Louis Knocks Out Schmeling
by Bob Considine
The International News Service
1938
Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling.
It was a shocking thing, that knockout – short, sharp, merciless, complete. Louis was like this: He was a big lean copper spring, tightened and retightened through weeks of training until he was one pregnant package of coiled venom.
Schmeling hit that spring. He hit it with a whistling right-hand punch in the first minute of the fight – and the spring, tormented with tension, suddenly burst with one brazen spang of activity. Hard brown arms, propelling two unerring fists, blurred beneath the hot white candelabra of the ring lights. And Schmeling was in the path of them, a man caught and mangled in the whirring claws of a mad and feverish machine.
The mob, biggest and most prosperous ever to see a fight in a ball yard, knew that there was the end before the thing had really started. It knew, so it stood up and howled one long shriek. People who had paid as much as $100 for their chairs didn’t use them – except perhaps to stand on, the better to let the sight burn forever in their memories.
There were four steps to Schmeling’s knockout. A few seconds after he landed his only punch of the fight, Louis caught him with a lethal little left hook that drove him into the ropes so that his right arm was hooked over the top strand, like a drunk hanging to a fence. Louis swarmed over him and hit him with everything he had – until Referee Donovan pushed him away and counted one.
Schmeling staggered away from the ropes, dazed and sick. He looked drunkenly toward his corner, and before he had turned his head back Louis was on him again, first with a left and then that awe-provoking right that made a crunching sound when it hit the German’s jaw. Max fell down, hurt and giddy, for a count of three.
He clawed his way up as if the night air were as thick as black water, and Louis – his nostrils like the mouth of a double-barreled shotgun – took a quiet lead and let him have it with both barrels.
Max fell almost lightly, bereft of his senses, his fingers touching the canvas like a comical stew-bum doing his morning exercises, knees bent and the tongue lolling in his head. He got up long enough to be knocked down again, this time with his dark unshaven face pushed in the sharp gravel of the resin.
Louis jumped away lightly, a bright and pleased look in his eyes, and as he did the white towel of surrender which Louis’ handlers had refused to use two years ago tonight came sailing into the ring in a soggy mess. It was thrown by Max Machon, oblivious to the fact that fights cannot end this way in New York.
The referee snatched it off the floor and flung it backwards. It hit the ropes and hung there, limp as Schmeling. Donovan counted up to five over Max, sensed the futility of it all, and stopped the fight.
The big crowd began to rustle restlessly toward the exits, many only now accepting Louis as champion of the world. There were no eyes for Schmeling, sprawled on his stool in the corner.
He got up eventually, his dirty gray-and-black robe over his shoulders, and wormed through the happy little crowd that hovered around Louis. And he put his arm around the Negro and smiled. They both smiled and could afford to – for Louis had made around $200,000 a minute and Schmeling $100,000 a minute.
But once he crawled down in the belly of the big stadium, Schmeling realized the implications of his defeat. He, who won the title on a partly phony foul, and beat Louis two years ago with the aid of a crushing punch after the bell had sounded, now said Louis had fouled him. That would read better in Germany, whence earlier in the day had come a cable from Hitler, calling on him to win.
It was a low, sneaking trick, but a rather typical last word from Schmeling.
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