so the Joe Louis story could resume.
Schmeling had the manners and judgment to observe years later in his autobiography, Memories, “Every defeat has its good side. A victory over Joe Louis would perhaps have made me into the toast of the Third Reich.”
Putting the best gloss on it, maybe Schmeling learned something from Louis that night. Maybe he learned that with a decent and honest hiding sometimes comes humility and respect. Nevertheless, however tempting it is to paint the fight and the result as a blow against Hitler and a triumph for democracy and the American way, the contest had less to do with the rights and wrongs of their respective ideologies (if indeed they would even have called them that) than with two fighting men testing themselves to the limit for a considerable amount of money.
Joe, simply, was too good for Max. Defeat did embarrass the Nazis, of course. And how good was that? But it had no tangible effect on their evil intent. It did not stop them annexing the Sudetenland in October. It did not delay their invasion of Poland the following September to start a world war. It hardly shamed them into treating Jews, Gypsies, and communists as human beings. But it did give Max Schmeling the opportunity to acknowledge that Joe Louis was the best heavyweight in the world and, by so doing, secure his own place in history.
It did also, briefly and dramatically, make America and what would come to be called the Free World feel uplifted. But soon enough the clamor faded, and everyone got back to business. It was, in the end, just a fight. As Mike Jacobs knew, it was business.
For Joe, and others, the money kept rolling in as the world slipped into its second global conflagration: John Henry Lewis, January 25, 1939, at Madison Square Garden, earned Joe $34,413; Jack Roper, April 17, 1939, at Wrigley Field, $34,850; Two-Ton Tony Galento, June 28, 1939, at Yankee Stadium, $114,332.17.
There is confusion to this day about the exact terms of the deal Gould did with Jacobs for Braddock. Some say it was 10 percent of the gate whenever the title was contested at the Garden. Another theory has it that Braddock got a tenth of the overall promotion, no matter where it was held, as long as Jacobs and the Twentieth Century Sporting Club were involved. My guess is Uncle Mike dipped into the champion's purse to meet his part of the deal, writing it off as expenses, one of the fight game's oldest dodges. Toward the end, Jacobs, his health failing, got tired of the arrangement, and their lawyers swapped expensive letters.
As Lucky Jim remembered it years later in conversation with the writer Peter Heller: “I got 10 percent of the promotions involving any championship because once Louis won the fight, Mike Jacobs, who controlled Louis, controlled the heavyweight division, and he had control of that title. But, if Louis got knocked out, we didn't make it with Louis, we made it with the promotions the next ten years, regardless of who was champion. As long as Jacobs promoted that fight, we were in for 10 percent, like an annuity. We might have got one hundred fifty thousand out of it over the ten years. Which wasn't a bad annuity.”
Chapter 6
Distant Drums
For Europe and their allies, the real fighting, the irreversible descent into global conflict, began at 4:40 a.m. on September 1, 1939. Schmeling was not among the Luftwaffe airmen who hit predetermined targets in Krakow, Lodi, and Warsaw that dawn. But he, and the rest of Germany, knew that a terrible beast had been let loose. Five minutes after the planes took off, the German Navy was bombing the free port of Danzig. By 8 a.m., the Wehrmacht had moved on the village of Mokra, only to be repulsed, a rare Polish victory in what was to become a nightmare occupation for the next six years.
While Max's ring cachet had been seriously diminished, he nevertheless was retained as a faded German hero from the last fragile days of peacetime. Not even that peripheral clout, however, could save him from the inconvenience of being drafted and serving as a parachutist in the invasion of Crete in 1941. Later, it is said, he gave shelter to Jewish refugees. By then, he had been parked in the relative safety of a military hospital in Ulm. His war was a decent enough one.
Joe, meanwhile, boxed on: Bob Pastor, September 20, 1939, at Briggs Stadium, Detroit, $118,400; Arturo Godoy, February 9, 1940, at Madison Square Garden, $23,620.21; Johnny Paycheck, March 29, 1940, at Madison Square Garden, $19,908; Godoy II, June 20, 1940, at Yankee Stadium, $55,989.04; Al McCoy, December 16, 1940, at Boston Garden, $17,938; Red Burman, January 31, 1941, at Madison Square Garden, $21,023.16; Gus Dorazio, February 17, 1941, at the Convention Hall, Philadelphia, $18,730.70; Abe Simon, March 21, 1941, at the Olympia Stadium, Detroit, $19,400; Tony Musto, April 8, 1941, at The Arena, St Louis, $17,468; Buddy Baer, May 23, 1941, at the Griffith Stadium, Washington, DC, $36,866; Billy Conn, June 18, 1941, at the Polo Grounds, New York, $153,905.
They called it the “Bum of the Month Club,”—which, Conn and Godoy aside, was not far from the truth. It was like a butcher's shopping list, with some cuts fresher than others. And, as the champ stood over each of his slain quarry, Joe Gould could hardly contain his happiness.
In America, the sense of removal from the Old World, embedded in the national psyche since the earliest days of colonization, seriously delayed for the second time in the century their entry into a world war. The cries of the Anti-Nazi League who'd demonstrated against Schmeling being allowed to represent the Third Reich against Louis in New York in 1938 had little impact now in the White House. The president had urged Louis to stand up and fight for his country against a German in the ring then, but Roosevelt was not able to persuade his fellow citizens so easily that taking up arms for old allies was worth it now. It took the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to change that. The bombs fell on American ships just six months after Joe came from behind to knock out Billy Conn in the thirteenth round and keep his title.
Two months before the day of infamy, as FDR had memorably called it, Joe gave the thoroughly outclassed Lou Nova an awful beating over six rounds at the Polo Grounds in New York, earning another $199,500. In January of 1942, at the Garden, he went to work on Max Baer's big brother, Buddy, for $65,000, a rerun of an earlier farce; in March, he gave Simon a second walloping at the Garden, this time for $45,882.
Later that year, Joe joined up. He was spared the chore of killing or dying for democracy, though, and sold war bonds for his country instead, rousing the troops in his stumbling, inarticulate, but sincere way. For the duration, he had one allegedly serious contest, against a guy called Johnny Davis in Buffalo over four rounds. Davis, knocked cold after just fifty-three seconds, could nonetheless tell his grandchildren he once fought Joe Louis for the world heavyweight title because, according to the rules of the New York State Athletic Commission, the champ's title was on the line every time he stepped into a ring. How Davis, who was knocked out nineteen times and lost twenty-one of his twenty-six fights between 1944 and 1946, ever got to share canvas space with one of the finest fighters of all time remains a mystery. And it did Joe's credibility no good at all after his string of one-sided defenses. It did not seem to bother him, though. For Joe, it was business, an interruption to his new obsession, golf.
The rest of World War II, Joe traveled the country, went to Europe, boxed exhibitions, had his face on billboards, and was on the screen and radio. From fights for the Army and Navy Emergency Relief Fund, he raised $100,000—all of it taxed. It was a debt that would one day crush not only his finances but his spirit.
Had he been asked, Joe would have killed Germans for a private's pay of $1.25 a day. That is pretty clear from what he said at the time, and later. But Joe knew he would not be asked to go into action, even alongside fighting men who adored him. America did not do that to their celebrities. Also, he was black. There was a residual prejudice that blighted the American war effort, as black soldiers, sailors, and airmen struggled with the dilemma of defending a country where they were still considered second-class citizens. It was as if blacks were so far down the social and cultural scale, they were barely worth sacrificing on the battlefield.
Into that very argument stepped a man who would later play a pivotal role in Joe's life, and that of the Mob in boxing.
Truman K. Gibson Jr., to give him the handle he always insisted on, was born in Atlanta the year the Titanic went down, 1912, two years before Joe was born. He grew up in an educated and proud black family in Columbus, Ohio. His parents