We had a poster here a few years back, called Maxie's Gal, who did a very thorough treatment of the subject on her website Maxbaer.org. That would have been my preferred reference, but I can't seem to find the link these days. There is an article by Norman Marcus on Boxing.com, which discusses the lead up to the Louis bout, when Baer was debating whether to risk taking the fight. Ancil Hoffman took Baer to Johns Hopkins University to see an orthopedic surgeon. A specialist named William Healy told Baer that his left wrist had a bone chip moving around, and that he had broken all four knuckles in his right hand. http://www.boxing.com/baer_vs._louis_fate_takes_a_hand.html That part you will have to decide. I can merely present you with the information. I think that we have to allow some mitigation for such an injury, while acknowledging that he could have handled the situation much better. I suspect that Baer assumed that Braddock would be an easy night, and once he broke his hand he tried to conceal it, so that Braddock would at lest stay wary of his power.
Again though, there is nothing definitive there about when it happened in the Braddock fight at all. There is nothing really to be gleamed from article other than he hurt his hands at some point and they were concerned about it for the Louis fight. Still though, my question remains, he didn't just act like that after his hands got hurt, he acted like a clown form the opening bell. So this notion that he was just acting like that after he got hurt to conceal it, doesn't really fly since he was clowning around before it supposedly happened. Baer took other fighters lightly, didn't like their chances, and it wasn't for the HW championship of world... yet he still went after him. Here, with all that on the line, you think a performance like that looks legit?
I will throw a hypothetical scenario at you. Baer obviously took Braddock lightly, and thought that he could end it at any time, so he starts out clowning. At some point, we don't know when, he injures both of his hands. Now he thinks: "Oh f*** , if Braddock figures this out, he is going to fight a more more aggressive fight, and it will be hard to win on the cards. At the moment at least he is wary of my power, and I might get it on the basis that he is not doing enough. Keep clowning!"
Thanks for the link to the Norman Marcus article. I had found it by by googling Max Baer fight with a broken hand on the internet. So far it is the only place other than this blog which seems to mention this broken hand. The article is from 2012, over 75 years after the event. It appears to be well researched, giving facts like the name of the orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins in 1935, but I would like to know more about what the primary sources are. I have a friend now recovering from a broken hand and specifically a broken metacarpal and his hand is grossly swollen and discolored and has been for over a mouth. Besides the wrapping he wears a padded shield thing to protect it, with the fingers sticking out. They are still much bigger than they should be and it has been about six weeks since his injury. On the face of it, it seems very odd that Baer would clown his way through the Braddock fight and then jump into the ring against Louis with a broken hand which he is hoping will heal although the physician has informed him it will take about 9 months. This certainly seems an unlikely motivation. Why not hold off fighting Louis until the hand is healed in the summer of 1936? But where is the original primary source? Hard to believe Healy would be around in the 21st century, or his records of hand injuries. Who has kept the X-rays? Where does any of this information come from this long after the fact? A contemporary newspaper report would add a lot of credibility to this story for me, at least evidence of some sort of injury. Hoffman and Baer are long dead. Even Buddy has been dead for decades. Four broken metacarpals would mean the hand was broken all the way across. It is really hard for me to see anyone training for boxing with such injuries or even attempting a big fight. My position is that I would just like the see a source which dates from the 1930's for any of this. Baer uses both hands quite normally in the film of the Braddock fight. He looks about the same as he did against Farr in 1937.
The injury was very reliably recorded at the time, and was even a talking point in the press. Baers hands were examined by reporters after the fight, and the injury was later confirmed by an X ray, the gold standard of proving a hand injury! You can see where this is going!
I can't google any report from the 1930's on this hand problem. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Only that I haven't been able to find it. I will be grateful for a link from the 1930's establishing this is true. Not trying to be obdurate, but I would like to nail this down. The amount of pain my friend has, and the swelling, certainly raises issues of how a man with his whole hand smashed (four broken metacarpals) would even consider going through with a fight, when the motive given is that he wants to quickly regain his title, although this severe an injury would make it questionable if he could overcome even an ordinary fighter, let alone Joe Louis. The truth might lie somewhere in between. Baer had some sort of hand injury, but Marcus has exaggerated it into four broken bones, a really improbable injury to try to box with.
I throw out a more likely scenario: What if people approached Baer and asked willingly or forcefully.... You're the big betting favorite and we could make a lot of money if you lose this fight. Nobody will believe a KO, cause you've never been knocked down at this point in your career, and you could KO him with your power, so don't mix it up much and telegraph shots so he can see them coming and there's no slip up. Then simply lose a decision to him, that some might think you were close to winning and nobody will suspect a thing. To me that makes more sense than to act the way he did from the opening bell. The theory that he did that to conceal something holds little water, because, well, he was already doing that prior to the injury. He already thought, according to you, that he could KO him at some point so I'll just clown around from the opening bell. Which is my issue. You act like, well, it had to be a hand injury or how else can you explain the pitiful effort when defending the title. Good question, but that should be asked from the get go, since he was acting the same way from the start. So my question is, if you act that way prior to getting hurt, if you got hurt at all, then who cares if you got hurt... you were already acting like a clown who didn't care from the start. It's not like, he was trying and winning and then boom injury... he wasn't trying and wasn't trying and then he gets hurt...
I found something on the hand injury. This is from the AP report on August 22, 1935 "Max Baer accompanied Jacobs to the commission and submitted to a detailed examination of his hands." "Dr Fredrich E. Elliott made a dozen or more X-ray pictures of Baer's hands. These will be studied and their results given to the commission within 24 hours." It goes on to mention that Baer had blamed the Braddock defeat on hand injuries. But if Baer had all these broken bones, why would the commission have sanctioned the fight? What would even be the point of x-rays if they didn't care and would let him go through with the fight regardless? Just me, and I might be too trusting , but I doubt the NYSAC was so corrupt they would have let this fight go on if Baer had four broken bones in his hand.
If anyone is in New York State, he could go the commission, or perhaps phone them, and see if they have kept the records of the report Dr. Elliott sent to the commission about the condition of Baer's hands on August 23, 1935. That might clear up a lot.
thanks for posting this. On my computer, I couldn't read anything but the headlines, which implies it is about Louis saying his hand were okay and Baer's would have to be if he fought him. No doubt Baer was saying he had injured hands in 1935. But one proven fact is that his hands were closely scrutinized by the NYSAC physician. Either the injuries were not as severe as modern writers like Marcus claim, or the NYSAC allowed the fight to go on knowing Baer was too injured to be able to compete fairly. That strikes me as unlikely. Baer's motivation for taking the Louis fight in 1935 is puzzling. Quickly regaining title status seems crazy. Fighting with an injured hand would more likely lead to a loss which would remove him from the title picture, which is what happened. The only plausible motivation I can think of is that Baer wanted a big paycheck and wanted it quickly and at all costs. Why? I don't know. Was he in debt and trying to get out of it as he was recently married? Just on Baer's height. I don't think he was 5 inches taller than Schmeling, but if the usual listed heights for these other boxers are correct, Baer does look more like 6' 3" to 6' 4" to me than the 6' 2.5" he is generally listed as. On the internet his height is listed as 6' 4"
On my computer, I couldn't read the text. Would it be possible to type up the key part here regarding what the medical experts said?
I've skimmed a few articles on this and I haven't seen anything suggesting that Baer's hands were actually broken. Seems like doctors consistently concluded otherwise, numerous times. The best that can be said for Baer is that he may have sincerely but mistakenly believed that he broke them. In a June 14, 1935 writeup, Harry Grayson claims that Baer calmly told him before the 11th round that he had broken both of his hands in the 5th round. Grayson also wrote that within a half hour of the fight, a doctor had carefully inspected Baer's hands and concluded they weren't broken. An August 20, 1935 article states: "Doctors in Baltimore told him what to do for the only real injury he suffered, a bruised knuckle on his left hand. He wears a special pad over it in training. He said he feels no pain no matter how hard he hits." The article also claims that Baer has "been hitting the heavy bag with tremendous power."
