THE LOUIS-SCHMELING FIGHTS: PRELUDE TO WAR

Seconds before Joe Louis and Max Schmeling began their historic rematch on June 22, 1938, referee Arthur Donovan said to them: "I want to impress upon you men now, of the terrific responsibility that you have in this ring tonight." Never since has such an ordinary man as a boxing referee spoken such a weighted and important truth.

by William Dettloff

On that summer night, Louis and Schmeling made the world stand still. They were just a pair of prizefighters, really, heavyweights to be precise, one the world champion and the other used up and trying to end his career on a high note. To them that's all it was, a fight like the dozens of others they'd had in their careers, exercises in mid-level brutality, played out mostly for the green it put in their wallets and maybe too a bit for the thrill it will always give one man to beat up another.

To the rest of the world it was much more than that, and Louis and Schmeling were anything but mere pugs. Nearly 70 years later, Louis' first-round knockout win remains the most historically important fight in the history of boxing, maybe the most important event in all of sport. In boxing, it easily eclipses its runners-up - Jack Johnson beating Tommy Burns to become the first black heavyweight champion in the century's first decade, and Joe Frazier besting Muhammad Ali in 1971 in a match ripe with cultural implications.

If it were any other time, under any other circumstance, it would have been a big fight - a very big one even. Heavyweight title fights were always big in those days; the heavyweight champion was a revered figure in American culture. Plus Louis and Schmeling had history; in a huge upset, Schmeling had knocked out the fast-rising contender two years before. Revenge plays big in this business, always has. Tickets sell and seats fill up on one of the basest and most cherished human pursuits.

Louis was 23-0 and seen as invincible heading into his first fight with Schmeling. He had recently decimated a pair of former heavyweight champions in Primo Carnera and Max Baer and Schmeling, at 30 years old and allegedly seriously faded, was expected to go as meekly as had his predecessors. So sluggish was interest in the bout early on that Schmeling's manager, Joe Jacobs, devised a publicity stunt that had Schmeling showing up at Louis' training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey and standing on line and paying 50 cents along with everyone else to watch Louis work the bags and spar.

It was typical Jacobs - all show biz. Schmeling had no reason to spy. All he needed to see he had seen during Louis' blowout of Paulino Uzcundun the previous December: Louis carried his left hand low and dropped it after jabbing. Schmeling's famous observation, quoted by the newspapermen of the day - "I see zomezings" - was the revelation that he would beat Louis with counter right hands. He would lean back and to the right to make Louis reach for him with the left, and when he did, Schmeling would come over with the right hand.

That's what Schmeling did. In front of 60,000 in Yankee Stadium, he landed that counter right on Louis' jaw no less than 54 times between the moment the first bell rang and 2:29 of the 12th, when the referee counted Louis out. Louis had been down three times total and so completely overwhelmed that no less an authority than the great Jack Dempsey held court on what suddenly appeared to be his obvious and myriad failings.

"Schmeling exposed the fact that Louis has a glass jaw and consequently cannot take a punch," Dempsey was quoted as saying. "All you have to do to beat him is walk into him and bang him with a solid punch. I don't think he'll ever whip another good fighter."

That wasn't true, of course, as Louis would go on to prove. But Schmeling had won nonetheless, which was the best possible outcome, from a promotional perspective, for Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich, which even then was propagating the superiority of the Aryan race and was in the early stages of planning wholesale genocide against European Jews.

A year before Schmeling's win, Hitler announced the German government would begin a huge military buildup, which was a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The following year the German army, marching under the Swastika banner, took control of The Rhineland, another violation of the same treaty. Following this reoccupation of a demilitarized land, Hitler's popularity exploded among voting Germans, but not with the rest of the world. The 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin and nearly boycotted by the United States over Germany's exclusion of German Jews, further revealed the vulgarity of the Nazi party, even as Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, saw the Games as a showcase for the "new Germany." It was in this milieu that Schmeling's win over Louis was exploited for all it was worth.

The victory put Schmeling in line for a shot at the world title, which was held by Jimmy Braddock. Schmeling even signed a contract for it to take place at the Madison Square Bowl in Long Island. But Braddock's manager, the cagey Joe Gould, used American anti-Nazi sentiment as an excuse to freeze Schmeling out of the title picture. Instead, he signed a deal with Louis that guaranteed Braddock $300,000 - an enormous sum for the time - and 10% of any profits Louis' promoters saw for the next decade. Louis stopped Braddock in eight rounds and afterward said famously: "I don't want to be called champ until I whip Max Schmeling."

Louis got his wish. They signed to meet exactly a year after Louis won the title. The promoters did their best to whip American fight-goers into a patriotic frenzy. They succeeded; Louis spouted all manner of patriotic speech that almost certainly had been written by his handlers. On the day of the fight, a syndicated article was run that credited Louis with saying: "Tonight I fight not only the battle of my life to revenge the lone blot on my record, but I fight for America against the challenge of a foreign invader, Max Schmeling. This isn't just one man against another or Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling; it's the good old USA versus Germany."

In any event, with the world veering inexorably toward war, the fight didn't need the hyperbole of boxing promoters; before the match Louis was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At one point Roosevelt told him, "Lean over, Joe, so I can feel your muscles. Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany." That was a full three years before America entered the war.

Schmeling, for his part, denied being a Nazi - "I am a fighter, not a politician" was his standard reply to such inquisitions - but he rarely went out of his way to discourage Nazi propagandists from depicting him as such. Claims that he was anti-Semitic persist, even though his manager, Joe Jacobs, was Jewish. Years later Schmeling wrote in his autobiography that when he arrived in New York he saw people waving signs calling him an "Aryan show horse" and a representative of "the master race." Protesters marched in front of his hotel carrying signs that read, "Boycott Nazi Schmeling."

"Up to the day of the fight, I received thousands of hate-letters signed 'Heil Hitler' or 'Hit Hitler,'" Schmeling wrote. "I didn't know what to do - only two years earlier this same city had cheered me wildly." The threats and hate mail so frightened Doc Casey, Schmeling's longtime cutman, that Casey refused to work his corner. On the way to the ring "I was hit by cigarette butts, banana peels, and paper cups so that I had to pull a towel over my head just to reach the ring safely," Schmeling wrote.

The fight was the most important thing happening in the civilized world at that moment. Outside New York, nearly two-thirds of all radios were tuned into the fight. In Germany, the 3:00 AM curfew was lifted so that cafes and bars could carry the broadcast for their patrons. Among those attending live were Hollywood stars Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper, and Gregory Peck. President Roosevelt's sons were ringside, as were several governors, and J. Edgar Hoover.

And in 124 seconds, it was all over. Louis, a 2-1 favorite, obliterated Schmeling in front of better than 70,000 fans who paid $1,015,012 for the assurance that Germany was wrong, that America could do better, that a black man in America, now the most famous black man in America, could be a hero. And that when the war came, America could win. The vertebrae that were cracked in Schmeling's spine and that kept him in the hospital afterward represented a warning to the rest of the world of America's might and its will. On that night, Joe Louis was America, whether or not he saw it that way or saw himself as the icon he was. All that mattered was the way America saw him. It's how history sees him.

Heywood Broun of the New York World-telegram wrote about the fight: "One hundred years from now some historian may theorize, in a footnote at least that the decline of nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automotive worker who had never studied the policies of Neville Chamberlain and had no opinion whatever in regard to the situation in Czechoslovakia."

It's true. Louis and Schmeling didn't create the moment. The moment created them. But Louis' win filled us with the spirit of triumph, whether or not he liked it. In his autobiography, Schmeling wrote about his ambulance ride to the hospital afterward: "As we drove through Harlem, there were noisy, dancing crowds. Bands had left the nightclubs and bars and were playing and dancing on the sidewalks and streets. The whole area was filled with celebration, noise, and saxophones, continuously punctuated by the calling of Joe Louis' name."

And this was all Louis had to say afterward: "I'm sure enough champion now."

Yes he was.