Book review: 'Joe Louis: Hard Times Man' by Randy Roberts

JOE LOUIS: Hard Times Man, by Randy Roberts. Yale University Press, 308 pp., $27.50.

Joe Louis was a titan, the undisputed heavyweight champion boxer for more than 12 years (a record 23 title defenses) and, probably, the greatest American sports hero of the 20th century. Yet, oddly to those of us who grew up hearing him talked about as if he were a folk hero in the mold of John Henry, the memory of his achievement has largely faded from our collective consciousness.

Why? Possibly because, as Randy Roberts points out in "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man," the sport that Louis strode through like a colossus has been in decline for decades. "During the 1930s in the United States," Roberts writes, "5,000 to 6,000 professional boxers practiced their trade annually, compared to half that number worldwide today."

Another reason is that Louis' legend is sandwiched between two great rebels of sport - Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (subject of Roberts' "Papa Jack") and Muhammad Ali. Because the flamboyant, divisive Johnson offended so many whites, no black boxers were allowed to fight for the heavyweight title from 1915 to 1937, when Louis knocked out Jim Braddock.

Born in 1914 in a sharecropper's shack near Lafayette, Ala., Louis moved with his family to Detroit when he was 12. Young Joe quickly discovered he had a talent for boxing; that he also took violin lessons (which his mother hoped would keep him out of trouble) seems like a scenario from a Hollywood melodrama. Guided by the expertise of trainer Jack Blackburn and black sportsman John Roxborough, Louis cut a swath through the amateur and then professional ranks.

Louis was widely regarded as the uncrowned champion before he was finally given a title shot. In 1936, while still an undefeated challenger, he was beaten in a shocking upset by Max Schmeling, a former champion and native German. Louis rebounded to win the title, and then, in 1938, in the most widely anticipated sporting event ever held, got his revenge by KO-ing Schmeling in the first round.

With the United States and Nazi Germany on the verge of war, sportswriter Joe Williams dubbed the second Louis-Schmeling fight "The Battle of Awesome Implications." Nearly 100 million people tuned in on radio. "No event had ever attracted an audience that large," Roberts writes, "not a sporting event, a political speech, or an entertainment show."

"Joe Louis" isn't so much a biography as a cultural history of its subject's life and times. Roberts is particularly sensitive to the issue of race. Newspapers of the time, for example, were filled with descriptions of Louis as something "not quite human . . . out of the African jungle."

But "Joe Louis" isn't sociology. It's a thrilling account of an extraordinary life. No other American sports figure of the century performed with such grace under unimaginable pressure - first representing black Americans, then representing American pride in the boxing ring. Roberts has reclaimed this giant for us.