness into an instinctive fighter, and had ruined him; nobody, said Miley, “will ever be able to pound anything through his kinky skull.” Louis, Collyer’s Eye gloated, was “going the way of nearly all negro gladiators”: “Money and food have the best of him.” It still picked him to win, discounting rumors that the fight was “in the bag” for Braddock. “The group of Nigger mobsters controlling the Brown Bomber was strong enough to turn thumbs down on all requests to ‘do business,’” it reported. So worried was Mike Jacobs that he dispatched Harry Lenny, a savvy retired white lightweight who’d once fought Blackburn, to check Louis out. The black press once more saw the horror stories as a racist plot, and was more concerned over rumors that the Louises’ marriage was foundering. “This is Joe’s first romance and if it is on the rocks it is also Joe’s first heartbreak, and brother, you can fight better with a broken hand than with a broken heart,” warned Lewis Dial of the Amsterdam News.
Once again, many dismissed the gloomy dispatches as Mike Jacobs’s usual manipulations; Braddock was too old and had absorbed too many punches to put up much resistance. “I can think of a million things wrong with Louis,” observed Jimmy Powers. “He is green. He is slow-witted. He stands like a dope when he is nailed. He has absolutely no defense against a right cross. He has had a lot of easy fights…. He can’t feint, jab, block or in-fight for sour apples. A dancer, a cutie, can slap him silly.” He picked Louis anyway. So did most of the experts: eighty-six out of one hundred, according to one poll. The oddsmakers favored him twelve to five, the first time since 1892 that a challenger—at least one who hadn’t previously been champion—was favored over an incumbent. “Youth, speed, strength, reflexes, punishing power—with all the advantages Louis carries into action he ought to be ashamed of himself if the fight goes beyond the sixth or seventh round, because it will be the final proof that he is lacking in both smartness and courage,” Rice maintained. Neither man impressed Jack Dempsey—“One guy is getting old and hasn’t been in the ring for a long time. And the other guy doesn’t know much and goes off his nut when you hit him in the head”—but he picked Braddock, especially if the fight lasted more than a few rounds. Braddock wasn’t discouraged, for he’d been a ten-to-one underdog against Baer; odds of three to one against him, he joked, ought to make him a sure thing.
With all that preceded the match, it was easy to forget that something many had vowed would never happen again was about to: a black man stood to become heavyweight champion. Pegler once more called it insanity to stage a mixed bout in a black neighborhood; Miley warned that if Braddock won, the riots that followed the Johnson-Jeffries fight would seem like “mild contusions and abrasions” by comparison. The NAACP braced itself for a Louis win. Should that happen, Walter White advised black newspaper editors, “there should be a minimum of exultation shown.” He urged his organization to mobilize ministers, social workers, and others so that a Louis victory “might be taken in its stride and not made the occasion for serious clashes.” A black weekly in Nashville felt compelled to remind readers of all the whites who had befriended Louis throughout his career. “Louis will be the last colored man to get a crack at the title if you guys start painting the town,” the Baltimore Afro-American warned. “Race pride is one thing and hooliganism is quite another,” another black writer admonished. The Houston Informer cautioned blacks to remain calm and modest even when whites praised Louis. “A white man can say a lot more about the defeat of a white man in the presence of other white people than a Negro can, and get away with it,” it explained. “The saner ones of our group can help a lot by pouring cold water on the over-enthusiasm of loud-mouthed-street-corner talkers by changing the subject or distracting the listener. Quietly work for suppression of bragging in the presence of white people.”
This was Chicago’s first big fight since Tunney beat Dempsey there a decade earlier. Things had calmed down since those days when Al Capone still reigned and everyone seemed to pack heat. But Chicago was still Chicago. On the town with Damon Runyon, Trevor Wignall observed that everyone seemed to be named “Red,” “Lefty,” “Good Time Charley,” or “One-Eye,” and cabdrivers routinely asked fares whether they wanted additional “entertainment.” The lobby of the Morrison Hotel became a temporary isthmus off Jacobs Beach. It was from there that New York sportswriters could cast their jaundiced eyes on America’s second city, and describe what a hick burg it really was—a place of poor service, bored shopgirls, and conniving taxi drivers, in which even the most pretentious bars served lemon soda in their mixed drinks and ginger ale in their gin rickeys. “Chicago is one of those places good for one big splash about once in every five years,” was how one veteran New York spor
tswriter put it.
Ticket sales lagged a bit, because of either the turmoil surrounding the fight or the high price of seats. Or maybe in Chicago people were accustomed to getting their mayhem for free. “Why pay $27.50,” one New York sportswriter asked, “when you can see a massacre for nothing any time the coppers fire on the pickets? Or any time the mobsters decide to settle a territorial dispute?” Scalpers reported little business. “They ain’t educated out here,” one New York dealer complained.
But black America wasn’t jaded. By one estimate, blacks bought three of every ten tickets, leading one writer to rechristen the fight site “Black and White Sox Park.” More than five thousand blacks were due in from Detroit on three special trains. Another large contingent came from Harlem, “and among all of these you find not only the notables, but Shoeshine Sams, hoboes, and others whose exchequer is very limited,” one black journalist wrote. Three hundred people boarded a train from Memphis. From Kansas City there was a $21 special. From Houston the “Joe Louis Special,” sponsored by the local black weekly, cost $35, but that included round-trip fare, fight tickets, a night’s lodging, a meal, “a good time en route”—and precious peace of mind.* Whites could also come, in a separate whites-only car.
Some blacks still suspected the fight was fixed, that “Washington” had decided America was not yet ready for another black champion or that fight bigwigs, fearing the heavyweight division would shrivel up if Louis won, had made sure he wouldn’t. Black fans hounded Mike Jacobs for assurances that things would be legitimate. Adding to the unease was the nagging sense that Louis wasn’t Louis anymore. When he visited Harlem, Ted Poston of the New York Post—the first black reporter hired by a mainstream New York newspaper—was struck by how many people had stuck around. Anxiety or poverty had kept some of them home; others had had their fill of trains when they’d left the South. Not that people weren’t following the fight: as it approached, one store owner said he’d fixed more radios in the past two days than in the previous three months.
Five hundred fight writers from all over the world converged on Chicago, though one place went conspicuously unrepresented. “Germany isn’t interested,” the Herald Tribune reported. “The outcome of the fight between Braddock and Louis should not be covered excessively,” the German press instructions declared. Only short reports would be tolerated, the newspapers were told, and should focus on how it was more of a financial than an athletic affair. Only Americans, said Box-Sport, considered this a real title bout; the shadow that Schmeling would cast over the proceedings, it said, would be darker than Louis’s skin. As for Louis, he was “a primitive man, a boxing machine without the sparks of divine intellect.”
More than two thousand people showed up for the weigh-in at the Auditorium Theater. Joe Gould tried giving Louis the evil eye, and when that failed, took another tack. “Gee, Joe, you sure are light for this fight,” he said. “Only 197½. You must be doin’ a lot of worryin’.” “You claim Schmeling sneaked the punch that knocked you out, don’t you, Joe?” he went on. “Well, don’t worry about that tonight. We’ll fight you clean. Jimmy’s right was never better. We won’t have to sneak with it. We know you don’t take it so well on that side, but we won’t club you the way Schmeling did. Jimmy’s a puncher, not a clubber. The first clean shot he gets, it will be over. We won’t have to mess you up the way Schmeling did.” On and on he went; Louis even smiled.
Whatever the hoopla, there was disappointment in the air. Not long ago, Louis had seemed destined to take the title by storm; now, he stood to win it almost by default. Even his friends at the Chicago Tribune had fallen out of love with him. “There is no legend of world domination or invincibility about either of tonight’s contestants,” Arch Ward wrote. The letdown was visible at the box office: at noon the day before the fight, 40,500 tickets remained unsold. But the police were taking no chances. Officially, they would station a thousand men in the stadium and another two thousand nearby, but rumor had it there’d be more. By one account, one-sixth of the entire Chicago police force would be working, augmented by a regiment of state troopers “armed to the molars.” Firemen laid hoses to douse potential rioters.
At dusk, people began making their way to Comiskey Park, passing vendors hawking fried chicken, pennants, jars of gin, and Louis photographs. The ring, shipped from New York, was the same one in which Schmeling had knocked out Louis. Sitting closest to it was the usual Hollywood contingent: this time, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Bing Crosby, Mae West, Carole Lombard, and George Raft. Where Al Capone and his cronies had congregated a decade earlier, J. Edgar Hoover now sat. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner who had kept baseball lily white, and Branch Rickey, the man who was to integrate it, were on hand. So were Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, two-thirds of the famous double-play combination for the Chicago Cubs. Also at ringside was much of boxing’s storied past. The last heavyweight title combatants here, Demp-sey and Tunney, now sat next to each other. Nearby was Jess Willard, who’d beaten Jack Johnson twenty-two years earlier in Havana in the last “mixed” heavyweight title bout. He shook hands with Dempsey, who’d mauled him in Toledo, Ohio, four years later, in what became the gold standard of heavyweight ferocity. (As they posed, someone yelled that it was the longest Willard had ever stayed upright with Dempsey.) Jim Jeffries, the former champ whom Jack Johnson had beaten in 1910, was also present. Only Johnson was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, the black papers speculated, he feared being dunned—or jeered. The choicest seats were “completely alabastered”; the black celebrities who did show up—Bill Robinson, Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald— sat farther back. Louis had asked his mother and Marva not to come. (Marva would listen on the radio with the society editor of the Chicago Defender and the wife of a “widely known mortician.” Louis’s mother stayed home.)
A preternaturally calm Louis, surrounded by policemen, made his way toward the ring—“a sheepish-faced boy in a long bathrobe, his eyes on the ground, his lips those of the old-fashioned shuffling ‘coon,’ not those at all of the alert, educated modern Negro,” one Chicago reporter said of him. Braddock followed. Louis wore his usual blue silk bathrobe; Braddock’s was bright green, with a shamrock. Around his neck was a Catholic medal. The Chicago ring announcer introduced the celebrities, with none of Harry Balogh’s brio. Louis got more boos than cheers. Before the first punch was thrown, history had been made: at twenty-three years old, he was the youngest challenger in heavyweight history. The fighters had been specifically instructed to head for the farthest corner in the event of a knockdown; Chicago wanted no reenactment of the “Long Count.” “Chappie, this is it,” Blackburn whispered to Louis shortly before the bell sounded. “You come home a champ tonight.” Meantime, life stopped in black neighborhoods everywhere. “Every man, woman and child with normal emotions dedicated the night to prizefighting, put aside every other consideration, and crammed their heads as close to the nearest radio loudspeaker as possible,” the Norfolk Journal and Guide said. Once more they would hear Clem McCarthy sharing the microphone with Edwin C. Hill.
The fight started at an astonishing clip, with Braddock taking charge. He was thirty-two years old, and figured to run out of steam first; he had to win fast. The two traded punches furiously, and with a right uppercut to the chin, Braddock knocked Louis down, becoming only the second person—after Schmeling—to do so during Louis’s professional career. The crowd was electrified, though Louis popped up before the referee could start a count. Quickly, he had Braddock’s left eye bleeding. Braddock had never been counted out before, nor, he insisted, had he ever felt any real pain in the ring, but Louis’s first left hook made him feel sick. In the second round things slowed down. In the third, fourth, and fifth the fight wasn’t settling in so much as it was evolving: Louis was becoming more precise, while Braddock was faltering.
In the sixth, the assault intensified. Braddock’s knees wobbled and the fight appeared to be almost over. Once the bell had sounded, through his
damaged eyes, Braddock saw Gould reach for a towel. “You throw that towel in there and I’ll never speak to you again. Never,” Braddock told the man who had managed him, through good times and lean, since 1926. Gould held on to the towel. But in the seventh, his legs wide apart, his arms leaden, his right eye swollen, his left eye ready to shut, Braddock continued to wilt. “Braddock fought a more relentless foe than Joe Louis last night,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. “He fought an enemy no boxer has beaten. He fought age.” In the eighth, Louis readied himself for the kill. “Get your hands up, Jimmy! Get your hands up, Jimmy!” Gould shouted. Braddock tried to obey, but he couldn’t get them high enough. McCarthy ticked off the punches: a left to Louis’s body, a hard left to Braddock’s head, then another under the ear. “And there Braddock came up with a right uppercut that missed, Louis has backed out of the way in time,” he said. “Now Braddock is in the center of the ring…. And Louis gave him … and Braddock is down!”
McCarthy, characteristically, never caught up to the fateful punch, but it was a right hook to the jaw, one of the hardest, most visible, and most audible ever; never, someone later said, had a punch sounded so loud. Even in the slow motion of the fight films, Braddock’s head twisted quickly. Louis’s blow knocked every bit of moisture off it, encasing it momentarily “in a halo of gleaming particles.” “Braddock went over stiffly—like something wooden and unreal,” Considine wrote. It was only the third time the Cinderella Man had been down, and now he lay flat on his face, blood running onto the canvas. “The count is two!” McCarthy chanted. “Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten! A new world’s champion! Joe Louis is the new world’s champion!” And a new kind of world’s champion, too, one whom blacks and whites could share. Louis had come back—not to the Louis of myth, perhaps, maybe just to what he had always been.
Beyond Glory Page 31