Read Max Baer and the Star of David for Free Online Page B

and strutted around the ring, yet even while the crowd cheered, and while Schaaf’s seconds dragged him to his corner and worked to restore him to his senses (it would be an exact three minutes, the length of a round, before Schaaf opened his eyes), Max, clinging to me, whispered his fear.
    “Did I hurt him the way I hurt Campbell?” he asked. “Tell me, Horace. Tell me, please. Tell me I didn’t, okay? I was just toying with him, really. He’s an okay fighter, but I carried him tonight, Horace. I didn’t hurt him bad, did I? I could have done him in early, but…”
    “You fought a good fight,” I said. “You were powerful yet merciful.”
    As if I had thrust a knife into his belly, Max pulled away. “Don’t you lie to me, Horace,” he said. “Don’t you ever dare lie to me, do you hear? Do you hear ? I ain’t the fool you or anyone else takes me for.”
    Then he turned away and, after blowing kisses to the crowd, went to Schaaf’s corner, embraced him, and told him he was the best fighter he had ever faced.
    A month later, in the same stadium, Max easily defeated Tuffy Griffiths, a fighter who had once won fifty consecutive bouts before being knocked out by the future champion James Braddock, and the newspapers confirmed our hope: that Max would soon be given a shot at the title. Before this could happen, however, we returned to New York City’s Madison Square Garden to watch Schaaf fight Primo Carnera, who was first in line, ahead of Max, for a challenge to the reigning champion, Jack Sharkey.
    Schaaf was as game against Carnera as Max had been in his first fight against Schaaf, but he was clearly not the fighter he had been before his bout against Max. In the eleventh round, Carnera landed a light blow to Schaaf’s chin that, surprisingly, caused Schaaf to go limp and drop to the canvas, where he lay, unmoving.
    He never woke up, and when he died two days later, Max agreed with what the boxing world quickly concluded: that it was not Carnera’s blow that had killed Schaaf, but the savage beating, six months earlier, Max had inflicted upon him. Max brooded on this—on the labels of “killer” and “butcher” that now attached to his name virtually every time it appeared in print—even while his will to be champion became more inflamed. Nor did he shy away from keeping himself in the public eye. Rather the opposite. So that, as he prepared for what would be the major fight of his life thus far, against Max Schmeling at the Yankee Stadium in New York City, he courted journalists as never before—taking me, and his trainer, Mike Cantwell, and his publicist, Sam Taub, with him on endless rounds of newspaper offices, where he entertained reporters with antics that included using Taub for a punching bag and then jamming him into a wastebasket. And two weeks before the bout, he told me, in confidence, of his decision to enter the ring at the Yankee Stadium with a large Star of David emblazoned on the right leg of his boxing trunks, thereby declaring to the world that he was a Jew who was ready to stand up to a German known to be the favorite of the German people’s new leader, Adolf Hitler. “You just watch and see, Horace—this is gonna make me immortal in the eyes of the whole goddamned world!”
    Although Max was only one-quarter Jewish—his father’s father was Jewish, which made him even less Jewish than former champion Jack Dempsey, whose paternal grandmother was Jewish—Max gloried in the way the press took up the story, especially given news arriving from Europe about the oppressive measures the Third Reich was inflicting upon Jews.
    “Hey,” he told reporters in the dressing room before the fight when one of them questioned how Jewish he was, “seems like over there, whether you’re part-Jew or all-Jew, you pay the same price, so you can bet your mother’s whiskers I’m gonna show this Kraut that we Jews know how to take care of ourselves.”
    And when on the night of June 8, 1933,