Schmeling v. Louis

In New York's Yankee Stadium last week, Germany's Max Schmeling knocked out Detroit's Negro Joe Louis in the twelfth round of a scheduled 15-round prizefight.

The bout was watched by a crowd of 40,000, some of whom paid $40 apiece for tickets, highest box-office price since 1929. Unlike many major prizefights of the last five years, it failed to end in a foul or a disputed decision. It launched what promises to be a successful season for a new promoting organization, 20th Century Sporting Club Inc., run by Tex Rickard's onetime right-hand man, Mike Jacobs, in opposition to Madison Square Garden Corp. which Rickard founded. It caused twelve deaths from excitement. Adolf Hitler congratulated the winner. What made the fight remarkable, however, was none of these facts. It was remarkable because in it Schmeling demolished not merely a capable & well-trained opponent but the hardiest of all those resilient myths which flourish so prodigiously on the sports pages of U. S. newspapers, the myth that Joe Louis was unbeatable.

The myth of Joe Louis' invincibility started a year ago when, a raw but talented young fisticuffer eight months out of the amateur class, he defeated a worn trial horse named Natie Brown. Prizefight reporters, hero worshippers by nature and naturally gullible, promptly hailed Louis, as they had hailed dozens of other promising fighters, as a coming champion. Louis failed to belie his billing as promptly as his predecessors. Matched with Primo Camera, tottering but still formidable, he won by a knockout in the sixth round.

Accustomed to seeing their idols shattered, prizefight reporters concealed their amazement by enthusiasm. They likened Louis, a cool young blackamoor who did his work with a commendable economy of motion, to a cobra, a leopard, a panther. He received innumerable complimentary and alliterated nicknames, and a match with noisy and preposterous Max Baer. Baer, like Camera, was slow, overgrown and easy to hit. Louis dealt with him the same way, except that this time the knock-out arrived in the fourth round. Louis ceased to be an animal. He became a "superman."

Impassive as a baby and equally susceptible, enormously pleased with the sleek clothes and large automobiles which changed circumstances made it possible for him to possess, Louis was no less pleased with this explanation of the change. To illustrate his own faith in the legend of Joe Louis, he got married two hours before he fought Baer. The more perfectly he lived up to the weird picture of himself created by the Press, the more frantically the Press worked to improve the picture. By last autumn Louis was not merely the ablest fighter of his generation but the greatest of all time. His opponents, crediting the myth, approached the ring as though it were an abattoir. Chicago's pugilistic chopping block, King Levinsky, lasted 141 seconds. Tough old Paulino Uzcudun did better. No one had ever knocked out Paulino, in 36 years. Fisti-cuffer Louis did it in four rounds.

By last winter it had long been unanimously conceded by all prizefight experts that Louis would win the heavyweight championship as soon as he fought the current holder, James J. Braddock--who had won it from Louis' predecessor as super-fighter, Max Baer. The desideratum was to heighten not the suspense but the dramatic finality of this achievement by delaying it as long as possible. In the hope that doing so would prove a profitable venture, 20th Century Sporting Club dug up Schmeling who, since losing the title to Jack Sharkey and being thrashed by a second-rater named Steve Hamas, had stayed in Germany, making tentative gestures toward a comeback. What sort of chance fight experts and their audience thought Schmeling had was last week shown by the odds, 10-to-1, and by the comments of famed prizefight reporters. Samples:

"He doesn't figure to win off the form, and that's a fact. . . ."--Damon Runyon. "How can Louis miss? . . ."--Joe Williams.

"Unless the law of gravity blows up, the closing curtain should fall on one of the first four acts. . . ."--Grantland Rice.

"Max Schmeling is managing to keep reasonably cool, calm and collected as the hour of his doom approaches. . . ."--Jack Miley.

"The execution of Maximilian Otto Adolf Siegfried Schmeling, condemned opponent of Joe Louis, was postponed. . . ." --Richards Vidmer, when rain delayed the fight.

"No one expects Schmeling actually to lose his life. . .'."--Wilbur Wood.

Among the things that prizefight reporters & public overlooked last week was the fact that the first-class heavyweights Louis had fought did not include one who was reasonably quick, intelligent and courageous. Consequently, Press & public were unaware that Joe Louis had not yet learned how to defend himself from a straight right-hand punch on the jaw. Max Schmeling revealed this shocking omission in the fourth round of the fight. Superman Louis flopped down on his haunches.

Bewildered, Mrs. Joe Louis, sitting beside Author Carl Van Vechten, fainted dead away. Almost equally astonished, the rest of the crowd set up an angry roar. It continued, a disappointed and monotonous chant, until, in the twelfth round, long since dazed by the steady, systematic pounding of Schmeling's right fist against his jaw, Superman Louis went down again. This time, as he wriggled on the canvas, the referee counted ten.

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