Blacks and The Brown Bomber - Part 1

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Part 2

three. By the time Louis became champion, Haynes was all but washed up. Still, if they had met while they were both contenders, and Haynes had an on-night as opposed to an off-night, heavyweight history might have taken a different turn.

Tiger Jack Fox was only a light-heavyweight, but he was good enough to hand leading heavyweights their heads. His victims among the big boys included Pack, Trammell, Whiters, and Walcott. By the time Louis came along, Fox was a veteran of more than 100 bouts. In his only title shot, he lost to light-heavyweight king Melio Bettina, in part because the Tiger went into the ring suffering from the effects of a stab wound inflicted by a woman with whom he’d had an altercation weeks before. If Louis’s management steered him clear of Fox, it’s not hard to see why.

After Louis won the heavyweight title, he defended it 21 times in five years. Then he joined the U.S. Army as the Americans entered World War II. During his early championship years, Louis could have given title shots to any of the above-named black contenders – except, perhaps, Haynes, who was clearly on the downslide in the late 1930s. He didn’t, though. Only one of those 21 defenses came against a black opponent. That opponent was John Henry Lewis, who was the world light-heavyweight champion and one of the few fighters to hold a decisive win over Tiger Jack Fox, knocking Fox out in three rounds.

But by the time he challenged Louis, John Henry was at the end of his career, and could only see out of one eye. Louis, who was friendly with Lewis outside the ring, got him out of there in the first round. That was John Henry’s final bout. At least he retired with a big paycheck.

Only Louis’s managers could say why they gave deserving black contenders the cold shoulder during the frist part of Joe’s title reign. With the advent of the war, however, the landscape changed.

Louis was not the only champion to join the armed forces during World War II. Many non-champions enlisted as well. The titles of the champions who went into the service were “frozen” over the course of the Allies’ struggle against the Axis powers. Boxers who remained civilians were eligible to become “duration” champions – something like the “interim” title-holders that today’s alphabet organizations foist onto the long-suffering public.

An extraordinary black fighter named Jimmy Bivins won both the heavyweight and light-heavyweight “duration” titles. Bivins was not big even by light-heavy standards, and he didn’t have much punching power. But he could box any man’s ears off. Billy Conn, who was about the same size as Bivins, came close to lifting the title from Louis in 1941. Bivins could have done just as well – if not better.

With Louis in abeyance, opportunities opened. Bivins wasn’t the only black heavyweight to come into his own during the war years. The story of Jersey Joe Walcott’s rise from obscurity is well-known. So is that of Ezzard Charles, even though he fought mostly as a middleweight and light-heavyweight at that time. There were others who might have given Louis problems if he had fought them before his long war-time layoff.

Hard-punching Elmer Ray had one of the all-time greatest boxing nicknames: “Violent.” And he lived up to the image that soubriquet implied. In the middle part of his career, he reeled off 50 consecutive victories, with 44 knockouts. He fought Charles and Walcott twice each, splitting both series. After his winning streak was snapped by Walcott, Ray’s career took a downturn, and he never got a title shot. Too bad. What a barn-burner a bout between “Violent” and “The Brown Bomber” could have been.

Lem Franklin hit even more violently than Ray, as 28 knockouts in 32 wins attest. By the early 1940s, Franklin had turned out the lights on Bivins, as well as Louis victims Abe Simon, Tony Musto and Eddie Simms. Those wins made him a logical opponent for Louis. But that logic came undone when Franklin faced another Louis victim: Bob Pastor. The glass in Franklin’s jaw shattered when the feather-fisted Pastor stopped him in eight rounds. From there, it was all downhill for Franklin. In his final 10 bouts, he was knocked out eight times. His last contest ended in tragedy, as he died after a nine-round beating at the hands of fringe contender Larry Lane.

Harry Bobo was yet another big hitter with a questionable mandible. Twenty-four of his 36 wins came by stoppage. So did four of his nine losses. Bobo knocked out Franklin in the first round. He did the same to Franklin’s conqueror, Lane. Bobo also stopped Louis victims Gus Dorazio and Lee Savold. In turn, he was kayoed by Wild Bill Boyd, Bill Poland, and Melio Bettina. By the time the war ended, Bobo had retired, and he never got a chance to check Louis’s chin.

Lee Q. Murray was a boxer-puncher who hit his stride during Louis’s last years as champion. He fought Bivins five times, winning twice. He also kayoed Bobo in eight rounds, but lost a decision to Roscoe Toles. Another key loss came by disqualification against Walcott. Despite those setbacks, Murray had sufficient skills to have given Louis trouble during Joe’s last years in the ring.

Curtis “Hatchetman” Sheppard, like Ray, lived up to his ominous nickname. With his “hatchet” of a right hand, he scored a one-round stoppage of Joey Maxim – the only knockout loss in the otherwise-elusive Maxim’s career. Even though he was a hard hitter, Sheppard could be stymied by clever boxers like Murray, Archie Moore and even Maxim, who outpointed him in a rematch after Sheppard’s knockout win. Louis would probably have beaten him, too. But then, Louis had problems with fighters who had big right hands, so Sheppard might have gotten lucky.

When the war ended, boxing’s titles were unfrozen, and the “duration” champs became contenders again. Louis was ready to resume defending his title. But age and inactivity had, inevitably, eroded his skills. He was still good enough to stop Billy Conn in a much-anticipated rematch, then annihilate Tami Mauriello in less than a round. It was clear, though, that he was not the Bomber of old, and there was a good chance he could be dethroned by a challenger determined to do so.

In the meantime, Jersey Joe Walcott had fought his way to the number-one contender’s position. On December 5, 1947, Walcott challenged Louis for the title. It was the first time Louis had faced a black opponent (other than in exhibitions) since his brief battle against John Henry Lewis in 1939.

Walcott made the most of his opportunity, dropping Louis twice and winning the bout in the minds of everyone except two of the three officials. When Louis was given the split-decision nod, he heard boos directed against him for the first time in his career. He had to fight Walcott again to redeem himself. In their 1948 rematch, Louis recovered enough of his old fire to come off the floor and stop Walcott in 11 rounds. That was Louis’s final title defense. He retired a year later. His record of 25 successful defenses stands to this day.

Two black fighters – Walcott and Ezzard Charles – faced off for the right to claim Louis’s vacated championship. Charles won by decision. If there was any discontent over one black champion being succeeded by another, it was muted. During Louis’s 12-year reign, he became the first crossover black celebrity, beloved by whites as well as blacks. The prospect of a black heavyweight champion was no longer the anathema it had been during Jack Johnson’s era and its aftermath.

With all his stellar accomplishments in and out of the ring, Louis should have been able to enjoy his retirement. But that was not to be. His tax troubles forced him to make a comeback.

The goodwill he had generated had created a far more accepting climate for black heavyweights than was the case when he started in the mid-1930s. In the 58 bouts he fought before abdicating his crown, only five were against black fighters (two of them against Walcott). That’s an anemic eight per cent. During his 10-bout comeback, he again fought black opponents five times – but this time, they accounted for 50 per cent of the total.

Louis’s first comeback fight was a challenge against Charles for the Brown Bomber’s old title. Ezzard won a one-sided 15-round decision to cement his claim to the crown. Joe should have retired for good then. But he couldn’t. He had to keep fighting as long as he could draw crowds make money – not for himself, but for Internal Revenue.

His next opponent was Omelio Agramonte, a black Cuban who was at best a fringe contender. Louis won by decision. Next came Andy Walker, an African-American journeyman from California. Louis stopped him in the tenth and final round. Then he fought a rematch against Agramonte, again winning a decision.

Three fights later, Louis met Jimmy Bivins. In the early 1940s, this would have been an intriguing matchup: speed versus power. But with both men well beyond their prime time, Louis had to settle for a dreary decision win. He didn’t know it, but the Bivins fight would be the last victory of Joe’s career.

In his final fight, Louis was brutally knocked out in eight rounds by the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano, who would go on to become an outstanding champion in his own right. It was only Louis’s third defeat. Ironically, three months before Louis fought Marciano, Joe’s old nemesis Jersey Joe Walcott won the title from Ezzard Charles in a shocking upset. Louis might have fought on, hoping to get Walcott in the ring again. But no one who cared about him wanted to see him absorb another beating along the way. Marciano was the one who knocked the crown off Walcott’s head.

 

Part 3

For four decades after the end of Louis’s career, black boxers dominated the heavyweight division. Only during the past decade have they yielded to a wave of fighters from the former Soviet Union. Louis gave his many black successors the chance to build on the foundation he established. Because of times and circumstances, however, his shadow hung so heavily over his contemporaries of color that they were deprived of the opportunities for glory that Louis’s managers were able to obtain.

Was that fair? No. But if it was the price necessary to give us the Brown Bomber when we all needed him – and later, Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King and, ultimately, freedom – so be it. Joe Louis was a great fighter regardless, and his managers’ decisions about his early opponents are a reflection on them, not him.