Listening to it all, throughout Germany, were those stalwarts who had again managed to stay up, this time until four a.m. As usual, Schmeling’s chums gathered at the Roxy-Bar, Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, among them. Each put up a bottle of champagne, with the person predicting the outcome most accurately collecting the lot. No one picked Schmeling to lose, or even just to win on points. For several rounds Schmeling simply shook off the cobwebs. Then he went to work, knocking down Thomas six times. In the eighth round Thomas was poised to fall yet again when Arthur Donovan called the fight. “Max’s rooters rattled the windows with their ‘heils,’” the Daily News reported. Joe Jacobs vaulted to the nearest microphone. “Schmeling desoives all the credit in the woild, ’specially since he’s been out of the ring such a long length of time,” he said. Fora fighter his age, Trevor Wignall wrote, Schmeling was absolutely remarkable, almost a freak. Coming after Louis’s dismal showing against Farr, the match convinced many that they’d watched the next heavyweight champion.
In his dressing room, Schmeling said he felt the long layoff in his bones. That, plus all those Atlantic crossings, had taken their toll; though he believed he could face Louis as he was, he wanted two more tune-ups, a desire that greatly displeased Mike Jacobs. “My nerves are shot,” Jacobs complained. “Why doesn’t he hide himself until June?” As Jacobs spoke, the German ambassador to Washington, Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, and the German consul in New York, Hans Borchers, entered. Dieckhoff seized Schmeling’s hand, still wrapped with gauze. “Max, you were wonderful!” he exclaimed. They spoke German a bit and then he left, with the ambassador’s aide giving a Nazi salute on his way out. The now-customary telegrams from Göring and Goebbels were joined this time by one from Rudolf Hess. Göring conferred on Schmeling the right to hunt a moose, a privilege reserved for VIPs. When Schmeling called Ondra to report his victory, he learned that Hitler had called her first.
Only two years earlier in the same spot, people had watched Schmeling watching Louis for the first time, and thought they saw him blanch. This time, everyone watched Louis watching Schmeling for the first time, at least as a spectator, and thought they saw him squirm and wince. “Emotionally, Louis probably took as much punishment last night as Mr. Thomas,” Joe Williams wrote. Actually, Roxborough, Black, Blackburn, and Louis saw nothing special or terribly alarming. Black said that Schmeling “looked terrible,” and that if Louis couldn’t knock him out in two rounds “he ought to go back and work for Mr. Ford.” Louis, his interest in the fight “contained in a prodigious yawn,” agreed; if he couldn’t whip him, he said, he never wanted “to see another pair of gloves.” Schmeling would encounter a different Louis come June, he said, someone who wouldn’t “go messin’ roun’ in no fog for twelve rounds.”
The postmortems were as much about politics as pugilism. Of enormous symbolic concern to all involved was the size of the crowd—the place was sold out—and of the gate: “Some of my friends informed me quite a few Jewish persons were in the crowd and I want to acknowledge my gratitude for their sportsmanship,” Schmeling said afterward. As Parker pointed out, there was something bizarre about Jews protesting a fight promoted by a Jew between two boxers with Jewish managers. Any anti-Nazi cause that had lost him was clearly doomed. No longer, he wrote, could Mike Jacobs hide behind the threat of a boycott to protect his hegemony over the heavyweights.
The German coverage was routinely ecstatic. The newspapers were filled with reports of Schmeling’s proficiency and Thomas’s bravery. “Max Schmeling’s popularity, particularly with the Brown Shirts, now knows no bounds,” The New York Times reported from Berlin. Schmeling was ageless, crowed the Angriff, impressing even the Americans; on this evening at least, “he would have knocked out any other heavyweight in the world.” But more noteworthy than Schmeling’s performance was the blow dealt to the boycotters. “Schmeling Also KO’d the USA Jews,” the 8 Uhr-Blatt proclaimed. “The Agitation Against Schmeling from the Synagogues Has Collapsed.” A cartoon on its front page showed one of Schmeling’s punches sending Thomas missile-like into the gut of a corpulent, scraggly tycoon labeled “Samuel Untermyer & Co.” A similar cartoon was more prophetic, showing an Untermyer-like figure wearing a Star of David on his jacket. The Völkischer Beobachter called the fight a great victory for German-American friendship. The calumnies heaped upon Schmeling weren’t American at all, but the work of alien, un-American influences, “the circle of Jewish boycott agitators, polluting the entire world.” Real Germans and real Americans had so much in common; it was such a shame the Jews in each place had to muck things up.
Boycott organizers tried to put the best face on the situation. They said Jacobs had sold many tickets at reduced prices, and only after pro-Nazi groups had all but ordered their members to go. The fight had actually netted considerably less than what Jacobs had predicted. As for the rousing ovation Schmeling received, it came from “an audience of appreciative storm troopers.” Schmeling ended up with only $25,000 for the fight; once Uncle Sam and Uncle Mike were through with him, he would have precious little to show for his labors, and Hitler even less. If it were any consolation to the league, Jacobs himself wasn’t satisfied; he hadn’t recognized many of the faces at ringside, meaning that the usual Jews weren’t there. Again he threatened to move the Louis-Schmeling bout out of New York, and even talked to Schmeling about transplanting it to Berlin. “I’ll get rid of all those headaches,” he groused. Indeed, like Joe Gould before him, he even contracted a brief case of missionary zeal, informing Schmeling that Germany could have the fight if Hitler stopped discriminating against Jews and Catholics.
Schmeling hastily left for Germany to be home for Christmas. Before departing, he thanked the Americans for their good sportsmanship. Some of those seeing him off raised their arms and shouted “Heil!” as he boarded the ship. But Schmeling kept his hands in his pockets and looked straight ahead as he walked up the gangplank. Thousands cheered him in Bremerhaven, and friends, reporters, and boxing officials, Metzner among them, greeted him when he reached Berlin. Tschammer und Osten saluted Schmeling’s victory “not only over a strong opponent but also over the hatred and slander of the eternal enemies of the German nature and of the athletic spirit.” A band of storm troopers serenaded Schmeling outside his home and staged a torchlight parade, which Schmeling watched through his window.
His ever more exalted status, and his usefulness to the regime, was apparent from the latest work in the Hellmis oeuvre: a long series on his life in HJ.: Das Kampfblatt der Hitler-Jugend, the magazine of the Hitler Youth. In twelve installments over nearly three months, Hellmis retraced Schmeling’s career and portrayed him as a regular, hardworking guy, loved and respected by all. This included all Americans—except for the American press, which was riddled with Jews. Torment at Jewish hands was nothing new for Schmeling, Hellmis maintained; “a small clique of sleazy Jewish agitators” had turned Germany against Schmeling in 1930, when he’d won the heavyweight championship. “The great boxer never learned to kiss up to the newspaper Jews,” he wrote. “Disgusted by their phony phrases, he had treated them coldly.” It marked one of the few times that the German press portrayed Schmeling himself as anti-Semitic. There’s no evidence that this was ever the case; what was significant was the extra degree to which the regime was now casting Schmeling in its image, and its confidence that Schmeling himself would offer no objection. Hellmis told his young readers that among Schmeling’s greatest treasures was a photograph of the Führer, inscribed, “To Our German World Champion in Boxing in True Admiration, Adolf Hitler.” Schmeling carried it with him at all times, Hellmis said.
“JOE LOUIS HADN’T HUNG UP his ‘sock’ for Santa Claus,” Chester Washington of the Courier wrote in his column for Christmas 1937. “He was saving it for Maxie Schmeling next June.” Washington’s colleague Wendell Smith asked Santa to give Louis something with which he could protect his jaw. The fight was still more than six months off, but the anticipation had begun. Sitting around
the Chicken Shack in Detroit, Washington sensed that Louis was angry: his crown still had an asterisk attached. And Louis still considered the German a bad sport for deliberately hitting him after the bell. “I’ll show him the next time,” he said. That was his only New Year’s resolution for 1938.
Various cities were maneuvering to inherit the rematch if Mike Jacobs abandoned New York. Chicago’s pitch was spearheaded by one Max Epstein, whose very name would presumably help defeat any boycott. Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit also made bids; a remodeled Briggs Stadium, where the Tigers played baseball, could hold ninety thousand fans. While Schmeling fought himself back into shape, Louis rested his weary hands and found that his marriage had become fodder in the bitter rivalry between two of New York’s premier gossip columnists, Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. Winchell said that the Louises were “definitely apart”; Sullivan said “a Harlem night club chorine” was responsible. A black weekly reported that the woman in question was a “sepia songstress” at the Plantation Club; another had Louis and Marva planning to break up after the Schmeling fight, with Marva walking off with $200,000 to $250,000. “Wherever she goes, she is the object of all eyes,” a friend of Marva complained. “The clothes she wears are torn to pieces by idle tongues which can find nothing else to talk about.”
From the beginning, Louis did not seem to feel unduly bound by his wedding vows. But before long, there were very public rebuttals. “Despite all of the upsetting rumors that have caused me so much embarrassment and worry, I will continue to trust the man I married September 24,1935,” Marva declared on the front page of the Courier. Louis, in turn, called Marva “the sweetest little wife a man ever had” and pledged that after beating Schmeling he would take her to Paris, where she would study dressmaking. Black America would do well to stop all this gossiping, the Defender warned; it could cause Louis to quit—win, lose, or draw—after the Schmeling fight. His fans, the paper said, had “meddled and meddled and meddled until they have driven both Joe and his wife to seek a place far away from the multitude, many of which seek to crucify both of them.” But the threat was undercut by something Louis said on the very same page. “Will defend my title as long as I keep it and the public demands me to,” he announced. “Ten years if necessary.” So the couple remained intact, at least for now. Marva even took on a new role, as the Defender’s fashion columnist.
Louis, meantime, bowed on the screen when Spirit of Youth opened in black movie theaters. He followed the premieres up the eastern seaboard, appearing before thousands of feverish fans in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Many couldn’t get seats or, even if they did, were too busy staring at the live Louis in the audience to watch the filmed Louis on the screen. That may have been just as well, for the critics, white and black, were not kind about the film, which, with its tale of a young fighter falling for a nightclub actress, breaking training, and giving lip to his managers, sounded too much like 1936 and reportedly had Mike Jacobs squirming in his seat. Louis was a great fighter and a good guy, but as a screen lover he was “a dud, with a capital D,” the Afro-American declared. But an Afro columnist thought most wives would like Louis anyway. “His awkwardness will remind them of their husband and they will feel perfectly at ease,” he wrote.
Louis inched his way back into boxing. On January 19 he stopped by Pompton Lakes, where Braddock was training for Tommy Farr. While dozens crowded around Louis, another visitor that day, Joe DiMaggio, was virtually ignored. A week later, Louis himself was training at Pompton Lakes, for a fight on February 23 against a Connecticut heavyweight named Nathan Mann. It was there, remarkably, that Louis watched the films of the Schmeling fight for the first time. A visiting newspaperman had brought it, and after a bit of hesitation, Blackburn consented to let Louis see it. So they pulled the shades, hung a sheet, and relived that fateful night of a year and a half earlier. Louis had not thrown his first three lefts before Blackburn muttered about Louis dropping his arm after every punch and then keeping it in his pocket. They watched the blow in the second that sent Louis spiraling. “I don’ ‘member nothin’ from that punch,” Louis said. “Next thing I know I’m on my way to the dressing room and Chappie heah is saying, ‘Cover up yo’ face.’”
As Louis prepared for Mann, Schmeling readied himself for a bout with Ben Foord, the onetime heavyweight champion of the British Empire, in Hamburg on January 30. For Germany it would be a double celebration: it was Schmeling’s first fight on native soil in nearly three years, and the fifth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power. Schmeling’s resurgence, and Germany’s, could be marked on the same bill. Goebbels felt it necessary to order the German press to play the anniversary celebration more prominently. An elaborate program had been planned: first would come the marching music, and then, at Goebbels’s specific direction, Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag. The fight would start as soon as the Führer finished. The Reichstag session was canceled, however; though it was not made public right away, two key generals were purged that day as Hitler consolidated his control over the German army. Instead, the audience had to settle for Metzner, who offered the usual paeans to the Führer. Both Schmeling and Foord were escorted to the ring by a phalanx of SS commandos; each gave the Hitler salute after climbing through the ropes. For half an hour, the crowd dutifully stood up and sat down through all the speeches, chants, and anthems. So swept up in the fervor was one British reporter that he, too, rose, gave the Nazi salute, and sang along. But it was Schmeling’s turn to disappoint his fans: though he was clearly superior, he couldn’t knock Foord out, settling instead for a decision. Derisive whistles filled the hall. Schmeling removed the laurels placed around his neck and gave them to Foord. The same SS men, resplendent in their black uniforms, then escorted Schmeling out of the ring.
Schmeling professed to be pleased, but others felt let down, partly because Hellmis’s call had led people to think that a knockout was near. “One had expected more,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. Hitler, too, derived scant satisfaction from Schmeling’s victory. “He tirades a lot against America and its scum,” Goebbels wrote. “He goes on about America’s miserable treatment of Schmeling.” Watching the films afterward, though, Goebbels reassessed Schmeling’s performance: “Thrilling and dramatic. A truly manly fight,” he wrote. With postproduction work done in a “real American” fashion, films of the fight, titled A Great Victor— A Brave Opponent, were soon showing all over the Reich. Still, the regime realized it had to maintain a certain distance from Schmeling. Sometime around Christmas 1937, a man had come to Schmeling’s apartment in Berlin to offer him honorary membership in the Brown Shirts. Schmeling ducked the visitor, but afterward told his friend Hans Hinkel, Goebbels’s deputy in the propaganda ministry, that if he were to join any Nazi group, it would be the SS. In February, Hinkel asked Heinrich Himmler for his thoughts. Himmler’s staff concluded quite correctly that it was a terrible idea, citing German interests abroad, and instructed Hinkel to back off.
Louis was even less impressed than Goebbels had initially been. Baer had knocked out Foord, he noted, and look at what he had done to Baer! Old age, he theorized, had finally caught up with Schmeling. “I’m kinda sorry today’s fight happened,” he said. “Because now, when I belt out Mr. Schmeling in June, people’ll say I just licked an old man who couldn’t even stop Foord. But I’ll get considerable pleasure from knockin’ him out anyway.” Ring marveled that Foord, ranked only thirty-sixth in the world, had lasted so long. “Tab this—Louis over Schmeling, by a knockout when and if,” it said. Fearing that Schmeling would embarrass or injure himself, Mike Jacobs ordered him to take on no more warm-up bouts. But Schmeling, who seemed to take pleasure in tweaking Jacobs and ignoring his directives, signed to meet an American heavyweight, Steve Dudas, for a last tune-up on April 16.
Jacobs now went public, sort of, with the offer he’d made Schmeling the previous December: a rematch with Louis in Berlin, but only if Hitler stopped picking on Jews and Catholics. He admitted that it sounded
like public relations but insisted he was sincere. Before weighing bids from other cities, he wanted to hear from Berlin. “I only hope that Hitler takes me up on this,” he said. “It would really please me.” The proposition was fine with Louis, as long as a million dollars, free of German taxes, were deposited in a New York bank beforehand (a personal check from Hitler, payable to Roxborough and Black, would do). Of course, the whole idea was ludicrous. As much as Hitler and Goebbels wanted a heavyweight championship fight in Germany, they wanted the Jews out far more. The anti-Jewish campaign accelerated when Hitler annexed Austria on March 13; in the second half of March alone, seventy-nine Austrian Jews committed suicide. When Hitler staged a “referendum” to ratify the Anschluss, though, Schmeling, along with other German celebrities, lent his support. For him and all friends of boxing, he said in an advertisement in the 12 Uhr-Blatt, voting “yes” was a way to thank the Führer for his support of the sport. “Under his leadership, German boxing has earned worldwide recognition,” he wrote. “He’s interested in everything that happens inside the ropes. So can there be any question at all for us athletes about whether we stand behind him and support him when he needs us?” German newspapers ran photographs of Schmeling and other prominent athletes happily casting their ballots.
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