LIFE ON THE GROUND
“I feel sorry for Joe,” Marciano said. “I’m glad I won, but I feel sorry I had to do it to him.” Another who expressed sympathy was Louis’ old rival Jersey Joe Walcott. “… I was very sorry to see him go that way,” Walcott said. “I knew he wasn’t the Louis of his great days. It was getting more plain every day that he was burned out. The reflexes were gone, and those don’t come back.” But Louis wasn’t signing off on his career just yet. He answered questions about his future with a non- committal grunt. If Louis hedged on announcing his retirement, the press was glad to do it for him. The best and worst writers in the country offered feeble cliches about how “Father Time” catches up to everybody. Louis’ loss became a handy symbol of old age, one that would be used by sportswriters for a decade or two whenever an older fighter dared to compete. Red Smith, one of the country’s most popular columnists, finished his Louis-
“A Great Champion Passes,” was a headline in the Buffalo Courier-Express. As Cannon wrote a few weeks later, “The way they carried on about Joe Louis … you’d think it was some funeral or something.” The more optimistic sportswriters of the day saw Louis’ loss as a reason to celebrate his extraordinary career. Sheldon Nulty, writing for The Post-Star of Glens Falls, New York, observed that it had been Louis, not Marciano, who made the Garden 10-rounder “the big attraction it turned out to be.” And while the former champion had failed, Nulty added, “it’s Louis that the fans are talking about.” Indeed, Louis was the talk of the sports scene for several days after the fight. Few fighters could match the illuminated peaks of Louis’ resume, in that the high spots of his career were also high spots in boxing history: his 1938 destruction of Schmeling when the hopes of America seemed at stake; his intense, come-from-behind KO victory over the dancing
Marciano coverage by writing, “… old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is by the fire.” Others used Louis’ painful loss as a commentary on America. New York Daily News contributor Ed Sullivan portrayed Louis’ ongoing tax problems as a warning to youngsters to save their money. Sullivan offered a sophisticated tirade about America’s escalating defense budget – estimated at $57 billion – which he connected to ever-rising taxes, astronomic inflation and the inability of average Americans to save for
Irishman, Billy Conn, in 1941; his bouts for the Army and Navy Relief Funds, and his memorable statement after his Army induction at the height of World War II, “We’ll win because we’re on God’s side.” Such was his legend that even this balding, 37-year- old version of Louis faced Marciano as a 6-to-5 betting favorite and was guaranteed a sweet 45% of the net gate as well as the radio and TV receipts. His name still meant enough that appliance stores offered sales on television sets with signs saying, “Buy Now and See the Joe Louis Fight!”
“Perhaps I can’t beat guys who are young, like Marciano, but I can still handle fellows who are 30 or more years of age.”
an uncertain future. “Joe Louis, hanging over the ring apron of Madison Square Garden, knocked out by Marciano, was the victim of Washington,” Sullivan wrote. “Taxes bankrupted Louis, forced him to go to the well several times too often.” In his coverage of the fight for the same newspaper, Jimmy Powers quoted lines from William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” (“All the world’s a stage …”), and then finished with a vivid description of Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream,” an intense 1899 oil painting where a Black sailor floated along on a rudderless ship surrounded by sharks, “the brilliant tropical sun” beating down on the hapless man whose end is near. Seeing similarities between the doomed sailor and Louis, Powers wished Homer could’ve painted the ending of the fight. “Instead of the scorching, merciless Caribbean sun,” Powers wrote, “there was the brilliant Garden ring light, delineating every detail with precision.” Some of the reportage made it seem Louis had died, with morning editions across the country serving up eulogies.
For more than a decade, Louis had enjoyed a rare status among fighters. He was iconic, beloved by fans both Black and white, respected by people from the poorest neighborhoods all the way to the White House. It was a blanket popularity that boxing hadn’t seen before and, frankly, wouldn’t see again in America. Other fighters – Dempsey, Robinson, Ali, Leonard, Tyson – were all enormously popular at times, but each fell in and out of favor and had detractors. Louis enjoyed a sort of unbroken, universal appeal. He fought when boxing was right beside baseball as America’s favorite sport, and the heavyweight champion was a revered figure. And now, after the Marciano bout, Americans realized the fighter they’d loved for so many years was done and gone. But was he really done? That was the question. Immediately after the fight, Louis announced plans to tour Japan. From there, he said, he’d resume fighting in America. He had his eye on Charles and heavyweight champion Walcott as possible opponents.
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