Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game by Budd Schulberg

Fight of the Century was moving into the center ring, clenched fists across the sea. When Max Schmeling returned to America to challenge Joe Louis for the championship of the world, the Wehrmacht was goose-stepping across the Austrian border. Neville Chamberlain was buying time with other people’s land and lives. There was a Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. The concentration camps that an eccentric fight manager in his moment of kidding-on-the-level had asked to open were now filling up with victims of bureaucratic madmen tooling for war and drooling for conquest. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic viewed Louis and Schmeling II as anything less than the personification of Good vs. Evil. If Schmeling won, the shadow of the swastika would darken our land. If Louis triumphed, Negroes, Jews, anti-Nazis, pacifists, and everyone who yearned for an order of decency without violence would feel recharged and reassured.
    Everyone from That Man in the White House to the Raggedy Anns in the street had a stake in the victory of Joe Louis that long-ago night in Yankee Stadium. The Bomber acknowledged it by leaping from his corner at the bell like War Admiral, another champion of that day, leaving the starting gate. Louis was two hundred pounds of dark and dedicated avenging angel that night, and in the first minute he had hit Goebbels’s boy so many terrible lefts and rights that the invader was wishing he had stood in Berchtesgaden. At the end of two minutesSchmeling instinctively turned away to avoid the punishment and Louis, for once uncool, pistoned a left and followed up with the convincer, a bone-crushing right that seemed to turn the German’s head around on its socket. Men of the ring are expected to fight like bulls, in stoic silence, but this time Schmeling let out the kind of a scream one hears from the victim of the mugger’s knife.
    That night we attended a democratic carnival in Harlem. Behind a coffin draped with a Nazi flag, tens of thousands bigappled and cakewalked. It was a spontaneous political demonstration. Joe Louis had gone forth to do battle for all of us and everyone was rejoicing, from Wendell Willkie to the black numbers runner who pulled out a roll and set up drinks for the house at a corner bar we wandered into on Amsterdam Avenue. I told my new friends I had been at ringside and could hear the blow that almost removed the German’s head. Everybody laughed and we hugged each other and the closest thing to it I would ever know was V-E night in London. The two victory street operas overlap in my memory—marking the beginning and the end of the long war against gas chambers and Gauleiters. When Herr Schmeling cried out in surrender we were ready psychologically to take on the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS. Yes, the God of Boxing and the God of War saw eye to eye that mythological June night in Yankee Stadium. Five years later, at Nuremberg, we learned that Goering had wept when he heard the unnerving news of his champion’s humiliation. But at another headquarters, the magnetic Hotel Teresa in Harlem where the Brown Bomber held court, the bright music and the vicarious laughter of the underdog winner mounted into the dawn. Fifteen months after that night of metaphor triumphant there would be blitzkrieg, all of Europe would go under; there would be seven years of blood and death before Der Führer was to turn his head and scream surrender like Max Schmeling after 124 seconds under the bombs of the first black champion of the world to be embraced by white America.

The Great Benny Leonard
    I N 1920, WHEN MY father B.P. was organizing one of the pioneer film companies and setting up shop at the (L. B.) Mayer-Schulberg Studio in downtown Los Angeles, he was a passionate fight fan. An habitué of the old Garden on Madison Square—before our western migration—his favorite fighter had been the Jewish lightweight Benjamin Leiner who fought under the nom-de-boxe of Benny Leonard. On the eve of my seventh birthday, my