Beyond Glory (eBook)

Just Off the Boat Five years earlier, on the morning of April 14, 1933, the North German Lloyd liner Bremen steamed into New York Harbor, with Max Schmeling aboard. The setting was spectacular--the mighty vessel, after its five-day crossing, making its way toward the Statue of Liberty, with the towers of lower Manhattan beckoning--but scarcely more epic, at least in the world of sports, than the events about to unfold. Schmeling would soon attempt something that had never been done: to regain the heavyweight crown. And his prospects looked good, after all, many believed he should never have lost it. Schmeling, twenty-seven years old, had been coming to the United States for five years now, and the arrival ritual had grown routine. Meeting him aboard the ship would be the usual mob of fight reporters, who had commandeered a cutter to bring them there: all ten New York City newspapers had at least one boxing writer, as did the wire services, and there were emissaries from Boston, Philadelphia, Newark, and Chicago, to name just a few other cities with boxing correspondents of their own. Then there would be the photographers and newsreel boys, who would put Schmeling through the same staged scenes and make him utter the same wooden dialogue for the cameras. The previous June, Schmeling had lost the title in a much-criticized decision to Jack Sharkey. 'We wuz robbed!' his fiery, outlandish manager, Joe Jacobs, had immortally declared afterward. But now, Schmeling, with characteristic determination, had set out to win it back. And why not? He had already defied the odds three years earlier, when, in an equally disputed fight, he'd become the first European ever to win the heavyweight title. A personable sort, Schmeling had long since come to know most of the reporters by name. They were friendly, irreverent types--smart alecks--likely to ask an impertinent question or two, but not to be too persistent or obnoxious about it, whatever edge they had was certain to be dulled by the good German beer Schmeling always brought with him. The floating press conference would then pull into the pier, where he would be greeted by a mob of fight fans coming to show their support or simply to glimpse a celebrity. Schmeling could easily have been unpopular, he'd won the title under the most debatable circumstances, spoke English with a heavy accent, and came from a country with which America had been at war only fifteen years earlier. After he'd beaten Sharkey for the title, he'd dragged his feet on a promised rematch, offending Americans and Germans alike. But when he lost the crown he'd been a gentleman, picking up an aura of martyrdom. Though he revealed only so much of himself, there always appeared to be something endearingly earnest about him. And then there was the good fortune of his physical appearance. Schmeling looked uncannily like the man who epitomized boxing's golden era, the legendarily hard-hitting and much-missed Jack Dempsey, who'd retired only a few years earlier after producing all five of boxing's million-dollar 'gates'--that is, fights where ticket sales went into seven figures. Schmeling had the same build, the same wavy, dark, slicked-down hair, the same heavy brows. Schmeling's style in the ring, though, was not the slashing, overwhelmingly aggressive assault Dempsey favored but something cooler, slower, more methodical--'Teutonic,' as it was often described. And outside the ring he was as self-contained and calculating as Dempsey was gregarious. Dempsey was promoting Schmeling's upcoming fight on June 8 in Yankee Stadium against a...