new york, (reuters)
WHEN MAX SCHMELING died in February at the age of 99, he took one of sport's enduring mysteries to his grave.
The only boxer to knock out Joe Louis in his prime, the German was himself pummelled into a first-round knock-out by the 'Brown Bomber' two years later in their 1938 heavyweight title bout.
The big question about Schmeling, who lived in Germany all his life, was whether he was a member of the Nazi party as the United States media suggested.
A new book tries to answer that but, in the absence of concrete evidence, author David Margolick concludes that the enigmatic Schmeling probably played both sides in order to preserve his lucrative source of income.
With dark, self-described Asian looks, Schmeling was hardly the archetypal blond Aryan of a "master race".
Despite being photographed giving the Nazi salute and socialising with Adolf Hitler, propaganda chief Josef Goebbels and the Nazi hierarchy, he had a Jewish manager for his fights in the U.S. and embraced a fight game that was dominated in New York by Jews.
That did not stop Zionists, anti-fascists and, for that matter, the boxing promoters at Madison Square Garden from setting up Schmeling as the villain in two of the most riveting sporting events of the 20th century.
As Margolick explains in Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink, being published this month, the picture was further clouded by race. Since Louis was black, there were large pockets of segregated America who did not want to see him win, even if he was an American.
TORCH BEARER
Equally, Louis, along with Jesse Owens who infuriated Hitler by winning four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was seen as carrying the torch for America's blacks in the pre-civil rights era. The fights captivated South Africa and Ethiopia as much as Harlem, Atlanta or Detroit.
"This story is surrounded by myths and cliches and I worked hard to get through and find out what was true," Margolick told Reuters in an interview.
"All the principals were dead except Schmeling, but he wouldn't talk to me. He had not given any meaningful interviews. Journalists had asked him the same platitudes and he gave the same platitudinous answers."
Schmeling, he said, wrote three autobiographies, all peppered with inaccuracies. In his research, Margolick, a former New York Times reporter, disproved many of the myths.
It was not true, he said, that the German ambassador pushed Schmeling to cry foul against Louis for the devastating kidney punch in the second fight that led to his defeat.
Neither did Schmeling's manager turn Louis away when he tried to visit his battered opponent in hospital. Nor was it true that Hitler snubbed him after the fight.
What was true was that Schmeling, a successful fighter before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, was popular in America, where he once met President Franklin Roosevelt. Yet with the clouds of war looming, the Nazis shamelessly used him to burnish their image abroad.
Much of Margolick's research was in the newspaper accounts of the time.
He spoke briefly with Louis's daughter but not the fighter's wife Marva, whom Louis divorced twice. Louis retired in 1949 with a 60-1 record, but drug and tax problems saw him briefly renew his career before finally hanging up his gloves after losing to Rocky Marciano in 1951.
CASINO GREETER
Louis earned $4.6 million in the ring but ended up with little to show for it and worked as a wrestling referee and a greeter at a Las Vegas casino before dying in 1981.
"Louis was a man of few words," said Margolick. "And unfortunately most of the other guys were not great diarists."
Schmeling talked a lot, but never about politics. He served as a paratrooper and was wounded in World War Two. Later the Nazis sent him to visit Allied prisoners of war in Germany to soften their image. "He veered from hero to villain -- and both were untrue," said Margolick.
But a card-carrying Nazi party member? "He walked a tightrope to keep Hitler happy while doing business in New York. The fact Schmeling's manager was Jewish was a profile in courage," said Margolick.
In 1936, Schmeling shocked pundits with a methodical performance at Yankee Stadium against an over-confident opponent who had slacked off during training. The German said he had seen Louis drop his guard after throwing left jabs in previous fights and exploited it in the 12th round with a right cross to the jaw that dropped the fearsome fighter.
Two years later, Louis, a brutal punching machine, attacked from the opening bell, knocking out Schmeling in just two minutes four seconds in one of the greatest displays of raw power seen in the ring.
That fight might never have happened, Margolick reveals. Schmeling was due to fly from Germany on the airship Hindenburg, but his manager Joe Jacobs wanted him to travel by sea earlier to attend a boxing commission meeting.
The person who took Schmeling's ticket died when the dirigible burst into flames landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
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