Eight Greats of Boxing from Heavy-Weight to Fly-Weight

HEAVY-WEIGHTS

I THINK there can be no question that far and away the greatest heavy-weight in the last twenty years is Joe Louis. Apart from anything else, he held the championship for more than half the period under discussion and his record, certainly since winning the title, compares favourably with any other heavy-weight of all time.

I was fortunate enough to be at the ringside on the night when he was probably at his peak. It was in June 1938 and the occasion was his return bout against Max Schmeling, the only man ever to beat him in a money fight.

Next to me was a Californian journalist. He had seen every heavy-weight championship fight in America since James J. Jeffries knocked out Bob Fitzsimmons in eleven rounds at Coney Island, New York, on June 9th, 1899, with the exception of the Dempsey-Tommy Gibbons fiasco at Selby, Montana.

The journalist was convinced that Jeffries was the greatest of all this century’s champions. I, of course, had never seen the old Boilermaker, but from reading contemporary ringside accounts, and by studying the record books, I was inclined to agree with him.

Two minutes and four seconds after the first bell for the fight had gone both of us had changed our minds. He spoke first. He said:

No man I ever saw could have stood up against Joe Louis’ attack tonight. I don’t believe that any man who ever breathed could have. Even Big Jeff would have gone down under that.

There was nothing else to say. He had said it all. Louis that night was a killer, but that was not the full measure of his deadliness. I have seen many killers in the ring but I have never seen a man go flat out, yet with coldly controlled ferocity, to cripple an opponent as quickly and mercilessly as Louis did then.

Normally the big tan-coloured negro lacks all perceptible emotion in the ring, but there had been special circumstances surrounding this bout from the moment that it was made. First of all Louis had that one solitary defeat to avenge. Secondly Schmeling had allowed a magazine article to appear in which he implied that Joe had deliberately fought foul in their first fight when he realized that he was going to lose.

Additionally the fight took place during one of the crescendos of anti-Nazi feeling amidst the Jews and the Catholics in America. On the other hand, there is always a considerable section of the community in the States who regard all negroes as shines, dinges, or stovelids, and are always happy to see them humiliated.

This happy breed were delighted with Schmeling’s assessment of Louis as an amateur, and welcomed his disdainful statements that you could not expect anything but the lowest behaviour from the apeman, a representative of an inferior race.

Curiously enough, in the preparation for the fight you would have imagined that Schmeling was the potential executioner. He always took his training very seriously; I had noticed that earlier in the year when I flew over to Hamburg to see him prepare for a fight against Ben Foord.

There he trained on part of the Bismarck estate—suitable surroundings for a man whom the Nazis were then building up into an apostle of a new blood and iron pseudo-philosophy. Schmeling was genuinely fond of the country and all its pursuits. He had estates of his own on which he hunted boar and got a lot of good shooting. His favourite game was a kind of German bird, something like a capercailzie. He liked shooting this because you had to stalk it, almost as though it were a stag, and I remember his telling me at great length the exact tactics necessary to bag it.

Sure enough, when he got to America, Schmeling took up his training quarters near a little town, called Speculator, in the north of the State of New York. Most fighters train within fairly easy distance of the town where the fight is to take place, so as to make it easy for the Press to visit them and send out pre-fight stories which boost the sale of the tickets.

Not so Schmeling. Speculator was a good two hundred miles from New York. Instead of the bonhomous, rather school-boyish, atmosphere of practical joking, hearty drinking and general air of excessive physical masculinity, tempered with rude humour, there was an almost monastic atmosphere about Schmeling’s camp.

Alternatively, it reminded you of a concentration camp, for there were extra policemen, big pistols very much in evidence on their hips, a number of what looked like police dogs, and the actual cabin which Schmeling used for his living quarters was surrounded by barbed wire.

Even there Schmeling had made his usual study of the wild life of the woods, and when I visited him he showed me with pride how he had succeeded in taming a chipmunk—a little animal which looks like a squirrel that has sat down in a pool of tomato ketchup—so that when the boxer lay full length and motionless on the ground the chipmunk would come down from the nearby trees and nibble delicately from his hand.

He seemed quite unconcerned about the forthcoming fight, although he would talk little about it. His work in the ring was not then impressive, but there was evidence that he had been punching destructively, for at least one of his sparring mates only went in against him after he had fixed the most massive headgear I have ever seen over his face. He looked like a twentieth-century Man in the Iron Mask.

Louis’ training camp, on the other hand, was a far more typical and lighthearted centre; although the champion himself, with the deadpan which he had been taught to cultivate so that there should be no suggestion of the mocking Johnson grin, added little to the general gaiety.

But if Louis were sombre or even morose his negro supporters, who streamed out to Pompton Lakes, New Jersey—about thirty miles from New York—were the gayest, most chatteringly excited bunch of human beings I have ever seen. There was a kind of wire netting, through which only the favoured few were allowed to pass, and behind this the blackamoors congregated, hot, sweaty and happy They were like a collection of singularly attractive monkeys.

But the key to the life which Louis had been trained to lead came behind the scenes when the champion had vanished into his rubbing room. An American writer described it rather well when he said it reminded him of the ménage of an animal trainer.

Louis had various attendants, all negro, and many of them seemed to dress to a pattern: there was an emphasis on leather breeches and boots, and tight, form-fitting, short-sleeved shirts. In the midst of them the champion would sprawl, nearly naked, his huge bronze limbs relaxed loosely in the manner of a great indolent jungle cat. It made one want to ask where were the whips and the pistols of the attendants—or were they so very sure that the brown colossus was thoroughly tamed?

Not only Louis’ whole career but his entire personality was so carefully manufactured that it was almost impossible, without living intimately with him for long periods, to delve into his essential make-up.

His story, prior to his irruption into the ring, was the familiar one of the poor American negro.

He was a seventh child, born in Alabama, of extremely poverty-stricken parents. While he was still a child his father went out of his mind and was taken to a local asylum. After he had been there for some time it was reported that he had died, and Louis’ mother remarried. As a matter of fact his father lived on for years, but it was only after Louis had won the title that he and his family learned of this. The father died eventually without ever knowing the world-wide fame which his son had won.

Things went from bad to impossible in Alabama and the Louis family—or to be exact the Barrow family, for that is Louis’ real name—migrated North to Detroit, spurred on by the hope of higher wages there.

Louis got a job in the huge Ford works and started boxing, as an amateur, in a desultory manner. He was by no means the invincible fighter then that he later became as a professional, and in one of his earliest important amateur fights a white light-heavy-weight, Johnny Miler, gave him a tremendous thrashing, knocking him down seven times, although unable to keep him on the canvas for the full count.

It may have been this fight which gave rise to the rumour, widely whispered during Louis’ early career, and eagerly spread by the antinegroes, that Louis enjoyed knocking out white men in the ring in front of thousands. Thus, it was alleged, he not only proved his own superiority to any other heavy-weight in the world but also gloried in the freedom to strike a white without risking the inevitable and bloody retribution which would overtake any negro who did such a thing outside the ring.

I never saw the slightest proof of this tendency in any of Louis’ fights, and certainly the shrewd men who controlled his destiny in the ring and his behaviour out of it would have suppressed any such frame of mind rigorously.

For as Louis’ amateur reputation grew he had attracted the attention of two wealthy Detroit negroes; one was a tough, bristly operator in the numbers game, a kind of lottery which took in a lot of money: the other a smooth, sleek, café-au-lait-coloured lawyer. They were named John Roxborough and Julian Black respectively.

Once they had decided to sponsor Louis it was necessary for them to get a really first-class trainer. They could not have picked a better man than Jack Blackburn, a former great light-weight boxer and, of course, another negro.

Blackburn was not too optimistic about Louis’ chances of ultimate success. Having fought in the ring himself, he knew the obstacles which would be placed in the way of a negro fighter, particularly a heavy-weight. The name and memory of Jack Johnson—still alive until late 1946—continued to stink in the nostrils of most white American fight fans, and a good many of the more serious and intelligent negroes.

Blackburn set out from the word go to turn Louis into a fighter with a chilling punch, for he knew that if a white man and a negro fought a reasonably close bout, with both of them on their feet at the finish, it was any odds on the decision going to the white man.

How well he succeeded can be judged by the record of Louis in his first three years as a professional. In 1934 he had twelve fights, and won ten of them the decisive way. In 1935 he had ten fights, and again only two men went the full distance of ten rounds with him. In 1936 he had only six fights, and all of them ended in knock-outs—but on one occasion it was Louis who was knocked out, for this was the year of his first, fatal meeting with Schmeling.

Almost more interesting than the physical creation of a nonpareil fighting machine was the mental moulding to which Louis was constantly subjected.

Never by word or deed was he allowed to give any weapon to the negro-baiters or race-haters. Even his most trivial utterances were heavily censored. I remember one little incident which illustrates this point well.

Louis was preparing for some fight and the news-reel camera men had arrived in his camp to get shots