Just finished a great sports book that would be well worth a read if you’re stuck for a Christmas present for a boxing fan! Unfortunately available only in hardback at the moment.
Spoliers below if you don't know the story
! Even if you do still worth getting
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Beyond Glory Max Schmeling vs Joe Louis ~David Margolick
This book details the lead up to and the actual epic second fight between the “brown bomber” Joe Louis and Nazi Germany’s (perceived) favourite son Max Schmeling in 1938 where Louis tries to gain revenge on the one man (at that time) who has managed to defeat him. At the time it was viewed not so much as just a boxing match but a clash of civilisations with Louis representing democracy and Schmeling the forces of Fascism. This was of course was a simplification of the facts and of the fighters something the book illustrates very well.
The backgrounds of the two men could not have been more different. Louis was the son of a dirt poor farming stock while Schmeling (born 1905) came from a solid middle class background and his family was not happy when he decided to become a professional boxer. The powerfully built Schmeling quickly became a hero to millions of Germans in the midst of a the economic slump in Weimar Germany in the late 1920s. He was loud and colourful, a relentless self publicist. His marriage to the Czech silent actress Anny Ondra made them one of Europe’s premier celebrity couples. He was by the book’s account a very solid and brave fighter but his record of W42 L4 D3 prior to his 1930 heavyweight title shot against Jack Sharkey shows that he was by no means the Aryan superman as subsequent Nazi propaganda tried to paint him. He won the title in that fight when a dangerously low blow by Sharkey in the 4th resulted in a win by disqualification (the only time that this has occurred in the division). In 1932 in a punishing 15 round rematch Sharkey and Schmeling had a toe to toe slugging match that resulted in a points defeat for the German. Like all the fights both men fought the book is excellent on these to the point where you really feel the ebb and flow of the action. Schmeling was considered a spent force after this fight and with the election of the Nazis in 1933 and his perceived links to them he began to find it harder and harder to get fights outside Germany. His boxing career looked like it was on the beginnings of a serious downward spiral.
While Schmeling was pursuing his steady if not spectacular career in Germany Louis (born 1914) was ascending the heavyweight ranks in the US. He made his debut in 1934 and a succession of opponents were soon left reeling by the power of the man that was voted “puncher of the century” by Ring magazine. He won all 27 fights in 1934/1935 and was soon the hero of much of black America. The polarised racial nature of American society still meant in the words of one commentator at the time that he was still considered “a big strong dumb nigger” by much of white America but the fights with Schmeling were about to change that.
The book is very strong on the hoops that both fighters had to go through to organise the first (non title) fight between Schmeling and Louis in 1936. Due to the situation in Germany and Schmeling’s high profile there were threats of boycotts but frantic behind the scenes negotiations (and it seems a few sizable backhanders) ensured that the fight went ahead to a less than ½ full house. At the time Schmeling was viewed as a huge underdog (he went of at 12 to 1 in Vegas) given he seemed a fighter in decline and the younger Lewis had been unstoppable up until then. Schmeling sensing however that if he lost this that his career was finished in any meaningful sense did his homework. Today studying videos of opponents goes without saying but back in the 1930s this was expensive and time consuming but Schmeling studied at length all Louis fights he could find. He trained obsessively and when the fight came around Louis was facing a man determined to win or be carried out on a stretcher. 70,000 (then the largest crowd ever for a boxing match) turned up. Louis battered the German for much of the fight but Schmeling took everything and a great punch to the kidneys in the 4th stopped Louis and in the 12th Schmeling put him down and out. Schmeling returned a hero to Germany. Louis was accused of throwing the fight in many quarters. Schmeling should have had a shot at the title but with Nazi aggression increasing and the situation for Jews worsening daily the strong US Jewish lobby conspired to prevent this. Louis meanwhile swore revenge. In June 1938 he got his chance.
The centrepiece of the book is the 1938 rematch and Louis’s “punch that shook the world”. In truth the fight itself was a huge anticlimax. Louis beat Schmeling from the moment the bell rang and a punch that it was claimed could be heard in the back seats knocked Schmeling out at the end of the first round. He was so badly battered that he spent nearly two weeks in hospital. He returned to Germany in disgrace while the German Foreign office in Berlin had to shut its telegraph office to stop the abusive telegrams addressed to Adolf Hitler from thousands of gleeful Americans. The live transmission was cut off in Berlin mid fight and Josef Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister set about trying to explain the defeat. In truth the fight itself is a lot less interesting that the war of propaganda that waged between the two camps and indeed between Germany and the US. Louis wanted to kill the Nazi Schmeling and Nazi papers were full of talk of Aryan supremacy and the inferiority of the Negro race. Louis more so than Schmeling harboured personal animosity. Schmeling would be at home in the WWF of today. To him a fight was show-business as much as anything else. For Louis it was personal – a black man fighting a white man who he thought viewed him as an inferior. He never visited Schmeling in hospital a fact that bemused the German who said that he would have visited him if the situation was reversed.
Schmeling made further efforts for a rematch as late as 1941 prior to Germany declaring war on the US. One of his more harebrained schemes involved him parachuting into Times Square prior to the third fight. It was not to be. War intervened and both men got caught up in it.
For me the book is brilliant up until here but the post fight years are glossed over too a bit too briefly as is the still divisive question of Schmelings Nazi links. In truth the years after the fight for both men are equally interesting. Both men joined their respective armies. Louis became a travelling entertainer for the armed forces. He gave exhibitions, helped sell war bonds and defended his title a number of times (giving up the purse for the war effort on every occasion). Schmeling joined the German paratroopers but received a jump injury in the slaughter of that elite force by Australian and New Zealand forces in the invasion of Crete in 1941. From then on like Louis he became an entertainer to the forces. Schmeling’s aborted jump on Crete would prompt the Aussies to claim they killed him and it became a tradition for Allied forces until the end to claim that any largely built German they killed was Schmeling which prompted one journalist to quip “if we’ve killed Schmelling once we have killed him a hundred times”.
One would think that post war with Louis on the victor’s side and Schmeling on the loser’s that the former would prosper and the latter would fade. In reality the reverse was true. In circumstances sadly familiar to many boxers to this day managerial swindles, bad "friends" and an I.R.S tax demand forced Louis into an ill advised comeback in 1950. The speed was gone and his heart was not in it. He suffered two further defeats and endured a lot of unnecessary punishment that would contribute further significantly to his later Parkinsons. His record of W68 L3 will however stand next to anyones. By the 1960s he was a cocaine addict and was reduced to being a celebrity greeter at a Las Vegas casino.
The immediate post war years were extremely hard for Schmeling and his wife. To many of the allies brainwashed by propaganda he was considered a poster boy for Nazi’s. He tried for a number of years to get a denazification certificate to no avail. He made an illfated 5 fight return to the ring to help pay the bills. By the late 1940s however he was beginning to rehabilitate his reputation as some of the propaganda smoke began to be blown away. Prominent in his defence were Henry and Werner Lewin two young Jewish boys he had hidden and smuggled out of Germany in 1938 during the Kristilnacht pogrom. They would go on to own a number of Las Vegas hotels and championed Schmeling in the post war years. A number of other Jews would also testify on Schmeling’s behalf and he would also point that his long serving manager Joe Jacobs who died in 1940 was Jewish and that he resisted a number of written requests from Nazi high command to sack him. He could also claim a number of sympathetic contacts with the anti Nazi Stauffenburg circle who planted the abortive bomb in Hitler’s bunker in the July plot of 1944. For Coca Cola this was enough and sensing that Schmeling was still a hugely popular and known figure in Germany awarded him the extremely lucrative first Coca Cola franchise in Germany. By the mid 1950s he was wealthier than he had ever been but his ambition was to rehabilitate himself in the US. He finally got his wish in the-mid 1950s. He also managed to persuade a reluctant Louis to meet him. It was the first of many meetings.
The book’s conclusion on Schmeling’s Nazi links is that while he wasn’t a Nazi he was an “opportunist”. It is a harsh judgement in my view. In addition to his actions in personally assisting a number of Jews he never joined the Nazi
party despite immense pressure. He was to me a realist. His beloved wife of 60 years was a non-national at the time. Short of leaving the country he had very few options. He tried his best to do what he could in the circumstances which is a lot more than many Germans did. The Allies had demonised him and it took him a long time to live the past down. Until his death he had to fight a number of books out to make a quick killing by branding him a Nazi. If there is a higher court it would I think find him “not guilty” on this count.
Louis had a terribly sad last few years. The up and coming Mohamed Ali denounced him as an “Uncle Tom” for betraying “his people” by serving the US government during the war. He also called him a “moron” on a number of occasions which has a bitter irony given that Louis was suffering from fighter’s related Parkinson’s which now sadly afflicts Ali. He was in and out of mental hospitals and treated for a drug addiction (that he finally kicked). Many of the bills were paid by Schmeling and others by Frank Sinatra. Prior to his death in 1981 he asked that Schmeling help carry his coffin. Louis died penniless in 1981. Schmeling paid for his burial and did indeed help carry his coffin. Ronald Reagan in a populist gesture from the most populist of presidents allowed him to be interred in Arlington national cemetry.
In early 2005 the still active Schmeling said his one ambition left was to reach his hundredth birthday. He died in his sleep 6 months short of it.
Beyond Glory Max Schmeling vs Joe Louis
