view raw text
AT THE RINGSIDE By Barney Naaler . NEW YORK, N. Y.. M.ay 14.— The day of Joe Louis 43rd birthday anniversary, which was Monday, a visitor at the International national Boxing isoxing ciud Clubs s national Boxing isoxing ciud Clubs s hideaway in Madison Square Garden reflected on the state of things in fist-fighting and came away with the thought that all might have been dif-erent if a kid out of Alabama, by way of Detroits Paradise Valley, had not come along years ago to give the the business business of of boxing boxing the the business business of of boxing boxing a direction it might never have taken without him. That would be Louis, of course, the one who now gets paid 00 a week "as a sort of hireling of the IBC, although the nature of his job is something remote from definition. He is said to be a kind of mission-- ary man, retailing the good story of the game to the citizenry wherever he goes. In truth, however, Louis is on the payroll because he showed the way, back in 1949, for the founding of the IBC, through his resignation as world heavyweight champion and by virtue of what he regarded as the intrinsic right he held in the title. At the time, Louis deeded title to the championship to Jim Norris and Ar thur Wirtz, who founded the IBC and who today stand shoulder to shoulder in their struggle against anti-trust agents who want to put them out of business, AAA Louis would not have been in a position to give away the title if it had not been for the coincidence of chronology. Louis might never had come out of the Midwest to affect the course of fight history if a New Yorker named Mike Jacobs hadnt come up to Broadway years earlier to become the countrys No. 1 ticket scalper and later its No. 1 promoter. Jacobs was more than a mere ticket broker. He was something beyond a fight promoter. He was a showman. He had his rflops too, including the time he presented ice-skating Sonia Henie down in Miami i Beach when the natives were not yet ready to see ice any place but in their whiskey , tumblers. Jacobs early recognized Louis attractiveness, even though a veteran fight promoter " had first crack at Joe and turned him J down, in a sense, because he did not believe that a Negro could cut the barbed j wiie of prejudice to become an outstanding • attraction. AAA Jacobs was not beset by bigotry because , Continued on Page Forty -Nine AT THE RINGSIDE I By BARNEY NAGLEB Continued from Page Two he was not socially attuned in that direction. From his early, or knicker, days he had been a hustler who made a buck wherever he detected a glimmer of green. He saw in Louis money in abundance and paid no attention to Joes race. For Jacobs, race meant a rush to the bank wicket. He accepted Louis as a commodity, nothing more. In time, of course, Jacobs came to believe that he had been motivated solely by democratic instincts. When he was painted as the man who beat down bigotry, he accepted the role as though born to the battlers uniform. Indeed, he even let it be believed that he was interested in striking a blow against tyranny when he made the second match between Louis and Max Schmeling. It turned out that Louis knocked out Schmeling and not only atoned for himself but gave some pause to the tyrants who retailed the fairy tale of race superiority. In the long run, obviously and tragically it took the lives of millions of fighters around the world to undermine the theorists of tyranny. At any rate, this was a high point in Louis career, unequaled in all the fights that came after it . . . All the fights including the first bout with Billy Conn . . . And the second one as well . . . The fistic fiasco, which made Jacobs richer but was his artistic undoing and, some say, led to his eventual physical collapse and the emergence of the IBC. They used to say, in Jacobs time, that he was a monopolist who ran the game to his own liking. Now they are saying this about Mr. Norris and Mr. Wirtz, which is true up to a point, but not beyond it, because boxing is run by the managers who run their fighters as they please, up to and into the ground. Louis was fortunate in this regard. He had managers who not only knew how to move him toward the championship, but also showed him the way to big money. How the money was spent is another story. For another day.
