Big Fight

In the crowd were Governors Lehman of New York, Hoffman of New Jersey, Earle of Pennsylvania, Cross of Connecticut. Fitzgerald of Michigan, Brann of Maine. There were One-Eye Connelly, Theodore Roosevelt. Ricardo Cortez, J. Edgar Hoover, Grade Allen, Warden Lawes, Paul Whiteman, Jock Whitney, Sally Rand. Gate receipts--including rights to radio and cinema--bettered $1,000,000. It was the first million-dollar fight since Dempsey v. Tunney in 1927, the sixth in ring history.* Hotels were packed to the doors, mostly by Middle Westerners celebrating a prosperous summer. Top-price on Broadway for ringside seats was $250 for two. Day after the fight, Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote a lead: "You are now listening to the most reassuring sound that has been heard in the land since a whisper from Samuel Insull was a roar from the douds. . . . I refer to the shrill, waning "No, no, no," while Referee Arthur Donovan ended the fight by counting ten.

Aftermath was the biggest party since 1929, the most elaborate display of individual and public drunkenness since 1920. In Jack Dempsey's saloon, grizzled old J. F. ("Jafsie"') Condon told his life history to a stranger from Wisconsin. At a nearby table, Bruno Richard Hauptmann's lawyer, Lloyd Fisher, glared into a beer glass. At 5 o'clock in the morning, a bartender named Mike Hurley and 13 friends sat down in an East Side coffeepot to a breakfast of beer and a 50-lb. tuna fish, cut in steaks, which they ate down to the tail. In the Stork Club, where celebrities and whatnots were three deep along the bar, Author Ernest Hemingway argued with Poloist Winston Guest.

Next morning, sportswriters hailed Joe Louis with all the superlatives they had used for Max Baer two years ago. In his Harlem apartment, a reporter asked Louis how he liked being married. Said "The Brown Embalmer",* ''One night is not enough to tell." His plans included a world tour, a Chicago apartment home, one fight a month, a chauffeur for the Lincoln car he gave his wife for a wedding present, a bout with Max Schmeling next June, another with Champion James J. Braddock next September.

Bruised and shaky, with a huge black ring around one eye, Fisticuffer Max Baer had a haircut, a shave and manicure, commiserated with his 238-lb. brother Buddy Baer, who had lost a decision to a Montana heavyweight named Ford Smith right after the big fight.* He wished Louis luck, announced that he would retire to raise white-faced cattle on his California ranch.

*The others: Dempsey v. Tunney in 1926 Dempsey v. Sharkey, Dempsey. v. Firpo, Dempsey v. Carpentier.

*Other press names for Louis: Brown Bomber, Ring Robot, Alabama Assassin, Dead-Pan Joe, Sepia Slasher, Dark Angel, Tan Thunderbolt, Detroit Dynamiter, Wildcat Warrior.

*Cracked Walter Winchell: "Mama Baer, Papa Baer and Camembert."

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