The Night Louis Won the War Before the War

Joe Louis Barrow Jr., in conducting interviews for a biography about his father, Joe Louis, talked to a Jew who’d been in a German concentration camp during World War II.

“We knew Germany couldn’t win, because we knew Joe Louis had beaten Max Schmeling,” the man told Barrow. “It gave us hope.”

Such were the kinds of forces that were brought to bear in a Yankee Stadium boxing ring 61 years ago.

It was Louis-Schmeling II, and it had everything:

* Revenge. In 1936, when both were contenders, Schmeling knocked out Louis. Champion now, Louis had waited two years for this night.

* Race. Played out against a backdrop of a world on the edge of war, it was Germany’s master-race representative against a black sharecropper’s son from Alabama.

In 1938, America wasn’t fully ready for a black champion. In fact, Schmeling, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi poster boy, received a bigger ovation from the crowd of 66,000 in New York than did Louis.

Americans, dressed in Nazi uniforms, had gone to Louis’ training camp to heckle him.

What transpired in the first round that night remains arguably the most dramatic 2 minutes 4 seconds in 20th century sports.

Louis beat Schmeling savagely. When Schmeling was smashed to the canvas a third time, a towel sailed into the ring from his corner.

Schmeling had arrived in New York with great fanfare on the airship Hindenburg. He left on a stretcher, then on a ship, after his discharge from a two-week hospital stay where he had been treated for a broken vertebra.

Louis died at 66 in 1981. Schmeling, 93, still lives in Germany, where for decades he was the West German distributor for Coca-Cola.

Decades later, an aged Schmeling told Louis’ son: “On that night, no one could have beaten your father . . . [such was] the level of his will.”

Also on this date: In 1937, Joe Louis knocked out James J. Braddock in Chicago to win the world heavyweight championship. . . . In 1997, Jeff Gordon won the first Winston Cup race on California Speedway’s opening weekend. . . . In 1976, Carlos Palomino of Westminster won the world welterweight boxing title in London by beating John Stracey.