Boxing/ James J Braddock: Cinderalla Man goes on general release in Irish cinemas this weekend - starring Russell Crowe as James J Braddock, heavyweight champion of the world, 1935-37. The film centres on Braddock's defeat of Max Baer in New York on June 13th, 1935, in what is generally rated as the greatest upset in that division until Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson in 1990. Braddock was the last titleholder with genuine Irish credentials. Jack Anderson tells his story.
As the United States slowly recovered from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, its sports fans sought out icons who encapsulated the nation's new deal. Joe DiMaggio would announce himself to major legal baseball with the New York Yankees in 1936. Seabiscuit was the horseracing story of the decade. Yet, no other sport could match the colour and charisma of heavyweight boxing.
On June 29th, 1933, Primo Carnera had defeated Jack Sharkey for the heavyweight championship, in a fight that was clearly fixed.
Carnera, an Italian, was, literally, a 6ft-6in circus freak show. He had everything a boxer's physique had to have, except the ability to take and throw a punch.
The mob manoeuvred him into a title shot, pressurising the champion's manager, 'Fat' John Buckley, into a deal. In the sixth round, Sharkey, tired of waiting for the 'Ambling Alp', fell as if shot by a sniper. A confused Carnera was champion.
One year later, after two lucrative, if embarrassing, defences, the mob were sufficiently sated to permit the hapless Italian to be brutally beaten in 11 rounds by Max Baer.
Baer was a throwback to the heavyweight lineage of the Jack Dempsey era - a ferocious puncher with a wild temperament - and his promoters struggled to find him a suitable opponent for the marquee summer fight of 1935. They eventually settled upon James J Braddock.
Braddock was seen as the ideal opponent for the first of, what was presumed, many title defences. A former light-heavyweight championship contender, he was not seen as a heavy puncher, but would be savvy enough to provide Baer with a mildly strenuous workout. Braddock also considered himself Irish, and being Irish was boxing's original and still profitable marketing ploy.
Braddock duly entered the ring with shorts stitched with a shamrock. Baer wore the Star of David. It is now largely forgotten, but working-class Irish-Jewish enmity was the seminal rivalry of the American fight scene.
While Baer-Braddock was an easy sell to the New York public, it did not rate as much of a betting contest. Braddock entered the ring the 10 to 1 underdog. An ambulance waited outside. It had not been ordered for Baer.
Jimmy Braddock had, however, faced worse odds. This year is the centenary of his birth in Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's west side. Both parents, though born in Manchester, were of Irish descent - and 1905 is symbolic in that it was the year in which John L Sullivan, the first world heavyweight champion of note, fought his last bout.
Braddock always placed himself firmly within that Irish-American prize-fighting tradition and his middle initial was adopted from James J Corbett, another Irish-American, who had defeated Sullivan in 1892 in the first heavyweight title bout fought under the Queensberry rules.
It says it all about the Hell's Kitchen area of the era that a family move to New Jersey was seen as a change for the better. It was in that state that Braddock first came to notice as a professional fighter.
In July 1929, he was defeated on points by the outstanding Tommy Loughran for the world light-heavyweight title. After the fight, with Loughran's right shoulder badly bruised, he told the waiting press that if Braddock ever learned to aim his left jab for the face he would be a champion.
Braddock, however, did not listen and like many young fighters who get their title shot early, he faded quickly. By July 1933, Braddock had lost nearly half of his 32 intervening fights.
His dependency on his right hand meant he broke it on several occasions and he became a journeyman pro, fighting through the excruciating pain as he could not afford to get his hand reset properly. His wife (played by Renée Zellweger in the film) urged him to quit.
He did and set up a taxi company, but it smothered in the Great Depression. With three kids to feed, he turned to New Jersey's waterfront for work and finally to welfare. In 1934, Braddock and 600,000 others in New Jersey signed on to receive $6.30 a week in social relief.
AS CHRISTMAS and destitution approached, Braddock's diminutive and loyal manager, Joe Gould, saw an opportunity. New York fight promoters were trying to secure a fight for an upcoming boxer from San Francisco, John Henry Lewis.
They were encountering difficulties because not only was Lewis good, he was also black. Gould took the fight. Braddock shocked Lewis in 10 rounds, announcing that most of his $750 purse would be spent on "milk and groceries".
On March 22nd, 1935, Braddock again used his ringcraft to beat the highly rated Art Lasky. Unbelievably, Braddock was now a contender. The 'Cinderella Man', as legendary sports writer Damon Runyon labelled him, had arrived for the ball. But first Braddock would give $300 of his Lasky winnings to a local relief fund covering the $240 all told that he had received on welfare.
Three months later, Braddock faced Baer. The movie captures the drama and sentimentality of that victory, but it was also a triumph of careful preparation.
In 1931, Baer had been beaten by Braddock's old master Tommy Loughran. Loughran had evaded Baer's power punching by moving anti-clockwise and using a retreating left jab. Now Braddock listened and learned, and an overconfident, ill-prepared Baer was defeated on points.
Two years later, Braddock participated in his only title defence, against Joe Louis. Technically, Braddock should have offered the defence to the number one contender, Germany's Max Schmeling.
Schmeling had defeated Louis a year previously, offering the Nazis some comfort in the face of Jesse Owens's domination of the Berlin Olympics. However, in boxing you rarely get what you deserve, only what you negotiate, and exploiting Schmeling's unpopularity, Braddock signed a lucrative contract with Louis.
Braddock would knock down the 'Brown Bomber' in the first round of their fight at Chicago's Comiskey Field on June 22nd, 1937. By the eighth round he was sprawled on the canvas like a crumpled duvet, pummelled by one of the sport's enduring stars.
Subsequently, Braddock slipped into obscurity. In a line of former champions introduced before the Rocky Marciano-Roland La Starzo heavyweight title fight of September 1953, the embarrassed announcer had to check who he was.
Nonetheless, unlike so many professional boxers before and since, Braddock had kept his winnings and his faculties. On November 29th, 1974, he died peacefully in the home he and his wife had bought from his championship takings of 1937.
IN CONTRAST, his opponent Max Baer had died of a heart attack in 1959. Baer was never the pitiless, cartoonish villain portrayed in the movie. He may have been a playboy champion and he did kill a man in a fight - Frankie Campbell in 1930. However, his family have always claimed the tragedy deeply affected Baer, manifesting itself not in the heartlessness the film attributes to him, but in his financial contributions to the welfare of Campbell's family.
In the 1930s his wearing of the Star of David was a hugely emblematic and not always popular gesture.
The practice had started in June 1933, when Baer defeated Schmeling. In the 10th round, ringside microphones picked up Baer's taunts - with every finishing blow he said, "There's one for Hitler."
It was Baer's finest moment in the ring and in beating Schmeling he also denied the Nazis a glorious propaganda coup in what was, supposedly, the first of the Third Reich's 1,000 years.
The Cinderella Man apart, professional boxing in 1930s America was a crowded screenplay.
It was full of inspirational plots and courageous personalities. In Braddock's circumstances, those words struggle to encapsulate the personal adversity he encountered in Depression-era America.
Within the ring, it is said that prize fighters leave no professional legacy greater than honesty. By all accounts, including Hollywood's, our Jimmy Braddock was an honest man.
* Jack Anderson lectures in sports law at Queen's University Belfast. He has recently completed a PhD entitled 'The Legality of Boxing.'
