Читать книгу Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing - Kevin Mitchell J. - Страница 13

For Europe and their allies, the real fighting, the irreversible descent into global conflict, began at 4:40 a.m. on September 1, 1939. Schmeling was not among the Luftwaffe airmen who hit predetermined targets in Krakow, Lodi, and Warsaw that dawn. But he, and the rest of Germany, knew that a terrible beast had been let loose. Five minutes after the planes took off, the German Navy was bombing the free port of Danzig. By 8 a.m., the Wehrmacht had moved on the village of Mokra, only to be repulsed, a rare Polish victory in what was to become a nightmare occupation for the next six years.

While Max's ring cachet had been seriously diminished, he nevertheless was retained as a faded German hero from the last fragile days of peacetime. Not even that peripheral clout, however, could save him from the inconvenience of being drafted and serving as a parachutist in the invasion of Crete in 1941. Later, it is said, he gave shelter to Jewish refugees. By then, he had been parked in the relative safety of a military hospital in Ulm. His war was a decent enough one.

Joe, meanwhile, boxed on: Bob Pastor, September 20, 1939, at Briggs Stadium, Detroit, $118,400; Arturo Godoy, February 9, 1940, at Madison Square Garden, $23,620.21; Johnny Paycheck, March 29, 1940, at Madison Square Garden, $19,908; Godoy II, June 20, 1940, at Yankee Stadium, $55,989.04; Al McCoy, December 16, 1940, at Boston Garden, $17,938; Red Burman, January 31, 1941, at Madison Square Garden, $21,023.16; Gus Dorazio, February 17, 1941, at the Convention Hall, Philadelphia, $18,730.70; Abe Simon, March 21, 1941, at the Olympia Stadium, Detroit, $19,400; Tony Musto, April 8, 1941, at The Arena, St Louis, $17,468; Buddy Baer, May 23, 1941, at the Griffith Stadium, Washington, DC, $36,866; Billy Conn, June 18, 1941, at the Polo Grounds, New York, $153,905.

They called it the “Bum of the Month Club,”—which, Conn and Godoy aside, was not far from the truth. It was like a butcher's shopping list, with some cuts fresher than others. And, as the champ stood over each of his slain quarry, Joe Gould could hardly contain his happiness.

In America, the sense of removal from the Old World, embedded in the national psyche since the earliest days of colonization, seriously delayed for the second time in the century their entry into a world war. The cries of the Anti-Nazi League who'd demonstrated against Schmeling being allowed to represent the Third Reich against Louis in New York in 1938 had little impact now in the White House. The president had urged Louis to stand up and fight for his country against a German in the ring then, but Roosevelt was not able to persuade his fellow citizens so easily that taking up arms for old allies was worth it now. It took the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to change that. The bombs fell on American ships just six months after Joe came from behind to knock out Billy Conn in the thirteenth round and keep his title.

Two months before the day of infamy, as FDR had memorably called it, Joe gave the thoroughly outclassed Lou Nova an awful beating over six rounds at the Polo Grounds in New York, earning another $199,500. In January of 1942, at the Garden, he went to work on Max Baer's big brother, Buddy, for $65,000, a rerun of an earlier farce; in March, he gave Simon a second walloping at the Garden, this time for $45,882.

Later that year, Joe joined up. He was spared the chore of killing or dying for democracy, though, and sold war bonds for his country instead, rousing the troops in his stumbling, inarticulate, but sincere way. For the duration, he had one allegedly serious contest, against a guy called Johnny Davis in Buffalo over four rounds. Davis, knocked cold after just fifty-three seconds, could nonetheless tell his grandchildren he once fought Joe Louis for the world heavyweight title because, according to the rules of the New York State Athletic Commission, the champ's title was on the line every time he stepped into a ring. How Davis, who was knocked out nineteen times and lost twenty-one of his twenty-six fights between 1944 and 1946, ever got to share canvas space with one of the finest fighters of all time remains a mystery. And it did Joe's credibility no good at all after his string of one-sided defenses. It did not seem to bother him, though. For Joe, it was business, an interruption to his new obsession, golf.

The rest of World War II, Joe traveled the country, went to Europe, boxed exhibitions, had his face on billboards, and was on the screen and radio. From fights for the Army and Navy Emergency Relief Fund, he raised $100,000—all of it taxed. It was a debt that would one day crush not only his finances but his spirit.

Had he been asked, Joe would have killed Germans for a private's pay of $1.25 a day. That is pretty clear from what he said at the time, and later. But Joe knew he would not be asked to go into action, even alongside fighting men who adored him. America did not do that to their celebrities. Also, he was black. There was a residual prejudice that blighted the American war effort, as black soldiers, sailors, and airmen struggled with the dilemma of defending a country where they were still considered second-class citizens. It was as if blacks were so far down the social and cultural scale, they were barely worth sacrificing on the battlefield.

Into that very argument stepped a man who would later play a pivotal role in Joe's life, and that of the Mob in boxing.

Truman K. Gibson Jr., to give him the handle he always insisted on, was born in Atlanta the year the Titanic went down, 1912, two years before Joe was born. He grew up in an educated and proud black family in Columbus, Ohio. His parents were articulate teachers prominent in the black community—and not fazed by celebrity of any kind, black or white. His mother, Alberta, had some memorable personal run-ins at their house with W. E. B. Du Bois. He was the renowned black intellectual and commentator who'd stepped into the debate over Jack Johnson's defeat of James J. Jeffries back in 1915. He was also the first black man to earn a doctorate from Harvard (he would ease Truman's father's path into that institution) and a man whose ego was hardly prepared for Alberta's sharp tongue. When he came calling one day and complained he'd only asked for “half a cup of tea,” Alberta handed him back the full cup and reminded him she was a busy woman. “It saves me a trip back to the teapot,” she said. “Take it or leave it.”

His father's grandmother, whose full name Truman never knew, was a part black, part Seminole Indian—and, like Joe's grandparents, a slave. So young Truman needed no history lessons in the oppression of blacks, or how to strive to rise above that oppression. His father, an independent and strident thinker, left academe to become a leading figure in the insurance business, in Atlanta and later Columbus. If you were looking for a pattern, there might be one in how the son, like the father, drifted from advocacy and intellectualism toward the convenience of pragmatic moneymaking.

Truman attended integrated schools in Columbus but recalls in his autobiography, “We were distant from the other kids; I had no white friends at school.” He played on the school football team but he and the only other black player dined separately. There was even a black YMCA in town. Segregation thrived in all corners of the city named after the white man credited with discovering the country. So he moved to Chicago. It was a move that would have consequences beyond his immediate career.

Gibson had also done his bit during World War II. He was as much of a groundbreaker for his race as was Jack Johnson, although in a more subtle way. He had an ego—for example, the use of the full, drawn-out moniker of Truman K. Gibson Jr.—but he had reason to be proud of his achievements. For all his later weaknesses, when he chose to do business with Jim Norris and his cohorts attached to the International Boxing Club, Gibson could go to his grave content with his contribution in tearing down Jim Crow prejudices in the armed forces before and during World War II, a time when bigotry was far more entrenched than now.

He was a big barrel of contradictions, noble and weak, intelligent and—conveniently, perhaps—naive. He made the best of whatever situation he was in but failed to see that he could have avoided being in some tight corners in the first place had he not let circumstances drift. Truman Gibson might have been boxing's ultimate pragmatist.

In the autumn of 1940, Gibson, one of his country's few prominent black lawyers, was summoned to Washington to act as an advocate for African-American soldiers. For five years he served as an assistant to Bill Hastie, the civilian aide to the secretary of war. He saw prejudice against black soldiers everywhere, who were “abused, assaulted and even murdered by white civilians in the south,” as he recalls in his autobiography.

When he and his wife arrived in the capital from Chicago, they were angered to learn segregation was deeply embedded in the Washington white mindset, from top to bottom. Even store employees refused to let Mrs. Gibson try on a pair of shoes. But Gibson's time had come; there were stirrings of black awareness on Capitol Hill as President Roosevelt, repairing the damage left by Hoover, was gearing up for his third term and leaning on the black and liberal vote.

Gibson marshalled black opinion makers in the media but felt powerless sometimes in trying to shift perceptions in society at large. As America stirred itself to fight fascism, at home its citizens were prepared to countenance all manner of segregation, from shoe shops in Washington to schools and buses in Alabama, and all the way through the military, where Negro-only units were still in place.

Gibson wanted to change attitudes but came up against brick walls everywhere. “The army is not a sociological laboratory,” the chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, told Gibson when he pointed out the many anomalies he discovered. But Truman persisted. He listened and learned. And argued. He walked out on intransigent opponents to his initiatives. Gently, he twisted arms. He even succeeded in getting blacks into the Air Force, long considered a bastion of whiteness and privilege. It was a small victory, but a significant one.

Gibson kept chipping away at the institutionalized racism in the military, like a pesky flyweight jabbing, jabbing, jabbing. His integrity and demeanor won him friends in the right places and, slowly, views moved in the direction of fairness and equality. It was not a tectonic shift, but its subtleties would be felt for longer than any single major eruption. Gibson demonstrated then in the halls of power the mental agility he was to bring to bear in that other bear pit, professional boxing.

It was a curious battle to fight: striving to give his black brothers and sisters the right to go and be blown up for the country that denied them so many basic rights and freedoms. He received one letter from a black soldier at Camp Lee in Virginia that summarized the dilemma: “The prisoner of war gets much better treatment than we do, even when they go to the dispensary or hospital, and it is really a bearing down to our morale as we are supposed to be fighting for democracy. Yet we are treated worse than our enemies are. . . . If something isn't done quick, I am afraid a great disaster will surely come.”

Fame in sports did not spare black servicemen from prejudice. Jackie Robinson, who, after the war, would become the first black player in Major League Baseball, did his basic training at Fort Riley in Kansas. Toward the end of his time there, he overheard a white officer call a black soldier “a stupid black nigger sonofabitch.” Robinson intervened, thinking his standing as a rising baseball star might carry some influence. “That goes for you too, nigger,” was the curt reaction. Robinson threw an angry right hand and knocked several of the officer's teeth out. Luckily for Robinson, Joe Louis, who had met Gibson in 1935, was by now also at Fort Riley. He informed his lawyer friend of the incident.

As Gibson put Robinson's defense to the officer in charge of the investigation, Louis intervened in a way that those who knew him might have imagined was beyond his simple ways. “General, you have to do a lot of entertaining and I took the liberty of delivering a case of wine to your quarters,” the heavyweight champion of the world told him. “This is not any bribe or whatever, but I would like for my friend, Jackie Robinson, to finish his course.”

Robinson graduated from the officer candidate school shortly afterward. However, he encountered more bigotry soon enough. On boarding a bus at another army camp in Texas, he was told, “Nigger, get to the back.” The combustible Robinson refused—and grabbed the driver's quickly drawn pistol, raking his mouth with it. Louis wanted Gibson to intervene again, but it wasn't necessary. Robinson had a result of sorts; he was honorably discharged.