Fireworks

It looked like the finale of an old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration in The Bronx's Yankee Stadium one night last week. The murky sky was suddenly illuminated with scores & scores of blinding flashes of light as photographers frantically realized that they had to get a whole evening's work into a few fleeting seconds. In the centre of the field, in a little canvas ring, German Boxer Max Schmeling, who was challenging Negro Joe Louis for the heavyweight championship of the world, was collapsing physically and professionally like a sky rocket.

It was all over in 124 seconds by the clock.* Most of the 70,000 spectators, some of whom paid as much as $125 for a seat, were as bewildered as the challenger. Men who were lighting their pipes missed the whole thing. By the time those in the rear rows had jumped onto their chairs to see over the heads of those who had jumped onto their chairs in front, the match looked like a crap game. In the ring everyone seemed to be crouched on the canvas. Referee Arthur Donovan was counting--three, four, five--over the dazed challenger as a towel came sailing into the ring. Picking up the towel (an outmoded symbol of surrender, now illegal in New York State), the referee threw it out of the ring, stopped the fight--a victory on a technical knockout for Champion Louis.

In his dressing room, Challenger Max Schmeling announced that he had been fouled by a punch to the kidneys. He was rushed to the Polyclinic Hospital, via a circuitous route to avoid the hysterical celebrations in Harlem. Meanwhile, millions of Germans, gathered around their radios all over the Reich at three o'clock in the morning, wept into their beer. "Impossible," they wailed when the broadcast was abruptly cut off immediately after the announcement of the knockout. Cafe and restaurant owners, who had been given special permits to stay open until 6 a.m., wrung their hands as their patrons gloomily filed out three minutes after the broadcast began. Schmeling's wife, pretty Anny Ondra, who is one of the most popular cinemactresses in Germany, sobbed: "It's terrible that punches like that are permitted." Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler sent her his condolences and Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels sent flowers.

The Berlin Boersen-Zeitung am Mittag sportingly editorialized: "We who for many years were proud and happy over Schmeling's victories must now show that we can be fair losers. . . . He may be assured that the Fatherland will never forget his 14 years' record."

Less handsomely, Berlin's 12 Uhr Blatt declared: "Max had to fight three opponents: Louis, advancing age and certain unfair machinations. If Max did not succeed, it was not because there is a better boxer than he, not because Louis is a superman. For two years Schmeling had to wait for a fight which was denied him against all the rules of fairness and sportsmanship."

Next day on Broadway, slow-motion newsreels revealed what had actually happened during those incredible 124 seconds. Schmeling was knocked down three times in the fastest and most furious attack in ring history. No foul blow was struck. The decisive punch was a violent right to the jaw (after five rapid hooks) that landed so squarely Schmeling's hair shook like a mop. The body blows that followed, when Schmeling was hanging glassy-eyed on the ropes, were just for good measure. The famed kidney punch, by this time almost an international incident, was a blow to the short ribs--a common ribroaster in fistic circles.

But from the hospital came hourly bulletins on Schmeling's condition. His managers said he was badly hurt. Two days later, when Schmeling was sitting up in bed and X-rays of his "fractured vertebra" were published in the papers, disinterested doctors laughed at the excitement. Some called his injury just a sprained back. Others said it was an everyday occurrence on college football fields.

*Louis got $2,590 for every second he was in the ring, Schmeling got $1,295.

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