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

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Remarkably, sadly, Johnson carried on selling himself for several years after losing to Price, dressing up in loincloth and spear as part of a traveling circus, even sparring with old opponents from decades earlier, black fighters who'd also found the bottom of the barrel. It was a wretched decline, no less shocking for its inevitability. The boxing writer Bert Sugar remembers seeing such a show by Johnson on a schoolboy visit to New York in the forties. “Real sad,” is how he describes it. This was white America's revenge. Johnson's “golden smile” had driven racists to distraction when he beat James J. Jeffries in 1910 on America's most treasured day, the fourth of July. He would pay for that for the rest of his life.

Joe Louis's first defense of the heavyweight title once owned by Johnson was against the Welshman Tommy Farr, who fought him mightily close in front of 32,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that August. Farr had been lined up to fight Schmeling earlier in the year in London for what the Germans and the Daily Mail were happy to call the real world championship. This was farcical. Schmeling had a legitimate claim to challenge Louis for the title, given he'd won so comprehensively two years earlier, but to ignore the champion's right to be considered the linear king of the world after he'd beaten the incumbent Braddock was crass. It also exposed some craven instincts among members of the British boxing and media establishment who were willing to go along with the Nazi hysteria surrounding their Max. They wanted a Farr–Schmeling fight in London as much as Hitler did. It might well have been that patriotism and greed played a bigger part than ideology in their meek acceptance of Goebbels's entreaties, but it was no more morally convincing for that.