Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Schmeling gained entry into elite German intellectual circles, meeting the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg, the artist George Grosz (for whom he became a model), the novelist Heinrich Mann, and other Weimar cultural figures. He relished the role. “Künstler, schenkt mir Eure Gunst-Boxen ist auch ’ne Kunst!” he wrote in the guest book of one artistic hangout: “Artists, grant me your favor—boxing is also an art!” That someone with his limited background and education could make himself comfortable in so alien a world was an early indication of Schmeling’s extraordinary adaptability. Conversely, German society was showing its ability to adapt itself to him, to see in him whatever it wanted.

  Even before meeting Schmeling or watching him in action, Paul Gallico, a sports columnist for the New York Daily News, a man who spoke German and read the German newspapers, began praising him and urging him to come to the United States. Schmeling had his lapses and his losses, which some attributed to his new and highfalutin life. But in April 1928, despite fracturing his thumb early in the fight, Schmeling outpointed Franz Diener for the German heavyweight championship. Now, America really beckoned; a cartoon in Box-Sport showed Schmeling “swimming after the dollar” across the Atlantic. That May, Schmeling, accompanied by Bülow, arrived in New York for the first time. His appearance rated only meager coverage in a few newspapers—all of which misspelled his name.

  Schmeling’s injured thumb precluded any immediate action. For months, he lived off the charity of Madame Hranoush Aglaganian Bey, a Constantinople-born grande dame who ran a famous training camp in Summit, New Jersey. Gradually Schmeling’s idleness, poverty, and poor prospects soured him on Bülow, and Harry Sperber, a reporter for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, a German-American paper, urged Schmeling to find himself an American manager, someone familiar with boxing in New York and wily and aggressive enough to get him a few fights. Schmeling initially hired Nat Fleischer, who advanced him $250 to tide him over until his thumb healed. But everything changed when Joe Jacobs came by Madame Bey’s to see one of his fighters. Before long, Jacobs had elbowed Bülow and Fleischer aside—a maneuver that earned him the nickname “Yussel the Muscle,” “Yussel” being the Yiddish diminutive for Joseph.* (In one story, someone asked Schmeling where he got the three crisp $1,000 bills he was brandishing. “Joe Jacobs gave ’em to me,” he said. “He told me to buy myself some cigars.”) Schmeling believed the Jews controlled New York, and now he had someone to help him negotiate his way around the place. For Schmeling, it was the start of a long and bitter feud with Bülow, with whom he technically remained under contract. It was also the start of what was surely one of the most incongruous and tumultuous partnerships in the history of sports.

  Jacobs, then in his early thirties, was the quintessential Broadway guy, a Damon Runyon character from whom even Damon Runyon, then writing a sports column for the Hearst newspapers, could pick up some pointers. His goal in life was to do everything with style. He was ever quick with the buck, the wisecrack, and the dames. No matter how strapped he might be, he wore tailor-made suits and striped shirts (all designed to make him look taller than his five feet two inches) and flashy shoes polished to a dazzling sheen. Then there was his omnipresent expensive cigar: he went through fifteen or twenty of them a day, and one could always gauge how flush he was by their pedigree. Reporters knew that Jacobs was always good for a snappy quote, and they clung to him. “If all the newspaper copy he inspired were stretched end to end, a blow would be dealt to the King’s English from which it would never recover,” Dan Parker, the sports columnist of the New York Mirror, once wrote. Even when he wasn’t trying to, Jacobs flirted with Webster’s, or Bartlett’s. There was that freezing day in Detroit when, violating all of his instincts and habits, he’d actually awakened early to attend the World Series. “I shudda stood in bed,” he famously complained. Most of the time, Jacobs stayed in midtown Manhattan, within a block or two of Broadway; anywhere else (apart from the places where his fighters fought) he seemed to wilt. Rural things, like training camps and trees, either bored or frightened him, or tired him out. “It’s too darned quiet to sleep,” he once complained upon returning to civilization. Jacobs invariably slept late, often in one of the love nests he shared with his retinue of showgirls, chorines, models, and divorcées. Each of them—there might be half a dozen at a time, several of whom he supported—he would introduce as “my little wife.” Someone once asked him if he was married. “Do you think I’m crazy?” he replied. Most days he’d get up as the sun went down, go for a shave, and emerge smelling, as someone once put it, like a fugitive from a florist shop. By eight-thirty or so in the evening, after checking in at his office, he’d have his “breakfast,” perhaps at Lindy’s. By midnight, after making further rounds, it would be time for “dinner.” Then it was off to the nightclubs, though always within reach of a fight promoter in search of a deal. Once, peering sadly down Broadway as day broke, he groused, “Why do guys have to sleep at all?”

  The columnist Westbrook Pegler once called Jacobs “a New York sidewalk boy of the most conspicuous Jewishness.” He wore it on his sleeve, but was forever trying to shed the coat, saying kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) for his mother one minute, then eating a ham sandwich in a Broadway beanery the next. He had grown up in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, the son of a tailor. His father wanted him to be a rabbi, but young Joe gravitated toward boxing; while still in high school he had fighters on his payroll. In military service during World War I, he arranged bouts between rival companies, then promoted fights between soldiers to the general public. Within a few years, he’d landed a light heavyweight named Mike McTigue, who went on to become champion of the world. In October 1923 he brought McTigue, along with his own portable New York-based referee, to Columbus, Georgia, to fight a local hero named Young Stribling. When McTigue tried to back out at the last moment— he’d hurt his hand—local Ku Klux Klan members threatened to string up Jacobs and his fighter. By one account, Jacobs stood up to the bullies. “If you hang me, there will be some guys down here from New York that will blow this dump off the map,” he warned. In another version of the story, Jacobs saw two trees, one a mighty oak, the other a mere sapling. “You take the big tree,” he told his boxer magnanimously. “The little one is all I want.” In any case, the fight proceeded, and when, after ten rounds, Jacobs’s referee called it a draw, the Klansmen filled the ring and forced him to name Stribling the winner. Three hours later, safely out of the Klan’s reach, the referee reinstated the original decision. After that, Jacobs never ventured down South again; there were, he explained, too many trees there. Jacobs was fanatically devoted to his fighters, whom he championed unceasingly and ingeniously. When doctors said one of them had double pneumonia, Jacobs asked why they couldn’t call it “triple pneumonia” instead: it would sound better in the papers, he explained, and besides, his man was a pretty big guy.

  Having landed Schmeling, Jacobs paraded his new prized prospect around tirelessly. The heavyweight division was, as he liked to say, where most of the “coconuts” could be made. Some, including Schmeling himself, credited him with what became Schmeling’s inapt but enduring nickname: “The Black Uhlan of the Rhine.” While it had a nice ring to it, it bore little resemblance to reality; Schmeling had no connection whatever to the Uhlans (cavalry lancers in the Prussian army), was from nowhere near the Rhine, and only his hair was black. (The nickname is more generally attributed to Damon Runyon.) In November 1928, his hand now healed, Schmeling made his American debut, knocking out Joe Monte. The following January, with the crowd shouting “Dempsey! Dempsey!” he won a decision against Joe Sekyra. That earned him his first big fight, in February 1929, against Johnny Risko, who had once gone the distance with Gene Tunney. When Schmeling knocked him out in nine rounds before twenty-five thousand screaming fans, people began predicting he’d be heavyweight champion. Thanks to Schmeling, Box-Sport declared, American public opinion toward Germany had warmed up for probably the first time since the Armistice. />
  The victory raised the stakes in Schmeling’s dispute with Bülow. During one hearing, the two men nearly came to blows; Bülow complained that Schmeling treated him like a dog. Despite Schmeling’s efforts—he visited with the German ambassador in Washington and may even have attempted to see President Coolidge—the New York boxing commission ruled that Bülow was still Schmeling’s manager, at least for the eighteen months remaining on their contract, and was entitled to a share of his income. Schmeling threatened to hang up his gloves for the duration. In the meantime, he returned to Germany, where twenty thousand people greeted him at the train station in Berlin. But he soon returned to America for a fight with another top contender, Paolino Uzcudun, the so-called Basque Woodchopper. Jacobs went into overdrive, writing a seventeen-part series on Schmeling for the New York American. Schmeling beat Uzcudun, and “all Berlin was frantic with joy,” The New York Times reported. The excitement in the Fatherland, one newspaper there stated, resembled what had followed the great German victories of World War I. A Schmeling championship appeared so inevitable that one former title-holder, James J. Corbett, began to bemoan what it signaled about American boxing. In barely a year, Schmeling’s purses topped $95,000, the fastest start for a boxer ever.

  Schmeling’s stubborn insistence on outlasting Bülow, though, meant remaining idle, which lost him admirers on both continents. But when he signed to fight Jack Sharkey on June 12,1930, for the heavyweight crown— Tunney, the champion, had retired—the sniping largely stopped. Schmeling’s arrival in New York on May 4, 1930, was almost regal, but he drew mixed reviews from the press. “He is quiet, modest, sincere (as far as one can tell),” wrote Frank Graham, the respected columnist of the New York Sun. Joe Williams of the New York Telegram disagreed, detecting “an insolence, an arrogance, and a latent meanness about him.” Jacobs tried to smooth things over. But taking no chances, Yussel, visiting a Bronx synagogue to say kaddish for his father, threw in a prayer for Schmeling, too—that, as the Yiddish daily Forverts later put it, God should help his fighter “punch harder than the Lithuanian sheygets [Gentile]. To secure the heavenly bequest,” it went on, “Jacobs flipped a couple of coins into the charity box.” And God delivered, in a backhanded kind of way.

  A crowd of eighty thousand gathered at Yankee Stadium for what was framed as a battle of nations. Schmeling wore the German national colors and was introduced as “the fighting son of the Fatherland.” The applause was deafening, for German Americans, Austrians, and Germans (including Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and Marlene Dietrich) filled the stands. Sharkey, whom the ring announcer called “the man on whom every American pins his faith,” was then introduced, and traipsed around the ring with an American flag wrapped over his shoulders.

  Schmeling, feeling under the weather, started out even more slowly than usual and lost the first two rounds. By the third, Sharkey felt he could knock him out at will, and restrained himself only to make Schmeling look bad. In Schmeling’s corner, Jacobs was shoving smelling salts under his nose between rounds. Mindful of fouls—he’d been cautioned in the second round against low blows—Sharkey was shooting only at the head. But in the fourth round he saw an opening to Schmeling’s body and went for it. It was a left, half hook and half uppercut. It landed, as someone later put it, with the sound of a cow pulling her foot out of the mud. But precisely where it landed, whether above or below the belt, will remain forever uncertain.

  Schmeling recoiled. A stabbing pain shot through his body, he later said, and his legs buckled. Down he went, his hand clawing at his abdomen. He tried to get up, but felt “paralyzed.” And that was fine with Jacobs. “Stay down, you idiot!” he shouted. “He fouled you!” The referee counted to five before the round ended, and Jacobs, “a screaming, dancing midge of a man,” climbed through the ropes, rushed at him, and grabbed his arm. Foul! Foul! Disqualify him! he shrieked. The befuddled referee frantically consulted the two judges. One thought the punch was low; the other had missed it. The ring was in chaos. It was then that Arthur Brisbane, the powerful Hearst columnist sitting at ringside, stepped in. Schmeling had been fouled, he decreed, and unless he was declared the winner, boxing either was dead in New York or would be banned from the Hearst papers, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. The ring announcer, Joe Humphries, then walked over to Schmeling and lifted his limp left arm. “You’re the champion, Max!” Jacobs shouted in his ear. Schmeling, who’d been doubled over with pain, “brightened up like a child seeing his Christmas tree for the first time.”

  Schmeling’s mood quickly blackened, however, as the full ignominy of his “victory” became clear. No one had ever won the title on a foul before (and, because the rules were changed as a result of the ensuing outrage, no one ever would again). Fans filed out of the stadium disgustedly. In Schmeling’s dressing room, Jacobs produced a dented protective cup, which some reporters suspected he had procured beforehand and made to look, as one writer put it, “as though an armored truck had struck it at full speed.” (Far more persuasive was a medical report of a spasm in Schmeling’s left testicle that suggested “a severe blow in that region.”) Schmeling believed he’d been turning things around in the fight, and would have won had it gone the distance. But he promised Sharkey a rematch whenever he wanted one. “From the bottom of my heart I can only thank [the American people] for a fairness to a stranger in their land that has never been equaled in the history of sport,” he told Paul Gallico of the Daily News, who had advised Schmeling that he’d be crazy not to accept the crown, even under such sullied circumstances. “I owe a debt to [them] and I swear to you that some day I will repay. And so, too, will my country.”

  It was not the only debt Schmeling incurred that night. Sitting behind a post in the mezzanine, covering the fight on a special woman’s pass for a magazine called Outlook and Independent, the novelist Katherine Brush saw things more clearly than many men at ringside. “If anyone won the heavyweight championship of the world on June 12, 1930, it was Joey Jacobs, height about five feet 2, weight about 120 pounds,” she wrote. Schmeling acknowledged as much. “You know, that Yacobs —I did not know that he could do that,” Schmeling said. “I see him the way he runs around the ring and fights for me. And I don’t forget that.” Nor did he forget Jacobs’s heavenly appeal. “I’m sure it helped me win the fight,” he said. (Perhaps, the Forverts mused, the spirit of Jacobs’s father had in fact come from the yene velt—the other world—and lowered Sharkey’s fateful punch.) Though always tight with a buck, Schmeling, technically still represented by Bülow, gave Yussel $10,000 anyway, and arm in arm, the two men left Yankee Stadium. That fall, shortly after his contract with Bülow expired, Schmeling signed a pact with Jacobs, extending into 1935. The Nazi press, predictably, had few kind words for Yussel, calling him “this unpleasant, loud-mouthed American Jew.” But with what even apolitical German boxing fans considered Jacobs’s unsentimental, aggressive, and mercenary ways, he was foreign to German sensibilities long before his Jewishness came to loom so large.

  There was some celebrating in Germany over Schmeling’s triumph, but the overwhelming reaction was embarrassment. This was no way to win a championship; some fundamental German sense of fair play had been violated. “We’re on our way to becoming the greatest sporting nation in the world if only we get hit often enough below the belt,” one paper sneered. Schmeling became the butt of vicious jokes. When the fight films arrived in Berlin cinemas, audiences laughed uproariously. Introduced at a local boxing match, he encountered “a concert of boos and whistles”; pale and shaken, he promptly left the hall.

  Reluctant to fight Sharkey again and unwilling to enter a ring until his contract with Bülow expired, Schmeling saw no action for months. The New York State Athletic Commission declared the crown vacant. Embarrassed German boxing officials begged Schmeling not to humiliate his country. An artist who’d once sculpted Schmeling lamented how he’d degenerated from a modest, curious, and sensitive young man into a self-centered penny-pincher. Newspap
ers across the political spectrum condemned him; one in Berlin called his evasions “a disgrace to German sport.” The Angriff blamed it all on the “mean, impertinent, incompetent Jew” representing Schmeling. It also accused Schmeling of using Berlin’s Jewish-owned newspapers as his personal mouthpiece. But when he finally signed up to defend his championship against Young Stribling, New York boxing officials decreed that Schmeling was still champ.

  In late January 1931, Schmeling returned to the United States to begin a forty-city exhibition tour, designed to cash in on his championship and make a bit of money between fights. It was poorly attended, and Schmeling was rudely received. But in Cleveland that July, Schmeling knocked out Stribling, something no one else had done in 264 previous fights, and began turning perceptions around, both in the United States and in Germany. Schmeling canceled a scheduled fight against Primo Carnera, the gargantuan Italian, earning him yet more criticism, but in January 1932, he finally agreed to a June rematch with Sharkey. In the meantime, the first Schmeling biography, by Rolf Nürnberg, sports editor of the 12 Uhr-Blatt in Berlin, appeared. It depicted Schmeling as cold, unforgiving, disloyal, selfish, and cynical, someone who exploited those who helped him and rarely gave anything back to anyone. “Ruthlessness was the law; for sentimentality there was little room,” Nürnberg wrote.