In June of 1938, the string was running out on normalcy. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had returned from, Germany, where Hitler had promised him “peace in our time,” and Chamberlain had sold out Czechoslovakia. In 14 months, Warsaw would be in flames. In two years, France would fall, and in three years, Pearl Harbor would be smoldering.
That was both the background and the immediate future of the world in which America lived.
I was seven years old and there was no television 85 years ago, the night Joe Louis fought his rematch against Max Schmeling. But much later, during a 72-year career as a sports columnist, I saw Louis fight, knew him well and was in his Las Vegas home the morning he died.
Still, I will never forget the night when he came thundering into my life as our Designated Warrior. I knew this to be true as a child, although I had never seen a prize fight. I knew it to be true because my father said it was so at our supper table on the night of the fight. All the horror Hitler was generating in Europe and all of the horror that would soon involve our own country served as the backdrop for that fight.
What follows here is a description of what I heard in the living room on our big Crosley radio that night and what I later learned after I got to know both men professionally. What I knew as a precursor to the fight at Yankee Stadium was that my father was determined that his two kids, as young as we were, understood what was happening in Nazi Germany. We were Jewish and recognizing the evil monstrosities of antisemitism and racism was as much a part of our education as multiplication.
Just before dessert that night my father said:
“Both of you will stay up late tonight. You and your mother will in the living room to hear the fight.”
“No,” my mother said. “It’s a school night.”
“This,” he replied, “is more important.”
Now I was old enough to understand a little on my own. I knew about antisemitism. I knew about the German American Bund, the KKK, the two Bund camps in New Jersey and the beginning of the Holocaust.
But here are the things I had yet to learn: I did not know that the morning of the fight 22 Americans were arrested as spies for Hitler. I had never heard the name of Arno Helmus, the man Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, selected to broadcast the fight back to Germany. Nor did I know about Arnold Sperber, whose role in the tension the history books never recorded.
Louis, then unbeaten, had been knocked out in 1936 by Schmeling. Now, Louis wanted revenge.
The German contingent was housed at the Osborne Hotel in Panoche, N.Y., and every afternoon, spectators and the media could see Schmeling, train outdoors. One of the reporters was Harry Sperber, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who had found a newspaper job in New York. While the media watched Schmeling box, Sperber searched the cottage Schmeling shared with his trainer, Max Michon. He was looking for a way to tie Schmeling directly to Hitler.
He opened a closet door and saw a freshly laundered Storm trooper’s uniform. He ran as fast as he could back to ringside, announced his discovery and escorted the American reporters back up the hill to see it. The us-against-them aspect of the fight exploded. The uniform, it turned out, did not belong to Schmeling. It belonged to Michon. A small mistake but one that stretched the tension even further.
Meanwhile, Helmus did nothing to cool tempers. In the hotel bar each night, he drunkenly trumpeted what he had been sent to say: “No man of an inferior race could possibly beat a man from the master race.” And, finally the President of the United States called Louis to say he had to win it for America.
So, my family gathered around the radio and waited. We heard announcer Clem McCarthy’s gravel-toned voice shout over the ringside babble, “They are coming now.” In the days of heavyweight boxing, moments like that were the most electric — no stupid smoke, no ridiculous music, no gaggle of freeloaders in the fighters’ wake. The moment belonged to the fighters, not the TV directors.
“The fighters are called to the center of the ring,” McCarthy said.
Now, all over the world, radio ringsiders rushed to the kitchen to grab a beer. What could they miss in such a short, moment? Not much. Just the whole fight.
My father jumped to his feet. When the bell rang, my dad was throwing punches at the radio, He was cursing, I was standing next to him. I was punching. I was cursing. Then, my mother reached up, grabbed my arm and cautioned, “Language, young man, language!”
Within seconds, Louis landed two rapier jabs to Schmeling’s head, hooked him with a left to the body and followed with a right high to the head, driving Schmeling into the ropes. He was hurt. He grabbed the top rope to steady himself while Louis kept banging the body. In a daze, Schmeling turned into a blow that shattered his third lumber vertebrae.
He went down three times in the first-round knockout.
Below ringside, Helmus — his beefy red face even redder, a throbbing blue vein pulsing on his forehead — was shrieking wildly into a dead microphone, because back home somebody had pulled the plug, cut off the sound and inserted a Wagner concert in its place.
Twenty five years later, I was in the all-Black town of Grambling, La., to do a Saturday Evening Post piece on Grambling College football team. The owner of the Campus Men’s Shop and I were talking about Louis. I told him I had heard the fight on radio and mentioned how my dad was throwing punches. He said he heard it in the barber shop and, as a kid, he was doing the same thing.
”Did he cuss?” I asked.
“Only every third word.”
“Me, too.”
“On that night,” he said, “we were all brothers under the skin.”
