circus, even sparring with old opponents from decades earlier, black fighters who'd also found the bottom of the barrel. It was a wretched decline, no less shocking for its inevitability. The boxing writer Bert Sugar remembers seeing such a show by Johnson on a schoolboy visit to New York in the forties. “Real sad,” is how he describes it. This was white America's revenge. Johnson's “golden smile” had driven racists to distraction when he beat James J. Jeffries in 1910 on America's most treasured day, the fourth of July. He would pay for that for the rest of his life.
Joe Louis's first defense of the heavyweight title once owned by Johnson was against the Welshman Tommy Farr, who fought him mightily close in front of 32,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that August. Farr had been lined up to fight Schmeling earlier in the year in London for what the Germans and the Daily Mail were happy to call the real world championship. This was farcical. Schmeling had a legitimate claim to challenge Louis for the title, given he'd won so comprehensively two years earlier, but to ignore the champion's right to be considered the linear king of the world after he'd beaten the incumbent Braddock was crass. It also exposed some craven instincts among members of the British boxing and media establishment who were willing to go along with the Nazi hysteria surrounding their Max. They wanted a Farr–Schmeling fight in London as much as Hitler did. It might well have been that patriotism and greed played a bigger part than ideology in their meek acceptance of Goebbels's entreaties, but it was no more morally convincing for that.
Mike Jacobs, however, outflanked them all. He stole Farr from under their sneering noses, brought him to America, and put him in with Louis. He deserved the fight, no question; he'd outpointed Baer over twelve rounds in London in April, then two months later knocked out the German Walter Neusel in three rounds.
The Welshman, awkward, determined, and well schooled in the orthodox English way, gave Joe all the trouble he could handle over fifteen rounds at Yankee Stadium on August 30, 1937, although no nostalgia-addled rewriting of history should persuade readers that Tommy deserved to win.
Not even the Evening Standard, as bellicose a British flag-waver as any, saw it that way, though their correspondent, Ben Bennison, did his best. “No fighter within my long experience,” he reported from ringside, “has fought a braver fight for the heavyweight championship of the world than did Tommy Farr against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium here. . . . Farr's gallantry was complete, and a scathing answer to the American critics who, almost without exception, held him to be no sort of fighter, certainly no foeman worthy of the negro's steel.”
Schmeling, at the height of his arrogance, suggested, “Shirley Temple has as good a chance”—although this was as much a snide shot at Louis as it was meant to deride Farr.
Bennison, nevertheless, felt justified and comfortable in declaring to his readers back home, “I say without hesitation that Farr proved himself the better, cleverer and more resourceful boxer.”
Farr finished with two cut eyes, Joe with two bruised hands. The champ came down the stretch strongly after some mediocre middle rounds, and the judges were impressed, albeit by wildly varying margins. Art Donovan, the referee, gave Louis thirteen rounds, Farr just one, with one even; the other two judges saw it 8-5-2 and 9-6 for Joe.
Farr's manager, Ted Broadribb, did not complain about the decision. Neither did the Tonypandy Terror himself. “Are you satisfied that I have not let either myself or my country down?” is how he humbly responded when Bennison put it to him he'd come damn close to becoming the first British world heavyweight champion since Bob Fitzsimmons.
And even Bennison had to concede, with all the reluctance of an expert whose prediction hadn't gone exactly as foreseen, “There was, according to my reckoning, only a fractional difference in favor of Louis at the end, and it says much for the sportsmanship of Farr that, when he was declared the loser, he took the verdict without the least quibble.”
Joe's purse for defeating Tommy was $102,578, a little over a grand less than he'd earned for beating Braddock.
After Farr, they set ’em up for Joe, and Joe knocked ’em down. It looked like great business. For Joe. For Jim and his Joe. And for Uncle Mike.
However, Joe Gould sniffed dismissively at the champion's next purse: $40,522 for a cakewalk against Natie Mann in the Garden in February 1938. He was similarly unimpressed in April, when Joe spent a mere five rounds getting Harry Thomas out of the way for a paltry $16,659.
Schmeling, meanwhile, waited and fumed—and turned the Atlantic into his personal highway as he crisscrossed to force a showdown with the man he'd beaten in 1936, the acknowledged world champion. There would be no complaints about the purse this time.
It was a marketing man's dream. Joe was fighting for every good guy who ever lived. His autobiography, published in 1947, was a whitewash typical of the genre of lighthearted and wholesome accounts at the time. The final chapter, entitled “P.S.—WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME,” reflects the enormity of the task assigned to him as a mere fighter.
He recalls meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House just before the rematch.
“You know, Joe,” the president said to him, “America is never supposed to lose.”
“I know, Mr. President,” Joe said. “And I'll take care of that this time!”
The media frenzy, from left, right, German, black, and Jew, was unrelenting. After so many postponements, so much hassle, so many tactical maneuverings and double-crosses, it had to go ahead. There was no avoiding the German now.
And so Louis–Schmeling II took place in New York on June 22, 1938. Joe's purse was $349,228, a remarkable amount of money—for a remarkable fight.
The 124 seconds it lasted were burdened with greater poignancy than anyone then or since has attached to a mere boxing match. And the “wider significance” of the occasion was not lost on the 70,043 fans who paid to get into Yankee Stadium that humid midsummer's night, nor on the millions who listened to English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese commentaries on radios around the world. If it were possible to re-create an event of vaguely similar global consequence today, a fight between two men representing good and evil in such simplistic, cartoon terms and in circumstances of such heightened international tension, there surely would be billions entranced all at once.
Schmeling had the best view of some of the punches, but not the ones that mattered—particularly the one to the kidneys he later complained was a foul, the one that Joe sank into his pale, untended trunk just below the ribcage in the first round and from which Max could not recover. In reality, it was a bolt-like right to his chin in the early seconds that did the damage; thereafter, the blows struck all parts. There was nothing illegal—in New York, at least—about the kidney killer that took away Schmeling's resolve, though.
Max went down. Art Donovan, again the referee, applied the count. Max got up. The terrible but beautiful assault continued. Joe was cold, balanced, and merciless. He just picked targets and let his gloves go. The hesitancy he'd shown against Farr had gone. A winded and bewildered Schmeling could not get out of the way, even when he turned sideways along the ropes like a boy being bullied. For Americans watching and listening, for others with an interest beyond the boxing ring also, this was retribution of the sweetest kind. The bad guy was getting his licks, good and proper. Dazed to the point of incomprehension, Max wandered like a lost sheep back into the storm and his legs had not a drop of strength in them to keep him upright as Joe slayed him like a righteous knight. The German swayed, tottered, and sailed south as Joe's fists rattled jawbone, brain, and spirit simultaneously. Max, clinging to the edge of the battleground, was up at five, but in his own hell. The white towel floated in. Donovan ignored it, in accordance with local statute, and then applied his own mercy.
It was a brief proto-war, shown so many times since as to be fixed irremovably on the brain like a birthmark, a round that made America feel good about itself again, a round that put the world to rights, it was claimed. After the indignations and hardship of the Depression, symbolism hung heavy in every punch Joe threw.
When it was over, Max could look back on exactly two punches of his own. He was spent as a heavyweight force. Joe, who'd thrown and landed maybe a hundred,