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

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Mike Jacobs, however, outflanked them all. He stole Farr from under their sneering noses, brought him to America, and put him in with Louis. He deserved the fight, no question; he'd outpointed Baer over twelve rounds in London in April, then two months later knocked out the German Walter Neusel in three rounds.

The Welshman, awkward, determined, and well schooled in the orthodox English way, gave Joe all the trouble he could handle over fifteen rounds at Yankee Stadium on August 30, 1937, although no nostalgia-addled rewriting of history should persuade readers that Tommy deserved to win.

Not even the Evening Standard, as bellicose a British flag-waver as any, saw it that way, though their correspondent, Ben Bennison, did his best. “No fighter within my long experience,” he reported from ringside, “has fought a braver fight for the heavyweight championship of the world than did Tommy Farr against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium here. . . . Farr's gallantry was complete, and a scathing answer to the American critics who, almost without exception, held him to be no sort of fighter, certainly no foeman worthy of the negro's steel.”