Pride and Prejudice

By Stefan Kanfer

In the '30s, sportswriters called him the Brown Bomber, the Dark Destroyer, the Sepia Slugger, the Mahogany Maimer, the Chocolate Chopper, the Tan Tarzan of Thump. These were far more than sobriquets. As Chris Mead observes in his enlightening biography, Champion, Heavyweight Joe Louis Barrow could never be a mere titleholder. He was always an emblem.

To black America, and to unbiased whites, Joe Louis symbolized the victory of poverty over circumstance. The prejudiced regarded him as an anthropoid in trunks. Before his first match with German Boxer Max Schmeling in 1936, a Nazi journalist wrote, "It is hoped that the representative of the white race will succeed in halting the unusual rise of the Negro." His hopes were not disappointed; Louis lost to Schmeling in the twelfth round. When the American won the rematch with a one-round knockout, his countrymen exulted, but by then the jungle-killer image of Louis had become endemic. He was now compared to "a savage tiger" and "an irate cobra."

Mead peels off these labels and traces Louis' career from the early days in a Detroit ghetto to the sad years of deterioration. Pugilism came easily to Louis, but he was not a natural celebrity. His advisers remembered that the previous black champion, Jack Johnson, had ruined his career with temperamental outbursts and interracial romances. Accordingly, they merchandised Louis' innate dignity and sold him as a shy family man given to choice utterances like "He can run, but he can't hide" and, during World War II, "We are on God's side." The champion did not disappoint his public. He KO'd a slew of contenders in his famous "Bum of the Month" campaign of the '30s and '40s, obediently served in the segregated army, raised money for the war effort and spread racial amity.

Privately, however, Louis was a womanizer and profligate who disastrously mismanaged his finances. A combination of pride and debt drove him to overstay his time in the ring. He lost his crown, became a referee and, briefly, an overweight professional wrestler. The battle between the Good Colored Boy and the resentful black man finally claimed its victim in the late '60s: he became a drug user and a blurting paranoid, convinced that murderers were stalking him. His last job before his death, in 1981, was as a "greeter" in a Las Vegas casino, where he signed autographs and played golf with high rollers. Frank Sinatra covered many of his medical bills.

Mead, 26, a recent Yale Law School graduate, is at pains to present a life but at a loss to give it meaning. Instead, his first book invokes appraisals of prominent blacks from Jesse Jackson ("With Joe Louis we had made it from the guttermost to the uttermost") to Conservative Sociologist Thomas Sowell ("Louis was a continuing lesson to white America that to be black did not mean to be a clown or a lout"). But it was another boxer who put the man in true perspective. Muhammad Ali remarked after the funeral, "Howard Hughes dies, with all his billions, not a tear. Joe Louis, everybody cried." --By Stefan Kanfer