What Our Grandfathers Knew About Joe Louis

Published

13 years ago

August 24, 2012

He might not have had the forethought or business acumen to nickname himself “The Greatest,” but Joe Louis was the greatest heavyweight prizefighter who ever lived.

Our grandfathers and great grandfathers knew this well. I wish we did, too.

They saw “The Brown Bomber” put together the most impressive championship reign in the history of the sport. They watched him absolutely demolish an opponent who’d previously bested him by exploiting a soon-corrected flaw of dropping his left lead too low in the most important sporting event there could ever be. They marveled at his unparalleled combination of power, speed and technical precision.

But Joe Louis wasn’t just the best heavyweight they had seen, he was the best heavyweight anyone has seen — ever.

In 2003, Ring magazine praised him as the greatest puncher of all-time. He was devastatingly accurate. He wielded beautifully mechanical combination punches with frightening ease. He elicited songs of praise and adulation like no fighter before or since. There were even a multitude of songs written about him.

Joe Louis never tried to break anyone’s arm or threaten to eat their children, and he didn’t float like a butterfly because he didn’t need to…he was all sting!

I happen to be of the opinion that God made one perfect prizefighter, and that it was Joe Louis. It’s a sentiment shared by many notable boxing historians. Our own resident history buff and TSS expert, Frank Lotierzo, calls Louis “the most faultless heavyweight fighter in history.”

In fact, the International Boxing Research Organization ranks Louis the top heavyweight in history according to its most recently updated member poll posted from March 2005.

Joseph Louis Barrow was born in 1914 in Lafayette, Alabama. He was the seventh of eight children in a family of sharecroppers. In his autobiography, Louis remembered the bareness of the red clay soil – its simplicity.

“You would have thought the whole world was red clay,” he penned.

When he was only two years old, Joe’s father, Munroe Barrow, was committed to an insane asylum. In 1926, his mother remarried a local contractor named Pat Brooks, and the pair moved the family to Detroit in search of a better life.

There, a young Louis took an interest in boxing at the request of a schoolmate. In order to keep his mother off the trail, Joe would sneak his boxing gloves around in a violin case she gave him for music lessons. Instead of making music with his violin, though, Joe made music with his fists, and he quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant fighter. He won fifty of his fifty-four amateur fights and decided to turn pro in 1934 at age twenty.

His professional career took off quickly. He was a paid pugilist for less than a year when he thrashed former champion Primo Carnera in six rounds. He knocked out iron-jawed former champ Max Baer later that year, and was quickly hailed the next great heavyweight champion.

But in 1936 Joe Louis lost to rival and future friend, Max Schmeling. He was hammered repeatedly by right hands from Schmeling who had figured out Louis would leave his left hand too low after delivering his jab. He made him pay for the mistake the entire fight. Louis was knocked out in round twelve after taking just too much punishment.

It was just the lesson he needed.

Two months later, Louis rebounded from the loss by knocking out former champion Jack Sharkey in three rounds. No longer letting his lead hand be lazy, he’d soon become the most dominant force the heavyweight division had ever seen.

Louis won the title in 1937, defeating “Cinderella Man” James J. Braddock in eight rounds. He defended the title three more times until he could get a rematch with Schmeling who, by this time, had become a pawn for Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany.

While Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi, it didn’t really matter. The world saw him in one corner, representing Hitler, fascism and the most vile racism conceivable, and Louis in the other, representing a fierce resistance to the Nazi ideals.

The build-up to the fight was incredible, and it is likely to never be duplicated. Hitler’s “master race” would be on display for the world to see. Schmeling was Nazi Germany’s unwilling hero – an Aryan superman who would prove the merits of their insane paradigm.

Meanwhile, Louis was cast as an American hero simply out of necessity. He embodied the anti-Nazi.

“Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany,” President Roosevelt told Louis before the fight.

If it wasn’t the first time a black man had been rallied behind as symbol of hope and freedom in racially divided America, it was by far the grandest and most galvanizing.

The fight itself turned out to be a mismatch. Hitler telephoned Schmeling moments before the opening bell rang and could have likely stayed on the line long enough to hear his fallen hero return from the ring broken and battered.

Louis pulverized his nemesis in just one round, and with him the perception of Hitler’s strength, knocking him to the canvas three times in brutal fashion. It was vintage Joe Louis. It was the greatest prizefighter who ever lived at his very best in his biggest moment.

Afterwards, when some hailed Louis as “a credit to his race,” one writer profoundly responded, “Yes, Louis is a credit to his race — the human race.”

Recalling the historical significance of the event with boxing historian Larry Schwartz for an ESPN special, “The Brown Bomber’s” son, Joe Louis Jr., praised his father for being a bridge between white and black America.

“What my father did was enable white America to think of him as an American, not as a black,” he said. “By winning, he became white America's first black hero.”

In his prime, Joe Louis was without equal. At his peak, as he was against Schmeling in 1938, Louis was the perfect fighting machine. He had everything a fighter could hope to have, and he was both athletically gifted and technically sound.

Arguably the most dominant champion of any weight class in history, Louis wore the heavyweight crown for almost twelve full years. Even taking two years from his reign to serve his country in World War II, he defended his title twenty-five times before retiring in 1949.

Despite his tremendous success, money problems forced him to come back to the ring in 1950 when he was well beyond his best. He lost a unanimous decision to Ezzard Charles, then reeled off eight straight wins before his final bout, a loss to Rocky Marciano (who was ten years his junior) in 1951.

After his retirement, Louis lived a beleaguered life. He battled family issues, mental illness, drug use and the IRS. In 1981, Louis died at age 66 in Las Vegas, where he had been given a job as a greeter at Caesar’s Palace.

It’s hard to describe the significance of someone like Joe Louis to today’s generation. Louis fought before the information age had taken over the world, and storytellers today only tend to spin yarns for those they can romanticize from their youth. If it were up to them, it seems, we’d only hear the tales of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson.

I resist the urge to do this, because I’d rather be a truthful boxing historian than a gifted raconteur. Boxing is more important than that to me, so, as much as I love Evander Holyfield, I try not to oversell his place among the pantheon of greats.

There is no such thing as overselling significance when it comes to Joe Louis.

I once tried to pen something to describe Joe Louis in an adequate manner, and all I came up with was a hodgepodge of words pieced together by others’ remembrances. One cannot capture something like a dream with mere sounds and letters.

Perhaps, though, the story of Joe Louis is best told as succinctly as his punches were against Schmeling in the rematch all those years ago. I found this scribbled about Joe in one of my old journals. It appears to be an attempt at that.

Joe Louis grew up dirt poor and died the same way. In between that, he became the second African American to win the World Heavyweight championship, the first and only person to defend any world title 25 straight times, the quintessential American hero who fought for his country both inside and outside the ring, and possibly the most feared fighter who ever lived.

Rather, if you’re one of those people who only have enough attention span left from your day to keep up with news through twitter (I’m guilty of this myself), here is the TLDR (too long didn’t read) version, too.

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Kelsey McCarson

Arne’s Almanac: The First BWAA Dinner Was Quite the Shindig

Published

13 hours ago

April 20, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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The first annual dinner of the Boxing Writers Association of America was staged on April 25, 1926 in the grand ballroom of New York’s Hotel Astor, an edifice that rivaled the original Waldorf Astoria as the swankiest hotel in the city. Back then, the organization was known as the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York.

The ballroom was configured to hold 1200 for the banquet which was reportedly oversubscribed. Among those listed as agreeing to attend were the governors of six states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland) and the mayors of 10 of America’s largest cities.

In 1926, radio was in its infancy and the digital age was decades away (and inconceivable). So, every journalist who regularly covered boxing was a newspaper and/or magazine writer, editor, or cartoonist. And at this juncture in American history, there were plenty of outlets for someone who wanted to pursue a career as a sportswriter and had the requisite skills to get hired.

The following papers were represented at the inaugural boxing writers’ dinner:

New York Times

New York News

New York World

New York Sun

New York Journal

New York Post

New York Mirror

New York Telegram

New York Graphic

New York Herald Tribune

Brooklyn Eagle

Brooklyn Times

Brooklyn Standard Union

Brooklyn Citizen

Bronx Home News

This isn’t a complete list because a few of these papers, notably the New York World and the New York Journal, had strong afternoon editions that functioned as independent papers. Plus, scribes from both big national wire services (Associated Press and UPI) attended the banquet and there were undoubtedly a smattering of scribes from papers in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Back then, the event’s organizer Nat Fleischer, sports editor of the New York Telegram and the driving force behind The Ring magazine, had little choice but to limit the journalistic component of the gathering to writers in the New York metropolitan area. There wasn’t a ballroom big enough to accommodate a good-sized response if he had extended the welcome to every boxing writer in North America.

The keynote speaker at the inaugural dinner was New York’s charismatic Jazz Age mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker, architect of the transformative Walker Law of 1920 which ushered in a new era of boxing in the Empire State with a template that would guide reformers in many other jurisdictions.

Prizefighting was then associated with hooligans. In his speech, Mayor Walker promised to rid the sport of their ilk. “Boxing, as you know, is closest to my heart,” said hizzoner. “So I tell you the police force is behind you against those who would besmirch or injure boxing. Rowdyism doesn’t belong in this town or in your game.” (In 1945, Walker would be the recipient of the Edward J. Neil Memorial Award given for meritorious service to the sport. The oldest of the BWAA awards, the previous recipients were all active or former boxers. The award, no longer issued under that title, was named for an Associated Press sportswriter and war correspondent who died from shrapnel wounds covering the Spanish Civil War.)

Another speaker was well-traveled sportswriter Wilbur Wood, then affiliated with the Brooklyn Citizen. He told the assembly that the aim of the organization was two-fold: to help defend the game against its detractors and to promote harmony among the various factions.

Of course, the 1926 dinner wouldn’t have been as well-attended without the entertainment. According to press dispatches, Broadway stars and performers from some of the city’s top nightclubs would be there to regale the attendees. Among the names bandied about were vaudeville superstars Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante, the latter of whom would appear with his trio, Durante, (Lou) Clayton, and (Eddie) Jackson.

There was a contraction of New York newspapers during the Great Depression. Although empirical evidence is lacking, the inaugural boxing writers dinner was likely the largest of its kind. Fifteen years later, in 1941, the event drew “more than 200” according to a news report. There was no mention of entertainment.

In 1950, for the first time, the annual dinner was opened to the public. For $25, a civilian could get a meal and mingle with some of his favorite fighters. Sugar Ray Robinson was the Edward J. Neil Award winner that year, honored for his ring exploits and for donating his purse from the Charlie Fusari fight to the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund.

There was no formal announcement when the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York was re-christened the Boxing Writers Association of America, but by the late 1940s reporters were referencing the annual event as simply the boxing writers dinner. By then, it had become traditional to hold the annual affair in January, a practice discontinued after 1971.

The winnowing of New York’s newspaper herd plus competing banquets in other parts of the country forced Nat Fleischer’s baby to adapt. And more adaptations will be necessary in the immediate future as the future of the BWAA, as it currently exists, is threatened by new technologies. If the forthcoming BWAA dinner (April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in mid-Manhattan) were restricted to wordsmiths from the traditional print media, the gathering would be too small to cover the nut and the congregants would be drawn disproportionately from the geriatric class.

Some of those adaptations have already started. Last year, Las Vegas resident Sean Zittel, a recent UNLV graduate, had the distinction of becoming the first videographer welcomed into the BWAA. With more and more people getting their news from sound bites, rather than the written word, the videographer serves an important function.

The reporters who conducted interviews with pen and paper have gone the way of the dodo bird and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A taped interview for a “talkie” has more integrity than a story culled from a paper and pen interview because it is unfiltered. Many years ago, some reporters, after interviewing the great Joe Louis, put words in his mouth that made him seem like a dullard, words consistent with the Sambo stereotype. In other instances, the language of some athletes was reconstructed to the point where the reader would think the athlete had a second job as an English professor.

The content created by videographers is free from that bias. More of them will inevitably join the BWAA and similar organizations in the future.

Photo: Nat Fleischer is flanked by Sugar Ray Robinson and Tony Zale at the 1947 boxing writers dinner.

A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.

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Gabriela Fundora KOs Marilyn Badillo and Perez Upsets Conwell in Oceanside

Published

1 day ago

April 20, 2025

David A. Avila

Gabriela-Fundora-KOs-Marilyn-Badillo-and-Perez-Upsets-Conwell-in-Oceanside

It was just a numbers game for Gabriela Fundora and despite Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo’s elusive tactics it took the champion one punch to end the fight and retain her undisputed flyweight world title by knockout on Saturday.

Will it be her last flyweight defense?

Though Fundora (16-0, 8 KOs) fired dozens of misses, a single punch found Badillo (19-1-1, 3 KOs) and ended her undefeated career and first attempt at a world title at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, California.

Fundora, however, proves unbeatable at flyweight.

The champion entered the arena as the headliner for the Golden Boy Promotion show and stepped through the ropes with every physical advantage possible, including power.

Mexico’s Badillo was a midget compared to Fundora but proved to be as elusive as a butterfly in a menagerie for the first six rounds. As the six-inch taller Fundora connected on one punch for every dozen thrown, that single punch was a deadly reminder.

Badillo tried ducking low and slipping to the left while countering with slashing uppercuts, she found little success. She did find the body a solid target but the blows proved to be useless. And when Badillo clinched, that proved more erroneous as Fundora belted her rapidly during the tie-ups.

“She was kind of doing her ducking thing,” said Fundora describing Badillo’s defensive tactics. “I just put the pressure on. It was just like a train. We didn’t give her that break.”

The Mexican fighter tried valiantly with various maneuvers. None proved even slightly successful. Fundora remained poised and under control as she stalked the challenger.

In the seventh round Badillo seemed to take a stand and try to slug it out with Fundora. She quickly was lit up by rapid left crosses and down she went at 1:44 of the seventh round. The Mexican fighter’s corner wisely waved off the fight and referee Rudy Barragan stopped the fight and held the dazed Badillo upright.

Once again Fundora remained champion by knockout. The only question now is will she move up to super flyweight or bantamweight to challenge the bigger girls.

Perez Beats Conwell.

Mexico’s Jorge “Chino” Perez (33-4, 26 KOs) upset Charles Conwell (21-1, 15 KOs) to win by split decision after 12 rounds in their super welterweight showdown.

It was a match that paired two hard-hitting fighters whose ledgers brimmed with knockouts, but neither was able to score a knockdown against each other.

Neither fighter moved backward. It was full steam ahead with Conwell proving successful to the body and head with left hooks and Perez connecting with rights to the head and body. It was difficult to differentiate the winner.

Though Conwell seemed to be the superior defensive fighter and more accurate, two judges preferred Perez’s busier style. They gave the fight to Perez by 115-113 scores with the dissenter favoring Conwell by the same margin.

It was Conwell’s first pro loss. Maybe it will open doors for more opportunities.

Other Bouts

Tristan Kalkreuth (15-1) managed to pass a serious heat check by unanimous decision against former contender Felix Valera (24-8) after a 10-round back-and-forth heavyweight fight.

It was very close.

Kalkreuth is one of those fighters that possess all the physical tools including youth and size but never seems to be able to show it. Once again he edged past another foe but at least this time he faced an experienced fighter in Valera.

Valera had his moments especially in the middle of the 10-round fight but slowed down during the last three rounds.

One major asset for Kalkreuth was his chin. He got caught but still motored past the clever Valera. After 10 rounds two judges saw it 99-91 and one other judge 97-93 all for Kalkreuth.

Highly-rated prospect Ruslan Abdullaev (2-0) blasted past dangerous Jino Rodrigo (13- 5-2) in an eight round super lightweight fight. He nearly stopped the very tough Rodrigo in the last two rounds and won by unanimous decision.

Abdullaev is trained by Joel and Antonio Diaz in Indio.

Bakersfield prospect Joel Iriarte (7-0, 7 KOs) needed only 1:44 to knock out Puerto Rico’s Marcos Jimenez (25-12) in a welterweight bout.

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‘Krusher’ Kovalev Exits on a Winning Note: TKOs Artur Mann in his ‘Farewell Fight’

Published

2 days ago

April 19, 2025

Arne K. Lang

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At his peak, former three-time world light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev ranked high on everyone’s pound-for-pound list. Now 42 years old – he turned 42 earlier this month – Kovalev has been largely inactive in recent years, but last night he returned to the ring in his hometown of Chelyabinsk, Russia, and rose to the occasion in what was billed as his farewell fight, stopping Artur Mann in the seventh frame.

Kovalev hit his peak during his first run as a world title-holder. He was 30-0-1 (26 KOs) entering first match with Andre Ward, a mark that included a 9-0 mark in world title fights. The only blemish on his record was a draw that could have been ruled a no-contest (journeyman Grover Young was unfit to continue after Kovalev knocked down in the second round what with was deemed an illegal rabbit punch). Among those nine wins were two stoppages of dangerous Haitian-Canadian campaigner Jean Pascal and a 12-round shutout over Bernard Hopkins.

Kovalev’s stature was not diminished by his loss to the undefeated Ward. All three judges had it 114-113, but the general feeling among the ringside press was that Sergey nicked it.

The rematch was also somewhat controversial. Referee Tony Weeks, who halted the match in the eighth stanza with Kovalev sitting on the lower strand of ropes, was accused of letting Ward get away with a series of low blows, including the first punch of a three-punch series of body shots that culminated in the stoppage. Sergey was wobbled by a punch to the head earlier in the round and was showing signs of fatigue, but he was still in the fight. Respected judge Steve Weisfeld had him up by three points through the completed rounds.

Sergey Kovalev was never the same after his second loss to Andre Ward, albeit he recaptured a piece of the 175-pound title twice, demolishing Vyacheslav Shabranskyy for the vacant WBO belt after Ward announced his retirement and then avenging a loss to Eleider Alvarez (TKO by 7) with a comprehensive win on points in their rematch.

Kovalev’s days as a title-holder ended on Nov. 2, 2019 when Canelo Alvarez, moving up two weight classes to pursue a title in a fourth weight division, stopped him in the 11^th round, terminating what had been a relatively even fight with a hellacious left-right combination that left Krusher so discombobulated that a count was superfluous.

That fight went head-to-head with a UFC fight in New York City. DAZN, to their everlasting discredit, opted to delay the start of Canelo-Kovalev until the main event of the UFC fight was finished. The delay lasted more than an hour and Kovalev would say that he lost his psychological edge during the wait.

Kovalev had two fights in the cruiserweight class between his setback to Canelo and last night’s presumptive swan song. He outpointed Tervel Pulev in Los Angeles and lost a 10-round decision to unheralded Robin Sirwan Safar in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Artur Mann, a former world title challenger – he was stopped in three rounds by Mairis Briedis in 2021 when Briedis was recognized as the top cruiserweight in the world – was unexceptional, but the 34-year-old German, born in Kazakhstan, wasn’t chopped liver either, and Kovalev’s stoppage of him will redound well to the Russian when he becomes eligible for the Boxing Hall of Fame.

Krusher almost ended the fight in the second round. He knocked Mann down hard with a short left hand and seemingly scored another knockdown before the round was over (but it was ruled a slip). Mann barely survived the round.

In the next round, a punch left Mann with a bad cut on his right eyelid, but the German came to fight and rounds three, four and five were competitive.

Kovalev had a good sixth round although there were indications that he was tiring. But in the seventh he got a second wind and unleashed a right-left combination that rolled back the clock to the days when he was one of the sport’s most feared punchers. Mann went down hard and as he staggered to his feet, his corner signaled that the fight should be stopped and the referee complied. The official time was 0:49 of round seven. It was the 30^th KO for Kovalev who advanced his record to 36-5-1.

Addendum: History informs us that Farewell Fights have a habit of becoming redundant, by which we mean that boxers often get the itch to fight again after calling it quits. Have we seen the last of Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev? We woudn’t bet on it.

The complete Kovalev-Mann fight card was live-streamed on the Boxing News youtube channel.

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