Two of the first people I spoke with yesterday about Max Schmeling were surprised to learn that he had died this week. They didn't know he was alive in the first place. Come September, he would have been 100. Somehow, Schmeling seemed part of a past so long gone as to be irretrievable. Meanwhile, the legend of Joe Louis lives even though the great champion died in 1981 at the age of 66. Likely it's because Louis was a genuine American hero while Schmeling, who died Wednesday in his native Germany, had been living far away and out of the limelight for years.
Fixing Schmeling's place among the heavyweights is easier than getting a handle on Schmeling the person.
(FILES) German boxing legend Max Schmeling in New York City before the title bout with World Heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Schmeling who won renown for his upset victory over the previously invincible Joe Louis and his defiance of Adolf Hitler, died Wednesday at the age of 99.
(AFP FILES - AFP)
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The records are incontrovertible: Schmeling, though champion from 1930 to 1932, wasn't even the best Max of the 1930s. Max Baer knocked him out in 10 in 1933.
After Louis knocked out Baer in four in 1935, who could possibly think that Louis was fully alert to the danger Schmeling posed when they met for the first time in 1936?
But Schmeling was astute. He studied Louis's fights assiduously and would declare, "I see something."
Louis tended to drop his left hand slightly, enabling Schmeling to come overtop with his right. He knocked Louis out in 12 -- to the surprise of the world because at the time the world paid attention to boxing. The stunning outcome set up the rematch on June 22, 1938, at Yankee Stadium in what was billed as the "fight of the century." And it stands as the "fight of the century" because of circumstances far beyond the control of either fighter or the quality of the fight.
The world stood still in a way it didn't even for Dempsey-Tunney or Ali-Frazier, as historic as all those fights were.
Adolf Hitler trumpeted Schmeling's victory over Louis as an example of Aryan supremacy, and from all accounts, all credible, he virtually ordered Schmeling to beat Louis again and help spread Nazism. Schmeling was photographed with Hitler. The war was coming and the sides were apparent. So no two opponents in the history of sports could have been chiseled more definitively.
All America united behind Louis. My father told me, as a boy, how the whole country rooted for Louis, and how unusual that was because Louis wasn't white. (It wasn't long afterward that I found myself baffled by the commotion stirred by Jackie Robinson when he came up to the Dodgers. I was only 8 then and thought we were all together. Hadn't we been with Louis?)
My father used to make his way to Philadelphia and New York to see big fights, but for whatever reason he said he listened on radio to Louis-Schmeling. It's what most Americans did that night. We watched films of it together several times in later years, and marveled at Louis. He destroyed Schmeling in the first round. Schmeling fought six inconsequential fights after that, losing twice in 1948, then retiring.
In books and stories written about Schmeling, it's been told that a lot was on his mind when he went to the ring for his beating by Louis. Hitler reportedly had threatened Schmeling's family, just in case the fighter got the idea of staying in America. Hitler did not like it, but let it go, when Schmeling refused to drop his handler who happened to be Jewish. Schmeling ended up in the war, serving as a German paratrooper.
He was married to the same woman for 54 years.
In older age, he met up with Louis, praising his skills as a boxer and doing a number of things for him that showed his admiration. Schmeling had become a successful businessman after boxing, while Louis stumbled into all kinds of financial woe. Schmeling made a number of visits to the United States in his later years, and to me he seemed to want to make it clear that he was a victim of circumstances, not a friend of Hitler's but one of Hitler's tools.
I saw him once in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas during the week of a fight. He was pleasing a crowd that had gathered about him. He was a big man, and was certainly affable and unhurried. Just seeing him made me think of Louis. The one time I met Louis he shook my hand, and my hand disappeared in his, and it was then that I understood what it meant to be a heavyweight boxer and figured I had been given the answer as to how he had beaten Schmeling to a pulp.
