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David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink ______________________________________________      Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling – bouts that symbolized and galvanized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war.      In Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink, author David Margolick takes his readers into the careers of both men.  Louis is seen in his boyhood and amateur days in Detroit and Chicago, and the blossoming of his boxing genius.  He is seen taking New York by storm in the 1930s, fighting before record crowds, the savior of a sport that had fallen into decline and a long sought after symbol of redemption for black America after the scandalous reign of Jack Johnson two decades earlier. And the reader witnesses how, with talent, a gentle personality, and shrewd management, Louis managed to trump the brutal racism directed at him and came to dominate what had been primarily a white man’s sport, becoming a hero of unprecedented power and influence in black America.      Schmeling was a kind of chameleon, a cultural icon in Weimar Germany who seamlessly, disconcertingly, maintained his privileged status after the Nazi takeover. He pulled off a remarkable feat, relying on a Jewish manager and a Jewish promoter in New York while being extolled at home as a model of “racial superiority.”  In Glory, Margolick examines all the complex ties that developed between Schmeling and the Nazis, shattering the myth that they frowned upon him before he upset Louis in 1936 – he was a ten-to-one underdog – and ostracized him after losing to Louis two years later.      Margolick details the extraordinary buildup to the 1938 rematch – the worsening international tensions seemingly raising the stakes – in which Louis would need only 124 seconds to defeat Schmeling, while radio allowed the whole world to listen.  He also captures the outpouring of emotion that the two fighters aroused – in the white South, in the black and Jewish communities in the United States, in Germany, everywhere – and makes clear the cultural and social divisions the two men came to represent as the threat posed by the Nazis became increasingly clear, and as America began to feel the effects of a nascent civil rights movement. Schmeling’s postwar success in business and Louis’s sad decline add a poignant coda.#      In a January 24, 2006 interview for Jerry Jazz Musician, Paul Hallaman talks with Margolick about his book, and the pivotal personalities at the center of it. * Original photo caption: Just a Rehearsal. New York: Louis, exactly 198 pounds; Schmeling, 192. Both men in perfect physical condition. In this laconic manner was the result of the traditional weighing-in ceremony announced when Joe Louis, Detroit's brown bomber, and Max Schmeling, of Germany, met at the New York Hippodrome to comply with the requirements. Here they are shown squaring off in fighting pose. Louis is at right. A few minutes after this picture was made, postponement of the fight was announced until tomorrow evening. Photographed June 18, 1936 * "No single sporting event -- even Jack Johnson's victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910, which sparked race riots throughout the United States, or anything in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin -- had ever borne such worldwide weight. The fight implicated both the future of race relations and the prestige of two powerful nations. Each fighter was bearing on his shoulders more than any athlete ever had. 'Louis represents democracy in its purest form: the Negro boy who would be permitted to become a world champion without regard for race, creed or color,' a sportswriter from Boston had written that morning. 'Schmeling represents a country which does not recognize this idea and ideal.'" - David Margolick _____ King Joe, Part 1, by the Count Basie Orchestra, Paul Robeson, vocal ____________________________________________________ PH  You have described the second fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1938 as one of the greatest sporting events of the twentieth century. Why? DM  Because that fight came to symbolize so much. It was a fight that featured a white man fighting a black man at a time when the color line existed in every major sport, and it was also a fight between an American and a German when war between the two countries was becoming increasingly inevitable. So this was a very unusual event that had enormous symbolic importance, which explains why so many people all around the world stopped whatever they were doing to listen to it on the radio. PH  One hundred million listeners around the world? DM  That is an estimate, but it is likely an accurate figure. From what I could determine, it was the largest radio audience in history up to that point. PH  The fight was called by Clem McCarthy… DM  Yes, and it was a very famous call, the recording of which I heard when I was a kid. Sixty or seventy million Americans listened to his call that night on the radio, and countless millions more have heard it since then because it is used on seemingly every major sports or history of the radio anthology. It is truly one of the immortal moments in the history of the medium. PH  I am one of those who heard it on record. I actually own a Clem McCarthy album on the Riverside label where this broadcast is featured.  He was primarily known as a horse racing announcer before he got into boxing. DM  That's right, he was principally a horse racing announcer, and you can certainly hear that cadence in his boxing call. "Clem McCarthy was the class of sports announcing." -Don Dunphy _____ Clem McCarthy calls the fight * "If boxing brought classes together, it brought the races together, too.  More than in almost any other segment of American life, fight crowds at heavyweight bouts had become integrated, at least since Joe Louis had come along, even if most blacks sat in the cheap seats.  In the stadium, one black writer observed, the wall between the races was far thinner than in almost any church.  And in the ring more than anywhere else, blacks had now come to believe they could be judged fairly. It hadn't always been so.  If a black man was too good, Damon Runyon once wrote, whites wouldn't fight him, and if he was no good, well then, what good was he?  Fights between blacks and whites were still rare enough -- white boxers as recent and as eminent as Jack Dempsey had ducked all their black counterparts -- to have a name: 'mixed bouts.'  Only a few years before Louis turned professional, a New York paper mistakenly called a white fighter black -- and the fighter sued for libel." - David Margolick _____ Joe Louis Blues, by Carl Martin PH  The Louis-Schmeling fights took place a decade before Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball, and well after Jack Johnson's reign as champion… DM  Johnson's reign was, of course, very controversial. After he lost his title, the white power structure in boxing vowed that there would never be another black champion. So Joe Louis had to re-break the color line barrier that was erected again after Johnson's day. What ultimately accounted for that was money. While the addition of a few black players didn't change the financial status of major league baseball, the boxing world, on the other hand, was experiencing fiscal difficulties. Along came Joe Louis, a very dynamic and incredibly exciting fighter, and everybody wanted to see him. So it was an instance where racial prejudice just gave way to avarice. Everybody wanted to see Joe Louis fight, and all of a sudden the racial questions didn't seem so important. PH  Joe Louis was depicted as being the opposite of Jack Johnson. Whereas Johnson was seen as a raconteur, a race car driver, and a womanizer, Louis was more dignified, humble, god-fearing and devoted to his mother, and was embraced by the hip urban African Americans as well as the white population. What made Joe Louis' appeal so special? DM  It was universal, and cut across all classes and races -- he was impossible not to like. He was an incredibly powerful and impressive athlete who appealed to the hip urban black population you mentioned, as well as to those in the South. Everyone followed him, no matter where they came from. According to the black press of the time, church-going people followed him, intellectuals followed him, and even very humble people bet all of their money on him. His appeal truly ran the gamut in both the black and white communities. PH  Much of the research for your book came from accounts in the black press of the time. Media coverage of the Schmeling-Louis fights was epic and the writing was really impressive. DM  The first thing I would like to say about this is that the black press was kind of a revelation to me. It was a whole subculture that has completely disappeared from the American scene today, but in segregated America, it was thriving and enormously impressive. Some of the reporters were great writers, and their work is thrilling to read. While the white press was sort of playing "ostrich" on racial prejudice -- or actually exacerbating it in many instances -- the writers of the black were confronting it and writing about it all the time. They frequently wrote of Louis' chances of getting a shot at the heavyweight title, the way he was viewed by white America, and the prejudices he encountered as well as the affection he received. During the course of my research, I developed a kind of personal relationship with some of these black press writers -- for example, the columnists for the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro American in Baltimore, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Every major American city had a black paper at that time, but today these papers are largely forgotten, and the journalists themselves are almost entirely forgotten. I was hoping to write biographical stuff about them for the book but I just couldn't find much of anything out about them. They wrote in obscurity and their work remains in obscurity, all of it stored on microfilm. It was really a pleasure and quite a revelation to read it. Regarding the white press, boxing was second only to baseball as the biggest story in the sports pages, and when the heavyweight championship fights came along, nothing was bigger -- it was the most significant event in sports. Newspapers put their best writers on boxing because everyone cared about the heavyweight title fights. This was well before television, so the papers needed people capable of painting vivid pictures about what was taking place in the ring. This quality and amazing breadth of reporting was another revelation to me. There were nine newspapers in New York City alone, and every one had a different voice and a different columnist whom people read, and each of them had wonderful boxing coverage and terrific writers. I was a newspaper reporter who wrote on deadline for fifteen years, so it is difficult to imagine the challenges of watching a boxing match without the benefit of instant-replay video, and then having to reconstruct it on a typewriter at ringside on a very tight deadline. Some of the stories were so good that they just blew my mind, and it is amazing to think that they were written within minutes or hours of a fight. I don't know how they did it. * "In a nation still racked by the Depression, people had spent nearly a million dollars for tickets, something that had happened in boxing only a few times before, and only during boom times. 'Judges and lawyers, Representatives and Senators, Governors and Mayors, bankers and brokers, merchant princes and industrial giants, doctors, artists, writers, figures of prominence in the various fields of sports, champions of the past and present in the ring…stars of the stage and screen - everybody, it seem,' would be at or near ringside that night, The New York Times predicted. But equally impressive were those in the bleachers, many of them black, who had dug deep down into their pockets and their cookie jars, sacrificed their relief checks, pawned the precious little they owned for the privilege of watching two distant specks do battle, and to be - at least for a little while - at what felt like the center of the universe." - David Margolick _____ Joe The Bomber, by Billy Hicks and his Sizzlin' Six Max Schmeling: An Autobiography PH  The respect you have for these writers is well communicated in the book… DM  I hope it is. Some of the book's critics have said I quoted them too much, but their work is just too good to not quote, and it felt better for me to use it rather than coming up with purple prose of my own to describe the events they witnessed in person. It would have ripped them off to paraphrase them, and I couldn't have done any better. Their work may be sitting in a library on microfilm, published alongside corset ads, but these are historic documents. People today think that newspaper work is instantly perishable, but writing this book reminded me that the best reporting actually lives on forever -- it is just waiting for someone to go back and rediscover it. PH  Clearly, you understand the value of on-site reporting as source material. DM  Another point to make concerning this is that Louis and Schmeling both wrote memoirs in later years, but they are filled with mistakes and very unreliable. I have my own suspicions about why that is, and I think they are unreliable for different reasons. The point is that I felt there were no better sources to use for my book than those who wrote about the fights at the time. The Joe Louis Story PH  You describe Max Schmeling as being a chameleon. He was very popular among the artists and intelligentsia of the Weimar republic, yet following Hitler's rise to power, he became a Nazi poster boy. He came to America about nine times or so during that time. He liked America and probably could have stayed here. Why didn't he? DM  I describe him as a chameleon because he really did seem to take on the coloration of whatever was going on around him. He was very smart about it, and he was very good at it. How could somebody be a hero in Weimar Germany and then be a hero in Nazi Germany and then be a hero in post-war West Germany? This is not easy. PH  And be a hero in America as well. DM  That's right, and be a hero in America as well, but only towards the end of his life -- not before then. He was a highly suspect figure during the thirties, forties and fifties, but history sort of burnished his reputation, and over the years, aided by the autobiographies he wrote, his image became brighter and brighter. You all but expected there to be a tree planted for him at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I thought this was very overdone, and I tried to set the record straight. He was very good at adapting to whatever was going on around him. He wasn't a terribly political guy, nor was he a terribly principled guy -- he basically looked out for himself. After Hitler came to power, while all of his Jewish friends were fleeing for their lives, life was good for Schmeling in Nazi Germany. Hitler was a big boxing fan, and the Nazis wanted Schmeling to vie for the world championship. They were very eager to have a world heavyweight champion -- the greatest title in all of sports -- be from Nazi Germany. They wanted to stage Schmeling's fights in Nazi Germany to show that the 1936 Olympics were not a fluke, and to confirm to the world that Germany was a world class power capable of staging athletic events and breaking the American monopoly on boxing. All of these things were good for Max Schmeling. He met with Hitler several times, and by all appearances got along fine with him. Having said all of that, it is important to acknowledge that it is not an easy thing to leave your country. It may be easy for us living in this era to question why he didn't he just leave. Well, even a lot of Jews didn't leave Nazi Germany. It was a very difficult thing to do. While you are right, it would have been easier for him because he had the talent and money and knew how to speak English, the fact is he didn't leave. * "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." - David Margolick _____ Joe Louis And John Henry Blues , by Sonny Boy Williamson The Granger Collection Max Schmeling being greeted in Berlin, 1936 _______________ PH  You had hopes of interviewing him in Germany… DM  Yes. I went to Germany to try to interview him. By the time I started writing this book, Schmeling was into his nineties, and so many of the other figures in the story had died already, which was another reason why the newspapers were such an important source. But he was the principle figure still living, and due to his age, time was of the essence. Before I left for Germany I made some perfunctory efforts to get in touch with him and his people, but I was unsure if he would see me because he only spoke to a few journalists who always asked him the same questions, and to whom he always gave the same answers -- nothing new ever came out of these interviews. Despite these uncertainties, I decided to go over there and try to interview him. I went to his house and got nowhere. I spoke to the person who handled his press requests, and he turned me down. I pulled out every stop I possibly could. I even contacted officials at Coca Cola, for whom Schmeling became an executive after World War II, but I didn't get anywhere. That, by the way, was another cruel irony of this story. Coca Cola wouldn't even ask Joe Louis to endorse their product, yet they made Schmeling a multi-millionaire after the war. PH  If you had the opportunity to interview him, what would you have asked him? DM  Probably the most important thing would have been just to see him. He was an old man by then, so I wasn't going to subject him to a cross-examination, and given his rusty English, I didn't expect to extract any great revelation during the interview, but I could have watched him and described the setting. That would have been very nice. I would have asked him about his relationship with Joe Louis, and I would have asked him about his relationship with Hitler, although I am sure he would have said he was always anti-Nazi. I also would have asked him about his relationship with his Jewish manager Joe Jacobs, which was an important part of my book. I believe Schmeling fundamentally misrepresented him in virtually everything he ever said or wrote about him. But I don't imagine I would have gotten anything very revealing from him. Joe Jacobs (right) salutes Hitler after a 1935 Schmeling fight in Hamburg * "Jacobs was now getting it from every direction.  The day he returned to America, the infamous picture appeared in several New York newspapers.  'When Schmeling Won...And Yussel Heiled.' blared the Daily News.  All over town, Jacobs found himself ridiculed and excoriated.  One paper noted that when he got off the boat, he was wearing a brown suit, shirt, shoes, and socks -- 'just to carry out the Nazi motif.' ...As he saw it, he'd had no choice in the matter.  'What the 'ell would you do?' he asked on reporter.  'When a band plays the Star-Spangled Banner you stand up and take your hat off.  And you expect everyone else to.'  'When in Rome, eat pasta fazoole,' he told another reporter.  To anyone challenging his religious credentials, he insisted he was '500 percent Jewish' and that he wore tsitsis, the fringed undergarments of the Orthodox.  He did have his defenders.  'What did these birds expect Yussel to do -- stand up in Germany and sing the Internationale?' wrote a News reader from the Bronx. - David Margolick _____ Joe Louis Is The Man, by Joe Pullum PH  Joe Jacobs -- the legendary "Yussel the Muscle" -- is a great character in the story. DM You could never invent him, and the richness of a character like him is one of the reasons why it took me so long to write the book -- I couldn't stop writing about him. Jacobs was a very colorful Jewish man from New York who sort of adopted Schmeling early in his career and helped make him the world champion from 1930 to 1932. He was a small man who lived a very large life -- a Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon type of character who mangled the language and smoked big cigars. He was also politically significant because, as a citizen of Nazi Germany, Schmeling was forbidden by law to employ a Jewish manager. Hitler kicked all the Jews out of boxing very fast, which was a development Schmeling never even acknowledged publicly. But Schmeling was allowed to keep Jacobs as his manager because the capitol of boxing was New York, and, being from Nazi Germany, Schmeling needed a Jew to run interference for him, and to tell everyone that was all right. So Jacobs played an absolutely crucial role in Schmeling's career, and this relationship between a citizen of Nazi Germany -- though not a Nazi himself -- and his visibly colorful Jewish manager is one of the most incongruous matches in the history of sports. It interested me a great deal and I wrote a lot about it -- one critic of the book, in fact, claimed that readers got to know Joe Jacobs better than Max Schmeling. While I don't think agree with that, there is no doubt that Joe Jacobs was an easier person to fathom and describe than Schmeling, who remained very opaque until the end. PH  Given how important it was to Hitler for a German to hold the heavyweight championship title, how was Schmeling able to justify having Jacobs as his manager? DM  Schmeling's line was always that he was a sportsman, not a politician, and that would justify whatever he did, including having a Jewish manager, and working for a Jewish promoter, Mike Jacobs, who ran boxing in New York at the time. Then he would go have a cup of tea with Hitler. He saw nothing incongruous about that because of his purported antipathy toward politics, although he was of course right in the middle of it all, particularly when the Nazis started to use him -- and Schmeling was very happy to be used. He didn't have the luxury of steering clear of politics, not in that era, and it was naïve bordering on disingenuous for him to suggest that he could. PH  Your book begins with a scene at Yankee stadium before the second Louis-Schmeling fight in 1938, and then flashes back five years earlier to Schmeling's arrival to the United States. DM  The reason that I did that was because, while Schmeling had been coming to the United States for five years prior to that point, it was the first time he had come to New York after Hitler rose to power, and everyone -- particularly everyone in New York, with its large Jewish population -- was intensely interested in the terrible things that were starting to happen in Germany. Schmeling's arrival at the pier when everyone asked him about what was happening in Nazi Germany was a way for me to set the political stage for the rest of the story. PH  Ernest Hemingway described Joe Louis as being too good to be true, and said he was the greatest fighting machine he had ever seen. How was Schmeling able to knock him out? DM  That was all part of the drama of the story. When Louis came along he was seen as virtually invincible. PH  As Superman, even. DM  Yes, as Superman -- a boxer unlike any who had come before him. He was the type of fighter boxing fans yearned for since the retirement of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. This was a time when there were only very temporary champions. When Louis came along he dazzled everybody, including Hemingway, and I think Louis dazzled himself as well, to the point that he came to believe all the reviews he was getting. When he fought Schmeling the first time in 1936, it was basically seen as a warm up for the championship fight, because Schmeling was an over-the-hill former champion, and Louis was the champion in waiting. Jimmy Braddock -- the "Cinderella Man" -- held the crown at the time, but he was considered to be an accidental champion. He beat Max Baer in the fight that was depicted in the movie Cinderella Man, but the great myth of that story is that the whole world was captivated by Jimmy Braddock beating Max Baer, when in fact the world was waiting for Joe Louis to become champion. When Louis fought his first match in New York a few weeks after Braddock beat Baer, there were more people there than had just attended the championship fight; Louis was the fighter everyone wanted to see. So, by 1936, Louis was the inevitable future champion, and since Schmeling was considered washed up, everyone thought it would be a quick fight. But they underestimated Schmeling. While he was not flashy, Schmeling was very scientific. He studied films at a time when people were not yet doing that, and from them discovered a weakness of Louis'. He very famously said, "I zee zomething," and what he had seen was Louis dropping his left after jabbing, and if Schmeling was willing to take a few hits, he could come back and hit him hard with the right. Schmeling was a ten-to-one underdog in this fight, yet he knocked Louis out in the twelfth round, which still stands as one of the great upsets in all of sports history. Joe Louis * "The sports pages put Louis's reach at seventy-six inches.  In fact, it was global." - David Margolick _____ Let's Go Joe, by Cab Calloway and his Orchestra _____ Louis-Schmeling Fight, by Lion and Atilla with Gerald Clark & his Caribbean Serenaders PH  It was such an unbelievable result that there were persistent rumors of Joe Louis having been doped. DM  That's right. No one could believe that the fight was legitimate. This was one of those events that was particularly interesting to read about in the black press because it was filled with conspiracy theories and speculation about the diabolical things that must have been done to Louis by his managers, the Nazis, nefarious whites, or whomever.  When Louis lost it was seen as an unbelievable catastrophe for his community. From reading the post-fight accounts in the black press, there was an element of incredulity and despair about the result of the fight. PH  Jack Johnson was incredibly jealous of Joe Louis' success. You wrote, "Jack Johnson could say 'I told you so,' and did; in forty years his jaw hadn't taken as much punishment as Louis's had in a single night, he declared upon showing up at the Renaissance Grill with his white wife. He was literally run out of the joint." DM  I find it interesting how everybody has fallen in love with Jack Johnson in recent years, but in his time he was a very controversial figure in both the white and black communities -- never more so than when he denigrated the beloved Joe Louis. After he did that, he heard about it in a big way from the black community. As I was nearing completion of the book, I found an article about Johnson attending a Negro League baseball doubleheader at the Polo Grounds sometime in the late thirties. This was about the time Johnson had been bad mouthing Joe Louis in the black press, and, according to the reporter for the Amsterdam News, as he was introduced the crowd of twenty-five thousand booed in a way that would have rocked the graves of his ancestors. Imagine what that must have been like -- twenty-five thousand black fans booing Jack Johnson. It is an almost unimaginable scene, but it happened. PH  I can't help but feel sorry for Jack Johnson at this point in his life. It got so bad for him that he wound him working in a Times Square flea circus. It didn't work out so well for Louis toward the end of his life either. DM  Not at all well. The great sportswriter John Larder once said that boxing was the only sport where, the longer you last, the poorer you get, and that is what happened to Joe Louis. Even when he was making all kinds of money, people were worried about him. They gave him plenty of advice about how to stay out of the poor house, but despite it all, he still landed there. The way he turned out is an awful story. Jack Johnson, early 1900's * "Jack Johnson continued to haunt, and taunt, Louis.  Bill Corum caught up with him one day at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus on Forty-second Street, west of Broadway, where he had become part of the freak show, selling memories 'at a penny a throw.'  'What about Joe Louis?' he was asked.  'Just another figher,' replied Johnson, who was to keep a photograph of the 1936 fight -- it showed Louis approaching Schmeling with a left, leaving his chin conspicuously exposed to the German's cocked right -- coveniently within reach." - David Margolick _____ - Listen to Jack Johnson speak on Runnin' Down the Title Holder, a 1924 recording Bob Milnes © Stars and Stripes Joe Louis, 1966 * "He was a precise and devastating puncher with both hands, and as [Damon] Runyon himself noted, 'the public loves a puncher, white, black, yellow or green.'  He invariably scored knockouts, clean and quick, ferocious and unequivocal.  White America was vaguely embarrassed by its love of boxing, but black America felt few qualms; for blacks, boxing offered a breach in the ghetto wall.  'Fame and money are still more likely to come to the Negro of brawn and skill and gameness who knocks men down for a count of ten seconds than to his fellow athlete, to the scientist, scholar, actor, doctor, artist, labor leader, statesman, preacher, business man, inventor or judge,' a landmark study of the time observed.  The roped square, at least with Louis inside it, meant a square deal.  'You can't Jim Crow a left hook' was how another great black boxer, Henry Armstrong, had put it.  Boxing also offered the black man revenge with impunity.  'The ring,' Malcolm X was to write in his autobiography, 'was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.'" - David Margolick _____ A video clip of Maya Angeloucharacterizing the Louis / Schmeling fight as "Good against bad in the arena" in a video clip PH  His management didn't exactly look out after him, did they? DM  That is something I truly don't understand. How could he have ended up broke? Sure, he was a quick man with a buck, and he wasted a lot of money on bad investments his management failed to protect him from, but the principal thing that created problems for him was the IRS coming after him. During the war, he donated some fight earnings to Army and Navy relief while neglecting to pay taxes on the money he earned, leaving himself in trouble with the IRS. With the interest compounding, his debts kept getting larger and larger, and they kept hounding him practically until the day he died. He ended up as a greeter in Las Vegas. I remember reading about that when it happened, and again when he died in 1981, but you don't understand the full poignancy of this until you revisit how important he was -- and my own feeling is that there was never an athlete in the black community more important than Joe Louis. I believe that is true exponentially -- he was more important than Muhammad Ali, far more important than Jackie Robinson, and far more important than Jesse Owens. This conclusion is not merely that of a white man making a judgement about black athletes -- it is also easy to see his importance from the coverage in the black newspapers. From their accounts it is absolutely evident that he was the essential source of pride in the black community. As an example, forty-three songs were written about Joe Louis. PH  Some were even calypso versions. DM  That's right, and there is an entire sixteen-song compact disc of nothing but Joe Louis songs. So, the facts about his importance are there. Ultimately he fell out of favor and came to be seen as an accommodationist and an "Uncle Tom," and he certainly suffered by comparison to the much more eloquent and loquacious Ali -- but there is absolutely no comparison in terms of their impact. PH  Ali, however, was vilified plenty during his conversion to Islam, so his rehabilitation was pretty remarkable. Think about the emotional impact of his participation in the torch lighting ceremony at the Atlanta Olympic Games, for example. DM  That is an extraordinary story to be sure, especially, as you say, when you consider the vilification of him early in his career. His rehabilitation from this period was in fact quite amazing. PH  He received some very harsh criticism from the mainstream press due to his anti-war stance, yet he is now considered one of America's most beloved athletes. DM  I agree that is a great story, and I don't want to take anything away from him. There is no doubt that Ali is one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. I was only talking about his impact as a champion at the time. PH  Yes, and it interesting to me how their paths were reversed. Louis started out as a hero of his people who ended up being seen as an accomodationist and an "Uncle Tom," whereas Ali was initially seen as anti-American who eventually became a great American hero who is a source of inspiration to us all. DM  It is absolutely true that their stories are polar opposites. It is an interesting point. PH  In her New York Times review of your book in October, 2005, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "…what seems missing in 'Beyond Glory" is authorial perspective: what does David Margolick make of the Louis-Schmeling phenomenon? Are such crude but potent myths of the 'moral' superiority of physical superiority still dominant in our culture?" What do you make of that? DM  That is too heavy for me. I don't even know what that means. It wasn't my mission to talk about myths and address those kinds of questions. I just wanted to tell a story that is seventy years old, but continues to have contemporary importance. I will leave those heavy judgements to her. Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis * "I made the most of my ability and I did my best with my title." - Joe Louis _____ Joe Louis Is A Fighting Man, by The Dixieaires _________________________________________________________ photo New York Daily News "In black America, Louis was idolized as no one had ever been.  Writers compared him to Booker T. Washington, the biblical David, and Jesus Christ.  Black newspapers were filled with poems about him.  Musicians composed songs about him.  Preachers who had once deemed prize-fighting crooked and unchristian extolled him from the pulpit; families hung pictures of him in their parlors.  Even Jesse Owens, the only black athlete to rival him in fame and accomplishment, became in his exalted presence just another rabid fan.  'Day by day, since their alleged emancipation, they have watched a picture of themselves being painted as lazy, stupid, and diseased,' Richard Wright wrote.  To black America, he went on, Louis 'symbolized the living refutation of the hatred spewed forth daily over radios, in newspapers, in movies and in books about their lives.'  Louis let blacks everywhere think lofty and heretical thoughts; if he could shatter racial barriers, those barriers could not be so formidable.  The sports pages put Louis's reach at seventy-six inches.  In fact, it was global." - David Margolick _____ King Joe, Part 2, by the Count Basie Orchestra, Paul Robeson, vocal Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink by David Margolick * About David Margolick PH  Who was your childhood hero? DM  I suppose the closest thing I had to a hero was John F. Kennedy. I don't think that anyone's death, even to this day, has upset me as much as his. So, on some level I must have really loved and admired him. I also looked up to anybody who was helping the Boston Red Sox win games, so I guess I liked Carl Yastrzemski and some his teammates as well, but I can't say I ever worshipped them. I suspect that journalists are not hero worshippers  -- we are always on the sidelines watching, never allowed to truly cast our lot with anybody. *      David Margolick is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he writes about culture, the media, and politics. He served as national legal affairs editor at The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly At the Bar column for seven years. He is the author most recently of Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. Beyond Glory is his fourth book. He lives in New York City. Joe Louis products at Amazon.com Max Schmeling products at Amazon.com David Margolick products at Amazon.com _______________________________ This interview took place on January 24, 2006 * If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey Ward _______________________________ Other Jerry Jazz Musician interviews # Text from publisher.

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