Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Blackburn, of course, knew all of this firsthand. “Take him away,” he said in one of many versions of his first encounter with Louis and his managers. “A colored boxer who can fight and won’t lie down can’t get any fights.” “You were born with two strikes on you,” Blackburn is said to have told Louis. “That’s why I don’t fool with colored boys! They’re too hard to sell since Jack Johnson went and acted like he did. I can make more sugar training white fighters, even if they’re only half as good.” But Blackburn conceded one exception to this otherwise ironclad law: America loved a great puncher, regardless of his race. As Louis—“just a funny-looking boy with high-water trousers and too much arms for the sleeves of his coat”— sat listening, Blackburn laid down his catechism. For a black man to have any chance at all, he said, he had to be “very good outside the ring and very bad inside.” “You’ve got to be a killer, otherwise I’m getting too old to waste any time on you,” he told Louis. “I ain’t goner waste any of your time,” Louis promised him. Blackburn remained dubious, but took on Louis anyway. It was, after all, a job. Louis and Blackburn quickly grew close. “Chappie,” they called each other.

  Blackburn soon discovered that Louis hit hard; as for the rest, he’d have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Louis needed to learn how to plant his feet for the best balance, how to weave and block, how to shuffle in and out of range, how to spot openings, how to punch with his whole body, how to aim those punches and how to put them together. Blackburn taught him how to hit without hurting his hands, and the virtues of short, snappy punches. He taught him how to be free and easy in the ring, how to stay fresh for later rounds. He taught him defense, and how to hit without leaving himself open. He taught him how to feint. The goal, he drilled into him, was always a knockout: people didn’t pay to see dancers or clinchers, and blacks rarely won decisions. “Let your fists be your referee,” he said. One of his concerns was that Louis was “too easygoing— too nice a fella” to succeed; Louis “didn’t have any blood in his eye.” Once Louis had a man on the ropes, he instructed, he must not get cute or sentimental. “You can’t show no pity in this game,” he said. “When you get a man in distress, toss every punch in the book into him. Finish him right off.” On another occasion, he put it a bit differently. “You just gotta throw away your heart when you pull on those gloves, or the other fella’ll knock it outa you,” he said. In the end, Blackburn said, “Joe Louis ain’t no natural killer. He’s a manufactured killer.”

  Blackburn got his new student into a regular routine: Louis arose at six each morning, ran twice around Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side, went back to bed, and then got back up for breakfast and a day of training. Blackburn began to develop a feel—and even, quite literally, a taste—for Louis: at one point in his daily sessions, he would lick Louis’s shoulder, and if it was salty enough, he’d know he’d had enough for the day. At night, the two of them occasionally watched movies, but mostly they sat around and talked boxing. Blackburn weaned Louis off the few vices he had, like sweets, particularly ice cream, at least while training. He did not flatter Louis, but convinced him that with enough time and seasoning, he could beat anyone. And in time, Blackburn came to believe that himself.

  As Blackburn labored to make Louis unbeatable, Roxborough and Black worked to make him unimpeachable. They devised an elaborate code of conduct, most of which came naturally to him anyway. Louis would be the antithesis of everything Jack Johnson had been. He would always be soft-spoken, understated, and polite, no matter what he accomplished. He would not preen or gloat or strut in the ring. If he needed his teeth capped, it would not be done in gold, as Johnson had done. He would always conduct himself with dignity and not, as Louis once put it, like one of those “fool nigger dolls” with wide grins and thick lips. When it came to women, he would stick to his own kind, and platonically at that, at least for now. He would never fraternize with white women, let alone be photographed with them. He would not drive fast cars, especially red ones. Anyone wishing to hold Louis back would get no help from Louis himself. 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, his abstemiousness and frugality.

  When you stripped away all the layers of mythology and idealization, it was hard to say very much about the Louis who remained. He was dignified and decent, uneducated and inarticulate, though with an odd knack for reducing things to pithy truisms. For all of his violence in the ring, he was largely passive, affectless, even dull outside of it. He was not oblivious to the gargantuan impact he had on others, but like just about everything else, he took it all in stride; the hopes that people placed on his shoulders, enough to crush normal people, appeared to impose no particular burden on him. He had few deep feelings of his own, but he had an ability to generate intense passions in others. He was the perfect vehicle for everyone else’s dreams; he could be, and was, whatever someone wanted him to be.

  A trainload of Detroit fans went to Chicago to watch Louis in his first professional fight, against Jack Kracken at the Bacon Casino on July 4, 1934. In the first round, Louis sent Kracken down for a nine count, then knocked him clear out of the ring. The referee quickly called the fight, for which Louis earned $59, and predicted that Louis would one day be champ. “If he isn’t the hardest punching heavyweight of all time—you can have Dempsey, too—I’ll eat your typewriter,” a veteran Chicago boxing man wrote Joe Williams of the New York Telegram. Louis won his first mention in another mainstay of the black press, the Pittsburgh Courier. Shortly thereafter, he made his debut as well in Ring, in the agate type at the back of the magazine.

  In September, in what he later called one of his toughest fights, he beat Adolph Wiater in Chicago. In October, before a sold-out crowd at Chicago’s Arcadia Gardens, Louis knocked down Art Sykes so hard that his head bounced off the canvas. Louis knocked out Stanley Poreda—and knocked Poreda out of the ring—in the first round on November 14; the timekeeper couldn’t start the count until removing Poreda from his lap. Later in November 1934, as Max Baer looked on, Louis faced Charley Massera, who’d beaten Steve Hamas. It was Louis’s first “big” fight, held in the Chicago Coliseum rather than in a neighborhood club, and matchmakers and scouts from all over the country came to see him. It was also the first mixed bout at the coliseum since 1929, when a panic, perhaps racially inspired, left one fan dead and several others injured. In the third round Louis landed two crushing rights, the second of which left Massera “hung like a sack of wheat” over the middle rope. It was the first time Louis had seemed brutal—perhaps, the Chicago Defender theorized, because he knew that the champ was watching. Also watching was Nat Fleischer. Just as he had championed a foreigner, Schmeling, he now championed a black man, imagining Louis as a future titleholder. The only question was whether he’d be given that chance. Times had changed, Fleischer stressed; race prejudice, while still pronounced in some places, had ebbed in others. He conceded that much depended on Baer, who was said to have promised his mother that he would never fight a black man. But this was the same man who had also said he would fight the Twentieth Century Limited if there were enough money in it.

  In any case, forces beyond Baer would likely decide the matter. Boxing was in trouble. Madison Square Garden had lost money in 1933 and 1934. The gate for the Sharkey-Carnera title fight was $200,000, less than one-tenth what Dempsey and Tunney had drawn in Chicago only seven years earlier. The sport was desperately short of cash and charisma, and Louis promised to fill both voids. “The Ring welcomes Louis among America’s fighting men,” Fleischer wrote. “Regardless of color, boxing needs good talent and in the Detroiter it has the type of gladiator for whom the sport has been looking.”

  And if Louis promised to bring white fans back to the stadiums and arenas, he would also bring out blacks, many of them for the first time. For all of its enduring, crushing problems, in the years since Jack Johnson black America had become more urbanized, concentrated, cohesiv
e, and assertive. Millions had moved north, from farms to cities, and a whole black subculture had developed. Black businessmen—some legitimate, some running numbers and other rackets—had appeared on the scene, and a small black plutocracy had sprung up. Black culture had blossomed; Harlem had had its Renaissance. Blacks developed greater political power, electing some of their own representatives. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won recognition. The NAACP had grown more established, and now had indigenous leadership; it led a campaign against lynching, and filed the first cases against segregated schools. Mass movements had grown around black nationalist leaders like Marcus Garvey. While baseball remained white, the Negro Leagues had appeared. The black press, led by newspapers such as the Defender in Chicago, the Courier in Pittsburgh, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, had become more vital and outspoken. The growth of black political and economic power and self-confidence was slow but profound. Though it would have to dig deeply into its pockets to do so, black America was ready to celebrate something, to splurge, to strut, to hope. It only needed an excuse. And now he’d come along.

  Louis was next matched, on December 14, with a California boxer named Lee Ramage. Ramage had never been knocked out, and he, too, had defeated Hamas. Gamblers, who thought Louis’s managers were putting him in over his head to earn some money for themselves, made Ram-age a two-to-one favorite. “If Louis stops the clever Californian he will throw the first ten heavyweight contenders into a panic,” the Chicago American reported. The Tribune disagreed: Louis “already has most of the contenders for the championship shaking in their boots,” it said. Louis started the fight slowly, and by the seventh round the crowd had grown impatient for what the Tribune’s French Lane called “the jaw-crashing, sleep-producing blow that is being talked about all over America.” Ramage was Louis’s best opponent yet, and Blackburn had told him beforehand to take his time, to learn as much as he could until he gave him the word. Insiders knew that when Blackburn slapped Louis on the rear end, it was his signal to “wrap it up” or “go to town.” In the eighth, Louis sent Ramage down twice for a nine count, then down again for good. “Who’s going to stop this new ‘black peril’ among the heavyweights?” Lane asked. “Maybe Maxie Baer. Remember, I say maybe.” For the first time, Louis broke into Ring’s top ten heavyweights, the ninth-ranked contender for the title.

  It may have been while Louis trained for Ramage that a friend came by with a beautiful nineteen-year-old black girl named Marva Trotter. (Or Louis may have met her at a party at a South Side hotel. Or he may have gotten her name from Al Monroe of the Defender—the saga of Louis’s courtship had many variants.) Marva, born in the black town of Boley, Oklahoma, and raised in Chicago, was a high school graduate who aspired to dress designing but who was then studying stenography in one of the few schools that accepted blacks. Julian Black’s lawyer was dating one of her sisters. By any measure, it was a mismatch: Marva was the daughter of a minister, well spoken and charming, while Louis remained raw. But to Louis’s handlers, that only made her more appealing. They were, of course, eager to wall him off from white women—to avoid the whole Jack Johnson situation. But black women were becoming a problem, too, at least according to Collyer’s Eye, a sports tip sheet out of Chicago. In July 1935 it cited reports “seeping out of the ‘black belt’” that “hotcha gals” in Detroit had already started in on Louis, with one jealous type tossing a brick through his car window. “Louis’s handlers… realize fully that wine, woman [sic] and song have been the most powerful enemy of recent near-champion negro fighters and understand the temptation confronting their charge,” it reported. So Marva and Louis were paired off. “It wasn’t arranged in the European sense of an arranged marriage or the Oriental sense, but they threw them together,” Louis’s longtime lawyer, Truman Gibson, later recalled. “Julian [Black] wanted a control over Joe, and this was one element of control.” At the time, Marva was taking dictation at a tooth powder company. But in black America, she would soon become a fairy princess, the Jackie Kennedy or Princess Diana of her day. Officially, none of this was happening. When a Tribune reporter asked Louis whether there was “a little girl back in Detroit waiting to become Mrs. Heavyweight Champion,” Roxborough interceded to insist that Louis hadn’t yet shown much interest in girls. But the specifics mattered less than the fact that to the mighty Chicago Tribune, one of America’s most influential newspapers, “Mrs. Louis,” whoever she might be, would also be “Mrs. Heavyweight Champion.”

  The Tribune regularly burnished Louis’s friendly, wholesome, un-threatening image, often by offering Roxborough a platform. He informed readers, for instance, that Louis didn’t smoke or drink, that his money was being saved for him, and that when he left the ring he would, as he said, engage in some respectable business among his own people. But Louis was in a peculiar position. He had to be good enough to prove himself, but not so good as to scare everybody off. In one sense, the better he got, the worse his prospects became. “A pretty good-looking young heavy,” one old-timer said of Louis in June 1934. “Too bad he’s a black boy, otherwise he might get somewhere in a couple of years.”

  With vicarious pleasure and pride, the black press touted Louis and served up details from his life. It described, in the manner of a satisfied mother, how prodigiously Louis ate—a crisp fried chicken reportedly failed to last one round in his hands—and his purchasing power, relating how he bought himself five pairs of custom-made shoes at a pop. It beamed over his black management. “Colored people usually reason that unless the head of something is white, it cannot succeed,” the Philadelphia Tribune observed. “If Joe does nothing except dispel that old fogey idea, he will have rendered a great service.” Meantime, a white sports-writer named Gene Kessler struck a deal with Louis to ghostwrite stories under his byline. Soon there would be a flood of stories by “Joe Louis,” written in a mishmash of voices, sometimes excessively colloquial, sometimes incongruously erudite (“I noticed he couldn’t flick that arm with the same alacrity”). The first mention of Louis in a New York newspaper may have come on December 4, 1934. HEAVYWEIGHTS DUCKING JOE LOUIS, the New York Post announced.

  That month brought the usual Christmas-gift lists and New Year’s predictions. Ed Harris of the Philadelphia Tribune wished Louis “a voodoo to hoodoo the heavies that are going to draw the color line.” To get a crack at Baer, wrote Al Monroe, Louis had to beat Levinsky and Hamas—but not too convincingly, or “he will find the color line facing his every move up the ladder.” But Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier disagreed. “Hard rights and lefts, coupled with real economic need for a man’s services, will help land a k.o. blow squarely on the chin of Old Man Prejudice,” he predicted. Louis resumed his ascent only four days into 1935, besting Patsy Perroni before nearly sixteen thousand people in his home-town. Louis earned $4,000 for the night, enough to make a down payment on the house he was buying for his mother.

  Three months before Schmeling and Hamas were to square off in Hamburg, Baer listed the two of them, along with Carnera, as the top contenders for his crown. Louis looked good, he said, but still wasn’t sufficiently seasoned; he could knock him out in a jiffy. Instead, he offered Louis five dollars a round to become one of his sparring partners. Baer’s flip-flops on whether he’d honor the color line left black writers dizzy and discouraged. Ed Harris marveled at how the color line worked: “The ease with which such an abstract idea becomes a concrete object is enough to raise the envy of any engineer,” he wrote. He doubted that Louis and Baer would square off anytime soon; if Baer waited long enough, after all, Louis could burn himself out. In what might have been a matter of wishful thinking, the British, custodians of a restive empire populated largely by people of color, painted a bleak picture of Louis’s prospects. “Jack Johnson put the kibosh on the Black Race for good and all,” Boxing opined in March 1935. “Another coloured man will never hold the heavyweight title so long as the U.S.A. have any say in the matter.” But t
o Fleischer, Louis was simply too good to keep down. Besides, it just wouldn’t be right. “When the color line is used as a subterfuge in this country, there can be no difference between such a stand against the Negro race than there is against the Jews by Hitler,” he wrote. One fighter who would not duck Louis was Schmeling. Anytime Louis was ready, said Joe Jacobs, Schmeling would be ready for him.

  Now that they were talking about Louis constantly, sportswriters, white and black alike, labored to find the right nickname for him. Many candidates emerged: Dark Destroyer, Tan Tornado, Sepia Slugger, Sepia Sniper, Somnolent Senegambian, African Avenger, Ethiopian Exploder, Bible Belter, Kruel Kolored Klouter (or KKK), Walloping Wolverine, Ebony Enervator, Ebony Eliminator, Sable Slugger, Sable Socker, Brown Blaster, Detroit Dynamiter, Detroit Demolisher, Dark Dempsey, Bronze Buddha, Beige Bonbon, Larruping Leopard, Purple Plague, Dead-panned Dusky David from Detroit, Alabama Assassin, Michigan Mauler, Mocha Manhandler, Cream-Colored Cremator, Almond-Colored Anni-hilator, Saffron Shellacker, Sepia Sandman of Slaughterland, Tan Tarzan of Thump. But it was a Detroit boxing promoter named Scotty Monteith who won the prize. “The kid can’t miss,” he said. “He’s a bomber. Come to think of it, that boy is a real brown bomber.” The name stuck.

  In February 1935 Louis made his first trip to California, for a rematch against Lee Ramage. He was greeted by a motorcycle escort, as well as by representatives of the governor of the state and the mayor of Los Angeles. This time, Louis didn’t have so much to learn from Ramage, and it was all over in two rounds. The West Coast, too, had now been dazzled. “One of these days several thousand Los Angeles residents will say of Joe Louis, ‘I saw him when he was on the way up,’” the Los Angeles Examiner wrote afterward. “Women—California women from domestic service and filmland’s honor roll—women who are inveterate fight fans—women who yip and howl for blood like a pack of coyotes—women who put their babies to bed early to attend the fight—business women who gave the excuse at sorority meetings or choir practice—women doctors who left O.B. cases to God and the wet nurse—all came and gasped at the apparent tenderness and innocence of Louis’s expression,” the Associated Negro Press reported. The trip also marked Louis’s first exposure to Hollywood; Mae West, Bing Crosby, and Clark Gable were among those who attended the fight. “It should please the fearful modern Vardamans and Tillmans [referring to two notoriously racist southern senators] below the Mason-Dixon line to know that Joe kept the same dead-pan to the bewitching smiles and interested looks of the Nordic girlies who surrounded him on visits to the studios as he keeps when facing an opponent in the ring,” the Chicago Defender reported. Since the fight was filmed, it afforded many black fans their first glimpse of Louis. “The Colored Comet of Clout Marching Toward the Heavyweight Crown!” declared an ad in the Norfolk Journal and Guide.