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

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While they willed him to lose against Braddock, even their ingrained prejudices could not drown out common sense, and 80 percent of them in the end plumped for the challenger when they met at Chicago's Comiskey Park on June 22, 1937, a year after Schmeling had creamed Louis and two years after Braddock had beaten Baer. Jack Dempsey, who never put his title on the line against a black man, picked Braddock, as ordinary a champion as the division ever had.

The fight wasn't a classic, but it didn't lack for drama. Louis hit the floor in the first, from an uppercut by the thirty-two-year-old champion. Cinderella Man, it seems, did not want to go home before his carriage turned into a pumpkin. It was his last half glimpse of the prize. What bettors didn't know was that Jim had a dead arm, pumped up by drugs to get him into the ring but anesthetized even further by Joe's constant battering. His left dropped lower and lower, exposing his chin to the Bomber's killer right cross. Soon enough, the fight swung the other way and, by the sixth, Braddock was spent and razored across his weathered face, but, as Gould reached for the white towel of surrender, the champion cautioned him that such an act of betrayal would be the last between them. And they'd been together eleven years, so Jim knew what he was talking about. Whatever the champion's bravery, Louis continued his clinical carving and, within two rounds, he'd dispatched the old man. He'd done it. Joe was the first black champion since Jack Johnson gave up the title in 1915 in dubious circumstances to the leering white behemoth, Jess Willard, on a sweltering afternoon in Havana.