Man, and it stuck, another of boxing's enduring fairy tales. What happened before and after that historic upset is less well chronicled.
In the engrossing Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers offers this real-life glimpse of Braddock's movements away from the ring:
The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde [Tolson]. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by [Frank] Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Frank Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.
This was not a fairy tale. This was the Cinderella Man out on the town with the head of the FBI and his boyfriend, surrounded by an array of unsavory types, as well as the biggest and most self-important windbag in town, Walter Winchell. Even back then, Frankie Carbo, who would go on to be the main man in the fifties, was in on the take, a regular at the Cotton Club and the Stork. It is said he was answerable only to Costello and had regular quiet talks with Mike Jacobs.
So, whatever the halo that filmmakers might have deposited over their innocent heads, Joe Gould and James J. Braddock moved with ease through all parts of Gotham, from the Garden to Lindy's, the Cotton Club, and on to the Stork. Sometimes they'd stop in at Dempsey's and hang out with Jack. Dempsey's got a reputation over the years as a drop-off place for the Mob's bag money, a sort of gangsters’ post office, but none of this ever rubbed off on the proprietor—who also played a background part in Max Baer's career.
Was Baer–Braddock a fix? There is no evidence. But Baer was the only heavyweight of the era not to go openly with Madden. Owney wanted him out of the picture. And it suited him and others to have Joe Gould's fighter as the heavyweight champion of the world, because he could be manipulated more easily, through Gould, his one-time point man to Dutch Schultz. It is inconceivable that Max took a dive—and what was to follow does not constitute a case for the prosecution. But, whatever the reality, it all fell neatly into place for Gould and his Cinderella Man.
The fight with Baer was, in truth, a one-off for Braddock. It has been dressed up over time as the greatest upset in the history of heavyweight boxing up to that point when, in fact, it was an honest, workmanlike performance. The fight itself was dull. When Max threw punches, they rocked Jim; trouble was, he hardly threw any—and Braddock just pecked away and survived. Every fighter has a story, often a good one, and this was Jim's. But the reality was Braddock fought the right fight on the right night against a champion who clowned about once too often.
Max, who might have had a long and lucrative reign, was consigned to boxing's second division without fuss. Had he gone with Madden, that might not have happened. Instead, Joe Louis—now part of the action at the summit of the fight game thanks to the encouragement of Mike Jacobs—gave him a memorable four-round beating in his next fight. Thereafter, over the next two years, Max belted out a decent living against other hopefuls, twenty-nine of them, but he would never get another shot at the title, even though he deserved one.
There was a curious symmetry to Baer's career, which he wound up in 1941: Max fought a total of 110 professional rounds and scored 110 knockdowns. The Ring magazine rated him at 22 among the 100 greatest punchers of all time.
Once he stopped taking advantage of being Jewish (Goebbels banned his first movie in Nazi Germany “not because I was Jewish, but because I beat Schmeling”), he made the most of his looks to earn a good living as an actor. Max was a bright-eyed, smiling presence in a succession of forgettable movies and TV shows, all the way up to 1959. His son, Max Jr., found screen fame as Jethro in the sixties’ TV hit The Beverly Hillbillies, and he was livid when Cinderella Man portrayed his father as a mean, unfeeling fighter. He was anything but. As far as his family and friends were concerned, Max was a rush of mountain air in a sewer.
For Braddock, life took a different turn. While the boxing fraternity and the general public were buzzing with the enormity of his achievement against the fearsome Baer, the game's machinery was grinding away to ensure this well-placed champion and his manager did not go short once he faced the inevitable: a big-money showdown with the unbeaten Louis and the loss of his title.
However good and fleeting a story Braddock's was, everyone at the time knew the best heavyweight boxer in the world was Joe Louis. Mike Jacobs knew, the kids stealing nickels from the pay phones knew, the president of the United States knew. Jimmy Johnston wasn't so sure. And the reason was Joe Louis was black. Johnston's reign as matchmaker at the Garden was, predictably, troublingly racist. The Garden, advised by Johnston, reflected the wider view in the business that fight fans wanted a white heavyweight champion. It was a prejudice that was to cost Jimmy the ride of his life.
In a single phone conversation with Joe's manager, John Roxborough, Johnston properly gave the game away.
Roxborough phoned Johnston to see if he could find a place for Louis on a Garden bill, after Joe's string of impressive wins in the Midwest, including two over the well-regarded Lee Ramage.
“If he comes here,” Johnston told Roxborough, “he'll be expected to lose a few. I don't care if he's knocked out Ramage. He's still colored. . . . Don't you have any white boys out there?”
What Johnston couldn't know over the phone was Roxborough was black—as black as Joe, who would go on to be the biggest box-office hit in boxing since Jack Dempsey and until Muhammad Ali. And Johnston missed out on signing Louis because his manager didn't much like Johnston's attitude. Such biological determinism as the Garden matchmakers would not have looked out of place in the beer cellars of Munich at that time.
Louis, contrary to the heavily massaged perceptions of his day, suffered at the hands of all types and races, including his own. He made a lot of money—for other people, mainly. He had a black manager, a Jewish promoter, and, waiting up the road, a Jewish-managed German opponent, Hitler's pet Max Schmeling, who would spend the rest of his life vigorously detaching himself from the prevailing philosophy of the Third Reich and all the sins they visited upon Hebrews everywhere.
This is the story of what happened to Joe Louis, and Mike Jacobs's part in it.
A couple of weeks after Baer–Braddock, Joe was scheduled to beat Primo Carnera—from whom Baer had won the title in 1934—and Louis duly did what he had to do. But, with the preliminaries out of the way, what might have seemed a natural match between the finest heavyweight of that part of the century, Louis, and the new champion, a man blessed (or otherwise) to share the same occupation, Braddock, did not pan out as expected—except by those in the know. And nobody was more in the know than Mike Jacobs. Jacobs was a strange fish. He had no worries referring to all dark-skinned fighters as schwartzes—but at the same time he would give them as much work as they could handle. His only prejudice was against an unimpressive bank balance. He knew Louis was good business. In time, he would also come to be proud of their friendship, not to mention their business relationship.
Roxborough and his partner, Julian Black, an old numbers racketeer, were as attuned to the moneymaking possibilities of their boxer as was Jacobs. They knew that, while Johnston was a roadblock, Jacobs was a conduit. What they had to overcome, however, was the ingrained resistance of white America to recognizing a black man as the best heavyweight in the world. Roxborough needed no history lessons on this subject.
The reason Louis was having trouble making his way to the top of the heavyweight pile was the legacy left by the last black champion, Jack Johnson. Jack gave the White Hope, James J. Jeffries, such a hiding in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, that few present would ever forget it.
Tex Rickard, who promoted Johnson–Jeffries, was anxious to give the bout a