Max Baer
World Heavyweight Champion
1934 - 1935

   

MAXIMILLIAN ADALBERT BAER
b. February 11, 1909
d. November 21, 1959

 

WON
72

LOST
12

DRAWS
0

KO'S
53
 

This vintage sepia-tone photo has been autographed by future world heavyweight champion Max Baer... Boldly signed and inscribed in black fountain pen ink... Baer has dated 5/25/34 beneath his signature making this photo signed just 20 days before capturing the title by knocking out Primo Carnera on 6/14/34!!

measures: 7 x 9"
condition: excellent

sold

Max Baer
    Max had the makings of a great fighter but he could never take the sport seriously. A curly-haired, likable fellow, Max infuriated his various managers by the way he clowned through life. He hated to train and despised hard work in any form, anything that kept him away from his companions.
    The "Magnificent Screwball," as sports writers dubbed him, was brought up on a ranch near Livermore, California, where his father owned a butcher shop. Max quite school early. In his teens he was swinging a sledge hammer and an axe in his father's shop, killing and butchering cattle. In this way he developed the long, supple arm and shoulder muscles that latter gave him his terrific hitting power.
    Good-natured Max was 19 when he threw his first punch in anger -- at a big cowboy in a Livermore dance hall. To his utter surprise the cowboy went down as if a train had hit him, and stayed down. This gave Max ideas. He bought boxing gloves and a punching bag and began to work out with them with a ring career in mind. Within a year he was fighting professionally along the Pacific Coast. From the start he was a hit as a knockout artist.
    Max was always poor at figures. Whenever he was in need of money, which was often, he would sell a piece of himself to anyone who would buy a share. Soon he found out that he had sold 113% of himself to several managers. This was a mathematic impossibility but that did not bother Maxie. He was having too much fun. In the press he was described as "the man with the million-dollar body and the 10-cent brain."
    "Madcap Maxie" -- another one of his many names -- never took the trouble to learn how to box, how to defend himself. He was perfectly willing to take a wallop in order to land his deadly right-hand punch.
    The word "deadly" used here is no exaggeration. Max killed a fighter named Frank Campbell in a San Francisco ring. The terrible beating he gave Ernie Schaaf caused a brain hemorrhage and his eventual death from Carnera's light tap.

John Durant-The Heavyweight Champions