Only a lone Black man stood between Max Schmeling and world domination. The German boxer was 30 years old and a veteran of some 60 bruising fights when he saw American heavyweight champion Joe Louis pulverize Spain’s Paulino Uzcudun in December 1935 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. There was no way, insisted reporters, that Schmeling could beat Louis—at 21, the most awesome boxer in living memory. Didn’t Schmeling know Uzcudun had collapsed in his dressing room after the fight? Sure, said Schmeling, he knew all right. “[But] I saw something which made me think I had a chance,” he later recalled. “Joe had a wonderful straight hand, but he’d punch and then sometimes drop it.”
With a fight against Louis scheduled for six months later, in June 1936, Schmeling returned to Berlin armed with films of Louis in action and obsessively played them over and over. While a confident Louis womanized in Hollywood and skipped training to play golf, Schmeling prepared diligently; the German was considered easy pickings for Louis as he punched his way into contention for for the world heavyweight title. Schmeling broke his strict training regime on one notable occasion, when invited to lunch with Adolf Hitler in Munich. Hitler was worried that Schmeling was going to lose to a member of an inferior race. Schmeling was, after all, taking on a formidable adversary, tagged as the “Brown Bomber” or the “Sepia Slugger,” who’d finished off five top boxers, including Uzcudun, Primo Carnera (Mussolini’s favorite), “Kingfish” Levinsky, Max Baer, and Charley Retzlaff in a total of just 16 rounds. Hadn’t Schmeling already been humiliated in 1933 by Baer—of all things a Jew?
On June 19, 1936, Schmeling entered the ring in Yankee Stadium first, his glisteningSchmeling showed that he had, after all, found Louis’s weakness. In the fourth round, sure enough, Louis dropped his guard. Schmeling hit him smack in the face. A split second later, Louis hit the canvas for the first time in his professional career.
