Let's write about an episode in the sport of boxing year 1936: Schmeling and Lewis New York City

Chapter 14, segment from "The Boys in the Boat", by Daniel James Brown.  An interesting report about boxing history during the rise of Nazi Germany. This particular segment from the wonderful history about the University of Washington's 1936, crew team's olympic gold medal victory, is a story unto itself. 

In the final days before the Poughkeepsie Regatta with University of Washington's crew team, another big sports story dominated the headlines on sports pages and sometimes on front pages areound the country- the story of a heavyweight boxing match.

Max Schmeling of Germany had been the hearvy-weight champion of the world from 1930 to 1932, and he was set on reclaiming the title from James Braddock.

Joe Lewis (May 13, 1914 – April 12, 1981) was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. Nicknamed "The Brown Bomber", ...

But, a twenty-two-year-old African American boxer from Detroit (he was born in Alabama) names Joe Louis, stood in Schmeling's way.

Louis had battled his way through twenty-seven professional matches with twenty-three  knockouts and no defeats to reach his current status as the number one challenger in the world.

In doing so, he had gradually begun to erode the racial attitudes of many- though far from all- white Americans. He was on his way, in fact, to becoming one of the first African Americans to be widely viewed as a hero by ordinary white Americans. Louis's rise to prominence had been so spectacular that few American sportswriters or bookies gave Schmeling much of a chance.

In Germany, though, the view was very different.  Although Schmeling was not a Nazi Party member, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi elite had enthuysiastically latched onto him and promised him as a symbol of German and Aryan supremacy.  The German press under the careful directonf of the minister of propaganda had made much of the umcoming fight.

Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic had an opinion about what would happen.  Even the crew tream's coaches in Poughkeepsie took time out to comment on the fight.  

"Schmeling might go four rounds," opined Al Ulbrickson*, Ky Ebright** was a blunter:  "Louis will murder him."

When the fight began, in a sold-out Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 19, 1936, (YouTube trailer here), Louis was at eight to one, the overwhelming favorite in New York. In Germany, though, interest in the fight was at a fever pitch, there was almost no betting on the fight. The odds were so low on Schmeling that few wanted to risk their cast, and no one wanted to be caught bettong on a black American.

In a small square of white light in the vast, dark void of the stadium, Louis stalked Schmeling around the ring like a predator for three rounds, lacing him with hard left jabs to the face.  It looked as if it would be a short evening. But, in the fourth round, out of nowhere, Schmeling landed a hard right to the temple that knowcked Louis to a sitting position on the floor. Louis took a count of two and then rose to his feet, covering his face and retreating until the bell sounded. Through the fifth round, Louis seemed dazed and ineffective. 

And then, at the end of the fifth, following the bell- which neither fighter heard over the crowd noise- Schmeling landed a particularly devastating right to the left side of Louis's head.  For the next six rounds,  Louis staggered about the ring, punished by a relentless barrage of rights to the jaw, somehow staying on his feet but scoring few if any points and inficting little damage on the German boxer.  Many in the overhwelmingly white crowd had by now turned suddenly and savagely against Louis.  "Delirious with joy," by the New York Times account, they screamed for Schmeling to end it.  Fiunally, in the twelfth, Schmeling went in for the kill.  With Louis now careening almost aimlessly around the ring, the German leaned into Louis's body and launched a rapid-fire flurry of hard rights to his head and fact, followed by one final cdrushing blow to the jaw.  Louis sank to his kneews, then toppled forward on his face.  Referee Arthur Donovan counted him out.  In the dressing room afterward, Louis said he couldn't remember anything about the fight beyond the fifth round.

That night in Harlem, grown men wee wept in the streets.  Younger men thres rocks at cars full of white fans returning from the boxing match.

In German American sections of New York, people danced in the street5s. In Berlin, Hitler wired his congratulatons to Schmeling and sent his wife flowers. 

Nevertheless, no one in Germany was happier with the evening's developments than Joseph Goebbles.  He had spent the night at his post summer house at Schwanenwerder, sitting with the fight on the radio, into the wee hours. He sent Schmeling a congratulatory telegram of his own.  "We are proud of you.  With best wishes and Heil Hitler."

Then, he ordered the state-controlled Reuters News Agency to issue a statement.  "Inexorably and not without justification, we demand Braddock shall defend the title on German soil."

The next day, still excited, Goebbels sat down and made an entry in his journal. "We were on tenterhooks the whole evening with Schmeling's wife. We told each other stories, laughed and cheered.  In round twelve, Schmeling knocked out the Negro. Fantastic. 

A dramatic, thrilling fight.  Schmeling fought for Germany and won.

The white man prevailed over the black, and the white man was German.  I didn't go to bed until five."

In the end, though, Jow Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would las all of two minutes and four seconds befoe his corner threw in the towel. Jow Louis would reighn as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1940, long after Joseph Goeggeles charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of his wife Magda and their children. (Joseph and Magda Goebbels had six children: Helga, 1932, Hilde, 1934, Helmut, 1935, Holde, 1937, Hedda, 1938, and Heide, 1940. Joseph Goebbels had many affairs during the marriage.The children, born between 1932-1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day both parents committed suicide.)

*Alvin M. Ulbrickson, Sr. (1903-1980) also known as Al Ulbrickson Sr., was an American rower and coach. After rowing as a student at the University of Washington, Ulbrickson went on to coach the crew there from 1927 until retiring in 1959.

**Carroll M. "Ky" Ebright (1894-1979) was a revered coach for the University of California, Berkeley crew.