Two Fights That Shook the World

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The New York Sun

Americans and Europeans tend to follow different sports, and rarely has a rivalry transcended the ocean’s divide. The great exception was on June 22, 1938, when a boxing match swept up millions on both sides of the Atlantic in a sporting fervor. The heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, a black sharecropper’s son from rural Alabama, was fighting a return bout with former champion Max Schmeling, the man chosen by the Nazi Party to carry the banner for Aryan supremacy. The world, or at least that portion of it ready to plunge into war, held its collective breath.


The triumph of Seabiscuit has been touted by revisionists as the most inspiring sporting event of Depressionera America, but as David Margolick points out in his epic retelling of the Louis-Schmeling saga, “Beyond Glory” (Random House, 480 pages, $26.95), on the night the two men stepped into the ring at Yankee Stadium, there were more people listening – perhaps 20 million more – than tuned in to follow Seabiscuit in his famous race with War Admiral. Half the population of the United States heard the fight, greater even than the audience for President Roosevelt’s fireside chats. It has been estimated that more journalists covered the fight than were present at the Versailles peace conference.


Louis-Schmeling is among the few mythic sporting events, yet the events surrounding the two fights have never been recounted in a historical narrative. Writers from Hemingway to Mailer have made much of boxing as symbol and metaphor, yet few have dealt with the racial, political, and sociological implications of these bouts. A.J. Liebling, regarded by many as the greatest of all boxing writers, never wrote about either Louis-Scheming fight. It’s ironic that the significance of Joe and Max and their two legendary meetings should come into focus at a time when boxing has all but receded from the national consciousness – it’s doubtful that one sports fan in 10 could name even one of the men claiming to hold the current heavyweight title, let alone all three (or is it four?).


Neither fighter was prepared to carry the burden of racial iconography. Swarthy and amiable, Schmeling, the leading European fighter of his generation, was awarded the heavyweight crown in 1930 after having been fouled by Jack Sharkey. By 1936, he was past his prime and regarded by many as no match for the young black challenger.


Shy and taciturn, Louis rose to prominence under the dark cloud cast by the only previous black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who outraged white America (and even some of black America) after World War I. “America may not have been ready for another dominant black heavyweight, but it was always ready for a spectacular puncher,” Mr. Margolick writes. But, as Louis’s trainer told him, for a black man to have any chance, he had to be “very good outside the ring and very bad inside.”


In 1936, the 23-year-old Louis appeared to be unstoppable, and Schmeling was presumed to be a fading ex-champion whose name would be added to Louis’s victory ledger on his way to a shot at the heavyweight championship. But the German noted a fatal flaw in Louis’s armor – he dropped his right hand after throwing his lethal left jab, making him vulnerable to an opponent’s right-hand counter. In the fight of his life, Schmeling weathered Louis’s early attack, scoring a 12th-round knockout that shocked sports fans everywhere.


Schmeling’s victory would soon have implications beyond sports. “The Nazis,” Mr. Margolick writes, “believed that Schmeling had deserved a title shot and that New York Jews had killed it. And it was hard to argue with either point.” In truth, Schmeling was denied his shot at Jim Braddock, who held the heavyweight crown, in large part because Hitler and the Nazi Party had become Schmeling’s biggest fans.


The debate would rage for decades whether or not Schmeling was a Nazi sympathizer. Mr. Margolick’s conclusion is that he “never said more than he had to to stay in the Nazis’ good graces. He did not spout Nazi rhetoric, or wrap himself in the swastika. … Whenever the Nazis asked him to pitch in, he obliged.”


He maintained something of a dual citizenship: Nazi Germany and America. “In the United States, boxing meant New York, and New York, in large part, meant Jews,” Mr. Margolick writes. (His own manager, Joe Jacobs, was a Jew, who, when he was chastised by his friends for managing a German, replied that he was “500 percent Jewish.”)


For Louis’s part, he carried not only the hopes and expectations of his own race but of millions of American and European Jews. He was also the first black athlete to be lionized by the white press. (Edward Van Every of The New York Sun composed a hagiographic biography that “conferred sainthood” on him.) Temporarily crushed by his defeat, Louis mounted a comeback, won the heavyweight title, and, finally, faced off again with his nemesis. By this time he had become so popular that perhaps two out of three white Southerners were pulling for him. “For Joe Louis, then,” writes Mr. Margolick, “much of the bigotry that afflicted America was briefly and selectively suspended.”


It isn’t necessary to care about boxing to find “Beyond Glory” irresistible. I was brought up by my father to worship Joe Louis and could have told you how every punch in their rematch was thrown long before I ever saw a replay of the 124-second fight. Over the last 150-odd pages, I found my pulse racing and my hands sweating. I could almost smell the cigar smoke and old beer and hear the roar that swept through the Yankee Stadium bleachers when Schmeling hit the canvas.


Joe Louis and Max Schmeling eventually became pals and once went out to a black nightclub together. And why not? Each probably wanted to talk to the only other man on the face of the earth who understood what he had been through.



Mr. Barra’s football column appears on page 18 of today’s New York Sun.


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