Thursday is the 85th anniversary of one of boxing's greatest fights
In this June 22, 1938 file photo, heavyweight champion Joe Louis, left, knocks out Max Schmeling in the first round at Yankee Stadium in New York. In June of 1938, the string was running out on normalcy. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had returned from, Germany, where Hitler had promised him “peace in our time,” and Chamberlain had sold out Czechoslovakia. In 14 months, Warsaw would be in flames.
But here are the things I had yet to learn: I did not know that the morning of the fight 22 Americans were arrested as spies for Hitler. I had never heard the name of Arno Helmus, the man Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, selected to broadcast the fight back to Germany. Nor did I know about Arnold Sperber, whose role in the tension the history books never recorded.The German contingent was housed at the Osborne Hotel in Panoche, N.Y.
So, my family gathered around the radio and waited. We heard announcer Clem McCarthy’s gravel-toned voice shout over the ringside babble, “They are coming now.” In the days of heavyweight boxing, moments like that were the most electric — no stupid smoke, no ridiculous music, no gaggle of freeloaders in the fighters’ wake. The moment belonged to the fighters, not the TV directors.Now, all over the world, radio ringsiders rushed to the kitchen to grab a beer.
Twenty five years later, I was in the all-Black town of Grambling, La., to do a Saturday Evening Post piece on Grambling College football team. The owner of the Campus Men’s Shop and I were talking about Louis. I told him I had heard the fight on radio and mentioned how my dad was throwing punches. He said he heard it in the barber shop and, as a kid, he was doing the same thing.“On that night,” he said, “we were all brothers under the skin.
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