Max Baer

John Jarrett

Description

They called Max Baer the 'Clown Prince of Boxing', but trainer Ray Arcel remembered a night in 1933 when he worked Baer's corner in what was probably Max's greatest triumph, the night he smashed Max Schmeling to defeat in ten brutal rounds. That was no clown. A year later, Baer was heavyweight champion of the world. New York loved the handsome Californian. Broadway was his playground and he was never short of playmates; his manager Ancil Hoffman often settling some breach-of-promise suit brought by a leggy blonde showgirl. A natural for Hollywood. Radio and vaudeville engagements brought in $250,000. From a $4 a day foundry worker, Baer's rise was rapid. He bought so many suits he couldn't keep track of them; wore a new hat every week; bought a house like a hotel. Arcel cried like a baby when he read in the New York Times that Max had died from a heart attack in November 1959. Baer was just 50 years old. This is the fascinating story of an iconic boxing figure who achieved so much in a life too short.

Sujets

• Boxing
• Xian de Boxing

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785312977
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2017
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
John Jarrett, 2017
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785312960
eBook ISBN 9781785312977
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Contents
Preface
1. A Baer Cub Grows Up
2. This Kid Can Punch!
3. It Beats Working
4. Death Stalks the Ring
5. New York, New York
6. Loughran and Dempsey Teach the Baer
7. Climbing the Ladder
8. The Baer Catches the Kingfish
9. The Contender
10. Max Versus Max
11. A Whale of a Fight
12. Beauty and the Beast
13. Baer s Reel Life Drama
14. Who s Going to Beat Him?
15. There s Gonna Be a Fight!
16. Bringing the Title Back Home
17. Who Needs Boxing?
18. The Cinderella Man
19. Looking For Answers
20. Mary Ellen and Joe Louis
21. The Million Dollar Fight
22. Max Baer - Everyman
23. Max Baer s Brother Bud
24. Baers Seen in London
25. The Best Night He Ever Had
26. Death and Defeat
27. Max s Final Bow
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Photographs
To Albie, our little champ
Preface
I FOUND this item in the sports pages of the Daily Review of Hayward, California, dated 9 April 1957: ANYBODY WANT TO WRITE THE MAX BAER STORY? Apparently, Speed Maddock, the one-time sports editor of the old Post-Enquirer , left a partly finished biography of Baer when he died in 1955.
In 1942, Nat Fleischer, editor and publisher of The Ring magazine, had published what one sportswriter referred to as a nifty little book on Max Baer. Titled Max Baer: The Glamour Boy of the Ring , the book ran to 42 pages and sold for 50 cents. Today, dealers ask for upwards of 50! I m keeping mine.
Well, 60 years down the line from the untimely demise of Speed Maddock, I want to write The Max Baer Story. That partly finished biography Mr Maddock was working on would have been a good start, but I am just having to go from scratch. Where to start? Well, there is the World Wide Web. So I googled Max Baer and came up with a mind-boggling 132,398 references. Add to that my 1,000-plus library of boxing books and 65 years of boxing magazines, and there you go. Some 15 months later I am looking at four thick files of research material totalling 990 pages, all numbered and indexed. Ring the bell!
I start perusing those 132,398 references and it soon becomes apparent that they don t all refer to the Max Baer who ruled as world heavyweight boxing champion in 1934-35, the chap I am looking for. Al Warden, sports editor of the Ogden Standard Examiner, recalled in a 1937 column, There is a cab driver named Max Baer who hacks in New York City. Wrong guy A 1944 headline in the San Antonio Express , Baer Charged As Fugitive By FBI Agent proved a bum steer Reported in the San Mateo Times of California, in October 1959, Trooper Robert J. Uscowska said the Max Baer arrested for speeding was asked before a justice of the peace whether he was the former prizefighter. The man just smiled and somebody took it that he was, said the trooper. He wasn t.
In July 1934, a few weeks after Max Baer annihilated Primo Carnera to become world heavyweight champion, the Oakland Tribune ran this item from Atlanta, Georgia. MANY BAER BUTCHERS AND MOST NAMED MAX. W. H. Baer, Atlanta meat cutter, wasn t surprised at all when the man he claims as a cousin, thrice removed, practically butchered the man-mountain from Italy. For, says W. H. Baer, Max was a butcher, I am a butcher, my brother is a butcher, my father was a butcher and Max s father was in the meat packing business. Explaining how the family runs to the Maxes, W. H. said he had a son named Max, he knows a Max Baer in Fort Scott, Arkansas, and has a nephew in Atlanta named Max. Nephew Max, by the way, is a butcher.
This from the Post Herald and Register of Beckley, West Virginia, March 1958: Max Baer, 202 Reservoir Road, has been cast in the role of Harry Brock, the uncouth but very successful junk dealer, in the May production of Born Yesterday. Break a leg, Max.
Checking The Mountain Democrat of Placerville, California, for Friday, 31 May 1929, I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Under the heading, MAXIE BAER WINS IN FIST FIGHT; JOKES RULE AT LUNCHEON OF LIONS Placerville Lions nominated new officers at their Tuesday luncheon meeting, but that is of secondary importance. The big news of the meeting is that an alleged Jekyll-Hyde existence of past president Max Baer has been revealed. Maxie Baer, according to a newspaper clipping read by president Thomas Maul, showed his old-time form in trimming Chief Caribou in a boxing match at Stockton recently.
President Maul had the newspaper clipping from the Livermore Herald , and the Lions agreed, for a consideration, not to carry the tale further. Mr. Baer, the Lions past president, quietly insisted that he is a clothier and not a box-fighter and that it must be a namesake who put Caribou to rout.
It was indeed a namesake. It was Max Baer, a young heavyweight from Livermore, California, and he had indeed knocked out Chief Caribou inside two rounds of their bout at Stockton.
There was only one MAX BAER, and this is the guy I want to tell you about.
1
A Baer Cub Grows Up
M Y MOTHER was peculiar for a woman, recalled Max Baer. She loved boxing and wanted a heavyweight champion in the family. But it was my brother Buddy who was labelled as the future champ. Me, I was just going to be a cattle rancher like my father. 1
Dora Bales met Jacob Baer when he was employed by the Swift Meatpacking Company in South Omaha, Nebraska, where Dora s father, John Bales, also worked. Jacob was of French and Jewish ancestry and came from a long line of butchers. His father, Aschill Baer, operated butcher shops in the frontier towns of Cheyenne in Wyoming Territory and in Red Jacket, Michigan, before settling his family in Denver, Colorado. Aschill and his wife, Frances, who was 21 years younger, raised a family of seven sons and two daughters. The sons were all named for the tribes of Israel and the children s early education was in Jewish schools.
Jacob Baer was born in 1875. Dora, of German and Scots-Irish ancestry, was two years younger than Jacob when they celebrated Christmas 1904 by getting married. Frances May came along in the winter of 1905 with brother Max weighing in at a healthy 9 lb on 11 February 1909. Dora had been born in the Iowa town of Adel and she called her first son Maximilian Adelbert. A sister, Bernice Jeanette, joined the family in 1911, to be followed by Jacob Henry in 1915. He would be known as Buddy, and Dora was convinced she had her heavyweight champion.
This was a heavyweight family! Sportswriter Alan Gould penned in a 1931 column, My San Francisco associate Russ Newland has bobbed up with some very startling statistics - Russ writes, Max s father, Jacob Baer, weighs 246 pounds and was a fair amateur boxer. His mother weighs 230 pounds. One of her cousins weighs 395 pounds. On his father s side of the family, Max s grandmother weighed 300 pounds and his grandfather weighed a mere 280. Max s 15-year-old brother, Jacob Jnr. weighs 200 pounds and stands 6 feet 2 inches. The family is German-Jewish and all are six-footers. 2
In the summer of 1909, when baby Max was just six months old, the Swift Company moved the Baer family to Denver, Colorado, where Jacob took up a managerial position. Bernice and Buddy were born there, before Papa Baer packed them all off to Kaylor in New Mexico in 1915, where he took charge of a meat-packing plant. But there were no schools in Kaylor, so Bernice was sent away to a boarding school in Denver. Dora wasn t happy at having the family split up, so they all, including adopted son August Augie Baer, moved bag and baggage back to Denver, where they stayed until 1919.
Next stop was the Colorado town of Durango, where Jacob took a job with the Gradon Mercantile Company. But the harsh winters didn t suit Frances s rheumatic fever, nor did they help Jacob s high blood pressure, so in May of 1922 the Baers were on the move again, jammed into Jacob s new car, which was thoroughly tested over 1,000-odd miles of unpaved roads before they reached the West Coast, where Dora s sister lived in Alameda, California, across the bay from San Francisco.
Jacob s expertise as a butcher and cattle killer preceded him, and he received numerous job offers around the San Francisco Bay area. The family lived in the Northern California towns of Hayward, San Leandro and Galt before moving to Livermore in 1926. A couple of years later, Jacob was able to buy the Twin Oaks Ranch in Murray Township, where he raised over 2,000 hogs, working with Louis Santucci, husband of Frances. At 16, Max took a job as delivery boy for John Lee Wilbur, who ran a grocery store on B Street in Hayward and bought meat from Jacob. Max was also going to school - not because he wanted to, but because his father thought it would be a good idea if he learned to read. For a year he went to high school, where he played tackle on the football team. He loved all sports and enjoyed putting the shot, throwing the discus and tossing the javelin. But one year in high school was enough for the youngster. He was too active to be confined to a schoolroom, so he joined his father s business fulltime. It was a remarkable commentary on his career that in his boy