Sport: The boxer Kevin McBride made an appearance on the Late Late Show recently.
A pleasant, lumbering sort of fellow, whose glacial style has been described as akin to watching somebody trying to box while underwater, McBride has achieved some fame and hopefully some fortune late in his career by becoming the last man to knock down the ruined ex-convict Mike Tyson.
The Clones Colossus - boxing has always taken a childlike pleasure in the welding of alliterative nicknames though our man has escaped the fate of Max Baer who lived and died as The Livermore Larruper - thus takes his place in the cursed lineage of boxing's decline. McBride punched Tyson's head. Tyson punched the head of Lennox Lewis and so on in one concussive line of decay through Lewis to Briggs to Foreman to Frazier to Ali to Liston to Patterson to Moore to Marciano to Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.
One punch reverberating through the ages and through the shuddering decline of boxing. It scarcely needs saying that the world of boxing in which Kevin McBride works is a grotesque and irrelevant sideshow to world sport. When Schmeling and Louis fought each other a heavyweight title fight could bring the world to the edge of its seat.
The sport held itself together and was recognisable as a sport until March of 1971 when its golden son, Muhammad Ali, fought Joe Frazier in a bout which was the apotheosis of what a sport could be. Since then the curve has been downwards.
David Margolick, whose work, in its preference for taking in the big picture, flirts often but skilfully with the danger of syllogism (this was so and that was so, therefore . . .), has chosen for his latest book to revisit the world as it sat and waited in 1938. Max Schmeling and Joe Louis served then not just as a global distraction but as crude symbols of other possibilities.
The moment is well chosen by Margolick. The rematched heavyweight fight of 1938 played out against a fetid backdrop of Nazi sabre rattling and Allied appeasement. On the cusp of war it was easy to believe that a boxing match could somehow settle the whole argument. There is a frightening quaintness in the notion of Americans sending derisive telegrams to Hitler in the light of Schmeling's defeat. And every moment of Louis's win is shadowed by the knowledge that his lease on the affections of white America is contingent and temporary.
The fight itself is well documented and has been the subject of several books and a fine PBS documentary (The Fight) but Margolick has raked the soil thoroughly and extracted much that is new and useful. He lets the argot of sportswriting in the 1930s tell the story and handles with particular subtlety Joe Louis's rise to prominence as freedom's saviour.
"One hundred years from now," suggested the east coast sportswriter, Heywood Broun, "some historians may theorise, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automobile worker who had never studied the policies of Neville Chamberlain . . ."
The reaction became less gleeful the further south Joe Louis cared to go in his choice of reading.
"No intelligent person of whatever color, is likely to claim that this proves Alabama negro stock is superior to Aryan stock but the situation appeals to the American sense of humour and fair play," said the Huntsville Times down in Alabama.
"The colored people do not win many great victories and when they do win a fisticuff in New York or a footrace in Berlin we don't grudge it to them," said the Charleston News and Courier.
There is nothing new in boxing, from Jack Johnston to Mike Tyson, being held up as a prism through which to assess race relations in the United States but Margolick's attention to detail and nuance and handling of a great story make the difference.
In the end, both Schmeling and Louis were loved by the American public because they represented their respective races so poorly. Neither man ever fitted comfortably the role into which the mainstream media of the time ushered him. Joe Louis was a genial, quiet man who never bothered white folk by being "uppity". Schmeling was no Nazi and fell in love with the States as a young man.
The irony is obvious in Louis - who would end his days broke and being exploited as a meeter and greeter in a Vegas casino - being hailed for dealing a fistic rebuke to Nazi theories of race. It is no less beautiful or significant for being obvious though.
Margolick does a fine job of looking into the smaller ironies and ambiguities of a unique American life and the picture which emerges of complex American attitudes to race and the divergence of public policy and private view is oddly prescient in the weeks after the Louisiana Superdome etched itself onto our consciousness as something other than a sports crucible.
For his part, Schmeling, who spent weeks in hospital after his defeat, retained a lifelong love of the US and having been Nazi Max in 1938 would become known as the "Good German" later in life. Louis (or "The Brown Bomber" as he was known) would not just fall on hard times but would be derided decades later by Ali for being an "Uncle Tom".
Schmeling would conceal and save two teenage Jewish boys in his Berlin hotel suite on Kristallnacht later in 1938. One of the boys, Henri Lewin, would later own the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
These are the sort of details which form the seam of Margolick's narrative and support the broader history he reaches for. Two apolitical, diffident sportsmen boxers intersected with the storyline of one of mankind's greatest conflicts. The tensions which radiated outwards were innumerable. Schmeling's colourful manager, Joe Jacobs, described at the time as a "New York sidewalk boy of the most conspicuous Jewishness", was once photographed giving a Nazi salute and managed to make himself a hate figure for pretty much everyone from the Ku Klux Klan to his own religion.
Margolick captures the nuance of all this beautifully. As a sports event which worked on several different levels Schmeling versus Louis is without parallel. In it's own compelling way, Margolick's definitive book does the event and the characters who lived it the justice they deserve.
Max Schmeling died last February, at 99 years of age. Who would have thought one of the participants and most of the racial problems from 1938 would outlive boxing itself?
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist
Beyond Glory: Max Schmeling vs Joe Louis and a World on the Brink By David Margolick Bloomsbury, 423pp. £18.99