Requiem for a Heavyweight

Joe Louis: 1914-1981

Joe Louis, World Heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, was perhaps the greatest boxer in history. He defended his title a record 25 times. Of 71 professional fights he lost only three, recording 54 knockouts. Yet he once observed: "If you dance, you gotta pay the piper. Believe me, I danced and I paid, and I left him a big fat tip." His dance was a flat-footed shuffle and a blur of powerful arms, and payment was eventual poverty and emotional problems. In the ring, the Brown Bomber was an impassive menace who revealed neither hatred nor benevolence. But from the first time he fought until his death last week of a heart attack at 66, he remained a victim of the pungent, half-lit world of the fight game.

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, Louis quit school as a teen-ager in Detroit to help support a hungry family. But after capturing the A.A.U. title in 1934, he amazed the pros by winning 34 fights, earning some $500,000 and taking the championship from James J. Braddock --all in three years. He did not waste words, either: "As soon as I catch 'em, I put 'em to sleep." When critics doubted that he could take the lighter, classier Billy Conn in 1941, Louis observed, "He can run, but he can't hide."

Louis' most famous fight lasted a mere 2 min. 4 sec. In a rematch with Max Schmeling, who had kayoed him in 1936, Louis redefined fury. Schmeling had to recover in a hospital. Now 75 and a prosperous West German businessman, Schmeling last week recalled his postwar friendship with Louis: "Joe was a highly decent person, but he was exploited because he was so good-natured."

Louis' fights earned $4.8 million, but the money went like three-minute rounds: ex-wives, bad bets and old friends drained it away. The IRS demanded $1.2 million in back taxes and penalties from him, and he suffered the humiliation of professional wrestling to help pay his debts. Following several stays in hospitals for drug abuse and paranoia, he became an "official greeter" at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Despite his personal setbacks, he remains the major black hero of his time. A decade before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, radios in the inner city blared his fights on hot summer nights, and street dances followed his victories. He toured the world, met F.D.R., and New York Mayor James Walker floridly proclaimed, "You laid a rose on Abraham Lincoln's grave." Louis was uncomfortable in the role of symbol. "Jesus Christ, am I all that?" he asked. He was, and could reflect in 1978, "I've been in a whole lot of fights inside the ring and outside. I like to think I won most of them."

Louis scored a T.K.O. in one bout he never fought. He told Muhammad Ali on television, "When I was champion, I went on what they called the bum-of-the-month tour." "You mean I'm a bum?" Ali asked. "You woulda been on the tour," Louis deadpanned. Many experts who saw both men in their prime agree that the Bomber would have whupped the Greatest. Even Ali, who remained strangely silent about Louis' death, concurs. As he tearfully told TIME last week, "Joe Louis was my inspiration. I idolized him. He wrote the book on boxing--the way he stood, the way he blocked shots was beautiful. I just give lip service to being the greatest. He was the greatest." Louis was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery at the request of President Reagan, the dancing done, the piper paid in full.

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