Max Baer and the Star of David by Jay Neugeboren Read Free Book Online

with Jack Dempsey, one of the bout’s promoters, at his side, Max came out of the runway and onto the long, open aisle that led to the ring, some 60,000 people roared their approval. “See what I mean, Horace?” he said to me while waving to the crowd. “My people are here the same as yours would be if you were in the ring against one of those Great White Hope guys the way Jack Johnson was. This city’s full of Jews, and they’re gonna love me even more after I knock the living day-lights out of Hitler’s pillow-boy.”
    Schmeling, who had briefly been world heavyweight champion after defeating Sharkey, and before losing the title to him in a return match, was a fighter who, unlike Max, trained with thoroughgoing efficiency, and did not party at night. The bookmakers had established him as a four-to-one favorite, and these odds served only to inspire Max. “Jews have always been the scapegoats and underdogs,” he told reporters when they asked how he felt about the supposed smart money going against him. “It’s why we learned to fight harder—the more people try to keep us down, see, the more we rise up and conquer. Just like we did against that Pharaoh guy.”
    Max started out on fire—“a human tornado,” the New York Times would call him the next day—but then, as often happened, once he demonstrated he could dominate his opponent, he seemed to become bored, and to merely go through the motions. Before the tenth and last round, however, Dempsey and Cantwell screamed at him that if he didn’t wake up—for Schmeling, plodding doggedly ahead, was landing short punches that had clearly put him ahead on points—he would lose the fight.
    “Okay then,” Max said, and he came roaring out of the corner at the start of the tenth round, going at Schmeling as if it were the fight’s opening round. Within seconds, he had landed a huge right to Schmeling’s jaw that sent the German to the canvas. Schmeling rose at the count of nine, but Max was on top of him with a furious barrage of lefts and rights that had Schmeling stumbling around the ring until Max, holding him upright on the ropes with his left hand, unleashed another devastating right—“This one’s for Hitler!” he announced, loud enough for those in the front rows to hear—that made Schmeling stagger helplessly in retreat, as if drunk, and that left the referee no alternative but to stop the fight and declare Max the winner by a technical knockout.
    Max was ecstatic afterwards, proclaiming to reporters that he would soon become the heavyweight champion of the world, and declaring to me, before he left the stadium to go out on the town with June Knight, his newest sweetheart—a twenty-year old movie star and Ziegfeld Follies headliner—that what he proved in the ring was that he had his people just like I had mine.
    “What I showed out there tonight, Horace, is that we gotta take care of each other the way we been doing,” he said, “because the rest of the world’s always ready and waiting to do us in. Kikes and niggers—we gotta stick together, ain’t I right?”
    “Perhaps,” I said. “But you are only a kike if you choose to call yourself one. Your people possess a long and rich history, and it behooves you not to make of this history a joke, but to cherish it even as Joleen and I, who are not of your Mosaic persuasion, have learned to do.”
    “Hey,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “Don’t you know how to tell it, Horace, and with words to burn. And ain’t you the smartest nigger anyone ever knew—this Jewboy first of all!”
    I pressed the palm of my hand against his chest and pushed him away—we were in the corridor outside the dressing room, and could hear the riotous chanting of fans who waited on the other side of the exit door—and when I did, he grabbed my hand in his own so that for a moment I thought he would try to crush it. Instead, he took it to his chest