Read Online Terror in the City of Champions by Tom Stanton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tom Stanton
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was the real reason why I allowed him to leave. I believe he is going to be one of the really great managers of the game. Like all new managers, he is trying too hard at present. He is taking baseball too seriously. Fifty years as a manager of a baseball team has taught me a lesson that Mickey has yet to learn.”
Boxing teams from twenty states converged on St. Louis for the national Amateur Athletic Union championships. Of the hundreds competing one boxer was drawing the most attention by far. Word had been spreading about the promising fighter from Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood. In a short time he had risen from the city’s Golden Gloves competition to the top tier of American amateurs. No one wanted to miss this emerging phenom, this “baby-face Negro,” as some writers were calling him. As Joe Louis, a light-heavyweight, slipped into the ring for his title match, aficionados of the sport rushed to their seats.
Joe Louis Barrow came to Detroit at age thirteen in 1926 after his mother and stepfather, Lillie and Pat Brooks, had moved north from Alabama with their oldest sons. A close call with the Klan had prompted Brooks to head to Michigan to seek a better life for his family. “The Ku Klux Klan stopped them and was going to pull them from the car,” recalled Louis’s sister Vunies. “Someone in the crowd recognized my stepfather. He said, ‘That’s Pat Brooks. He’s a good nigger.’ . . . My stepfather . . . made up his mind that night he was leaving Alabama.” After Brooks had settled into a job, he and his wife sent for their children, who were staying with family. In Detroit Joe floundered in school but got work. He shoveled snow. He sold ice in the summer and coal in the winter from a horse cart. Later he operated a lathe. When he discovered boxing at the Brewster Center—famously redirecting the money his mother had given him for violin lessons—he began to see his future take shape. As Louis plowed through opponents, others took notice.
“When he hit you, it hurt for days,” said Eddie Futch, who had sparred with him.
In Missouri the AAU match did not last long. Louis dropped his opponent, Arlo Soldati of Princeton, Illinois, three times in two rounds. His final punch, a right to the head, put Soldati on the mat, unconscious, for five minutes. Nat Fleischer, covering the bout for Ring magazine, called Louis “the most promising heavyweight prospect” he had seen since Max Schmeling in 1926. James Zerilli, writing for Louis’s hometown fans, said Louis had honored himself as “the classiest and most finished boxer” at the tournament. The black press lavished attention on Louis as a posse of trainers, managers, and racketeers pushed to get a piece of his lucrative future. They wanted to take Louis into the professional ranks. He wasn’t yet twenty.
The Tigers exploded at the end of May. They swept the Boston Red Sox at Navin Field, split a four-game series in St. Louis against the Browns, and then won eight of ten games against Cleveland and Chicago, scoring more than ten runs in five of those contests. In a cycle of three games, they accumulated forty-three runs—twenty in one thrashing of the Indians. By the end of the second week of June, Detroit sat in first place, ahead of New York.
But the Yankees were also playing well. Thirty-nine-year-old Babe Ruth was winding down his tenure in pinstripes. He would last one more season in the majors. After the previous campaign New York had tried to unload Ruth, offering him as a playing manager and a gate draw. Frank Navin had considered him for a while, but the deal grew complicated with demands and delays, and ultimately Navin favored Cochrane. Ruth could still hit on occasion. In a two-game series against the Tigers, he popped three home runs. But he was becoming a liability overall. Sports editor Harry Salsinger, who had witnessed Ruth’s entire career, offered a blunt assessment. He described Ruth as a “distinct handicap” in
Boxing teams from twenty states converged on St. Louis for the national Amateur Athletic Union championships. Of the hundreds competing one boxer was drawing the most attention by far. Word had been spreading about the promising fighter from Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood. In a short time he had risen from the city’s Golden Gloves competition to the top tier of American amateurs. No one wanted to miss this emerging phenom, this “baby-face Negro,” as some writers were calling him. As Joe Louis, a light-heavyweight, slipped into the ring for his title match, aficionados of the sport rushed to their seats.
Joe Louis Barrow came to Detroit at age thirteen in 1926 after his mother and stepfather, Lillie and Pat Brooks, had moved north from Alabama with their oldest sons. A close call with the Klan had prompted Brooks to head to Michigan to seek a better life for his family. “The Ku Klux Klan stopped them and was going to pull them from the car,” recalled Louis’s sister Vunies. “Someone in the crowd recognized my stepfather. He said, ‘That’s Pat Brooks. He’s a good nigger.’ . . . My stepfather . . . made up his mind that night he was leaving Alabama.” After Brooks had settled into a job, he and his wife sent for their children, who were staying with family. In Detroit Joe floundered in school but got work. He shoveled snow. He sold ice in the summer and coal in the winter from a horse cart. Later he operated a lathe. When he discovered boxing at the Brewster Center—famously redirecting the money his mother had given him for violin lessons—he began to see his future take shape. As Louis plowed through opponents, others took notice.
“When he hit you, it hurt for days,” said Eddie Futch, who had sparred with him.
In Missouri the AAU match did not last long. Louis dropped his opponent, Arlo Soldati of Princeton, Illinois, three times in two rounds. His final punch, a right to the head, put Soldati on the mat, unconscious, for five minutes. Nat Fleischer, covering the bout for Ring magazine, called Louis “the most promising heavyweight prospect” he had seen since Max Schmeling in 1926. James Zerilli, writing for Louis’s hometown fans, said Louis had honored himself as “the classiest and most finished boxer” at the tournament. The black press lavished attention on Louis as a posse of trainers, managers, and racketeers pushed to get a piece of his lucrative future. They wanted to take Louis into the professional ranks. He wasn’t yet twenty.
The Tigers exploded at the end of May. They swept the Boston Red Sox at Navin Field, split a four-game series in St. Louis against the Browns, and then won eight of ten games against Cleveland and Chicago, scoring more than ten runs in five of those contests. In a cycle of three games, they accumulated forty-three runs—twenty in one thrashing of the Indians. By the end of the second week of June, Detroit sat in first place, ahead of New York.
But the Yankees were also playing well. Thirty-nine-year-old Babe Ruth was winding down his tenure in pinstripes. He would last one more season in the majors. After the previous campaign New York had tried to unload Ruth, offering him as a playing manager and a gate draw. Frank Navin had considered him for a while, but the deal grew complicated with demands and delays, and ultimately Navin favored Cochrane. Ruth could still hit on occasion. In a two-game series against the Tigers, he popped three home runs. But he was becoming a liability overall. Sports editor Harry Salsinger, who had witnessed Ruth’s entire career, offered a blunt assessment. He described Ruth as a “distinct handicap” in
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