Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн

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Fame in sports did not spare black servicemen from prejudice. Jackie Robinson, who, after the war, would become the first black player in Major League Baseball, did his basic training at Fort Riley in Kansas. Toward the end of his time there, he overheard a white officer call a black soldier “a stupid black nigger sonofabitch.” Robinson intervened, thinking his standing as a rising baseball star might carry some influence. “That goes for you too, nigger,” was the curt reaction. Robinson threw an angry right hand and knocked several of the officer's teeth out. Luckily for Robinson, Joe Louis, who had met Gibson in 1935, was by now also at Fort Riley. He informed his lawyer friend of the incident.

As Gibson put Robinson's defense to the officer in charge of the investigation, Louis intervened in a way that those who knew him might have imagined was beyond his simple ways. “General, you have to do a lot of entertaining and I took the liberty of delivering a case of wine to your quarters,” the heavyweight champion of the world told him. “This is not any bribe or whatever, but I would like for my friend, Jackie Robinson, to finish his course.”