Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Though one could scarcely have imagined it at the time, Max Schmeling picked himself off the canvas on the night of June 22,1938, and lived another sixty-seven years. But no matter how successful or beloved he turned out to be, and no matter how impoverished, enfeebled, or ignored Louis became, Schmeling stuck by him, repeatedly flying halfway around the world to appear with him, greeting him like a lost brother, praising him lavishly. And it all made perfect sense. His triumph over Louis represented the capstone of his career. His loss to Louis spared him greater infamy, and gave him immortality. Louis represented his youth. He also represented his link to America, the nation he had always loved, if only in his own utilitarian way. Most of all, it was Louis who provided Schmeling with what he coveted most: expiation. If der braune Bomber, the simple and decent man whom more Americans, black and white, loved more than just about any other man in his generation, harbored no hard feelings toward him, how could anyone else? So of course Max Schmeling honored Joe Louis when he lived, and once Louis died, Schmeling embraced him even more tenaciously, until he, too, passed on. “I didn’t only like him,” he once said. “I loved him.”

  * According to one eyewitness, the camp commandant introduced Schmeling as a living legend who had “destroyed the nigger Louis” only to lose two years later on a foul. He had served his Fatherland faithfully, the commandant went on, and was now volunteering his services to the Führer when he could have spent his furlough at a spa.

  * Schmeling may have distanced himself from Göring, but Göring still stuck by Schmeling. His lawyer at Nuremberg recalled coming to the prison in January 1946 to find Göring arguing animatedly over the Louis-Schmeling fight with one of his American guards. “Göring became very animated, jumped up and practically demonstrated how the blow of the Brown Bomber went into Schmeling’s kidneys,” he wrote. “He said this was clearly not fair!” The debate proceeded good-naturedly for a while, “and eventually Göring was satisfied when the Americans confirmed for him that Schmeling had been the technically superior and fair fighter while Louis’s victory had been brought about mainly by the primeval nature of his race.”

  * Despite his exemplary intentions, twice during the show Edwards called Louis “boy.”

  * Later, they patched things up, and Ali played straight man to another of Louis’s famous lines. “Joe, you really think you coulda whipped me?” Ali once asked him. “When I had the title, I went on what they called a bum-of-the-month tour,” Louis replied. “You mean I’m a bum?” Ali interjected. “You woulda been on the tour,” said Louis.

  * Schmeling’s rendition of the second fight—in seven pages—is typical, and instructive. He wrote that the experts favored Louis “almost unanimously”; that it was only the second fight to produce a million-dollar gate; that Yankee Stadium was sold out; that his reception there had been unremittingly hostile; that Doc Casey had been too scared by the anti-Nazi fervor to be his second that night; that the German ambassador pushed him to charge Louis with a foul (a move he says he personally opposed); that Louis attempted to visit him at the hospital, but that Machon and Jacobs had turned him away; that he did not hear from Hitler after the fight; and that his name “simply disappeared” from the German press afterward. Every one of these claims is untrue.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I CAN THINK OF few greater favors someone can bestow than nurturing another person’s labor of love. And over the past seven years, this book had lots of nurturing, and nurturers.

  First, there were those who helped in the research. I especially want to thank Mitch Abramson, Elizabeth Dribben, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Leslie Friedman, Leah Garchick, Stephanie Goldberg, Rick Hornung, Kenneth Janken, Arnold Kaplan, LeeAnna Keith, Dave Kelly of the Library of Congress, Martin Krauss, William Lin, Ken Maley, Dan Morgenstern of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Eddy Portnoy, Jonathan Shenfield, Karol Stein, Studs Terkel, Paul Tilzey, Mike Welch, Esther Wilder, and Chris Willis. I’m also indebted to the extraordinary boxing mavens who gave generously of their time, insight, and materials, particularly the incomparable Hank Kaplan, Mike DeLisa, and Mike Silver.

  In all of my explorations, the New York Public Library was the mother ship. It is one of mankind’s towering achievements. David Smith of the library staff took great interest in my work and helped me more than I can say. Warren Platt also pitched in. Though I’ve never met them, I’m much indebted to the folks in the Interlibrary Loan program there, particularly Jacqueline Willoughby and Terry Kirchner. The morgue of my alma mater, The New York Times, is another inspiring institution, also built up and run by generations of unsung heroes. It is an irreplaceable, and endangered, resource; long may it exist, even in the age of Nexis and ProQuest! I want to thank Jeff Roth and Lou Ferrer there for their gracious and knowledgeable help.

  Finding, translating, and analyzing the German materials was a huge undertaking, and I very much appreciate the efforts of Rick Minnich, Bernard Bindzus, Mark Landsman, and Stefan Knerrich. Thanks, too, go to those who read the manuscript at various stages, usually when this was an even more considerable undertaking than it eventually became: Richard Bernstein, Eric Fettmann, Andrew Margolick, Gertrude Margolick, Joe Margolick, Fred Morton, and Ray Robinson. Their constructive criticism improved the book and spared me from making all sorts of embarrassing mistakes.

  Throughout a long period of gestation, I was blessed with the perfect work environment, one that gave me time, flexibility, and security, and I’m deeply grateful to Graydon Carter, Doug Stumpf, and Chris Garrett at Vanity Fair for their support—and their patience. My agent, David Black, not only got this project off the ground, but steered it in the right direction: to Alfred A. Knopf. My editor there, Jonathan Segal, was just what I wanted, and needed: discerning, demanding, meticulous. His assistant, Ida Giragossian, was helpful in innumerable ways. Maria Massey tolerated with great grace the infuriating last-minute manipulations of a lapsed newspaperman. Virginia Tan and Melissa Goldstein put together the wonderful pictures. Thanks, too, to Paul Bogaards, Carol Carson, Elizabeth Cochrane, Roméo Enriquez, Kate Norris, Amy Stackhouse, Evan Stone, and Sonny Mehta.

  It’s always said that newspaper work is ephemeral, but that’s not so: the best of it is not lost at all, but merely waiting to be rediscovered and beheld. Reading the journalists who covered boxing, and the world, in the 1930s, and realizing the care they lavished on their work (on tight deadlines and primitive machines, to boot) was a thrilling experience for me. It was also inspiring, a reminder that words matter, and endure. A few of the best white reporters ofthat era are justly lionized, though most—Dan Parker, Richards Vidmer, Anthony Marenghi, John Lardner, Bill Cunningham, to name just a few—are almost entirely forgotten. At that, their fate has been kinder than that of black contemporaries like Al Monroe, Ed Harris, Roi Ottley, and Ralph Matthews, whose glorious work was almost entirely unread outside Afro-America. That these men and so many like them are unknown, and unsung, is a crime. Thank God for microfilm; someday, someone will do them justice.

  I’m grateful to Aline Gittleman for her encouragement and support as this project neared completion. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Moses and Gertrude Margolick. Whatever intelligence and empathy this book contains comes, ultimately, from them. And if, more than forty years ago, my father hadn’t brought home a record called “I Can Hear It Now,” in which Edward R. Murrow introduced me to Clem McCarthy’s call of the second Louis-Schmeling fight, this book never would have happened at all.

  David Margolick

  New York, July 2005

  NOTES

  Introduction

  “Ringside Tonight!”: New York Journal-American, June 22,1938.

  “Wars, involving the fate of nations”: New York Mirror, June 22,1938.

  “On this day”: Angriff, June 15,1938.

  “The Night of the Bright Windows”: Ibid., June 24,1938.

  “The relative merits”: Daily Worker, June 22,1938.

  “Louis or Schmeling?”: New York Sun, June 4,1938.


  “Louis represents democracy”: Boston Traveler, June 22,1938.

  “Judges and lawyers”: New York Times, June 22,1938.

  “World Series scarcely”: United Press International, June 20,1938.

  bubbly and alive: Paris Soir, June 21,1938.

  “If Joe loses”: Amsterdam News, June 25,1938.

  “The first nationally-sponsored heavyweight”: New York Journal-American, January 15, 1938.

  “Tonight’s the night”: New York Post, June 22,1938.

  “the public loves”: New York American, May 12,1936.

  “Fame and money”: Sterling A. Brown, “The Negro in American Culture: Sports,” p. 1, in The Negro in America, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (1938–1940).

  “You can’t Jim Crow”: Lester Rodney, Detroit Metro Times, June 11–25, 1981.

  “The ring was the only place”: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 23.

  “Bronx Bombers”: Associated Negro Press, June 24,1936.

  “a big, superbly built Negro”: New York Evening Journal, June 19,1937.

  “There is not one iota”: Ring, May 1938.

  “Day by day, since their alleged”: New Masses, July 5,1938.

  “in purring limousines”: New York Mirror, June 23,1938.

  “Now let’s go”: This and all quotations from the American fight broadcasts in this book come from recordings in the collection of the author.

  Chapter One: Just Off the Boat

  “Oh, Max!”: New York Evening Post, April 15,1933.

  “Athletic Club”: New York Daily News, April 15,1933.

  “Hundreds of Jews”: New York Evening Post, April 5,1933.

  “our greatest hope”: Box-Sport, January 6,1927.

  “an insufficient will”: Ibid., April 12,1927.

  “Künstler, schenkt mir Eure Gunst”: Max Schmeling, Erinnerungen, revised and amended edition (Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Ullstein, 1995), p. 87.

  “swimming after the dollar”: Box-Sport, May 22,1928.

  “Joe Jacobs gave ’em”: Washington Post, May 2,1940.

  “If all the newspaper copy”: New York Mirror, June 26,1936.

  “It’s too darned quiet”: The Boxing News, June 1936.

  “my little wife”: New York Mirror, October 7,1940.

  “Why do guys have to sleep at all?” Ring, July 1940.

  “a New York sidewalk boy”: New York World-Telegram, April 26,1940.

  “If you hang me”: New York Sun, April 26,1940.

  “You take the big tree”: New York World-Telegram, June 8,1933.

  “triple pneumonia”: Collier’s, July 1,1939.

  “The Black Uhlan of the Rhine”: Schmeling, Erinnerungen, p. 128. Frank Graham, among others, attributed the nickname to Damon Runyon, New York Journal-American, February 6,1961.

  “Dempsey! Dempsey!”: Box-Sport, January 7,1929.

  “all Berlin was frantic with joy”: New York Times, June 29,1929.

  “He is quiet, modest”: New York Sun, June 7,1930.

  “an insolence”: New York World-Telegram, May 29,1941.

  “punch harder than”: Forverts, June 22,1930.

  “the fighting son of the Fatherland”: New York Daily News, June 13,1930.

  “the man on whom every American”: Ibid.

  “paralyzed”: New York Times, June 14,1930.

  “Stay down, you idiot!”: Forverts, April 27,1940.

  “a screaming, dancing midge”: Outlook and Independent, July 2,1930.

  “You’re the champion, Max!” New York Mirror, June 13,1930.

  “as though an armored truck”: New York Journal-American, April 25,1940.

  “a severe blow”: Associated Press, April 13,1930.

  “From the bottom of my heart”: New York Daily News, June 13,1930.

  “If anyone won”: Outlook and Independent, July 2,1930.

  “You know, that Yacobs”: New York Daily News, June 14,1930.

  “I’m sure it helped me”: Forverts, June 22,1930.

  “this unpleasant, loud-mouthed”: Angriff, November 25,1930.

  “We’re on our way”: Der Abend, quoted in New York World, June 14,1930.

  “a concert of boos”: Rolf Nürnberg, Die Geschichte einer Karriere (Berlin: Grossberliner Druckerei für Presse und Buchverlag, 1932), p. 148.

  “a disgrace to German”: New York Times, January 8,1931.

  “mean, impertinent, incompetent Jew”: Angriff, January 8,1931.

  “Ruthlessness was the”: Nürnberg, Die Geschichte einer Karriere, p. 13.

  “He was robbed”: New York Evening Post, June 22, 1932; “He was jobbed”: New York American, June 22,1932; “We were robbed”: New York Graphic, June 22,1932.

  “The great Sharkey-Schmeling”: New York Daily News, June 23,1932.

  “someone closing a deal”: New York World-Telegram, June 23,1932.

  “German boy of the future”: Hajo Bernett, Nationalsozialistische Leibeserziehung (Schorndorf bei Stuttgart: Karl Hofmann, 1966), p. 25.

  “There is no sport that cultivates”: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: F. Eher Nachf., 1933), p. 453.

  “a German revolution of pimps, deserters”: Ibid., p. 453.

  “the high cheek bones of an Indian”: New York Mirror, December 4,1937.

  “incapable of performing even a single knee-bend”: Angriff, November 6,1930.

  “a man from whom even his own kind turn away”: Ibid., January 7,1931.

  “mean,” “impertinent,” “incompetent” Jew: Ibid., January 8,1931.

  “grubby” Jacobs; “spruced-up numbskull and toady”: Ibid., January 7,1931.

  “Finally, Finally!”: Ibid., April 4,1933.

  “Jewish capital or Jewish persons”: Box-Sport, April 3,1933.

  “a defensive action against”: Angriff, April 4,1933.

  “whatever else these blood-suckers call themselves”: Ibid.

  “a clique of corrupt”: Box-Sport, April 3,1933.

  “Jewish big-wigs and corrupt exploiters”: Ibid.

  “giving the cold shoulder”: Ibid., April 18,1933.

  “If anyone over there”: Schmeling, Erinnerungen, p. 263.

  “exaggerated and untruthful”: Boxing, April 5,1933.

  “It would be paradoxical”: LAuto, April 2,1933.

  “The fact that the new, great leader of the German people”: Box-Sport, October 24, 1933.

  “the decrepit medievalism”: New York Mirror, March 27,1933.

  “We all know what would happen”: New York American, April 14,1933.

  “shame the Nazis by lying down”: New York World-Telegram, April 17,1933.

  “Delancey Street dandy”: New York Daily News, March 22,1935.

  “There are many Hebrews here”: Montreal Herald, April 14,1933.

  “He dodges embarrassing questions”: New York Sun, April 15,1933.

  “What conditions?”: New York Evening Post, April 14,1933.

  “I haff never seen Yermany”: New York Daily News, April 18,1933.

  “my friend Joe”: New York World-Telegram, April 14,1933.

  “the most popular person in Germany”: New York Evening Post, April 14,1933.

  “I tell you this—Germany is improving”: New York American, April 15,1933.

  “prices on the Boerse”: New York World-Telegram, April 14,1933.

  not to be “silly” about the man: New York Evening Post, April 14,1933.

  “Were I to meet Baer in Germany”: New York Mirror, April 15,1933.

  MAX SCHMELING SAYS GERMANY IS NOT CRUEL TO JEWISH FOLKS: The paper is probably the Plain Speaker of Hazelton, Pennsylvania.

  “100 percent Hitlerist”: Moment (Warsaw), June 11,1933.

  “Schmeling pulled himself”: Box-Sport, May 1,1933.

  “When I told them about the reception”: Schmeling, Erinnerungen, p. 266.

  Chapter Two: A Regime’s Embrace

  “stand in defense, with
clenched fist”: Box-Sport, April 25,1933.

  “to follow in his path”: Ibid., May 1,1933.

  “The movement to make Max Schmeling suffer”: New York Mirror, April 21,1933.

  “none is so blind”: Ibid., April 25,1933.

  “no more of a Jew-hater”: Ibid., April 26,1933.

  “has to return to Germany some time”: Ibid., April 27,1933.

  “I’ll try to make [Max Baer] think you’re to blame”: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 18, 1933.

  “Shall I give them a political talk?”: Pittsburgh Press, April 17,1933.

  “We simply ignore it”: New York Times, April 26,1933.

  “Well, that’s awfully nice of him”: New York Mirror, April 26,1933.

  “malicious, vitriolic, and imbecilic”: Ring, June 1933.

  “at that moment … a friend, or a lover, or something”: New York Journal-American, March 3,1965.

  “I’ve got a million-dollar body”: New York Times, November 25,1959.

  “Hey, Barney”: Barney Ross, No Man Stands Alone: The True Story of Barney Ross (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957), p. 133.