The Champ Remembered

Twenty-five years after Joe Louis' death, Anderson recalls that some of the heavyweight champion's most significant blows were delivered on behalf of black golfers

The heavyweight champ for nearly 12 years, Louis (1948) loved golf.

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

By Dave Anderson

Photo: Courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

April 21, 2006

Once a heavyweight champion, always a world heavyweight oracle. Joe Louis had not reigned for more than a decade before his 1965 arrival at the Poland Spring resort in the Maine woods to hype the second Ali-Liston heavyweight title bout in nearby Lewiston. The champ was there to dispense his pugilistic wisdom to the boxing literati attending Liston's workouts, except that he seldom was there.

"Joe's out on our golf course," somebody explained. "He's out there all day." And if you knew where to look every few hours, he indeed was out there, towering above his pull-cart as he trudged from the 18th green to begin another round on the fashionable resort course that President William Howard Taft had played nearly a century ago on vacation from the White House.

"Joe just keeps going around and around," a man in the pro shop said. "He must play 45 holes a day, maybe 54."

At ringside the night of the fight, the old champ was sitting behind the sports columnist Jimmy Cannon who once defined Louis as "a credit to his race--the human race." Midway through the first round Ali threw what appeared to be a soft right hand, but Liston dropped as if shot. After flopping around like a hooked salmon during the confusion over the timekeeper's count, Liston was up and trading punches when referee Jersey Joe Walcott waved his arms. With the crowd chanting, "fake, fake, fake," Cannon turned to Louis and asked what he thought of that punch.

"Wouldna crushed a grape," the old champion said.

Joe Louis always told it like he saw it. When asked why the United States was going to win World War II, he said, "Because we're on God's side." When he donated more than $111,000 to Army and Navy Relief from two title bouts during the war, then was asked how it felt to be fighting for nothing, he said, "I ain't fightin' for nothin'. I'm fightin' for my country." When reminded that black soldiers weren't getting as much respect as white soldiers did, he said, "Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain't goin' to fix 'em."

Among the wrongs at the time was the PGA of America's "Caucasian-only" clause, inserted in its by-laws in 1943, that excluded African-American golfers from its membership, thereby barring them from PGA-sanctioned tournaments, but Joe Louis was the first to help fix it. Twenty-five years after his death on April 12, 1981, Louis is remembered primarily as the heavyweight champion for a record 11 years and nine months from 1937 to 1949, for his record 25 successful title defenses, for his first-round knockout of Max Schmeling, later a German Army paratrooper, in 1938 when Hitler was on the brink of his blitzkrieg through Europe, and for his 13th-round knockout of Billy Conn in 1941 when the Pittsburgh challenger was ahead on points.

But not enough people remember Louis for his humble integration of the American sports conscience as a boxer a decade before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line in 1947 and nearly three decades before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led civil-rights marches. Except for the Joe Louis "The Champ" GC, a 6,869-yard par-72 public course south of Chicago, nothing in golf honors him for his mostly forgotten integration of the 1952 San Diego Open.

As an undefeated 22-year-old heavyweight contender, Louis had hardly seen a golf course until the weeks before his first fight with Schmeling in 1936. Introduced to the game by two sportswriters, Hype Igoe and Walter Stewart, he even left his Lakewood, N.J., training camp two weeks before the fight to spend a day at that year's U.S. Open at Baltusrol. When not sparring, as recalled in David Margolick's Beyond Glory, he sneaked off to play golf so often that Schmeling's manager, Joe Jacobs, saw it as a weakness.

"He's even cut out his road work to play golf every morning," Jacobs snorted. "Get a load of that, will ya? Golf!" Instead of discussing boxing during a conversation with a Detroit sportswriter before that fight, Louis talked "all golf: stances and grips and hooks and slices." In a stunning upset, Schmeling knocked him out in the 12th round. But he never blamed his sudden fascination with golf for that loss, and for the rest of his life he played whenever and wherever he could.