Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (6 page)

And when it all came down, when the rich cut back on their servants and the middle class found itself pushed down into the working class and the working class could find no work and started selling apples and muttering about stealing bread before they’d let their loved ones starve, why then we had FDR and the alphabet soup of social revolution. The face of America was forever changed; a society that had reared itself on rugged individualism became a welfare state. Naturally we needed a new breed of heavyweight champion and lo, he materialized like the ancient kings of the Hebrews.

His name was Joe Louis and he was black and he was simply the greatest heavyweight fighter who ever lived. He could defend like Johnson and jab harder than Tunney and punch like Dempsey at Toledo. Maybe the New Deal and hard times had turned our minds around, but all of a sudden it seemed good to have a black champion of the world—what could those know-nothings have been thinking a generation earlier when they had begrudged the great Jack Johnson his hard-earned crown? There had been black fighters before the incomparable Joe L., condescendingly described as “a credit to their race,” but
sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said it for all of us when he wrote of Louis, “He’s a credit to his race—the human race.”

If there is no God, man needs to invent him, and so it would seem with our champions and their antagonists. The God of Boxing is a Machiavelli of social balance. In the thirties, with radicals chanting, “Black and white, unite and fight!” who could better champion our hopes and our needs than the Brown Bomber? Gone was the vicious cheer of Caucasian for Caucasian. Our Bomber quickly changed all that. We were there when our white cousins were rooting him on to topple Primo Carnera and Maxie Baer and Max Schmeling. And what a blow to our democratic hopes when Schmeling, Adolf s darling and Goebbels’s calling card, found the flaw in our young hero’s armor—or call it an Achilles jaw, knocked Louis down in an early round and down for the count in twelve.

Who in hell pulls these celestial strings? Who decides that just as Der Führer and his self-styled Supermen are bullying their way into the Rhineland, a German knight should return to our shores and smite down our black-white hope?

For the next twelve months our heavyweight championship moved out of the squared circle into the political arena of global power. Old Jim Braddock had lifted the title from a playful Baer. Suddenly Braddock’s little manager Joe Gould found himself playing international chess. As the conqueror of Louis, Schmeling had credentials as the No. 1 challenger, and the Garden wanted the match. But crustaceous Mike Jacobs, who played his chess with ringside tickets, had an exclusive on Joe Louis and wanted Braddock and that title for his man. Whoever controlled the heavyweight title controlled the multi-million-dollar business of boxing. But there were even higher stakes and bigger players. This act of the drama comes from Joe Gould himself, reliving his glory days. “I’m just sittin’ down t’ supper when the phone rings and it’s Max Schmeling callin’ from Berlin. He asks me if I signed for Louis yet and I sez No, but we’re gettin’ closer. He wants t’ know how much I’m askin’ and I say three hunnert t’ousand against 50 percent
of the gross. Max says if we come to Berlin and fight him instead we c’n do even better. I sez for a Jew to bring his champion to Germany and face all them anti-Semites they gotta do a lot better. He sez wait a minute I’m makin’ this call from the private residence of Reich Minister Goebbels—I’m goin’ to put him on the phone—the German Government is ready to underwrite the fight. Just tell ’im what you want—.

“So there I am, a little Yiddle who didn’t have a dime until I got the brainstorm of scraping the washed-up Braddock off the Jersey docks an’ bringin’ him back from retirement—Joe Gould talkin’ long distance to the Number Two Man in Nazi Germany. Goebbels is very polite. He says the Germans are great sports fans and we will be treated like royalty when we come to Germany. He says he would like to bring us to Berchtesgaden to meet Der Führer himself. I can see him and Max all smiles on the other end of that phone. ‘Now would you like to tell me your terms,’ he sez.

“Well for openers I want three hunnert t’ousand in dollars here in the Chase National Bank before we get on the boat,’ I sez.
‘Ya,
you haf it’—sez Goebbels. ‘An’ another hunnert thou when we get to Berlin.’
‘Ya,
you haf it,’ he sez. ‘An’ first-class travel and hotel accommodations for six people.’
‘Ya,
you haf it,’ he sez. ‘An twenny-five t’ousand trainin’ expenses.’
‘Ya, ya,
you will haf that also. If you come to Berlin right away we will sign the contract.’

“Then I take a big breath,” Joe Gould went on, “an’ I sez, ‘Only one more clause, Mister Goebbels. Before we enter the ring we want every Jew let out of your concentration camps.’ ”

According to Gould, who gave us this for the book he hoped we’d write, the phone went dead. There was to be no demonstration of Nazi Superman over decadent America in the Sports Palast. The coveted title that would have become the property of the neo-vandals of the Third Reich remained in America. Eventually Gould did sign for a fight with Schmeling, but in New York. Wheeling and dealing, he also signed for his resurrected champion to meet Joe Louis in Chicago. Under the
table was a deal for Gould and his fading tiger to enjoy 10 percent of Louis’s subsequent winnings. (It was arrangements like this, plus 40 percent tax-free to his first wife, plus shares to his Detroit sponsors, to Mike Jacobs, to his gambling “buddies,” and to the Treasury Department, that turned Joe Louis into a million-dollar pauper.) While Max Schmeling showed up for his phantom fight with the sought-after Braddock, Gould’s Cinderella Man was gallantly submitting to the quick hard hands of a lithe colored boy, Joe Louis Barrow, born into a large family of hungry mouths in a ramshackle cabin in the cotton country of Alabama.

So the next Fight of the Century was moving into the center ring, clenched fists across the sea. When Max Schmeling returned to America to challenge Joe Louis for the championship of the world, the Wehrmacht was goose-stepping across the Austrian border. Neville Chamberlain was buying time with other people’s land and lives. There was a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. The concentration camps that an eccentric fight manager in his moment of kidding-on-the-level had asked to open were now filling up with victims of bureaucratic madmen tooling for war and drooling for conquest. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic viewed Louis and Schmeling II as anything less than the personification of Good vs. Evil. If Schmeling won, the shadow of the swastika would darken our land. If Louis triumphed, Negroes, Jews, anti-Nazis, pacifists, and everyone who yearned for an order of decency without violence would feel recharged and reassured.

Everyone from That Man in the White House to the Raggedy Anns in the street had a stake in the victory of Joe Louis that long-ago night in Yankee Stadium. The Bomber acknowledged it by leaping from his corner at the bell like War Admiral, another champion of that day, leaving the starting gate. Louis was two hundred pounds of dark and dedicated avenging angel that night, and in the first minute he had hit Goebbels’s boy so many terrible lefts and rights that the invader was wishing he had stood in Berchtesgaden. At the end of two minutes
Schmeling instinctively turned away to avoid the punishment and Louis, for once uncool, pistoned a left and followed up with the convincer, a bone-crushing right that seemed to turn the German’s head around on its socket. Men of the ring are expected to fight like bulls, in stoic silence, but this time Schmeling let out the kind of a scream one hears from the victim of the mugger’s knife.

That night we attended a democratic carnival in Harlem. Behind a coffin draped with a Nazi flag, tens of thousands bigappled and cakewalked. It was a spontaneous political demonstration. Joe Louis had gone forth to do battle for all of us and everyone was rejoicing, from Wendell Willkie to the black numbers runner who pulled out a roll and set up drinks for the house at a corner bar we wandered into on Amsterdam Avenue. I told my new friends I had been at ringside and could hear the blow that almost removed the German’s head. Everybody laughed and we hugged each other and the closest thing to it I would ever know was V-E night in London. The two victory street operas overlap in my memory—marking the beginning and the end of the long war against gas chambers and Gauleiters. When Herr Schmeling cried out in surrender we were ready psychologically to take on the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS. Yes, the God of Boxing and the God of War saw eye to eye that mythological June night in Yankee Stadium. Five years later, at Nuremberg, we learned that Goering had wept when he heard the unnerving news of his champion’s humiliation. But at another headquarters, the magnetic Hotel Teresa in Harlem where the Brown Bomber held court, the bright music and the vicarious laughter of the underdog winner mounted into the dawn. Fifteen months after that night of metaphor triumphant there would be blitzkrieg, all of Europe would go under; there would be seven years of blood and death before Der Führer was to turn his head and scream surrender like Max Schmeling after 124 seconds under the bombs of the first black champion of the world to be embraced by white America.

I
N 1920, WHEN MY
father B.P. was organizing one of the pioneer film companies and setting up shop at the (L. B.) Mayer-Schulberg Studio in downtown Los Angeles, he was a passionate fight fan. An habitué of the old Garden on Madison Square—before our western migration—his favorite fighter had been the Jewish lightweight Benjamin Leiner who fought under the nom-de-boxe of Benny Leonard. On the eve of my seventh birthday, my hero was neither the new cowboy star Tom Mix nor the acrobatic Doug Fairbanks. I didn’t trade face cards of the current baseball stars like the other kids on Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth could hit fifty-four homers that year (when no one else had ever hit more than sixteen in the history of the league) and I really didn’t care. The legendary Ty Cobb could break a batting record almost every time he came to the plate but no chill came to my skin at the mention of his name. That sensation was reserved for Benny Leonard.

He was doing with his fists what the Adolph Zukors and William Foxes, and soon the L. B. Mayers and the B. P. Schulbergs, were doing in their studios and their theaters, proving the advantage of brain over brawn, fighting the united efforts of the
goyim
establishment to keep them in their ghettos.

Jewish boys on their way to
schule
on the Sabbath had tasted the fists and felt the shoe-leather of the righteous Irish and Italian Christian children who crowded them, shouted
“You killed our Christ!” and avenged their gentle Savior with blows and kicks. But sometimes the young victim surprised his enemies by fighting back, like Abe Attell, who won the featherweight championship of the world at the turn of the century, or Abe Goldstein, who beat up a small army of Irish contenders on his way to the bantamweight title. But our superhero was Benny Leonard. “The Great Benny Leonard.” That’s how he was always referred to in our household. There was The Great Houdini. The Great Caruso.
And
The Great Benny Leonard.

My father gave me a scrapbook, with a picture of Benny in a fighting stance on the cover, and I recognized his face and could spell out his name even before I was able to read. In 1920 he was only twenty-four years old, just four years younger than my hero-worshiping old man, but he had been undefeated lightweight champion of the world ever since he knocked out the former champion, Freddie Welsh, in the Madison Square Garden.

B.P. knew Benny Leonard personally. All up-and-coming young Jews in New York knew Benny Leonard personally. They would take time off from their lunch hour or their afternoon activities to watch him train. They bet hundreds and often thousands of dollars on him in stirring contests against Rocky Kansas, Ever Hammer, Willie Ritchie, Johnny Dundee, Pal Moran, Joe Welling. … He was only five-foot-six, and his best fighting weight was a few pounds over 130, but he was one of those picture-book fighters who come along once or twice in a generation, a master boxer with a knockout punch, a poised technician who came into the ring with his hair plastered down and combed back with a part in the middle, in the approved style of the day, and whose boast was that no matter whom he fought, “I never even get my hair mussed!” After his hand was raised in victory, he would run his hand back over his sleek black hair, and my father, and Al Kaufman, and Al Lichtman, and the rest of the triumphant Jewish rooting section would roar in delight, as half a century later Ali’s fans would raise the decibel level at the sight of the Ali Shuffle. To
share in his invincibility. To see him climb into the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighborhood gauntlet.

One of my old man’s pals practically cornered the market on the early motion-picture insurance business. But all through his life he would be singled out as the unique amateur boxer who not only had sparred with Benny Leonard but had actually knocked Great Benny down! Every time Artie Stebbins came to our house, my father prefaced his arrival by describing that historic event. Artie Stebbins had a slightly flattened nose and looked like a fighter. He would have gone on to a brilliant professional career—B.P. had convinced himself—except for an unfortunate accident in which his opponent had died in the ring. No matter how modestly he dismissed the legendary knockdown of Benny Leonard—“I think Benny slipped …” or “I just happened to tag him right”—that knockdown remained with him as a badge of honor. My father would say with a note of awe, “He might have been another Benny Leonard!”

But when I was going on seven, there was only one Benny Leonard; my scrapbook fattened on his victories. In those days fighters fought three or four times in a single month. Benny had been an undernourished fifteen-year-old when he first climbed into the professional ring, getting himself knocked out by one Mickey Finnegan in three rounds. A year later he was knocked out again by the veteran Joe Shugrue. But from the time he reached the seasoned age of eighteen, he had gone on to win more than 150 fights, in an era in which the lightweight division was known for its class. The Great Benny Leonard had gone to the post twenty-six times in 1919 alone, and almost every one of his opponents was a name known to the
cognoscenti.
As for me, I had only one ambition, to become a world champion like The Great Benny Leonard. Or rather, two ambitions, for the second was to see The Great Benny in action.