HOPELESSLY BEATEN

Evening Star, Issue 22144, 26 September 1935, Page 3

HOPELESSLY BEATEN

BAER KNOCKED DOT NEGRO'S RAPID RISE [By Hooker.] A few short months have seen Max Baer descend from the heights of pugdom until to-day he is just another lighter. ■ When he won the world’s heavy-weight championship from Primo Camera, there were some critics extravagant enough to hail him as another Jack Dempsey. How far out they were is shown by the Californian’s rapid fall from grace. He looked upon his bout with James J. Braddock as a mere set-up, and the whole world knows what happened. Braddock came through with an exhibition of dogged courage and grim determination to outbox Baer, and a new world champion was crowned. i

Deprived of his crown, Baer received iittle ' sympathy. His clowning antics, his neglect of training, and his -general demeanour deprived him of his admirers, and the “playboy” of the American ring was unmercifully castigated by the sporting I’rcss of the United States.

It was thought that his contest with, the 21-year-i.ld American negro, Joe Louis, would give him an opportunity to regain his lost prestige, and he was reported to -have taken his training seriously for once. Facing the Alabama colourca boy, however, Baer was nob in the race, and he was toppled in the fourth round of a match which, if ability is recognised, must pave the way for a world’s championship bout between Louis and James J.,Braddock.

Louis is the most-talked-of negro heavy-weight since the days of Jack Johnson. He was born on May 13, 1914, at Montgomery,. Alabama. He is 6ft lin tall, and weighs 1961 b. Following the winning of the Golden Gloves champipnship, ho won the American Amateur Athletic Unioxi light-heavy-weight and heavy-weight titles in the spring of 193 d. He started his professional career in Chicago by knocking out Jack Kracken in one round, on July 4, 1934., Among his victims are Charley Massera, whom he kayoed in three rounds; Lee llaraage twice, first in the eighth round and again in the second. He outed Hans Birkie in 10 rounds, and Red Barry in three.

More recently he has disposed of Primo Camera and Kingtish Levinsky, both in short order, and he has smashed his “way through the crop of heavy-weight contenders like a hurricane, and has shown himself to bo a fast, and punishing puncher, and outside of the ring he is a very popular young fellow, quietly spoken and unassuming.

If, Louis receives his just deserts—a match with Braddqck—then a mil-liou-dollar gate should be in the oiling. He Is the first “ black menace since the days of the giant George Godfrey. A PEN PICTURE Paul Gallico, one of America’s greatest sports writers, paints a vivid pen picture in ‘ Vanity Fair ’ of the man whom many think will be the next world’s champion. He writes:—“When I finally met Joe Louis at Pompton Lakes, 1 round him all that was described, quiet, polite, and retiring. But somehow, as the afternoon progressed, and I watched him, I felt myself strongly ridden by the impression that here was a mean man, a truly savage person, a man on whom civilisation rested no more securely than a shawl thrown over one’s shoulders, that> in short, here was perhaps for the first time in many generations the perfect prizefighter. “ I had the feeling that I was in the room with a wild animal, and that his managers, Johnny Roxburgh and

Julian Black, in their brown riding boots, riding pants, 'and polo shirts, were his trainers. Their ever watchful eyes never left him, and something seemed to be missing from their costumes and _ their attitudes—they weren’t carrying whips and pistols loaded with blank cartridges. “Mind you, I am only quoting an impression. When they i tell me that Joe Louis is good to his mother and reads a chapter out of the Bible every

day, I believe them. After all, he did buy his mother a ten thousand-dollar house in Detroit, and. they will show you the Bible. But he walks like an animal, and he never looks you in the eye. \Vhen he sits in his' chair his eyes are cast on the floor. The expression on his face is sulky and_ sullen. Time, he was by no means at his ease when I. saw him. He was confronting a room full of reporters, who themselves were not in a particularly brilliant mood, and that is no easy task for anyone, much less a'2l-year-old boy. Also, it was no more than five days before his fight, and lie was getting on edge. “ We were gathered waiting for him in' the rear room of Dr Bier’s old colonial farmhouse. The front room, separated from it only "by a wide archway, contained a pool table. His three sisters came in. They had driven all the way from Detroit. They were all cafe-au-lait coloured, and dashingly named Vunies and Eulalia and Emmarell. Joe had been sleeping upstairs. When he came in the three sisters crowded around and threw their • arms around his neck. He looked at' them coldly, brushed some arms down, untwined others, pushed them away, glided across the room, and slouched into a chair, his pudgy face expressionless. It seemed a natural thing to do, but there were two ways of looking at_ it. It might have been a brother extricating himself from a mass of sisters. And it might , have been the action of a man with very little warmth or affection in him. He has another purely animal characteristic. The two things that he cannot seem to get enough of are food and sleep, and especially “ He answered all of our questions politely and to the best of his ability, and even laughed and smiled occasionally, showing fine white teeth. After which ho would relapse into those moody, sullen silences, silences that to mo had even a quality of truculence. Looking at him I had the strong, definite impression : ‘ This man’s gorge lies very close to the surface, it hasn’t far to go to rise. This is a dangerous man. “ If you have read this far you will have found traces of rather a confused mind. It is just this. To date the

boy’s behaviour has been above reproach. Bub I simply cannot bring myself to believe that any man who in the ring is capable of showing the absolutely cold, cruel, relentless, destructive, calculated ferocity that Louis shows, can, by the simple progress of pulling off a pair of stuffed leather mittens, backing through the strands of rope, and climbing down three little wooden steps from the ring to the floor, suddenly become a sweet and gentle character, “ If you saw Louis in the process of dismembering the two hundred and sixty pounds of Primo Carnera, and in the space of eighteen minutes transforming a powerful, courageous man into a .babbling, dithering, goggle-eyed jelly, you have a part of the picture. For the rest of it, yon should see or have seen Louis operating upon his sparring partners. Even Dempsey, who, up to this time, set tho_ standard for cruelty to human punching bags, had a pat on the head or the back for a man he had knocked- out or injured in a practice session. “I watched Louis batter three men of his own race brutally in rehearsal for his fight with Carnera, and < never once when it was over show a kindly gleam on his sullen countenance, or offer a single human touch of the hand. There is not so much as a glimmer of pity or mercy in this boy. The miracle is that he can be stopped and returned to his corner by the ringing of a bell. And yet it is not so much of a miracle at that. Even the supposedly untameabk tiger returns to his stool for Clyde Beatty.

“ There , was a spar boy who came to Louis’s camp with three cracked ribs that he got from Max Baer. Louis was short-handed because lie had battered most of his hired hands to the point where they were useless even as practice opponents. The boy with the bad ribs agreed to go in and box with Louis, and I imagine that it was tacitly understood that Louis would not hit his_ injured side, which, as he climbed into the ring, was a mass of tape. The bell rang, and the spar bo.v went into retreat, Louis chasing him. He was a pretty active fellow, and Lop is had trouble catching him, or connecting solidly to the head. After pursuing him for two minutes, Louis finally cornered the boy, and smashed him with his right hand squarely on the taping. “ Now, boys and_ girls, you can fool your old Uncle Gallio most of the time, but don’t try to tell me that he got that out of the Bible. That’s just plain men. But it’s swell. When you go to a prize-fight, you go for excitement and to see someone get hurt. Joe Louis is your man, “ His full name is Joseph Louis Barrow. He was born in Alabama. His father, a poor cotton picker, died when he was two years old. His mother is living. She is large and stout and placid, and a little puzzled. She was at the training camp the day I was there. Slio just looked at her son, and ■in her look, I thought, was constant and utter bewilderment. The same look, I imagine, that you might expect to find on the face of a large black hen that had hatched out a catamount.

“ Louis is being tutored, because he never had very much schooling. He was in a trade school learning to make cabinets, when he began amateur boxing, and wont on to win the Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago. One of the strangest things about him is his phenomenal development. In one fight ho was floored seven times. Since he turned professional a year ago he has never lost a fight, has never been on the floor, and out of 24 encounters, has knocked out 19 opponents. “ And he grew in weight and strength as he did in ability. In the Golden Gloves he was a light heavyweight, which means that he fought at 1751 b. To-day he weighs 2001 b, but so evenly distributed about his body that he looks small in the ring. He is the hardest hitter and the greatest natural puncher since the palmy days of Dempsey. In many of Louis’s earlier fights the ringsiders were willing to swear that bis opponents were shot from the balcony. “ His style is a sliding, weaving, rolling in that brings him close to his man. He carries his hands in front of him, and uses them for but one purpose—-to hit. For defence ho slips and rolls and ducks, or side-steps. Sooner or later the opening comes. The left whips through so fast that you hear the crack of the punch before you really know that one has been delivered. Or it might be right. “His job on Camera was the most technically brilliant and perfect a piece of planned destruction I have ever witnessed. In the opening round he hit Camera one right-hand crack to the face, and broke the inside of his mouth, so that for the rest of his allotted time, which was along into the sixth round, the Italian fought with a telltale' trickle of blood always streaming from one corner of his lips. “ But the punch was merely a sample and an experiment. It told Louis that, while he could hit Primo with his lethal right hand, and hurt him, due to Camera’s tremendous arras and guard, it was a difficult thing to bring off properly. He then set about the task of bringing those arms down where they would no longer interfere with him.' He did this by pelting Prime’s body for Four rounds. For 12 minutes he ‘ poured in agonising punches that made the big man gasp and double. In the fifth round he tried his man out. In a clinch, Camera tried to wrestle a little, and Louis spun him and threw him into the ropes, all 2GOIb of him. That was all Louis wanted to know.

“ At the end of the round, Camera’s guard 'was down around his waistband. Louis studied him the way a doctor studies a patient into whom he has shot a local anaesthetic, Then he turned and walked to his corner, and announced that the next round would be the one. In the sixth round, when lie went to smash Camera with his right, there were no arms to impede his passage, and so ho knocked him down three times, and finally the referee took the wreck of what had recently been Camera in his arms and prevented Louis from killing him, which he might have done. For when he got up the third time his hands were down at his side, and Louis was going to hit him as hard as he possibly could with both hands, and once again on the way down. “ For the young man is a disciple of Jack Blackburn rather than the prophets, He is good to his mother, goes to. church, and, they tell me, likes music—but he’s a mean, mean man in the ring.”