On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At the time of his initial retirement in 1949, Joe Louis had a brilliant ring record of sixty wins—fifty-one by knockout—and one loss, through a career of fifteen years that included twenty-five title defenses. Along with his controversial predecessor Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (1908-15), and his yet more famous successor Muhammad Ali (1964-67; 1974-78; 1978-79), Louis ranks with the greatest heavyweight boxers in history, of a stature surpassing that of, for instance, Rocky Marciano, who defeated him in 1951 after Louis’s ill-advised comeback. Like many former champions, Louis was forced to resume his career for financial reasons, with humiliating results. His accounts had been so mismanaged that though he’d reputedly earned $4.6 million by the late 1940s, Louis had virtually nothing to show for it. (In a gesture of patriotic but naive generosity, he had donated the purses of two of his fights to the United States war effort in the early 1940s, for which the IRS relentlessly hounded him for taxes and arrears amounting to nearly a half-million dollars, a colossal debt at midcentury.) As in the grimmest of fairy tales, the most honored athlete of his time, the man responsible for “the greatest show of Negro unity America had ever seen,” would end his career as a professional wrestler, then a “greeter” at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where, drug-dependent and paranoid, he would die of cardiac arrest and general physical collapse in 1981, at the age of sixty-six.

  By contrast, and ironically, the ever-resourceful, chameleonlike and urbane Max Schmeling not only survived the brutal vicissitudes of the boxing ring and the trauma of his 1938 defeat but was able to maintain his reputation as a homeland hero—“German Champion in All Classes”—through a lengthy, perennially public career of self-promotion and self-mythologizing. As Margolick writes, “The man who was malleable enough to fit into Weimar Germany and the Third Reich with equal ease now became an exemplar of West Germany, of its economic miracle and its fledgling democracy.” Schmeling would live to be ninety-nine; he would die a millionaire.

  Where Joe Louis gives the impression of being, for all his dominance in the ring, essentially passive and susceptible to manipulation by others (see Joe Louis: My Life, by Joe Louis with Edna and Art Rust Jr., 1978), Max Schmeling appears to have been the consummate manipulator of others. In appearance, in boxing trunks, Schmeling more resembled the Manassa Mauler, Jack Dempsey, than an emblem of fair Aryan manhood, but his ring style was the antithesis of Dempsey’s unstoppered aggression: “cooler, slower, more methodical—‘Teutonic’” As a young man Schmeling had taken pride in associating with German intellectuals like the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg, the artist George Grosz and Thomas Mann’s novelist brother, Heinrich Mann: “Artists, grant me your favor—boxing is also an art!” he wrote to one of these. Shrewd enough never to have joined the Nazi Party, in part because he was depending upon American (i.e., Jewish-managed) boxing for a lucrative career, Schmeling yet benefited from the patronage of the highest-ranking Nazis and the admiration of Hitler; in the United States he emphasized the separation of politics and sports, as in Germany he readily gave the Nazi salute and acquiesced in the “Nazification” of athletics. His canniest decision was to have signed a contract as a relatively young boxer to fight in America under the auspices of Joe Jacobs, the Jewish manager with whom he would remain through the anti-Semitic ravages of the Third Reich. As Margolick notes: “He had the best of both worlds: he was making enormous amounts of money…and had the approbation of his people and his government. There is no evidence, in anything he said or did at the time, to suggest that he ever agonized over anything.” Schmeling’s greatest coup, more lucrative than any boxing purse, was being offered a Coca-Cola dealership in northern Germany that would make him wealthy in the very years when Joe Louis, whom the Atlanta-based company had never wished to approach for advertising purposes, was crushed by debt.

  When American boxing was at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth-century, as Margolick says, “Jews were all over boxing, not just as fighters and fans but…promoters, trainers, managers, referees, propagandists, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, chroniclers.” (Jewish boxers? The most famous were the lightweight champions Benny Leonard and Barney Ross. Marketable Jewish heavyweights were in such short supply that the non-Jewish Max Baer, a charismatic champion of 1934-35, performed in trunks adorned with the Star of David.) Through their careers Louis and Schmeling were associated with Jewish boxing entrepreneurs, both named Jacobs: Mike, Joe. Not only were the two Jacobses unrelated but the men were temperamental opposites: Mike Jacobs the dour, humorless fight promoter whom few liked, Joe Jacobs the “quintessential Broadway guy” liked even by men who didn’t trust him. Where Joe Jacobs was “fanatically devoted to his fighters, whom he championed unceasingly and ingeniously,” Mike Jacobs took so little interest in his boxers that he sometimes didn’t trouble to watch even their championship matches: “For him, the real sport lay in staging a show, outwitting the other guy, putting fannies in seats…. Fight nights he could often be seen patrolling the stadium, or even hawking tickets.” Yet “Uncle Mike” was the individual responsible for Joe Louis’s phenomenal career, financing the young boxer at the start and grooming him for the championship by assuring that Louis would be marketed to the white public in a way to neutralize the image of the flamboyant Jack Johnson. Margolick writes:

  Louis would be the antithesis of everything Jack Johnson had been. He would always be softspoken, understated and polite, no matter what he accomplished. He would not preen or gloat or strut in the ring…. He would always conduct himself with dignity…. When it came to women, he would stick to his own kind…. He would never fraternize with white women, let alone be photographed with them. He would not drive fast cars, especially red ones…. The press would be saturated with stories of Louis’s boyish goodness, his love for his mother, his mother’s love for him, his devotion to Scripture.

  Without this discreetly constructed persona, which accounts for Louis’s “frozen” demeanor in public, it’s probable that Joe Louis would be recalled as one of the legendary “shadow champions” like Peter Jackson and Harry Wills, black boxers whom the champions John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey managed to avoid.

  Joe Jacobs, Schmeling’s ever-zealous manager, was also concerned with honoring marketable images for his fighters. He was scrappy, bright, inventive and courageous or reckless enough to take one of his fighters to Georgia, where Jacobs was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. The anti-Semitic newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler called him “a New York sidewalk boy of the most conspicuous Jewishness,” but fight folks called him “Yussel the Muscle.” In a time in which activist Jews were organizing boycotts of German goods and of individuals like Max Schmeling, Joe Jacobs came to the seeming defense of Nazi Germany: “Most of the trouble with the Jews over there is caused by the Jews in this country.” In a comic-nightmare episode like a scene from a Woody Allen movie, after a victory of Schmeling’s in Hamburg in 1935 the wily Jew from New York City found himself hauled into the ring by Schmeling as the German national anthem was being sung by twenty-five thousand ecstatic Germans lifting their arms in the Nazi salute:

  “Jacobs was momentarily at a loss. But everyone else was saluting, he thought, and he was in plain sight; what else was he to do? So up went his right arm, too, though with a cigar nestled between his fingers…. Schmeling’s arm was stiff and resolute, while Jacobs’s was more limp, as if halfheartedly hailing a cab.”

  Joe Jacobs would die of a heart attack at forty-two in 1940, not long after his star boxer had left boxing to become a paratrooper in the Wehrmacht.

  The actual time a boxer spends fighting is minuscule set beside the interminable preparation, training, “intrigue and…politicking” of the kind Margolick reports in detail, so in Beyond Glory the Louis-Schmeling fights take up a very small part of the text. Most of the chapters are impersonal historical accounts, culled from numerous sources, in which the author’s voice is subordinate to his material. Amid much summarizing, press clippings of the era, many of them p
ainfully racist, provide candor and color; occasionally there are outbursts of a kind of comic surrealism, as in this rapid collage following the dramatic outcome of the 1938 fight:

  In the stands there was bedlam. Tallulah Bankhead sprang to her feet and turned to the Schmeling fans behind her. “I told you so, you sons of bitches!” she screamed. Whites were hugging blacks. “The happiest people I saw at this fight were not the Negroes but the Jews,” a black writer observed. “In the row in front of me there was a great line of Jews—and they had the best time of all their Jewish lives.”…“Beat the hell out of the damn German bastard!” W. E. B. Du Bois, a lifelong Germanophile who rarely swore, shouted gleefully in Atlanta. In Hollywood, Bette Davis jumped up and down; she had won $66 in the Warner Brothers fight pool…“Everybody danced and sang.” Woody Guthrie wrote from Santa Fe. “I watched the people laugh, walk, sing, do all sorts of dances. I heard ‘Hooray for Joe Louis!’ ‘To hell with Max Schmeling’ in Indian, Mexican, Spanish, all kinds of white tongues.”

  (Here is history as antic folk art, like a mural by Thomas Hart Benton.)

  Beyond an ambitious distillation of facts and a blizzard of opinions, what seems missing in Beyond Glory is authorial perspective: what does David Margolick make of the Louis-Schmeling phenomenon? Are such crude but potent myths of the “moral” superiority of physical superiority still dominant in our culture? Did not a single commentator among so many make the obvious point that Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling in the ring because, that night, he was the better boxer, not because he was the better man, or represented the better country? Did not one commentator take note that boxing, like warfare, has nothing to do with virtue? Even in the epilogue the author’s voice is curiously muted, where one might expect some of the subtly nuanced, informed and engaging commentary that gives such life to At the Bar (1995), a collection of Margolick’s legal columns from the New York Times.

  Yet Beyond Glory is a valuable addition to a growing library of books on sports and culture, one to set beside Gerald Early’s Culture of Bruising (1994) and Geoffrey C. Ward’s Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004) as a chronicle of an era not so bygone as we might wish.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Anderson, Dave. In The Corner: Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art (William Morrow, New York, 1991).

  Anderson, Dave. Articles in The New York Times.

  Berger, Phil. Articles in The New York Times.

  Collins, Nigel. “Mike Tyson: The Legacy of Cus D’Amato,” The Ring, February 1986.

  Early, Gerald. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (The Ecco Press, New Jersey, 1989).

  Fried, Ronald K. Corner Men: Great Boxing Trainers (Four Walls, Eight Windows, New York, 1991).

  Gorn, Elliot J. “The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine: An Interpretation of the Dempsey-Tunney Fights,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 19 (1985).

  Hauser, Thomas. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1991).

  Hauser, Thomas. The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, 1991).

  Heller, Peter. In This Corner: Forty World Champions Tell Their Stories (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973).

  Illingworth, Montieth. Mike Tyson: Money, Myth and Betrayal (Birch Lane Press, New York, 1991).

  McCallum, John D. The World Heavyweight Boxing Championship: A History (Chilton Book Co., Radnor, Pennsylvania, 1974).

  McIlvanney, Hugh. McIlvanney on Boxing: An Anthology (Beaufort Books, New York, 1983).

  Mead, Chris. Champion: Joe Louis; Black Hero in White America (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1985).

  Odd, Gilbert. Encyclopedia of Boxing (Crescent Books, New York, 1983).

  The Ring magazine (New York, New York).

  Schulian, John. Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists (Andrews & McMeel, Fairway, Kansas, 1983).

  Background material for the section on “opponents” was drawn from articles by Michael Shapiro and Budd Schulberg appearing in The New York Times and Newsday respectively.

  Sociologists David P. Phillips and John E. Hensley in “When Violence Is Rewarded or Punished: The Impact of Mass Media Stories on Homicide,” Journal of Communication, Summer 1984, argue that highly publicized boxing matches have a direct and measurable effect upon the homicide rate, albeit with curious qualifications of race.

  I am deeply indebted to my friend Ronald Levao of Rutgers University, who made available to me much of his collection of films and tapes of boxing matches from Johnson-Ketchel, 1909, to the present time, and whose advice and encouragement in the preparation of the manuscript has been invaluable.

  About the Author

  ON THE WALL above Joyce Carol Oates’s desk is a 1957 quote from the film director Alfred Hitchcock. It says: “It’s only a movie, let’s not go too deeply into these things.” These simple words of advice were given to Kim Novak when she was feeling agitated and despondent on the set of Vertigo. “I thought it was good advice,” says Joyce Carol Oates. “Writers can get too intense and too emotionally involved with their work. Sometimes I tend to get a little anxious and nervous about my writing, and I can make myself unhappy, so I look up at that quote and think, it’s only a book, don’t worry, it’s not your life.”

  But writing is an intrinsic part of Joyce Carol Oates’s life, the biographical details overshadowed by her literary output. To date, Oates has thirty-nine novels, nineteen collections of short stories, and numerous plays and nonfiction works (including monographs on boxing and the American artist George Bellows) to her name—as well as the novels of her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. By the time this interview appears that number, in all likelihood, will have increased. “I like writing, and I’m always working on something; if it’s not a novel, then it’ll be a short story, or an essay, or a book review.”

  From an early age Oates was fascinated by words; she began writing when she was very young. “Even before I could write I was emulating adult handwriting. So I began writing, in a sense, before I was able to write.” Her first stories were about cats and horses. “I love animals. I’m very close to animals.” Born on Bloomsday—June 16, 1938—she grew up on a small farm in Lockport, New York, and studied at the same one-room school her mother attended. Her grandparents had a hard life: Joyce’s father and his mother moved frequently “from one low-priced rental to another”; Joyce’s mother was handed over to the care of an aunt when her father died suddenly and left the family impoverished. “Is ‘die’ too circumspect a term?” asks Oates. “In fact, my maternal grandfather was killed in a tavern brawl.”

  “‘Even before I could write I was emulating adult handwriting. So I began writing, in a sense, before I was able to write.’”

  Oates is the eldest of three and her childhood territory was mapped out in books. She was a voracious reader; by the time she was in her teens she was devouring Henry David Thoreau, Hemingway, Emily Bronte, Faulkner—and she can track the influence of these major writers in her own work. She explains: “I think we are most influenced when we are adolescents. Whoever you read when you’re fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen are probably the strongest influences of your whole life.” She adds, “I think it’s true for all artists: as an adolescent you don’t have much background, you don’t know much. I can imagine a young artist who’s, say, thirteen years old and seeing Cezanne for the first time being very, very overwhelmed. But it’s not going to have the same impact when you’re forty.”

  “[Oates] won the Mademoiselle ‘college short story’ competition in 1959, when she was just nineteen (Sylvia Plath received this coveted award in 1951).