Читать книгу Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing - Kevin Mitchell J. - Страница 12

“Somebody else” was at ringside the night Lucky Jim won the title. He even dropped off to sleep between rounds, so dull an affair was it. But then Joe Louis was always an unusually relaxed and patient man.

Not a lot moved him, save a big left hook when he wasn't watching, or a disapproving glance from his first wife, Marva, after he'd been caught out yet again. Joe, for all his physical and athletic strength, was a prisoner of forces beyond his control. He sometimes would say, in expectation and hope, “God is on our side.” A simple phrase, which became something of a slogan for GIs during World War II, it not only described Joe's fatalism but identified a peculiar strand of benign righteousness in America. It was a sentiment that would be the bedrock of his career. It made him acceptable, a good American. That night back in 1935, meanwhile, Joe was content to let his Lord anoint James J. Braddock the winner—and make him a prime candidate for the chop further up the road.

Paul Gallico, a sportswriter possessed of both wit and witlessness, once described Joe's quietness as “sly servility.” Gallico, the son of Italian immigrants, a born New Yorker to the tips of his fancy shoes, a man of no little intelligence whose father wanted him to be a concert pianist, should have known better. But he still did not have the mind or instincts needed to make the intellectual leap away from the herd. He was, Robert Lipsyte generously said many years later, “a man of his times.” As Lipsyte acknowledges, though, that always was the lamest of excuses for clever racism.

Gallico, an evocative if reflexive writer, was a friend of Runyon's. He was a friend of anyone in sports, in fact, as long as they'd support his commercial ventures. And there were many of those. His critical integrity was easily bought. Just like Damon's. They belonged to a distant phenomenon, the sometime entrepreneur moonlighting as commentator and social wit. Gallico and Runyon covered many cultural and sporting waterfronts—then went to their typewriters to shape the market for their enterprise. They described the mood of a New York ripe for such description, and their perspective was, like the skin that housed their bones, unequivocally white.

Lipsyte, a childhood fan of Gallico's whose affection waned as he grew into the sportswriting gig himself, sees the fingerprints of prejudice all over the man's work, lyrical and lovely as it sometimes is. At ringside, for instance, Gallico looked up from his free seat, his telegraphist by his side, his cigar tucked away somewhere in his silk-lined jacket, and saw not just two fighters trying to earn an honest (or dishonest) dollar but, on occasions, “the colored brother,” as he liked to dress it up. And “the colored brother” might triumph—if he were in against a white fighter—not necessarily because of his skill or courage alone but because he was “not nearly so sensitive to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands.”

That was the climate in which Joe had to make his mark. He had two things going for him: his left and his right.

Joe's star was hanging high in 1935, and James J. Braddock, the luckiest Jim that ever got up in the morning, would hitch himself to it before long—or rather his supposedly avuncular manager would do it for him. Gould knew he had to move deftly to maximize his earnings before “somebody else” came along and put Jim out of the picture.

Louis needed the title, but he was not going to earn a night in the Garden right away. To get his shot at the Irish patsy who called himself champ, and to build his already formidable reputation, he was encouraged to bide his time with easy wins, to go with the nineteen he had registered since turning professional in 1934. He'd already detonated the myth of the Ambling Alp, Carnera. In quick order and with a coldly simple left-jab, right-cross efficiency, he went on to dispose of King Levinsky in Chicago in August, Baer the following month back in the Bronx, Paulino Uzcudun before Christmas, Charley Retzlaff in January . . . and the rumbling grew for something more meaningful from the prodigy. The strategy was working.

Then a bombshell landed. Or rather, an 8-1 German underdog landed. The contest between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in June 1936, a year after Braddock won the title, shocked not just boxing fans and the wider world, but the guys who made things happen. This wasn't scheduled. And it was on the level. The Brown Bomber, a 10-1 on favorite (as Baer had been against Braddock), was blitzkrieged off the boxing landscape. He was outpunched and outboxed by a decent opponent who, on the biggest night of his life, got it right. Just like Braddock. For a sport that was supposed to be riddled with arranged results, the no-hopers were doing OK.

Maximillian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling, the Black Uhlan, so called because of the heavily dark complexion common to people from that part of Germany, shared a name with Hitler but not, according to all reliable testimony, his thirst for genocide. Nevertheless, through expediency or inclination, Schmeling's reluctance to endorse his führer was not always as enthusiastic at the time as it has become in the revisiting of the story.

What is clear is, as a professional fighter, he put the chance to beat the most feared heavyweight in the business above the inconvenience of representing a regime dedicated to wiping out the Jews and subjugating all other peoples with no obvious links to the Aryan race. Apologists at the time, such as leader writers on the Daily Mail and The Times of London, looked the other way. Revisionists later, such as Gallico, stressed how Max never had Hitler around for supper. But, as David Margolick notes in his must-read study on the fights between Louis and Schmeling, Max did vote along with 48,799,268 of his compatriots for the annexation of Austria in April 1938. It is hard to accept that Schmeling, a bright man who would later become a wealthy franchise holder in Germany for the most American of products, Coca-Cola, was a complete innocent.

Nor was he a mug as a fighter. In the twelfth round of their first fight, Schmeling hauled down Joe's star. Joe, who'd grown complacent in the glow of adulation, hadn't trained well. Max had. The German belted Louis senseless and left him shaking his head as he sat bewildered, hurt, and friendless on the canvas. Max deserved his win; he'd done it on the night, and Joe had let himself down. That's sports. It should neither have vindicated Nazism nor demeaned Louis. But it did both those things in many people's eyes, for reasons that now seem obvious but did not seem so at the time.

The picture of Joe Louis sitting on the canvas staring into the middle distance, with the German standing over him, was one America did not want to look at. It was the worst sort of news for the other main players, too. Especially for Joe Gould. Initially, he'd wanted Braddock to fight Louis sooner rather than later because he knew that was the one big go he and his fighter would ever have at making a pile. The apparently foolproof plan that emerged after the Braddock–Baer fight was to build Louis and mothball Braddock. Nobody counted on Schmeling beating Louis.

With Louis's invincibility punctured, they had to put the Brown Bomber back together again. Braddock still had not laced up since the Baer fight; Joe had boxed six times.

After Schmeling, Louis would have another seven bouts before he got in the ring with the unemployed champion Braddock. When the dust settled many years later, Gould could reflect on a job well done. This was to be the long-term payoff, one worth waiting for, according to Braddock's cagey, dodgy manager—even though his client, at the first time of asking, would lose his title and give up the cachet, notionally at least, of being the best heavyweight on the scene.

Away from the headlines, Jim's manager saw in Louis the most malleable, marketable of champions—and he wanted a piece of him. Braddock, his buddy, was no more than the means to get to Louis. This was Mob strategy—skimming, as it's known in gambling and liquor circles. What Joe's connections and others then did to the man who was “a credit to his race” would be regarded as cruel in any other undertaking but professional boxing.

When the unaffected and trusting young man from Detroit turned twenty-one in 1935, he signed over half his gross earnings for the following ten years to his first manager, Julian Black; his other manager, Roxborough, claimed a quarter “for an indefinite period”; his trainer, Jack “Chappie” Blackburn, a convicted felon but a man the champ considered his one true friend in boxing, took his wages from the quarter that was left for Joe. Then the taxman went to work on Louis. It was a salami slice. From the day he entered the gym back in Detroit, Joe never stood a chance.

Initially, Madison Square Garden wanted Braddock to defend against Schmeling in June of 1937. But Mike Jacobs wasn't so interested in that. Not yet. He persuaded Gould to stall on any offers from the German, to keep his fighter for Louis later. Gould agreed—but he wanted the deal sugared. According to some accounts, about this time Roxborough was picked up by some persuasive gentlemen and taken to see Gould. The champ's best friend told Roxborough he didn't reckon Jim could beat Joe if he hit him until the sun came up. But, to make sure there was no upset, Gould wanted 50 percent of Louis. Roxborough, sweating hard in front of the interview panel, held out. “I can't do that, Joe,” he said, with good mathematical reasoning. “If you want to do a deal, you gotta talk to Mike.” Gould was outraged. He went to the Garden and talked to Mike. It was a conversation that would leave an enduring scar on Joe Louis.

“Mike, I'm a reasonable man,” said Gould. “I'll settle for 10 percent—or there's no fight.”

Jacobs, who'd been in the game too long and had muscle of his own, laughed in Gould's face. “Joe, you're crazy. There ain't no 10 percent to give ya! Didn't Roxy tell ya that?”

He hadn't. The boys had already carved Joe Louis to pieces. “We need something, Mike. We need something. You got it. We need it.”

“Tell ya what, Joe. We all need this fight, so I'll do this for ya: you can have one dollar in every ten Uncle Mike earns with the title until some schmuck gets lucky and knocks the schwartze over. Whaddya say? Joe Louis is gonna be around a long time, Joe. And so is Uncle Mike. We're all gonna earn some serious moolah here.”

Gould did his math as quickly as if standing in front of the bookies at Santa Ana.

“Done.”

So Gould was set for a tenth of Jacobs's profits from every world heavyweight title he would promote for the next ten years. That, effectively, meant every fight Joe Louis had under Jacobs's promotion with the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. It also meant the new champ's purse would be shaved accordingly. Mike Jacobs was not about to give Joe Gould 10 percent of Mike Jacobs; but he would give him 10 percent of Louis.

After the deal was done—behind Louis's back—the fighter would go to work to make everyone rich. First, though, Gould had to get Braddock out of his fight with Schmeling.

Germany in 1937 was an arrogant, menacing place. Hitler had held his Olympics the year before and he had in Schmeling a high-profile heavyweight with whom to peddle the message of Aryan supremacy.

There is a story, first written in 1950 by Budd Schulberg, that Joe Gould told Germany's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels in uncomplicated terms what he thought of Hitler's wish that Braddock defend his title against Schmeling in Germany.

The telephone exchange is said to have finished with Gould informing Goebbels that $500,000 up front and an American referee would not be enough to clinch the fight.

“The third point,” Gould said matter-of-factly, “is that you get Hitler to stop kicking the Jews around. Unless he gives them back full citizenship and property rights, you know what you and Max can do with your fight.”

Gould the saint and wit? It is a departure from everything we know about Gould to regard him as a moralist first and a businessman second. Besides, who'd want to take the title to Germany?

David Margolick pointed to the pages of the New York Daily News of March 22, 1935, to capture a different picture of the times. If Gould was reluctant to do business with the Nazis, one fellow American Jew prominent in the boxing game was not. The image decimated the weasel words written then and since about Schmeling and those around him. He had just knocked out Steve Hamas in Hamburg and, in keeping with the protocol of Germany's totalitarian diktats, the winner stretched out his strong right arm in saluting his führer. It was an increasingly common sight—and would be repeated shamefully by England's footballers in 1938—but such displays of obsequiousness raised indignation beyond the boundaries of the Third Reich. And this picture was different. Standing near Schmeling, hand also raised in tame homage to a totalitarian lunatic, and prevented from full extension of the fingers only by the cigar in his grip, was the German boxer's Jewish manager, Joe “Yussel” Jacobs. The Daily News headline over the picture read: “WHEN YUSSEL WENT NAZI.” He wasn't alone.

Yussel wanted Braddock for his man, and Schmeling even came to America to sign a contract to fight the champ. But Gould wanted no part of Schmeling; he wanted Louis for the champion. This seemed odd from a boxing perspective. Why would Braddock want to test against himself the murderous punching of Louis rather than the less threatening work of the aged Schmeling? The answer, of course, was Gould and Braddock couldn't lose against Louis. They had 10 percent of him, whatever the result.

While Schmeling posed for pictures and spent time at the Garden, hustling up interest in a nonevent, Braddock and Louis were in training for their title fight. In May, a federal judge named (believe it or not) Guy L. Fake ruled the Garden could not force Braddock to fight Schmeling.

Meanwhile, although he was the centerpiece of the sport and generated the interest that kept fight writers busy, Joe Louis struggled to convince some of them he could bounce back from the Schmeling defeat. He was fat and lazy, according to many of these sages, and disposable. They were fine to his face, of course, but patronizing—and they would not kiss his big black ass, even for another two-buck bribe from the promoters.

While they willed him to lose against Braddock, even their ingrained prejudices could not drown out common sense, and 80 percent of them in the end plumped for the challenger when they met at Chicago's Comiskey Park on June 22, 1937, a year after Schmeling had creamed Louis and two years after Braddock had beaten Baer. Jack Dempsey, who never put his title on the line against a black man, picked Braddock, as ordinary a champion as the division ever had.

The fight wasn't a classic, but it didn't lack for drama. Louis hit the floor in the first, from an uppercut by the thirty-two-year-old champion. Cinderella Man, it seems, did not want to go home before his carriage turned into a pumpkin. It was his last half glimpse of the prize. What bettors didn't know was that Jim had a dead arm, pumped up by drugs to get him into the ring but anesthetized even further by Joe's constant battering. His left dropped lower and lower, exposing his chin to the Bomber's killer right cross. Soon enough, the fight swung the other way and, by the sixth, Braddock was spent and razored across his weathered face, but, as Gould reached for the white towel of surrender, the champion cautioned him that such an act of betrayal would be the last between them. And they'd been together eleven years, so Jim knew what he was talking about. Whatever the champion's bravery, Louis continued his clinical carving and, within two rounds, he'd dispatched the old man. He'd done it. Joe was the first black champion since Jack Johnson gave up the title in 1915 in dubious circumstances to the leering white behemoth, Jess Willard, on a sweltering afternoon in Havana.

Joe Louis, the new heavyweight king, took his mantle in the quiet and humble way his friends associated with his every movement and utterance. The ghost of Jack Johnson had been laid to rest, to the relief of white America. There were no complaints from the loser's corner.

Any right-thinking person would regard the secret deal Gould did with Jacobs as a hangover from slave times. Such was the story of Joe's life. He was exploited from the moment he taped up until the night Rocky Marciano clattered him through the ropes at Madison Square Garden for the last time, in 1951. By that stage, he'd sold another pound or three of his own flesh to the Mob. Just like Jack Johnson told him he would. . . .

Johnson was there in Chicago to see Joe succeed him. Indeed, to the incredulity of all, Jack was still a licensed boxer. A year after Louis's win over Braddock, the Galveston Giant, slightly stooped now at sixty, got into a ring with Walter Price in Boston and was knocked out in seven rounds.

Virtually nothing is known of Price—age, nationality, where he was born, how he died—apart from the fact he had four fights in his entire professional career. The first three were in 1925, two wins and a loss against fellow novices around Massachusetts and Maine. His fourth and final bout was thirteen years later, when he beat the pension-aged illusion of a genuine ring great.

Remarkably, sadly, Johnson carried on selling himself for several years after losing to Price, dressing up in loincloth and spear as part of a traveling circus, even sparring with old opponents from decades earlier, black fighters who'd also found the bottom of the barrel. It was a wretched decline, no less shocking for its inevitability. The boxing writer Bert Sugar remembers seeing such a show by Johnson on a schoolboy visit to New York in the forties. “Real sad,” is how he describes it. This was white America's revenge. Johnson's “golden smile” had driven racists to distraction when he beat James J. Jeffries in 1910 on America's most treasured day, the fourth of July. He would pay for that for the rest of his life.

Joe Louis's first defense of the heavyweight title once owned by Johnson was against the Welshman Tommy Farr, who fought him mightily close in front of 32,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that August. Farr had been lined up to fight Schmeling earlier in the year in London for what the Germans and the Daily Mail were happy to call the real world championship. This was farcical. Schmeling had a legitimate claim to challenge Louis for the title, given he'd won so comprehensively two years earlier, but to ignore the champion's right to be considered the linear king of the world after he'd beaten the incumbent Braddock was crass. It also exposed some craven instincts among members of the British boxing and media establishment who were willing to go along with the Nazi hysteria surrounding their Max. They wanted a Farr–Schmeling fight in London as much as Hitler did. It might well have been that patriotism and greed played a bigger part than ideology in their meek acceptance of Goebbels's entreaties, but it was no more morally convincing for that.

Mike Jacobs, however, outflanked them all. He stole Farr from under their sneering noses, brought him to America, and put him in with Louis. He deserved the fight, no question; he'd outpointed Baer over twelve rounds in London in April, then two months later knocked out the German Walter Neusel in three rounds.

The Welshman, awkward, determined, and well schooled in the orthodox English way, gave Joe all the trouble he could handle over fifteen rounds at Yankee Stadium on August 30, 1937, although no nostalgia-addled rewriting of history should persuade readers that Tommy deserved to win.

Not even the Evening Standard, as bellicose a British flag-waver as any, saw it that way, though their correspondent, Ben Bennison, did his best. “No fighter within my long experience,” he reported from ringside, “has fought a braver fight for the heavyweight championship of the world than did Tommy Farr against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium here. . . . Farr's gallantry was complete, and a scathing answer to the American critics who, almost without exception, held him to be no sort of fighter, certainly no foeman worthy of the negro's steel.”

Schmeling, at the height of his arrogance, suggested, “Shirley Temple has as good a chance”—although this was as much a snide shot at Louis as it was meant to deride Farr.

Bennison, nevertheless, felt justified and comfortable in declaring to his readers back home, “I say without hesitation that Farr proved himself the better, cleverer and more resourceful boxer.”

Farr finished with two cut eyes, Joe with two bruised hands. The champ came down the stretch strongly after some mediocre middle rounds, and the judges were impressed, albeit by wildly varying margins. Art Donovan, the referee, gave Louis thirteen rounds, Farr just one, with one even; the other two judges saw it 8-5-2 and 9-6 for Joe.

Farr's manager, Ted Broadribb, did not complain about the decision. Neither did the Tonypandy Terror himself. “Are you satisfied that I have not let either myself or my country down?” is how he humbly responded when Bennison put it to him he'd come damn close to becoming the first British world heavyweight champion since Bob Fitzsimmons.

And even Bennison had to concede, with all the reluctance of an expert whose prediction hadn't gone exactly as foreseen, “There was, according to my reckoning, only a fractional difference in favor of Louis at the end, and it says much for the sportsmanship of Farr that, when he was declared the loser, he took the verdict without the least quibble.”

Joe's purse for defeating Tommy was $102,578, a little over a grand less than he'd earned for beating Braddock.

After Farr, they set ’em up for Joe, and Joe knocked ’em down. It looked like great business. For Joe. For Jim and his Joe. And for Uncle Mike.

However, Joe Gould sniffed dismissively at the champion's next purse: $40,522 for a cakewalk against Natie Mann in the Garden in February 1938. He was similarly unimpressed in April, when Joe spent a mere five rounds getting Harry Thomas out of the way for a paltry $16,659.

Schmeling, meanwhile, waited and fumed—and turned the Atlantic into his personal highway as he crisscrossed to force a showdown with the man he'd beaten in 1936, the acknowledged world champion. There would be no complaints about the purse this time.

It was a marketing man's dream. Joe was fighting for every good guy who ever lived. His autobiography, published in 1947, was a whitewash typical of the genre of lighthearted and wholesome accounts at the time. The final chapter, entitled “P.S.—WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME,” reflects the enormity of the task assigned to him as a mere fighter.

He recalls meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House just before the rematch.

“You know, Joe,” the president said to him, “America is never supposed to lose.”

“I know, Mr. President,” Joe said. “And I'll take care of that this time!”

The media frenzy, from left, right, German, black, and Jew, was unrelenting. After so many postponements, so much hassle, so many tactical maneuverings and double-crosses, it had to go ahead. There was no avoiding the German now.

And so Louis–Schmeling II took place in New York on June 22, 1938. Joe's purse was $349,228, a remarkable amount of money—for a remarkable fight.

The 124 seconds it lasted were burdened with greater poignancy than anyone then or since has attached to a mere boxing match. And the “wider significance” of the occasion was not lost on the 70,043 fans who paid to get into Yankee Stadium that humid midsummer's night, nor on the millions who listened to English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese commentaries on radios around the world. If it were possible to re-create an event of vaguely similar global consequence today, a fight between two men representing good and evil in such simplistic, cartoon terms and in circumstances of such heightened international tension, there surely would be billions entranced all at once.

Schmeling had the best view of some of the punches, but not the ones that mattered—particularly the one to the kidneys he later complained was a foul, the one that Joe sank into his pale, untended trunk just below the ribcage in the first round and from which Max could not recover. In reality, it was a bolt-like right to his chin in the early seconds that did the damage; thereafter, the blows struck all parts. There was nothing illegal—in New York, at least—about the kidney killer that took away Schmeling's resolve, though.

Max went down. Art Donovan, again the referee, applied the count. Max got up. The terrible but beautiful assault continued. Joe was cold, balanced, and merciless. He just picked targets and let his gloves go. The hesitancy he'd shown against Farr had gone. A winded and bewildered Schmeling could not get out of the way, even when he turned sideways along the ropes like a boy being bullied. For Americans watching and listening, for others with an interest beyond the boxing ring also, this was retribution of the sweetest kind. The bad guy was getting his licks, good and proper. Dazed to the point of incomprehension, Max wandered like a lost sheep back into the storm and his legs had not a drop of strength in them to keep him upright as Joe slayed him like a righteous knight. The German swayed, tottered, and sailed south as Joe's fists rattled jawbone, brain, and spirit simultaneously. Max, clinging to the edge of the battleground, was up at five, but in his own hell. The white towel floated in. Donovan ignored it, in accordance with local statute, and then applied his own mercy.

It was a brief proto-war, shown so many times since as to be fixed irremovably on the brain like a birthmark, a round that made America feel good about itself again, a round that put the world to rights, it was claimed. After the indignations and hardship of the Depression, symbolism hung heavy in every punch Joe threw.

When it was over, Max could look back on exactly two punches of his own. He was spent as a heavyweight force. Joe, who'd thrown and landed maybe a hundred, was reborn. And so the Joe Louis story could resume.

Schmeling had the manners and judgment to observe years later in his autobiography, Memories, “Every defeat has its good side. A victory over Joe Louis would perhaps have made me into the toast of the Third Reich.”

Putting the best gloss on it, maybe Schmeling learned something from Louis that night. Maybe he learned that with a decent and honest hiding sometimes comes humility and respect. Nevertheless, however tempting it is to paint the fight and the result as a blow against Hitler and a triumph for democracy and the American way, the contest had less to do with the rights and wrongs of their respective ideologies (if indeed they would even have called them that) than with two fighting men testing themselves to the limit for a considerable amount of money.

Joe, simply, was too good for Max. Defeat did embarrass the Nazis, of course. And how good was that? But it had no tangible effect on their evil intent. It did not stop them annexing the Sudetenland in October. It did not delay their invasion of Poland the following September to start a world war. It hardly shamed them into treating Jews, Gypsies, and communists as human beings. But it did give Max Schmeling the opportunity to acknowledge that Joe Louis was the best heavyweight in the world and, by so doing, secure his own place in history.

It did also, briefly and dramatically, make America and what would come to be called the Free World feel uplifted. But soon enough the clamor faded, and everyone got back to business. It was, in the end, just a fight. As Mike Jacobs knew, it was business.

For Joe, and others, the money kept rolling in as the world slipped into its second global conflagration: John Henry Lewis, January 25, 1939, at Madison Square Garden, earned Joe $34,413; Jack Roper, April 17, 1939, at Wrigley Field, $34,850; Two-Ton Tony Galento, June 28, 1939, at Yankee Stadium, $114,332.17.

There is confusion to this day about the exact terms of the deal Gould did with Jacobs for Braddock. Some say it was 10 percent of the gate whenever the title was contested at the Garden. Another theory has it that Braddock got a tenth of the overall promotion, no matter where it was held, as long as Jacobs and the Twentieth Century Sporting Club were involved. My guess is Uncle Mike dipped into the champion's purse to meet his part of the deal, writing it off as expenses, one of the fight game's oldest dodges. Toward the end, Jacobs, his health failing, got tired of the arrangement, and their lawyers swapped expensive letters.

As Lucky Jim remembered it years later in conversation with the writer Peter Heller: “I got 10 percent of the promotions involving any championship because once Louis won the fight, Mike Jacobs, who controlled Louis, controlled the heavyweight division, and he had control of that title. But, if Louis got knocked out, we didn't make it with Louis, we made it with the promotions the next ten years, regardless of who was champion. As long as Jacobs promoted that fight, we were in for 10 percent, like an annuity. We might have got one hundred fifty thousand out of it over the ten years. Which wasn't a bad annuity.”