Donovan rushed over to the two men. Though Schmeling technically remained on his feet, only the ropes were keeping him aloft, and to the referee, it was a knockdown; for one thing, he feared that another of Louis’s blows at that moment might kill Schmeling. Donovan shooed Louis away and, his arms raised, began a count. But he’d only reached one when Schmeling righted himself. Donovan gestured for the fight to continue, and Schmeling moved forward tentatively. Puzzled momentarily by what the referee had done, Louis, expressionless as always, resumed his work. He stung Schmeling with another vicious right that sent him sprawling, then rolling over. The knockdown timekeeper fumbled for his mallet. This time Schmeling was up at four. Two years earlier Schmeling had pooh-poohed Louis for failing to take a count: a sure sign of his inexperience, he sniffed. Now, in his own befuddled state, he had done precisely the same thing. From that alone Donovan knew Schmeling couldn’t last much longer.
“Louis attacks again!” Hellmis shrieked. “Aber das ist doch Wahnsinn! [Why, that is madness!]” “And Schmeling … is… down! Schmeling is down!” McCarthy exclaimed. “The count is four. It’s…” While Hellmis managed to say little, McCarthy tried capturing it all, but even with a rapid-fire delivery honed at hundreds of racetracks, he could not keep up; no horse had ever done so much so fast. It was the crowd’s muffled, dense, thunderous roars, and not what McCarthy blurted out a millisecond later, that told the story. “With each blow you imagined Louis saying: ‘So I fouled you, eh?’ … Boom! … ‘So you gave me a beating I’ll never forget, eh?’ … Boom!” Joe Williams wrote. Black America could now exhale. “Laughter roared through the land like mighty Niagara breaking through a cardboard dike,” Frank Marshall Davis wrote. So startling was what was unfolding at the stadium that not everyone knew how to react. To Richard Wright, it was all “so stunning that even cheering was out of place.”
“Joe Louis is in his corner,” said Hellmis. “Steh auf, Maxe! Maxe! [Get up, Max! Max!]” … No, he is down for good…. No, he gets up!” And Schmeling was up again, but only for an instant. Another powerful combination again sent him to his knees. “A red drool dribbled from his lips and formed a crimson beard of bubbles on his chin,” wrote Austen Lake of the Boston Evening American. Again, Schmeling was up too quickly, this time at one. Donovan wiped the resin off Schmeling’s gloves with his shirt before jumping out of Louis’s way. “Joe Louis throws himself again at him,” a horrified Hellmis declared. McCarthy, meantime, was rattling off the punches. “Right and left to the head! A left to the jaw! A right to the head! And Donovan is watching carefully! Louis measures him. Right to the body! A left hook to the jaw! And Schmeling is down!” For the third time, Schmeling was on the canvas, this time on his side, trying desperately to get back up.
Louis’s final right to the face, the Herald Tribune’s Caswell Adams wrote, seemed “to smash it like a baseball bat would an apple.” Louis was Louis again, “abandoning all science and newfangled lessons, fighting as he must have done it in the Alabama canebrakes, as men have fought since men have borne hatred toward one another.” Even some of the reporters were shouting, “Stop it!” Machon, his face “a pale study in vicarious suffering,” then sprang into action. As the two men fought in the ring, another fight had been under way: twice already, Machon had tried to throw in the towel, and twice, Doc Casey had stopped him. Now he could no longer be restrained. He took his towel—lifted from the Concourse Plaza Hotel that afternoon—and threw it into the ring. It floated down “like a seagull” and almost landed on Donovan. “Das Handtuch! [The towel!]” Hellmis shouted. “Max Schmeling ist geschlagen! Max Schmeling ist geschlagen! [Max Schmeling is beaten! Max Schmeling is beaten!]” “Schmeling was no longer a man,” Gallico later wrote. “He was a broken, glass-eyed, silly, blubbering thing.”
Technically, boxing’s classic gesture of surrender was no longer recognized in New York State, and Donovan grabbed the towel, crumpled it up, and threw it contemptuously toward the green, velvet-covered ropes. It landed on the middle strand, where it hung limply, much the way Schmeling himself had hung only a few seconds before. Then, as Schmeling, on his hands and knees, tried once again to stand up, Machon dashed into the ring. That did have legal standing: it was against the rules, just as Donovan had reminded everyone beforehand. The referee shoved Machon aside, but it was all quite pointless. He counted to five, then declared the fight over. McCarthy struggled to disentangle what had happened, and began a count of his own. “The count is five,” he cried. And there it stayed for several seconds, before he resumed. “Five! Six! Seven! Eight! The men are in the ring! The fight is over, on a technical knockout! Max Schmeling is beaten in one round!” There was another fleeting, timeless interval, this one born of incomprehension rather than anticipation. Handlers and policemen clambered through the ropes. McCarthy fobbed off the microphone on Thorgersen and climbed into the ring as well. “Joe Louis is practically smothered by seconds, handlers, photographers, policemen, and about fifty others who’ve crowded into the spotlighted square,” Thorgersen said. “You have a feeling as you see Joe sitting there now for the first time he believes himself to be the undisputed world heavyweight champ. And the beating he handed Schmeling tonight in that one terrific, frightful round certainly dispels any doubt as to who is the preeminent heavyweight boxer in this world today.”
Donovan moved seamlessly from officiating to ministering, cradling Schmeling with his arm and, with the help of Machon, Casey, and one of Louis’s seconds, dragging his bloody carcass back to the corner he’d left so confidently only three minutes earlier, kicking up a small cloud of resin along the way. Schmeling was quivering; someone squeezed a sponge over his head, “and the water ran past the corners of his mouth in little pale red streams.” As Machon slapped his face, Schmeling came to. What was the matter? he asked. Why were they not fighting? It was all over, Machon told him: He had lost. Meantime, Joe Jacobs climbed through the ropes. “He was—for the first time in his life—speechless,” someone wrote.
In the stands there was bedlam. Tallulah Bankhead sprang to her feet and turned to the Schmeling fans behind her. “I told you so, you sons of bitches!” she screamed. Whites were hugging blacks. “The happiest people I saw at this fight were not the Negroes but the Jews,” a black writer observed. “In the row in front of me there was a great line of Jews—and they had the best time of all their Jewish lives.” Inside 938 St. Nicholas Avenue, Marva let out a squeal. “Wasn’t it swell?” she asked. Champagne was then served, though the abstemious Mrs. Louis had none of it. “My daddy told me that he was fighting this fight not only for me but for his mother and the Race,” she later said. Elsewhere, everywhere, people leaped out of their chairs. “Beat the hell out of the damn German bastard!” W. E. B. DuBois, a lifelong Germanophile who rarely swore, shouted gleefully in Atlanta. In Hollywood, Bette Davis jumped up and down; she had won $66 in the Warner Bros. fight pool. Joseph Mitchell of the World-Telegram, who stood to collect $16 in his pool, also jumped up, kicking over a cabinet with his precious—and, he learned, fragile—Bessie Smith records. “Everybody danced and sang,” Woody Guthrie wrote from Santa Fe. “I watched the people laugh, walk, sing, do all sorts of dances. I heard ‘Hooray for Joe Louis!’ ‘To hell with Max Schmeling’ in Indian, Mexican, Spanish, all kinds of white tongues.” In an auditorium in Macon, Georgia, Jimmie Lunceford and his band were temporarily, joyously ignored as “dusky maids in evening gowns and gay young bucks in the latest fads … danced spontaneous jigs without the music they had paid to hear.” Whites watched it all from the balcony.
Eighty miles away, the black field hands who had listened on Earl Carter’s radio quietly thanked him for the privilege. “Then,” Jimmy Carter was to write, “our visitors walked silently out of the yard, crossed the road and the railroad tracks, entered the tenant house, and closed the door. Then all hell broke loose, and their celebration lasted all night.” “It was hard to explain to the wife why I was taking a prizefight so seriously,” the American Communist writer Mik
e Gold later wrote.
But it was Joe Louis versus Adolf Hitler Day, and I just couldn’t think of another thing. And when I jumped up as the knockout came over the radio, and hopped around the room and howled like a curly wolf, I guess she just about gave up on the male sex. She was rooting for Joe, but not this wild way. “After all, it’s only a prizefight, and prizefights don’t decide anything real.” “Baby, dear, it’s more than a prizefight; it’s another nail in the coffin of fascism, and almost everybody, including the Nazis, feels it deep in their bones.”
Balogh fought his way into the center of the ring and announced the time: two minutes and four seconds. It was the second-fastest heavyweight championship fight ever, thirty-six seconds longer than when Tommy Burns beat Jem Roche in 1908, and four-fifths of a second faster than the 1938 Kentucky Derby six weeks earlier. Blackburn “did a fandango” as he slapped Louis on the back. But Louis showed not even a semblance of a smile as Balogh raised his hand. His lips parted only when he removed his mouth protector.
Legend later had it that when Schmeling went down, so, too, did the German broadcast. In fact, the Nazis weren’t quite so quick. Throughout German-speaking Europe, Hellmis’s dirgelike commentary continued. Now that the action had stopped, he became calmer and a bit more coherent. He had, the Jewish listener in Warsaw observed, regained consciousness more quickly than his hero, and, realizing that at some point he’d have to return home, had begun to rehabilitate himself.
He is on his knees… on the floor. Joe Louis has battered him down in the first round…. No, he has not suffered a heavy defeat, he has taken the blows, the towel just in time…. Joe Louis has succeeded in his revenge. Schmeling is beaten. Shortly before his goal he broke down. What a meanness of fate. This man who tries so hard, fails within sight of his goal. Joe Louis was terribly strong, he attacked, he threw himself at Schmeling, shattered him into pieces. One moment Max could not get away in time from the ropes and then it was too late, it happened, it was too late….
Max, our hearts are all with you, you have prepared yourself as conscientiously as anyone. … It was not meant to be, Max. But you were defeated as an honest fighter… you have shown the world what can be done with a strong will and heart and courage.
Hellmis’s soliloquy became a Festschrift, with the ambient noise of Louis’s exultant fans as its soundtrack; little did these people, the Rassengenossen and Lehmgesichter and Mischlinge and “wire pullers” and “parasites” and “children of Israel” so often vilified in German print and over German airwaves, know that while they saluted their hero that night, they were also—at least in the few remaining seconds before Goebbels’s minions finally did pull the plug—taunting Nazi Germany.
Black writers would grope to describe Louis’s astonishing power. “Fighting Fury … Forked Lightning … Blinding Speed … DESTRUCTION … JOE LOUIS! They’re all the same!” one wrote. “Horror, dynamite, mayhem, destruction, devastation, atonement are some of the choice words chronicled by Mr. Webster that found their true definition in the murderous mittens of the thundering Tan Terror last night,” said another. But the Louis with whom McCarthy caught up in the ring, only moments after the knockout, warranted other words: gentle, shy, awkward, laconic, inarticulate, boyish, sweet. “You said it would take you two rounds,” McCarthy said breathlessly to him. “You know how long it took you?” “No, I don’t, exactly,” Louis replied politely. “I imagine about a minute and a half,” McCarthy told him. “Well, that’s fine.” “Joe, which punch, if any, do you think, was the one that started him downhill?” “I think the right hand to the ribs,” said Louis. “I saw it going in there, Joe, and she looked terrible,” McCarthy replied, before throwing it back to Thorgersen. “I think Clem will agree that this is a scrap to be long remembered,” he said. Others had that same sense. “In every land and in myriad tongues they’ll tell you for years to come of the blows which laid Schmeling low,” wrote Bill Nunn of the Courier, which put out one of the several extras published by the black press that night. What turned out to be the most famous description of the fight was written by Bob Considine in the Mirror.
Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling. Louis was like this: He was like a big lean copper spring, tightened and re-tightened through weeks of training until he was one package of coiled venom. Schmeling hit that spring. He hit it with a whistling right hand punch in the first minute of the fight—and the spring, tormented with tension, suddenly burst forth with one brazen spang of activity. Hard brown arms, propelling two unerring fists, blurred beneath the hot white candelabra of the bright lights. And Schmeling was in the path of them, a man caught and mangled in the whirling claws of a mad and feverish machine.
Fred Digby of the New Orleans Item put it more succinctly. “Mox kept a bold front until the gong sounded,” he wrote. “Then he saw zomedings. It was stars.” But the prize for the shortest story went to the book editor of the Charlotte News, whose piece, headlined BLOW-BY-BLOW STORY OF FIGHT, consisted of one word: “Bang!” As the writers wrote, the photo agencies rushed out their stock. “I told you I sent out the last picture!” one harried editor shouted over the phone. “The one with Schmeling on his ass, that’s the last one!” It was the most technical of technical knockouts, declared only because Machon had rushed into the ring; no fighter had ever been more knocked out. “Donovan could have counted off a century and Max could not have regained his feet,” the Times declared. Though counts varied, one tally had Louis landing forty-one blows, thirty-one of them “serious,” fourteen of them to the chin. Schmeling landed but two, and they were cream puffs. “I was in a hurry to get that guy outta there,” Louis was to say many years later. “Artie, that was the softest dough you ever made,” someone later told Donovan. “You’re wrong there, pal,” he replied. “A referee lives a lifetime in two minutes like that.”
Schmeling made his way across the ring and threw his arm around Louis’s shoulders. It was virtually the only glove he’d laid on him all night. “Joe, you are a real champion,” he said. “You are a goot fighter.” Then he went back to his corner, stood for a moment—and began to cry. “He wept softly at first,” the Daily News reported. “Then his whole body shook, and the man, who for six years has chased his dream of winning back the world’s heavyweight title, buried his face in his soggy gloves and cried his heart’s disappointment like a chastened schoolboy.” Six rows back, Hellmis had calmed down. “Max Schmeling is sitting in his corner, quite recovered,” he announced. “‘Why,’ he probably is saying, ‘was the towel thrown?’ It was better, Max, much better…. You were beaten the moment you had the bad luck to catch that one blow, and now it is too late.” It was, Hellmis pronounced, the end of a glorious career, one to which only the greats could be compared. And had Schmeling not been denied his title match a year earlier, he’d have regained the crown. Now, it looked like retirement. “But our hearts, Max, are with you,” Hellmis continued. And when he got home, he predicted, all that talk that Germany would despise him, would even throw him into prison, would be exposed as the foolishness it always was.
Microphone in hand, McCarthy tried nabbing Schmeling before he left the packed ring. “Max! Max, come over here!” he shouted. “Bring him over! Max! Max! Max Schmeling! Bring him over, officer! Get Max Schmeling! Officer! Get Max Schmeling over here, get him! Bring him over! Max!” McCarthy was about to surrender. “They [sic] don’t look like I can get him, they’re crowding him through the ropes on the far side, he’s never even seen us. Max! I’m trying to get him. Officer! Get Max Schmeling, will ya? And I can’t get him. He’s going out of the ring.”
For the gravel-voiced announcer, it was only the latest of his many misses that night. He had missed at least one knockdown. He had missed the kidney punch. He had missed Machon’s flying towel. Twice, he’d said mistakenly that the title had just changed hands. The press would pic
k him apart for his performance. “Reduced to dithering bewilderment,” said Time. Should stick to the horse racing and stay away from prize fights, urged the Bronx Home News. “Some of the noble 72,000 appear to have by now a fair notion of what they saw,” a young sportswriter named Red Smith wrote in the Philadelphia Record. “In this respect they have a marked advantage over the 72,000,000 who still have no clear idea of what they heard.” Even the sponsor called him “a little addled.” In fact, McCarthy had produced one of the immortal moments in the history of radio. He hadn’t caught every punch, but he had captured the incomparable drama of the moment for an entire generation of Americans, and for posterity, too. With such an audience, one prescient observer speculated, “Mike Jacobs must be spending wakeful nights wondering what kind of a tie-up he can make with the television companies when that invention is as commonplace as the radio today.”
The fans made their way to the exits. One encountered a new arrival in a tuxedo, white scarf, and top hat, running wildly into the outgoing traffic. “What round is it?” he asked. “What round is it?” Many black fans lingered; on a night like this, they weren’t quite ready to leave. Others were too stunned to move, including some of the Germans. The knot of them who had earlier cheered Schmeling’s single, puny punch now sat disconsolate. “Unser Max!” someone sitting nearby heard one of them say. “Die Juden haben ihn vergiftet”: The Jews poisoned him. A German reporter cried over his typewriter.
For all the money they had spent, some fans were unhappy not to have seen more action, or at least not to have seen Schmeling suffer longer. Then there were all those who had missed the climax altogether. There was the fellow who, thinking he could beat the clock, had gone to buy a sandwich. There was Count Basie, who had bent over to pick up his straw hat. There was Roy Wilkins, who had finally reached his seat as the opening bell rang, and who was still draping his coat over it when the end came. (He still considered the fight “the shortest, sweetest minute of the entire Thirties.”) There was the man from Variety who turned around to greet Damon Runyon and turned back to learn the fight was over. There was the Courier’s business manager, who, concerned about soiling his white Palm Beach suit, had been cleaning off his seat. And the man in the mezzanine still fiddling with his opera glasses. And the woman whose purse opened, spilling all of its contents onto the ground. And the fans in adjacent seats arguing over which one of them would sit behind the pillar. And all of those behind all of those who stood up with the opening bell and never sat back down. And those whose seats, thanks to Mike Jacobs’s sleight of hand, had not been as advertised. “We might just as well have been in Anny Ondra’s chamber in Berlin,” complained an irate owner of some “ringside” seats.
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