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Heavyweight champion max7/8/2023 ![]() ![]() “Now I feel like the champ,” said Louis, who would go on to make a total of 25 consecutive title defenses, a record that still stands. The fight had lasted just two minutes and four seconds. Louis tore into Schmeling from the opening bell, dropping him three times and knocking him out in the very first round. Louis poured everything into his preparation, while Schmeling stated publicly that he could see no way the American could correct his previous mistakes. It was also the first time that many people heard a black man referred to simply as ‘the American.’” Louis himself pierced the hypocrisy of the situation more prosaically: “White Americans-even while some of them still were lynching black people in the South-were depending on me to K.O. Writing in 2007, boxing historian Thomas Hauser noted that, “It was the first time that many white Americans openly rooted for a black man against a white opponent. Margaret Garrahan of the Birmingham News, for example, opined that Louis was a “tan-skinned throw-back to the creature of primitive swamps who gloried in battles and blood.” The irony, of course, was that, while African Americans understandably revered Louis as a hero, much of white America draped its support in racist disdain. ![]() The American sporting public eagerly devoured news of the fight’s build up, seeing it as an opportunity for an American sporting hero to stick a thumb in the eye of Hitler’s Aryan dreams. Joe Louis smiles as he reads the NY Daily News the day after his fight against Schmeling on June 22, 1938. “I ain’t no champion ‘till I beat Schmeling,” he declared.Īnd so, on June 22, 1938, the two men squared off again. But Louis insisted that his victory was incomplete. Instead, he defended against Louis in 1937, who knocked him out in the eighth round to become heavyweight champion of the world. (Conversely, Schmeling resisted pressure to split with his Jewish-American manager, and sheltered two young Jewish boys during Kristallnacht.)Īfter James Braddock (known as the “Cinderella Man”) claimed the heavyweight championship in 1935, he refused to give Schmeling a shot at his crown. Hitler’s soon-to-be-wife Eva Braun privately confessed in her journal her obsession with him. He went hunting with Nazi military leader Herman Göring and attended the annual rallies in Nuremburg.įollowing his win over Louis, he watched films of the fight with Adolf Hitler, who insisted they be shown across Germany. He gave the Nazi salute in the ring after beating American Steve Hamas in Munich. While Schmeling did not support the Nazis and never joined the party, he “enjoyed a comfortable relationship” with them. The 1936 Match: 12 Rounds, Then a Knock-OutĪdolf Hitler pictured with German boxer Max Schmeling and his wife Anny Ondra at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin after Schmeling's victory against Joe Louis in New York, 1936. He seemed the perfect foil for unbeaten up-and-coming, hard-hitting American phenom Louis. In 1930, he won the heavyweight championship against Jack Sharkey, before losing it to the same man two years later.īy 1936, he had seven losses to go with his 48 wins, and at 31 was considered old for a heavyweight boxer. Schmeling made his debut as a professional boxer in 1925 and began fighting in the United States-then the undisputed global epicenter of the sport-in 1928. Schmeling was born in Klein Luckow, Germany, in 1905 Louis in Lafayette, Alabama nine years later. The year was 1938, and as storm clouds gathered over Europe, African American Louis and Germany’s Schmeling were unintentional combatants in a preliminary proxy skirmish. ![]() As the bell rang and they walked to the center of a 20-foot square boxing ring in the middle of New York’s Yankee Stadium, all each man wanted was to have his hand raised in sporting victory.īut for the more than 70,000 in attendance, and the millions listening to radio broadcasts around the world, there was so much more at stake. Max Schmeling wanted repetition, the chance to regain the title he had lost and to defeat the younger man, just as he had beaten him two years earlier. Joe Louis wanted redemption, to remain the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and to avenge his sole defeat. ![]()
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