(See Cover) Next Monday night 27-year-old Joe Louis is to defend his Heavyweight Championship—for the 19th and maybe the last time.
This time the challenger for Joe Louis' crown is a student of yoga, 26-year-old Lou Nova who has boasted that he is a Man of Destiny, that he will knock out the Champion with his "cosmic punch" (straight from the seventh vertebra, center of balance), and the aid of his "dynamic stance," his controlled breathing.
Probably about 50,000,000 radio-fight fans* will listen in for good reason. Not only is Lou Nova about as likely to beat Joe Louis as any challenger now afoot, but even if Joe Louis wins—and the chances, as always, are better that he will than that he won't—it may be Joe's last fight. Recently reclassified 1-A by a Chicago draft board, the Brown Bomber will probably join the Army next month.
As a soldier, he may get a furlough to fight now & then during the next 18 months, as Bummy Davis, Fred Apostoli, Steve Belloise and other enlisted men have done. But Broadway fightmongers last week predicted that Joe will do what he has always hoped to do: retire undefeated champion of the world—as Gene Tunney did, but without benefit of Shakespeare.
If Joe Louis' fistic career terminates next week, ten fabulous years of a big coffee-colored boy's life will end. Ten years ago, Joe Louis Barrow was a Detroit ragamuffin, toting ice for fly-by-night icemen to earn a few pennies to keep his feet in shoes. Transplanted from an Alabama cotton patch at the age of 12, the strapping, slow-thinking boy, only two generations away from slavery, had found himself a misfit in city schools where his classmates were nearly half his age. He never got beyond the fifth grade.
On city streets, Joe got along better. When his gang started something, Joe finished it. One day in 1931, one of his pals persuaded him to go to the Brewster St. Recreation Center (a settlement house in the heart of Detroit's "black bottom"). There Joe learned to box. At first he disliked it, preferred handball. But within a year, Joe Barrow was the best fighter in the Center, won a silver cup as the most outstanding novice light-heavyweight in Detroit's Golden Gloves tournament.
Two years later Joe reached the final in the light-heavyweight division of the National Amateur boxing championships at Boston. By that time Joe had come to the attention of dignified, college-bred John Roxborough (recently indicted and charged with connections with the numbers racket). Roxborough, son of a reputable Negro lawyer and angel of Detroit's black belt, had helped put a dozen colored boys & girls through the University of Michigan.
At that time Roxborough was on the verge of backing another up-&-coming Negro light-heavyweight, John Henry Lewis of Arizona. But after seeing Joe box a few rounds, Roxborough forgot about John Henry. "What's your name, boy?" he asked the shy, shambling kid. "Joe Louis Barrow," the kid replied. "That's too long, I'll just call you Joe Louis."