THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink by David Margolick (Knopf, 432 pp., $26.95). No sport employs hype more than boxing. There...
...There are some questionable assertions, such as the Nazis pushing Schmeling to fight because Germany was short of hard currency...
...They referred to Louis as America's "pet pickaninny...
...The Hearst papers were worse...
...Now David Margolick seeks to place this famous grudge match in historical perspective...
...He also was an African American in a still segregated nation...
...Louis was thoroughly beaten with the bout culminating in a twelfth-round knockout...
...John P. Rossi...
...The American boxing community adopted Louis because a great heavyweight was needed to revive a sport dead since the retirement of Jack Dempsey...
...Given the background of the two nations it is easy to see the Louis-Schmeling conflict as a clash of democracy versus tyranny, a cliché Margolick wisely avoids...
...Is he all instinct, all animal...
...Not only was he a great heavyweight champion, but, by regularly beating whites, he also vindicated black hopes for equality...
...America, in the midst of the Great Depression, needed new heroes like Louis...
...For the Nazis, another Schmeling victory would be a propaganda bonanza...
...Schmeling had to carry the burden of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, although Margolick believes Schmeling "was never Nazi Max...
...Schmeling became a millionaire through ownership of a Coca-Cola dealership and was postwar Germany's most popular sports hero...
...Louis's devastating knockout of Schmeling in one round was cheered throughout the nation, especially in the black community...
...Louis's rematch with Schmel-ing was the most ballyhooed fight since the second Dempsey-Tun-ney bout...
...There have been many self-proclaimed "Fights of the Century," but the greatest was the second Louis-Schmeling bout in June 1938...
...Despite this, Louis was viewed by sports writers as ignorant...
...To many Americans, it would be a bloody nose for Hitler...
...Louis and Schmeling are made to represent their respective countries...
...Schmeling was a former heavyweight champion when he met Louis in 1936...
...The writer Paul Gal-lico admired Louis, but described him as living "like an animal, untouched by externals...
...He remained close to Louis because their friendship helped lift the Nazi stigma from him...
...The clamor for a rematch began immediately...
...Joe Louis emerged as a heavyweight contender when boxing was in the doldrums following the sport's golden era in the 1920s...
...This will come as a surprise to those nations smashed by the blitzkrieg in 1939-40...
...Margolick describes him as an exciting fighter with a devastating punch who waded through the ranks of the heavyweight contenders with ease before he was 21...
...After a twelve year reign, Louis wound up broke...
...No other black celebrity had captured their enthusiasm as did Louis...
...He was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life and ended his career as a greeter at a Las Vegas casino...
...But the Nazis exploited Schmeling, arguing that his defeat of Louis proved their racist theories...
...In the long run, who really won...
...Margolick's study is overlong and is drawn almost exclusively from newspaper and magazine articles...
...Or have a hundred million years left a fold upon his brain...
...Yet, overall, Margolick has produced a fine study of a brutal sport that casts insights into America in the last years of the Great Depression...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 27
