Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Similarly, countless radio listeners tuned in too late or chose the wrong moment to fetch a beer. One man listened aboard a Greyhound bus just as it entered the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey; it was all over when the bus emerged into New York. The tubes in Dizzy Dean’s radio took too long to warm up. At a softball game in Coffeyville, Kansas, someone accidentally kicked the radio cord running under the stands out of its socket. The newest graduates of City College were unable to flee commencement ceremonies as quickly as La Guardia had. Because of crossed lines, Spanish speakers in South America heard the Portuguese play-byplay and Portuguese speakers heard the Spanish; things ended too quickly to fix the problem.

  But few of those at Yankee Stadium that night felt shortchanged. Purely as a matter of boxing, they had witnessed, or at least been part of, something extraordinary—an exhibition, Grantland Rice conceded, even greater than Dempsey in Toledo. Jim Corbett once said that in the life of every champion there came a night when he had everything; for two minutes and four seconds, Joe Louis might well have been the greatest boxer who ever lived. And to those at the stadium who had missed it, or had seen little more from their cheap seats than two specks in a phosphorescent square, there was still the lifelong privilege of saying that they’d been there. The Defender told of a man who, over three years of self-denial, set aside $350 to see the fight in style, buying himself new clothes and a ringside seat, flying to New York, staying in a first-class hotel, finding himself a woman. Though the trip had cost him his job, he had no regrets. “I’m willing to eat crusts of bread until I find another job, because I have pleasant memories to feast upon,” he told the paper. “I have lived a dream I’ve dreamed since I became a man. That’s more than most people ever do.”

  Afterward, Louis remembered how everyone had patted his back as he made his way to the dressing room. When he arrived, forty reporters crammed in with him, while forty more struggled with the police outside to join them, in a fight that was longer and more evenly matched than the one in the ring. The room was stifling and sepulchral, brightened only by flashbulbs. Louis sat on a dressing table in his bare feet, covered by towels. Policemen made it nearly impossible to get close to him; many were collecting his autograph. “Lift up that hand that did it!” a photographer shouted at him. “Ah sho ’nuff a real champion now,” Louis was quoted as saying.

  “Yeah, yo’ sho’ are,” replied Blackburn, wiping the damp off his brow.

  Someone said that Schmeling had already asked for a rubber match.

  “What for?” Julian Black shot back. “Didn’t he just have his chance and lose? We’ll take anybody else. Anybody.”

  “You must have felt different tonight, Joe, from the other night,” one reporter said. “What was it?”

  “Ah just felt stronger,” Louis said. “Ah was off that other night. Did me lotta good, though.” He was calm, matter-of-fact. That must have been someone else altogether in the ring. “He never hurt me,” he went on. “That right he threw just barely grazed me. I saw it coming and I rode with it. I’ve been telling all the folks at my camp for the last few days that I’d do it in one round. They thought I was kidding, but I meant it. I’ve felt all along that he was meat for me.” It was, Louis said, one of his easiest fights. As he said it, he yawned.

  So they don’t come back, eh, Joe? “I got what folks call revenge—and how.” Did he know how many punches he threw? “Ah don’t know how many. Ah was throwin’ ’em in there a mile a minute. I bet Smellin’ couldn’t count them, either.” When did he know he would knock Schmeling out? The moment he signed the contract. Was it the easiest fight of his career? “Levinsky was pretty easy. This is right with it, though.” Had he felt any animosity toward Schmeling? “I was sore at some of the things Schmeling’s been saying.” But what if they’d been planted? “Well, he didn’t deny them, and that’s just as bad to me.” Would he visit Germany on that European trip he’d been planning? “Now man, you know ’ah ain’t got no business in Germany.” He said it with a faint smile. Bill Robinson came in and planted a kiss on Louis’s forehead. “Why, you old son of a gun!” shouted the mayor of Detroit. “How did you do it?” “I guess I just done it, Mayor,” Louis replied. The governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, told Louis he’d never know how much he’d made his heart thump. “I’m glad I made it short for you, sir,” replied Louis, looking, as the Times put it, “exactly like a wool-gathering youngster standing in awe of royalty, instead of a young man who had just earned about $400,000 in 124 seconds.” A beaming La Guardia, somewhere underneath a ten-gallon hat, grabbed Louis’s hand. “Nice work, Joe!” he said. Braddock came in, too. “This is our anniversary tonight,” he explained. And it was true: exactly a year had passed since Louis had taken his crown, in what had turned out to be, when it came right down to it, a preliminary event.

  The other big winner of the night came by, too. “Nice work, Bomber,” said Mike Jacobs. Louis just smiled.

  It was left for Julian Black to say, “How’s that for our old boy?”

  “I knew he would do it,” Jacobs replied. But he’d given Louis an assist, given him time to get over the other fight and, as for Schmeling, “giving Father Time time to whet his scythe.” Jacobs said he would have another fight for Louis in September, and Louis said that was fine with him; all he wanted was a month’s vacation, and then he’d be ready to go back to work. Two years earlier, Black had gone to Schmeling’s dressing room to congratulate him. But now no one from Schmeling’s camp reciprocated. “Sportsmanship, I suppose,” one of Louis’s handlers muttered. Half a dozen fans stood by the door of Louis’s lair and raised their right arms. “Heil Louis!” they shouted in unison. Mounted policemen were needed to control the crowds awaiting Louis outside.

  Moments earlier, as he exited the ring, Max Schmeling had managed a wan smile for a photographer. Damon Runyon watched him take his leave, probably for the last time, at least from an American ring. If old age hadn’t already killed whatever hope he harbored of yet another comeback, war soon would. “He is a pugilistic old man from the first belt on the chops,” Runyon wrote, “and there is only one fate for old men in the ring, when a youngster is on their trail.” Joe Williams of the World-Telegram was also watching Schmeling. “To put it bluntly, he was a complete flop,” he wrote. “No other reputable challenger ever went out so ingloriously, ever looked so pathetically outclassed.”

  Williams’s thoughts then turned to Louis. “They said he’d never forget the first beating he took from Schmeling,” he observed. “In view of what happened last night, it might be added that Schmeling will never forget the beating he took from Louis. All right, Adolf, take him away.”

  * Two people sitting directly behind Hellmis later claimed he’d lifted his microphone to pick up the catcalls for Baer, and then said, “Listen to this booing. You will see from this that the Jews are no more popular here than they are in Germany.” The two eavesdroppers relayed what they said they’d heard to Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor and author, who passed it along to NBC chief David Sarnoff, who asked that an English transcript of the broadcast be prepared. It contained no such statement.

  Aftermath

  ANNY ONDRA HAD KEPT HER VOW. She had not listened to the fight, though she lay wide awake in her room as it unfolded. But Hellmis didn’t know that, and having spent most of the night talking to Schmeling, he spent his last few seconds on the air talking to Schmeling’s wife—or, as he put it, to “a young blond woman in Berlin,” assuring her that her husband was leaving the ring clearheaded, standing tall, and intact, without any serious battle scars. Then someone in Germany decided to end the transmission. “Our broadcast from the Yankee Stadium in New York is finished,” Hellmis suddenly declared. For more than two hours, Germans had been sitting in their homes and cafés and Bierstuben, and suddenly, it was all over—“aus,” as the Angriff man later wrote, using the very word Hellmis had invoked so memorably two years earlier. “That was the last word in the ether,” a listener in Prague wrote. “Germany no lo
nger reported.” In fact, there were a few more words. “That was the Schmeling-Louis fight,” an announcer in Berlin stated simply, without offering the result. There followed the sounds of the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland über Alles” and then one more word: “Heil!” “That was the last word from the receiver,” the Jewish listener in Warsaw noted. “We said, ‘Bravo, Louis!’ It was our answer to ‘Heil!’ And then we turned off the radio.”

  Now Hellmis, like McCarthy, came in for second-guessing. It was, as Box-Sport later put it, “as if someone had suddenly turned the lights off on someone reading.” So busy had Hellmis been eulogizing Schmeling, guaranteeing him safe passage home, and comforting his wife, that he had neglected to tell Germany what had actually happened; an entire nation now scratched its head. “Everyone was asking, how was it possible??” Box-Sport complained. “How did Schmeling actually go down? Which punch was it? What was the cause? When and how did Louis hit Schmeling? No one could say. No one had any idea what was going on.” Sure, it had been—to use a word not quite yet in vogue—a blitzkrieg, too fast for anyone to describe completely. But instead of offering a recapitulation, the broadcast was over, “and everyone sat bewildered in front of the radio.” Anyone tuning in late might have thought his receiver wasn’t working. In one neighborhood in Nuremberg, the silence was broken by the sound of someone taking an ax to his radio. In Schweinau, people heard a loud bang, then saw the remains of a radio in the street. Were the two owners upset over having missed the fight? Or over having heard it? Like everything else about that night, it was unclear. After months of conditioning, Germans were utterly unprepared for what had happened, then utterly baffled by it.

  “Shaking our heads silently, we disperse,” wrote a reporter for the Angriff who’d listened in a small restaurant in Berlin. “In the streets, from all the bars and cafés which had tuned in to the fight, came other men who stared soberly into the morning. Only slowly were they able to speak again.” The Roxy-Bar was like a tomb. As Louis pummeled Schmeling, “a breathless, half-loud crossfire of weak cries” had gone up in a bar on the Alexanderplatz. Then all grew quiet and completely still. “We looked at each other silently,” a newspaperman from Dresden wrote. “No one can find a word. We turn off the radio. Could that really be, Max defeated? No, that can’t be. 3:10 and everything is over. We went back to bed, sleep-lessly tossing and turning into the morning.”

  Marked only by a swollen and discolored left eye, Schmeling had made his way out of the ring, unassisted but hardly unscathed. “Go back to Germany!” someone shouted. “You Nazi bum, you never could fight!” Schmeling entered his dressing room a “woebegone and tragic figure,” his left hand clutching his side. “Too bad, Max,” Braddock told him, patting him on the back. “I know how you feel.” But he didn’t. Something had happened between Schmeling’s final moments in the ring and when he met with the press: the gracious, smiling loser had been supplanted by someone filled with pain and pique. “When he got in his dressing room he found out he had been fouled,” someone put it afterward. Standing in a corner of the room, which stank of men and adhesives and unguents, Schmeling now said he’d been done in by an illegal punch. He’d been fouled. From Schmeling it was a familiar refrain, though this time he was on his own; while he was feeling robbed, Joe Jacobs apparently was not.

  “Yah, he hit me such a terrible blow on the kidney. I can’t think. I can’t zee,” Schmeling told the reporters, slowly rubbing his left side as he spoke. “Such terrible pain. I can’t move…. My legs vould not move. They were paralyzed.” “Paralyzed”: it was the very word he’d used after the first Sharkey fight, eight years earlier. Before that one punch, he insisted, his head had been entirely clear, notwithstanding all the blows he had already taken; after it, he was blinded and immobilized. The Germans knew American rules—a kidney punch was perfectly legal as long as it wasn’t thrown while in a clinch—or should have known: Schmeling had complained of one during his first fight with Louis, and Donovan had explained the rule to him then. Hellmis had made that precise point in Schmelings Sieg. It didn’t matter. “A kidney blow is a foul,” Schmeling now maintained. “He didn’t mean to hit me with one, I know, but he did and it blinded me. It made me so I can’t feel.”

  Schmeling got little sympathy from the Americans. “Max! Max!” the photographers shouted. “Point at your kidney!” “It wasn’t vare, it wasn’t,” Schmeling remonstrated to Mike Jacobs, who gave him a patronizing pat and walked away muttering a curse. Even within his own camp, Schmeling’s charge was disputed; Doc Casey conceded that it was “strictly legal.” For succor, Schmeling had to turn to his countrymen. The German ambassador to Washington, Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, who had blanched as the slaughter unfolded, gave him a long handshake. Then Heinz Dit-gens of the Roxy-Bar, an overstuffed man who looked like Hermann Göring, appeared, buried himself in Schmeling’s shoulder, and began to cry. “But Max,” he said between heaving, violent sobs, “how was dot possible, how was dot possible?” It was not fair, Schmeling assured him, too. The German reporters looked embarrassed, as if not knowing just what to send back to Berlin. Schmeling helped them, though. “What’s clear is that his version was very well-received by the German press,” wrote Curt Riess of Paris Soir. “And what an imagination: they all saw the wound in the kidneys!” Things might have turned out differently, Jacobs said, had he been in Schmeling’s corner. Right, one sportswriter mocked: “Jacobs could not have done a more polished job of towel tossing himself.” Aside from that, Yussel was oddly, even unprecedentedly, detached—and mute. You “wondered if Louis had hit hard enough to silence both Schmeling and Jacobs,” wrote Anthony Marenghi of the Newark Star-Eagle.

  “What will Hitler think?” one reporter shouted to Schmeling. “Der Führer won’t say anything,” Schmeling replied. “It’s a sport, isn’t it?” How would his loss affect his standing in Nazi Germany? “Nothing. Dot’s foolish,” he replied. He grew indignant when asked if he would fight again. “Yah, I fight again. Why not? I want to fight Louis again. Next time Joe won’t slip over a kidney punch like that. If he is a good sportsman he will give me a return bout.” Finally, the man with the NBC microphone caught up with Schmeling, and he talked to America. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have not much to say,” he said. “I’m very sorry but I won’t make any excuse but I had such a terrible hit the first hit that I get in the left kidney I was so paralyzed I couldn’t even move.”

  Machon led Schmeling to the shower. The defeated fighter walked with catlike strides, his hand still on his kidney. Waiting outside, Joe Jacobs told a reporter they were going to take Schmeling to the hospital to have him examined. Schmeling reemerged a few moments later and put on his street clothes. Music returned to the American airwaves; a station in Chicago resumed with “You Go to My Head.” Louis was still in his dressing room when he learned about Schmeling’s charge. “No, sah, dat was no foul,” he said. “Ah hit him right in the left kidney and ah really hit him. Ah felt that punch touch home.” His managers were incensed, then contemptuous. “That’s for German consumption,” one of them huffed. Maybe Schmeling’s mind remained clouded, Parker wrote; otherwise, he was the poorest loser on record. But the charge would “make good stuff for the home trade when Herr Doktor Goebbels gets his flippers on it.” “It must have been a kidney punch to the chin,” Bill Corum wrote.

  Largely unnoticed and under his own power, Schmeling walked out of the stadium, stooped over, still holding his side and dragging one of his legs, his face set in grim, pathetic lines. He was then taken to the Polyclinic Hospital on Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue, across from Madison Square Garden. Schmeling walked into the building and plopped himself into a wheelchair. When he got to his room, he reached his wife in Berlin, then took a call from one of Hitler’s adjutants. He asked hospital personnel to turn off his telephone and, after getting some injections for pain, he went to sleep. Around 2:30 a.m. his cabbie called the Daily News with the whereabouts of his famous passenger, guaranteeing there would be
a mob outside the hospital when Schmeling woke up.

  Joe Jacobs’s policeman brother, who moonlighted as Schmeling’s bodyguard, did his man a great favor that night. Rather than have the driver head due south into Manhattan from the stadium, he directed him to go west toward the Hudson River, then hug it all the way south to the city. In other words, he steered clear of a delirious Harlem. New York’s police chief, Lewis Valentine, did come back via Harlem, stopping at the West 135th Street station long enough to lay out department policy for the occasion. “This is their night,” he declared. “Let them be happy.” “Too bad it ended so early,” one of his officers griped. “That gives them so much more time to celebrate. We’ll be on duty here all night.” And they were. Harlem, recalled a white woman who had gone to the stadium by boat but returned by car, was “aflame in happiness.”