Chapter 5
Setting Up Joe
“Somebody else” was at ringside the night Lucky Jim won the title. He even dropped off to sleep between rounds, so dull an affair was it. But then Joe Louis was always an unusually relaxed and patient man.
Not a lot moved him, save a big left hook when he wasn't watching, or a disapproving glance from his first wife, Marva, after he'd been caught out yet again. Joe, for all his physical and athletic strength, was a prisoner of forces beyond his control. He sometimes would say, in expectation and hope, “God is on our side.” A simple phrase, which became something of a slogan for GIs during World War II, it not only described Joe's fatalism but identified a peculiar strand of benign righteousness in America. It was a sentiment that would be the bedrock of his career. It made him acceptable, a good American. That night back in 1935, meanwhile, Joe was content to let his Lord anoint James J. Braddock the winner—and make him a prime candidate for the chop further up the road.
Paul Gallico, a sportswriter possessed of both wit and witlessness, once described Joe's quietness as “sly servility.” Gallico, the son of Italian immigrants, a born New Yorker to the tips of his fancy shoes, a man of no little intelligence whose father wanted him to be a concert pianist, should have known better. But he still did not have the mind or instincts needed to make the intellectual leap away from the herd. He was, Robert Lipsyte generously said many years later, “a man of his times.” As Lipsyte acknowledges, though, that always was the lamest of excuses for clever racism.
Gallico, an evocative if reflexive writer, was a friend of Runyon's. He was a friend of anyone in sports, in fact, as long as they'd support his commercial ventures. And there were many of those. His critical integrity was easily bought. Just like Damon's. They belonged to a distant phenomenon, the sometime entrepreneur moonlighting as commentator and social wit. Gallico and Runyon covered many cultural and sporting waterfronts—then went to their typewriters to shape the market for their enterprise. They described the mood of a New York ripe for such description, and their perspective was, like the skin that housed their bones, unequivocally white.
Lipsyte, a childhood fan of Gallico's whose affection waned as he grew into the sportswriting gig himself, sees the fingerprints of prejudice all over the man's work, lyrical and lovely as it sometimes is. At ringside, for instance, Gallico looked up from his free seat, his telegraphist by his side, his cigar tucked away somewhere in his silk-lined jacket, and saw not just two fighters trying to earn an honest (or dishonest) dollar but, on occasions, “the colored brother,” as he liked to dress it up. And “the colored brother” might triumph—if he were in against a white fighter—not necessarily because of his skill or courage alone but because he was “not nearly so sensitive to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands.”
That was the climate in which Joe had to make his mark. He had two things going for him: his left and his right.
Joe's star was hanging high in 1935, and James J. Braddock, the luckiest Jim that ever got up in the morning, would hitch himself to it before long—or rather his supposedly avuncular manager would do it for him. Gould knew he had to move deftly to maximize his earnings before “somebody else” came along and put Jim out of the picture.
Louis needed the title, but he was not going to earn a night in the Garden right away. To get his shot at the Irish patsy who called himself champ, and to build his already formidable reputation, he was encouraged to bide his time with easy wins, to go with the nineteen he had registered since turning professional in 1934. He'd already detonated the myth of the Ambling Alp, Carnera. In quick order and with a coldly simple left-jab, right-cross efficiency, he went on to dispose of King Levinsky in Chicago in August, Baer the following month back in the Bronx, Paulino Uzcudun before Christmas, Charley Retzlaff in January . . . and the rumbling grew for something more meaningful from the prodigy. The strategy was working.
Then a bombshell landed. Or rather, an 8-1 German underdog landed. The contest between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in June 1936, a year after Braddock won the title, shocked not just boxing fans and the wider world, but the guys who made things happen. This wasn't scheduled. And it was on the level. The Brown Bomber, a 10-1 on favorite (as Baer had been against Braddock), was blitzkrieged off the boxing landscape. He was outpunched and outboxed by a decent opponent who, on the biggest night of his life, got it right. Just like Braddock. For a sport that was supposed to be riddled with arranged results, the no-hopers were doing OK.
Maximillian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling, the Black Uhlan, so called because of the heavily dark complexion common to people from that part of Germany, shared a name with Hitler but not, according to all reliable testimony, his thirst for genocide. Nevertheless, through expediency or inclination, Schmeling's reluctance to endorse his führer was not always as enthusiastic at the time as it has become in the revisiting of the story.
What is clear is, as a professional fighter, he put the chance to beat the most feared heavyweight in the business above the inconvenience of representing a regime dedicated to wiping out the Jews and subjugating all other peoples with no obvious links to the Aryan race. Apologists at the time, such as leader writers on the Daily Mail and The Times of London, looked the other way. Revisionists later, such as Gallico, stressed how Max never had Hitler around for supper. But, as David Margolick notes in his must-read study on the fights between Louis and Schmeling, Max did vote along with 48,799,268 of his compatriots for the annexation of Austria in April 1938. It is hard to accept that Schmeling, a bright man who would later become a wealthy franchise holder in Germany for the most American of products, Coca-Cola, was a complete innocent.
Nor was he a mug as a fighter. In the twelfth round of their first fight, Schmeling hauled down Joe's star. Joe, who'd grown complacent in the glow of adulation, hadn't trained well. Max had. The German belted Louis senseless and left him shaking his head as he sat bewildered, hurt, and friendless on the canvas. Max deserved his win; he'd done it on the night, and Joe had let himself down. That's sports. It should neither have vindicated Nazism nor demeaned Louis. But it did both those things in many people's eyes, for reasons that now seem obvious but did not seem so at the time.
The picture of Joe Louis sitting on the canvas staring into the middle distance, with the German standing over him, was one America did not want to look at. It was the worst sort of news for the other main players, too. Especially for Joe Gould. Initially, he'd wanted Braddock to fight Louis sooner rather than later because he knew that was the one big go he and his fighter would ever have at making a pile. The apparently foolproof plan that emerged after the Braddock–Baer fight was to build Louis and mothball Braddock. Nobody counted on Schmeling beating Louis.
With Louis's invincibility punctured, they had to put the Brown Bomber back together again. Braddock still had not laced up since the Baer fight; Joe had boxed six times.
After Schmeling, Louis would have another seven bouts before he got in the ring with the unemployed champion Braddock. When the dust settled many years later, Gould could reflect on a job well done. This was to be the long-term payoff, one worth waiting for, according to Braddock's cagey, dodgy manager—even though his client, at the first time of asking, would lose his title and give up the cachet, notionally at least, of being the best heavyweight on the scene.
Away from the headlines, Jim's manager saw in Louis the most malleable, marketable of champions—and he wanted a piece of him. Braddock, his buddy, was no more than the means to get to Louis. This was Mob strategy—skimming, as it's known in gambling and liquor circles. What Joe's connections and others then did to the man who was “a credit to his race” would be regarded as cruel in any other undertaking but professional boxing.
When the unaffected and trusting young man from Detroit turned twenty-one in 1935, he signed over half his gross earnings for the following ten years to his first manager, Julian Black; his other manager, Roxborough, claimed a quarter “for an indefinite period”; his trainer, Jack “Chappie” Blackburn, a convicted felon but a man the champ considered his one true friend in boxing, took his wages from the quarter that was left for Joe. Then the taxman went to work on Louis. It was a salami slice. From the day he entered the gym back in Detroit,