Madison Square Garden wanted Braddock to defend against Schmeling in June of 1937. But Mike Jacobs wasn't so interested in that. Not yet. He persuaded Gould to stall on any offers from the German, to keep his fighter for Louis later. Gould agreed—but he wanted the deal sugared. According to some accounts, about this time Roxborough was picked up by some persuasive gentlemen and taken to see Gould. The champ's best friend told Roxborough he didn't reckon Jim could beat Joe if he hit him until the sun came up. But, to make sure there was no upset, Gould wanted 50 percent of Louis. Roxborough, sweating hard in front of the interview panel, held out. “I can't do that, Joe,” he said, with good mathematical reasoning. “If you want to do a deal, you gotta talk to Mike.” Gould was outraged. He went to the Garden and talked to Mike. It was a conversation that would leave an enduring scar on Joe Louis.
“Mike, I'm a reasonable man,” said Gould. “I'll settle for 10 percent—or there's no fight.”
Jacobs, who'd been in the game too long and had muscle of his own, laughed in Gould's face. “Joe, you're crazy. There ain't no 10 percent to give ya! Didn't Roxy tell ya that?”
He hadn't. The boys had already carved Joe Louis to pieces. “We need something, Mike. We need something. You got it. We need it.”
“Tell ya what, Joe. We all need this fight, so I'll do this for ya: you can have one dollar in every ten Uncle Mike earns with the title until some schmuck gets lucky and knocks the schwartze over. Whaddya say? Joe Louis is gonna be around a long time, Joe. And so is Uncle Mike. We're all gonna earn some serious moolah here.”
Gould did his math as quickly as if standing in front of the bookies at Santa Ana.
“Done.”
So Gould was set for a tenth of Jacobs's profits from every world heavyweight title he would promote for the next ten years. That, effectively, meant every fight Joe Louis had under Jacobs's promotion with the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. It also meant the new champ's purse would be shaved accordingly. Mike Jacobs was not about to give Joe Gould 10 percent of Mike Jacobs; but he would give him 10 percent of Louis.
After the deal was done—behind Louis's back—the fighter would go to work to make everyone rich. First, though, Gould had to get Braddock out of his fight with Schmeling.
Germany in 1937 was an arrogant, menacing place. Hitler had held his Olympics the year before and he had in Schmeling a high-profile heavyweight with whom to peddle the message of Aryan supremacy.
There is a story, first written in 1950 by Budd Schulberg, that Joe Gould told Germany's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels in uncomplicated terms what he thought of Hitler's wish that Braddock defend his title against Schmeling in Germany.
The telephone exchange is said to have finished with Gould informing Goebbels that $500,000 up front and an American referee would not be enough to clinch the fight.
“The third point,” Gould said matter-of-factly, “is that you get Hitler to stop kicking the Jews around. Unless he gives them back full citizenship and property rights, you know what you and Max can do with your fight.”
Gould the saint and wit? It is a departure from everything we know about Gould to regard him as a moralist first and a businessman second. Besides, who'd want to take the title to Germany?
David Margolick pointed to the pages of the New York Daily News of March 22, 1935, to capture a different picture of the times. If Gould was reluctant to do business with the Nazis, one fellow American Jew prominent in the boxing game was not. The image decimated the weasel words written then and since about Schmeling and those around him. He had just knocked out Steve Hamas in Hamburg and, in keeping with the protocol of Germany's totalitarian diktats, the winner stretched out his strong right arm in saluting his führer. It was an increasingly common sight—and would be repeated shamefully by England's footballers in 1938—but such displays of obsequiousness raised indignation beyond the boundaries of the Third Reich. And this picture was different. Standing near Schmeling, hand also raised in tame homage to a totalitarian lunatic, and prevented from full extension of the fingers only by the cigar in his grip, was the German boxer's Jewish manager, Joe “Yussel” Jacobs. The Daily News headline over the picture read: “WHEN YUSSEL WENT NAZI.” He wasn't alone.
Yussel wanted Braddock for his man, and Schmeling even came to America to sign a contract to fight the champ. But Gould wanted no part of Schmeling; he wanted Louis for the champion. This seemed odd from a boxing perspective. Why would Braddock want to test against himself the murderous punching of Louis rather than the less threatening work of the aged Schmeling? The answer, of course, was Gould and Braddock couldn't lose against Louis. They had 10 percent of him, whatever the result.
While Schmeling posed for pictures and spent time at the Garden, hustling up interest in a nonevent, Braddock and Louis were in training for their title fight. In May, a federal judge named (believe it or not) Guy L. Fake ruled the Garden could not force Braddock to fight Schmeling.
Meanwhile, although he was the centerpiece of the sport and generated the interest that kept fight writers busy, Joe Louis struggled to convince some of them he could bounce back from the Schmeling defeat. He was fat and lazy, according to many of these sages, and disposable. They were fine to his face, of course, but patronizing—and they would not kiss his big black ass, even for another two-buck bribe from the promoters.
While they willed him to lose against Braddock, even their ingrained prejudices could not drown out common sense, and 80 percent of them in the end plumped for the challenger when they met at Chicago's Comiskey Park on June 22, 1937, a year after Schmeling had creamed Louis and two years after Braddock had beaten Baer. Jack Dempsey, who never put his title on the line against a black man, picked Braddock, as ordinary a champion as the division ever had.
The fight wasn't a classic, but it didn't lack for drama. Louis hit the floor in the first, from an uppercut by the thirty-two-year-old champion. Cinderella Man, it seems, did not want to go home before his carriage turned into a pumpkin. It was his last half glimpse of the prize. What bettors didn't know was that Jim had a dead arm, pumped up by drugs to get him into the ring but anesthetized even further by Joe's constant battering. His left dropped lower and lower, exposing his chin to the Bomber's killer right cross. Soon enough, the fight swung the other way and, by the sixth, Braddock was spent and razored across his weathered face, but, as Gould reached for the white towel of surrender, the champion cautioned him that such an act of betrayal would be the last between them. And they'd been together eleven years, so Jim knew what he was talking about. Whatever the champion's bravery, Louis continued his clinical carving and, within two rounds, he'd dispatched the old man. He'd done it. Joe was the first black champion since Jack Johnson gave up the title in 1915 in dubious circumstances to the leering white behemoth, Jess Willard, on a sweltering afternoon in Havana.
Joe Louis, the new heavyweight king, took his mantle in the quiet and humble way his friends associated with his every movement and utterance. The ghost of Jack Johnson had been laid to rest, to the relief of white America. There were no complaints from the loser's corner.
Any right-thinking person would regard the secret deal Gould did with Jacobs as a hangover from slave times. Such was the story of Joe's life. He was exploited from the moment he taped up until the night Rocky Marciano clattered him through the ropes at Madison Square Garden for the last time, in 1951. By that stage, he'd sold another pound or three of his own flesh to the Mob. Just like Jack Johnson told him he would. . . .
Johnson was there in Chicago to see Joe succeed him. Indeed, to the incredulity of all, Jack was still a licensed boxer. A year after Louis's win over Braddock, the Galveston Giant, slightly stooped now at sixty, got into a ring with Walter Price in Boston and was knocked out in seven rounds.
Virtually nothing is known of Price—age, nationality, where he was born, how he died—apart from the fact he had four fights in his entire professional career. The first three were in 1925, two wins and a loss against fellow novices around Massachusetts and Maine. His fourth and final bout was thirteen years later, when he beat the pension-aged illusion of a genuine ring great.
Remarkably, sadly, Johnson carried on selling himself for several years