by Kluge, P. F.
“I never watch my fighters fight,” she told me. “Even on film …”
“In the case of this film,” I said, “I can’t blame you.”
“Paulino trained here,” she said. “And Max …” Her voice trailed off. Then she added something I never forgot, looking me in the eyes when she said two words I remembered and shared with her. “My Max …”
Well, boxing in real life is nothing like in Hollywood. In Hollywood, you have a war every round. In movies, every punch lands right on target. You watch the real thing, you see elbows, clinches, punches missing and, careful as you are, you wouldn’t want to have to say who won that last round. That explains why, all those years I watched Friday Night Fights, the future travel writer wanted to switch to wrestling.
“Pop,” he’d say. “This is boring.”
“Wrestlers are clowns,”I’d snap back. George loved them, though. Ricky Starr, the ballet-type wrestler, Antonino Rocco, the inventor of the flying drop kick, and his particular hero, Tony Martinelli, the Clifton (New Jersey) Cutie. Now I think about it, the difference between the writer I’d hoped he’d be and what he actually became was the difference between boxing and wrestling. I wanted a Schmeling, I got a Gorgeous George.
“You know what?” George complained again. “Boxing’s fixed.”
“I see,” I said. “And that’s why we should switch to wrestling.”
He shrugged and went upstairs to read, another father-and-son moment, up in smoke. I watched the fights alone. I’d learned what to watch for and it went back to that shaky black and white film I saw at Madame Bey’s. Joe Jacobs was one of the first to use films. Through the early rounds, Max mirrored Uzcudun. Not much of a fight you’d say. George would vote again for wrestling. But then you saw what was happening. Max had Uzcudun timed. He started firing uppercuts that landed, if not on the jaw, then on the forearms and biceps. By the tenth round, poor Uzcudun couldn’t keep his arms up.
“See, Max,” Jacobs said. “Like taking the shell off the crab. Get past that shell and …”
“Joe,” Schmeling said. His English was like mine. Polite, guarded, careful. I heard that kind of English again in the newscasts, where Hauptmann pleaded for his life, before they electrocuted him in Trenton. His English wasn’t good enough. “I remember that fight fine, Joe,” Max said. “I was there. That’s me.”
“Okay, Max. Good that you remember. Because now comes the main attraction. Which you remember also. Only not so fondly.”
The next film was Sharkey versus Schmeling. I knew Max had won the title on a foul but I had no idea how ugly and disappointing the whole fight had been. The famous low blow came near the end of the fourth round. Max had just caught Sharkey with a nice right and Sharkey came back with a punch that was low, no doubt about it. Max collapsed on the floor, the referee called time, Joe Jacobs jumped into the ring, other people followed and they asked Max to continue, which he said he couldn’t. All this, with eighty thousand customers trying to figure out what the hell went on, which wasn’t finally decided until they declared Schmeling the champion a week later.
We watched the foul again and I watched Max watch the foul. Some people didn’t see it … but it was there alright. The next question was harder. How much did it hurt? Only Max could answer that. Was he acting? Another heavy-weight, the Englishman “Phainting Phil Scott,” had made a medium-successful career out of getting fouled. Is that was Max was doing? And what made the question harder was that, up to the fourth round, he was losing the fight. He wasn’t going down, he wasn’t hurt, but it was slipping away. When he wanted to, Jack Sharkey could fight and when he didn’t feel like fighting, he could box. That’s what Joe Jacobs was trying to say.
“Max, you dance with him, you lose. You follow him around the ring, you lose. Kein tanzen, this time.”
Max listened, waved away the worry. But Jacobs wasn’t done yet.
“Max, listen, you’re an Auslander here, Verstehs? An outsider. Take it from a Jew. Amerikaner ist du nicht. They gave you the title on a foul. That surprised me. But listen, Max. I say this in front of your freunds from the old country. Every champion, every—every white champion—gets a few rounds. That’s the tradition. A tip of the hat to the man who owns the title. Verstehs?”
Max nodded yes. Everyone knew that, for a challenger to win the title, he had to take it decisively.
“Well, Max, you don’t get that edge. It’s better you think about it the other way. Sharkey starts the night three rounds ahead.”
Max nodded again.
The next morning, Max and Heinz and three sparring partners went out for roadwork. I watched them leave, standing next to Mr. Jacobs. I couldn’t have put it in English yet, but I was moved by the sight of them running down the hill, turning right on River Road, disappearing in the direction of the little town of New Providence. And I know why. We were innocent, all of us, in my time of oranges. That goes for me, for Heinz, for Max most of all. We had a lot left to learn and some of it wasn’t so good. So excuse me if I look back at that training camp, that bunch of shacks and bunkhouses and the sound of German voices after visitors cleared out, the gathering darkness of a spring night in New Jersey, the sight of a champion on a child’s swing—a decent man with no idea what history was cooking up for him—and I choke up a little. To this day. Anyway, it was touching. It was touching, seeing them run, as though each step would make them stronger, as if preparation were everything, even though I knew Jack Sharkey was running too, even though Joe Jacobs had delivered a warning that scared me the night before, whether or not it scared Max.
“Max is always in shape,” Joe Jacobs said. There was no one else nearby. That meant he was talking to me. “Not like some guys I’ve had, come into the camp thirty pounds over and a ring of hickeys around their neck. You know what is a hickey, Hansel?” He took one look and knew I didn’t. “Christ. A love küss. From a fraulein. To say thank you for a nice time.”
“I see.”
“Come on, Hansel, we’ll get some breakfast.” Why so nice to me, I wondered, because he wasn’t necessarily a nice man. He’d maneuvered Schmeling’s original manager, Arthur Bulow, out of a contract. He was a terror at the boxing commission and negotiating with promoters. Still, he couldn’t stand to be alone. He’d rather have an argument than take a nap.
Food from the city, bagels and farmer’s cheese he shared with me, guaranteeing that I’d remember him the rest of my life when I saw that food again. He ate fast, like someone might take it away from him. He never faced a meal that lasted more than two rounds. But after he drank his first cup of coffee—boiling hot—he relaxed.
“You know how Max got started?” he asked. “You remember Jack Dempsey?”
“Everybody remembers Dempsey,” I said.
“Hell of a fighter. When he fought. Which wasn’t much, once he had the championship. You could look it up. Years went by, he fought stiffs, he fought exhibitions. It was enough letting people see him. So, 1925, Dempsey comes to Deutschland. Max is fighting middleweight. Doing okay, but it’s still Germany, you know what I mean? Maybe you don’t. So listen. You brew good beer. You make music. You make war. Cuckoo clocks. What else? Chocolate? That’s Switzerland. Well, Hansel, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Max could’ve been the middleweight champ for years and nobody would care. Local hero, that’s all. Well, Dempsey sees him. They go a few rounds, nothing serious, but Dempsey likes what he sees. Not just in the ring. In the mirror. He sees his younger self. He mentions it in the papers. He comes home, he mentions it to me. So when Max comes to America I went after him. A little bit of this, a little bit of that and I’m his manager.”
Just then, the runners came back, heading into the showers. Half an hour later, Joe Jacobs was driving me back to New York City. He had to see the Boxing Commission. He wasn’t happy with the officials, especially the referee, a former heavyweight, Ed “Gunboat” Smith. He suspected Smith wanted to see the title back in America. He talked all the way to the Holland Tunnel
, and then he drove me all the way back to 125th Street, pulling up in front of Otto Hofer’s building.
“You live here, Hansel?” He was impressed. “High society.”
“Ja,” I said. “In the downstairs. I also work here.”
“At what?”
“Apprentice janitor.”
He laughed, slapped me on the back, wished me luck and pulled away. I’d enjoyed my time with him. An hour from now he’d have another audience. If I met him again—even tomorrow—he’d have forgotten all about me. So I thought. But I was wrong.
The afternoon of the fight we met at the Restaurant Germania. Heinz wasn’t there: he was with Schmeling, coming in from Summit. The men I joined to go to Schmeling-Sharkey were mostly Heinz’s friends, some greenhorns, some a few years off the boat, out to cheer our landsmann. Who all was in the bunch? Heinie Strasser was there and Otto Jacobus and Lorenz Schroeder and some others, I forget their names, mostly all died or moved to Florida by now. We were working men, not your sporting types, but a heavyweight title fight—an international title fight at that—was something special back then, the way the World Series used to be special, and a presidential election.
I remember it all, like it was yesterday. Better than yesterday. More to remember. The fight was out in Long Island City. We arrived hours early to beat the crowd, but the crowd was there, sixty thousand plus, sweeping in past cops and vendors, everybody talking fight, so that you could feel it in your chest, in your calves, in the palms of your hands. Tremendous excitement. You knew that something was going to happen. But you didn’t know what. So two things came together—certainty and mystery. Usually, they don’t mix. One cancels out the other. But this—oh my God—it made me shiver. Then came the moment when they turned down the lights and a spotlight reached across the audience to a far corner where the fighter came out, stepping into the spotlight, which guided him into the ring, Sharkey first, then Schmeling, dark robes, dark trunks. No nonsense. I studied Schmeling when he came into the ring. Tall, muscular, heavily bearded, swarthy, Max had the 1930’s barbershop handsomeness of a Gable or a Dempsey or a Hemingway. Or—for what it was worth—a Heinz Greifinger. Sharkey looked like a rum runner, shifty and mean and sneaky smart. I didn’t hate him. I just never liked him, a Lithuanian or someone who took an Irish name. I didn’t hold with name-changing, then or now.
Next came an odd moment. At the time, I thought nothing of it. Later, when it seemed important, I wished I’d studied it more closely—but I was excited—the fight was so close—and it was only the national anthems. Two of them. First, “Deutschland Über Alles.” There were scattered boos. We stood, all of us, though the people around us stayed in their seats and elbowed each other as if to say, get a load of this. We sang, some of us, and the rest moved their lips. It sounded good, a rousing national anthem, say what you will, and it made me feel good, just then, to think of all the people back in Germany. Then came “The Star Spangled Banner.” We stayed on our feet and some of us sang the words to that one, too. It tickled us to be part of both places. That’s all. Maybe we should have felt silly or awkward or disloyal. You couldn’t have two national anthems, any more than you could root for Schmeling and for Sharkey. I guess we didn’t think about it. It wasn’t a war. It was a fight. And now the fight was starting.
Bum or not, Jack Sharkey was smart, you could see right off, a jabbing, jumpy, dodging kind of fighter who made our Max miss badly during the first couple rounds. “Plodding” and “methodical”—those were the words that always came up when they wrote about Max Schmeling. What they meant, of course, was: GERMAN. Long on effort, low on imagination, disciplined and dull. The world always thought of us that way and for a while I thought this night was going to confirm it—goose step losing out to Irish jig. It was what I’d seen at the training camp, when Paulie Costello made Max look clumsy. Only this wasn’t just sparring. This was in front of 60,000 people.
The men I came with made it worse. “That was close,” one would say after Max missed a right. “Any minute now,” another added hopefully. “It’s coming soon.” But not yet. One bad round led to another. “Those jabs don’t count,” they said. But they were landing, those Sharkey jabs, and I was sitting with a bunch of landsmänner who made me feel like a greenhorn all over again. By the fourth, though, Max Schmeling started to beat Jack Sharkey. He pressed forward, took charge, started landing. One of his rights spun Sharkey half way around, and it was all proof of what we all believed in, hard work and being on time and that stuff. We looked at each other, us greenhorns, as if to say, now we’ll see what’s what. Or, as Lorenz Schroeder put it, “Jetzt gibts wurst,” now the meat comes on the table. Our sense of justice was restored. Max was winning, and that was right, not because he was German, oh certainly not that, but because he was solid and deep where Sharkey was flimsy and shallow. Schmeling came to fight, Sharkey came to avoid fighting. What was happening—though it wasn’t the most exciting thing to watch—was correct. That was what it was, that was all it was, and please, being German had nothing to do with it, and if the situation were reversed … and so forth. So we thought. But then, Sharkey came back at Schmeling. Sharkey recovered in the middle rounds and—if you could call back-pedaling fighting—he fought well, his kind of fight, give credit where credit is due. He was talented—“a regular fancy Dan”—someone said, a German using the phrase for the first time, sounding like Germans do in war movies, when they try to sound like Americans. Sharkey’s surge lasted for a round or two. Not longer. After the eighth round it was all Schmeling. Nothing spectacular, not Dempsey and Tunney. But it was solid, steady and—no getting away from it—German. Late in the fight, the sting drained out of Sharkey’s punches, his face puffed up and, a time or two, Schmeling had him wobbling. But that was where another German thing came into play: caution. He never risked that last shot which would have landed Sharkey on the canvas. Oh, how we talked about it later, Sharkey just hanging there, so ready to go! One good Schmeling right would have ended all the arguments! Why, oh why, did he not throw that punch? Was it something German? Something good or bad? Was it charity towards a beaten opponent? Or an unwillingness to depart from a plan that was working? Later that night, Lorenz Schroeder summed things up nicely. Last year, I had a card from him in Sebring, Florida. “The way he fought,” Lorenz said, “it was as if he thought people would be disappointed if he did not give them fifteen rounds.”
Still, when it ended we were feeling fine. I looked around at my pals and we nodded approval. You only had to look at the ring where Sharkey was draped over the ring ropes, like a passenger being seasick over the railing of a ship, he was the picture of a beaten fighter. No, no doubt about it. We felt the way we felt when we got up from the table after one of those hot, heavy German meals, roast pork, dumplings and gravy. No strange fixings, no fancy sauces, just solid stick-between-the-ribs cooking. Or boxing. A victory, no doubt about it. Our kind. Later, they said two thirds of the reporters at ringside gave it to Schmeling. The Times reporter, Dawson, gave it to Schmeling nine rounds to five, one even. Mayor Walker gave it to Schmeling. The crowd gave it to Schmeling.
The judges gave it to Sharkey.
Split decision. The worst in history. Don’t take my word for it. You could look it up. The last I saw, among all the booing, the nose holding, the throwing of stuff into the ring, was old Max walking across the ring, rushing to shake Jack Sharkey’s hand, even though he’d just been robbed. We all were robbed. A so-so fight is bad enough. A wrong decision is worse. The taste in your mouth won’t go away, every time you swallow, you gag all over again. We stayed in our seats after the fighters had gone back to the dressing rooms. I pictured Schmeling as I’d seen him on that swing, up and down, back and forth, as darkness came.
On the ride home that night, Lorenz Schroeder went on about appeals to authorities, protests, setting things right, honesty and fair play, the way Germans go on when the world puts one over on them. Heinie Strasser, too. A rematch was a foregone conclusion, the
public would demand it. And Otto Jacobus saying, over and over again, there must have been an error somewhere, as though our Max got robbed by mistake. Inventing excuses for thieves. I doubt I kept my mouth shut, but all I remember is looking out the window of the car as we moved through Queens, as we passed all the apartment houses and cemeteries, the factories along the East River. A strange country, America. It disappointed me that night. It was a disappointment I was determined to put behind me. You couldn’t stake everything on a fight, I told myself. That’s what gamblers did and I wasn’t a gambler.
We were on the park bench by the lake, sometime the next week, Cleveland and Billy and I. It was the first hot day. We hadn’t discussed “Smelling.” Another bum decision. Add it to the list. My list was new and short. Theirs went back forever. Already, Max had returned to Germany, confident about a rematch. For me, it was as if a fever were passing. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face and wondered if I could make a trip to New Jersey sometime. Maybe look in on Madame Bey. Then I sensed someone standing in front of me, blocking the sun. I opened my eyes and my brother was there.
