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THE SECOND LOUIS-SCHMELING FIGHT
On the night of June 22, 1938, when Max Schmeling entered the ring for
the second time against Joe Louis, he was, by choice, a representative
of the super race and thus an extension of Adolf Hitler. Louis was, by
birth, a member of a race Hitler, if successful, would have enslaved
or liquidated. Thus this meeting had a political importance never
before or since associated with a prize fight, and Louis had his
greatest night.
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Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from
a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose
jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock
out Max Schmeling.
It was a shocking thing, that knockout-short, sharp,
merciless, complete. Louis was like this:
He was a big lean copper spring, tightened and retightened
through weeks of training until he was one pregnant package of coiled
venom.
Schmeling hit that spring. He hit it with a whistling
right-hand punch in the first minute of the fight-and the spring,
tormented with tension, suddenly burst with one brazen spang of
activity. Hard brown arms, propelling two unerrring fists, blurred
beneath the hot white candelabra of the ring lights. And Schmeling was
in the path of them, a man caught and mangled in the whirring claws of
a mad and feverish machine.
The mob, biggest and most prosperous ever to see a fight in a
ball yard, knew that here was the end before the thing had really
started. It knew, so it stood up and howled one long shriek. People
who had paid as much as one hundred dollars for their chairs didn't
use them-except perhaps to stand on, the better to let the sight burn
forever in their memories. |
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Bob Considine
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