Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Someone handed a British reporter a boycott flyer. It stated, inaccurately, that “a quarter of every dollar” spent on tickets ended up with Hitler and reminded people, accurately, that none of Schmeling’s take went to refugees. “The first knock-out in next week’s big fight has been landed: the boycotters have taken it,” he observed. “The intensity of the boycott will not stop thousands of Jews and all Harlem from going to the fight, but they will go with the fervent hope of seeing Louis cut Schmeling to ribbons.” Berlin newspapers were as pleased with brisk ticket sales as Mike Jacobs was. “The alleged anti-German attitude of the New York audience, once used to justify the cancellation of the Schmeling-Braddock bout, could not have been refuted more convincingly,” a reporter wrote.

  The Broadway columnists had ignored the boycott. Though staunchly anti-Nazi, Walter Winchell had praised Schmeling and taken him and Joe Jacobs on a tour of local hot spots. The publisher of the Post was on the league’s board, yet his paper, I. Q. Gross charged in The Nation, had “ballyhooed the fight like it has never ballyhooed any other fight in history.” Gross pleaded with league leaders to be more aggressive. The group boasted that Mike Jacobs was well short of the million-dollar gate he envisioned; Schmeling would bring home far less bacon than Goebbels had expected. “The League expresses the profound hope, inasmuch as the fight is to be held, that it will result in a knockout wallop to the Nazi yowl of Aryan supremacy,” it declared. In other words, the fight was going forward anyway, so pull for Louis. Picketers were outside Yankee Stadium the day before the bout, carrying BOYCOTT THE FIGHT banners. But no one picketed the Hippodrome, where tickets were actually being sold, and most fans bought them by mail anyway.

  In a radio interview from Pompton Lakes, Nat Fleischer predicted a paid attendance of 74,982 and a gate of $1,062,000. Scalpers were selling $30 tickets for $100 to $110; ringside seats were fetching $200. A reporter from New Orleans detected last-minute demand among conformist New Yorkers afraid to miss something big. A Virginia paper sneered at how, in a country racked by Depression, seventy thousand fools could drop $1 million on something so inconsequential. “As long as people are boobs enough to pay a fortune to a couple of prizefighters to perform for their entertainment, the pugilists can’t be blamed for taking the money,” it added.

  Finally, the time came for the fighters to break camp and head for New York. Louis’s trip was uneventful. Schmeling’s was not.

  On the afternoon of June 21, some thirty hours before the fight, Schmeling was scheduled to board a train in Amsterdam, New York, that would reach Grand Central around ten that night. For a week, though, rumors abounded that he would come by air. On his Sunday night radio program, Walter Winchell made it official: “Max Schmeling will fly to New York on the day of the fight!” he announced breathlessly. “Dick Merrill will handle the stick!” Merrill was a legendary aviator, the first ever to fly round-trip across the Atlantic, holder of several speed records, rescuer of Antarctic explorers. The year before, Franklin Roosevelt had invited him to the White House, and Eddie Rickenbacker called him the best commercial pilot in the United States. But Mike Jacobs wasn’t impressed. To him flying was still too dangerous, and was, like horseback riding or baseball playing, on his list of proscribed activities. Jacobs went further, calling a local company that rented planes to make sure no aircraft was available. But Schmeling, and Merrill, could not be stopped. For Schmeling flying was simultaneously a way to save time, have a great adventure, show his sangfroid on the eve of the biggest moment in his life, tweak Jacobs, intimidate Louis, and protect his own well-being: he and his people believed Jacobs wanted him rattled by a long and rickety train ride.

  Jacobs’s phone call scuttled Merrill’s original, spectacular plan to rent an amphibious craft and land it on the lake outside Schmeling’s cottage. Instead, Merrill obtained a plane from Eastern Air Lines, which he flew to Schenectady on Tuesday afternoon. He then drove to Speculator, where he dined with Schmeling and some of his friends. By seven-thirty the group—which included Joe Jacobs, Machon, two state troopers, and a pair of reporters—was at the airport in Schenectady. Schmeling boarded fast, taking time only to wave to the two hundred or so people who had somehow caught wind of what was afoot. Within ten minutes, the hour-long flight to Newark had begun. Once the plane leveled off at four thousand feet Schmeling took the controls, where he remained until they were over the George Washington Bridge. He appeared almost boyishly gleeful over evading Jacobs’s strictures. But the German was “Sphinxlike” as he emerged from the plane, leaving all the talking to Yussel. He would not even say where Schmeling was spending the night, though it was one of his usual haunts: the Essex House, on Central Park South.

  The staff there had readied the place, installing an air conditioner to protect Schmeling from New York’s blistering summertime heat. His chef was already on the job, in a secure kitchen. A reporter in Berlin reached Schmeling by phone just as he arrived in the lobby. “Next time we’ll speak, you’ll be world champion,” the reporter said. “Hopefully,” Schmeling replied with a laugh. “Things should work out fine.” Around nine, Erwin Thoma and two other German journalists went to Schmeling’s suite, on the thirty-sixth floor. Greeting them in an anteroom were three detectives, armed to the teeth. Thoma was struck by how suspiciously the policemen eyed even the maid who came to make up Schmeling’s outsize bed. More detectives were in the lobby; Schmeling was protected like a jewel. “We find this all a little strange, exaggerated,” Thoma later wrote. “At home a guard of detectives would be ridiculous. But here in the United States, the country where kidnapping, along medieval lines, is still known as a form of blackmail, this caution is entirely appropriate.” Even stranger to him was the mood in Schmeling’s room: something “serious and depressed” hung in the air. For two hours, all attempts at sociability failed. “I don’t know what’s wrong up there,” Thoma told his colleagues after they’d left. “Schmeling is so quiet, like I’ve never seen him before. Is something worrying him?” The night was oppressive, at least for Germans, one of those New York summer evenings when even the walls seemed to sweat. “We sink into the asphalt and the skyscrapers disappear in the fog,” wrote Curt Riess, the German-Jewish émigré covering the fight for Paris Soir. “Everyone is drained of their energy.” Thoma worried that going from the cool breezes of Speculator to the “city of wash-house air and the smell of gasoline” could weaken an athlete, cut his force of will in half.

  A fan had approached Schmeling in Speculator once, saying he’d come 1,500 miles to see him. “You’ve traveled 1,500 miles to see me but I’ve traveled 60,000 miles to get a close-up of Louis,” Schmeling replied. And it was true: for Schmeling and for those who followed him, the fight marked the end of a long, long trail. Six years had passed since Schmeling had lost the title, and a year had gone by since he’d been robbed of his chance to regain it. He had overcome all the setbacks, obstacles, disappointments, and harassment, but he still faced every athlete’s greatest adversary: time. For most boxers, thirty was the fatal divide, when legs, judgment, reflexes, and stamina began to wane. Though Schmeling was now pushing thirty-three, Thoma thought him still as young, ambitious, self-confident, and strong as a twenty-five-year-old. Louis, at twenty-four, enjoyed youth and all the physical advantages of his race, Thoma acknowledged, but with it came the black man’s weaknesses: indifference, melancholy, a spirit easily broken and impossible to repair. Hurt a black man only once, Thoma believed, and “something somehow turns off in his brain and in his heart.”

  Throwing caution to the wind, the Angriff now apotheosized Schmeling into a modern Germanic hero: “In him, too, the wanderlust of the typical German has always been alive.” Always, he had been “called by the far-away, like all those who feel a drop of the blood of the conqueror in their veins.” Schmeling personified everything positive: “He is life affirming, he is the embodiment of optimism, and when others doubt, then Max becomes calm for a few moments, stands up, and then says with his deep voice, ‘Even that
we can do!’” A newspaper in Königsberg fit Schmeling specifically into Nazi ideology. “National-Socialist Germany, the sports people, is imbued with this: that man can be not only in top form for a few years, but perform at a high and respectable level over a long period of time if only the will is hard enough,” it wrote.

  For “Germany’s best-known radio announcer,” as the 8 Uhr-Blatt called Hellmis, it was also a climactic moment: his faith was about to receive its sternest test. A visitor to any German kiosk found Hellmis expounding on Schmeling wherever he turned, and in none of those venues did he ever waver. His conclusion was inescapable: logically speaking, Schmeling simply could not lose. “Nothing but a dumb accident, which in boxing must certainly always be taken into account, justifies pessimism,” he wrote. Schmeling would need six rounds or so to thwart “the primitive nature-boy.” Most American sportswriters would have agreed with him, he said, if denigrating Schmeling was not just a matter of professional self-preservation—they had, after all, to placate their Jewish bosses—but one of self-enrichment, too; by raising the odds against Schmeling, they’d collect more betting on him.

  Thirty thousand people had entered the Angriff’s pool. Readers picked Schmeling by one hundred to one. Of the 6,000 who participated in a similar contest in Nuremberg, only 150 brave souls went with Louis; the ratio was about the same in Hamburg.* The Angriff offered snippets from twelve entrants, all picking Maxe, all parroting the Nazi party line. “I’m just afraid that Schmeling will still lose a sure victory through some kind of treacherous incident,” one wrote. “Schmeling will do it, even though Louis probably hopes to be able to bring about the opposite through low blows,” stated another. “A Negro can and never will summon the ambition Schmeling has,” said a third.

  As the fighters made their way to the city, so did thousands of fans; three-quarters of them, Jacobs estimated, came from out of town. “Not a train pulled to a stop in Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station without pouring out fight customers,” wrote Henry McLemore of the United Press. “Not a bus jerked to a halt in the city’s dozens of terminals without unloading more of the same. Not an airplane taxied to a halt at Newark airport without a fight fan included in its cargo.” Never, in fact, had so many fans arrived by air. Others came by boat, be they one-day excursions from Boston (round-trip fare: $6.75) or transatlantic voyages. Tommy Farr came via the Queen Mary, and spotted a crowd around another celebrity passenger as they disembarked. It was Joseph P. Kennedy. “Who’s he gonna fight?” Farr asked. Trains teeming with Louis fans came from Detroit, Chicago, and Washington. A “Louis Victory Special” pulled in from Philadelphia. A caravan of two hundred cars arrived from Pittsburgh; a similar procession came from New Orleans. Relief officials in Cleveland and Chicago were reportedly checking whether anyone on their rolls had headed to New York. A hundred blacks came from Atlanta, infuriating a minister there. “I can count on the fingers of one hand the Negroes who are really able, without sacrifice to their families or themselves, to take this long and expensive trip,” he groused. But his complaint, like the boycotters’, was futile.

  The density and pace of New York changed. Jack Dempsey’s anticipated an additional $10,000 a night in business. With so many people in town, attendance at Aqueduct Racetrack was of “holiday proportions.” A Broadway movie theater did a brisk business showing films of the first fight. “As jittery as a bridegroom fumbling for a wedding ring,” was how The Washington Post described the city. But the neighborhood that was most transformed was Harlem. Its hotels, penthouses, guesthouses, flophouses, and crash pads filled up, as did its bars and restaurants. The Hotel Theresa put beds in its lobby to deal with the overflow. “Not even General Washington in his Revolutionary War rambling had as many headquarters as do the Joe Louis fans,” the Associated Negro Press wrote. The rich flaunted their money—the Amsterdam News reported more Packards and other fancy cars on Harlem’s streets than on the assembly lines of Detroit—while the poor scraped together what little money they had. One reporter spotted a black woman purchasing two $11.50 seats. “From her bag, she drew an old blanket-sized $20 bill that must have been under a rug since Dewey steamed into Manila Bay,” he wrote. A store on 125th Street had marked radios down to $50 for the occasion, with many buyers paying for them in installments. “Of course, after the fight, there will be a rush to reclaim these machines from delinquent customers, but they shall have heard the fight,” one black weekly reported. The neighborhood went about its business with a mix of eagerness and apprehension. Most of the visiting Germans stayed on their ships. But in a bow to Schmeling, the Casino movie theater on East Eighty-sixth Street featured Grossreinemachen, a comedy starring Anny Ondra.

  Uncertainty over the fight was ubiquitous. “It is a grab in the dark, a guess thrown to the winds, a groping in the fogs of chance—no matter what anyone may tell you,” Grantland Rice wrote. Another sportswriter spent the day before the bout on Jacobs Beach, schmoozing with managers and seconds, trainers and reporters, fighters and hangers-on—the greatest concentration of fight experts on the planet, at least until the next night in Yankee Stadium. And from all those conversations, he reached only one conclusion. “This,” he wrote, “is the fight nobody knows anything about.”

  * The Nazi press laughed off such speculation. A paper in Hamburg joked that were Schmeling to lose, he would have to report to the Gestapo daily and recite a Christian prayer of repentance 207 times. Then he would be thrown in the meat grinder, with his remains fed to the fishes. But if he won, Berlin would erect a monument for him along Unter den Linden, and Hamburg would be renamed “Schmeling.”

  * It was a far cry from Warsaw, where an estimated eight thousand people placed bets, with most wagering their zlotys on Louis.

  The Fight

  EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 22 —fight day—five thousand people stood on the south side of West Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue. Someone with an eye for drama and publicity had wisely decided to move the weigh-in from the dingy, claustrophobic downtown offices of the boxing commission to something more spacious and splashy: the center of the arena at Madison Square Garden. Five hundred policemen held back the teeming crowd as it awaited the two principals.

  Schmeling had spent a fitful night, disturbed by the traffic around his hotel, and slept until eleven. A mass of people cheered as he left the Essex House and made his way south a few blocks to the Garden, in a car driven by Joe Jacobs’s detective brother. The perpetually punctual German arrived thirteen minutes early, at 12:47 p.m. He was very much unshaven, and wore a dark suit. He clasped his hands above his head as the crowd shouted its approval. When he stepped inside, someone handed him an envelope. As strange as it seemed—why there, rather than at his hotel? and who was the courier?—it was a cablegram from Adolf Hitler. “To the next world’s champion, Max Schmeling,” it said. “Wishing you every success.”

  Louis arrived twenty-five minutes later, in a shiny blue limousine, followed, in what some saw as an ill omen, by a long black hearse. So many people clogged the thoroughfare that the car had to slow to a crawl as it approached. The Louis that emerged was a “Creole fashion plate,” wearing a gray plaid suit with pocket square, soft hat, open-collared shirt, foulard, and sunglasses. He, too, received a boisterous ovation. Mike Jacobs, wearing a straw skimmer, escorted him inside. Three doctors examined the fighters in their respective dressing rooms. One of them pronounced Louis to be in much better shape than for the last Schmeling fight; never, he said, had he examined a more perfect athlete. The two boxers met coming out of their quarters and shook hands. A grinning Schmeling was the first to say hello, and Louis—irritable because the weigh-in had been postponed an hour, thereby upsetting his sleep cycle—mumbled a reply. Then they walked together to the ceremony, clad incongruously in suit coats and trunks. Louis, the area beneath his left eye slightly swollen from sparring, wore gray suede oxfords, Schmeling a pair of bedroom slippers. The head of the boxing commission, General John J. Phelan, greeted the two of them and joke
d that because they presumably knew one another already, there was no need for introductions. A courtly Schmeling asked Louis how he was, and held out his hand. Louis said hello.

  Ignoring the old boxing shibboleth that it brought bad luck, Schmeling had shaved. Stripped naked, he stood on the scales, grinning and winking at the press. He came in at 193, a bit lighter than he’d expected, but a pound heavier than for the first Louis fight. When Louis’s turn came, he balked. “I ain’t going to take my pants off,” he declared. “Make ’em turn those things off,” he added, pointing to the cameras. After a three-minute huddle, Roxborough announced that if the cameras were shut off and the lights lowered, Louis would drop his trunks. He weighed 19834. The Bomber was “as emotionless as the corner of a house.” The two fighters mugged for the photographers, with Louis offering Schmeling a limp handshake and Schmeling holding his right fist a quarter inch from Louis’s jaw. James Dawson of The New York Times thought that Schmeling looked intimidated. Chester Washington, one of ten Courier reporters covering the fight, reminded Louis of the New Year’s resolution he’d made to him. “I know, and I’m gonna finish this one in a hurry,” Louis replied. He had heard about the Führer’s telegram, and said he would make Hitler sorry he had ever sent it.

  The boxing commission barred the Chicago-made gloves Louis preferred, whose protruding thumbs, Schmeling charged, could have poked him in the eye. It was a victory for Joe Jacobs, who had seen them to be, as someone joked, “not only a menace to his fighter, but also a violation of the Constitution, a reversal of the Dred Scott decision, an insult to the American flag, and an abuse of the pure food and drugs act.” Schmeling and his entourage quietly repaired to the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx, four blocks from Yankee Stadium. It was a way to shake the press, avoid the long drive from Manhattan later on, and take an afternoon walk in the fresh air. Louis went to Duke Ellington’s apartment, where neither Blackburn’s jokes nor someone tickling his feet could make him laugh. For a couple of days he’d been surly, barely talking to people, grunting out monosyllables. “We’d better let the champ rest,” Blackburn said. “He’s in a bad mood.” “I’m goin’ out and fight three rounds as fast as I can go,” Louis told Blackburn. “If Schmeling is still on his feet after that you’d better come get me.” Blackburn himself was satisfied. “I did all I could,” he said. “He’s as good as hands can make him.”