Free Max Baer and the Star of David by Jay Neugeboren

although the tales from the Bible are religious in nature—written by God, or to praise God—her love of Bible stories—of The Song of Solomon, which is her favorite—has had more to do with the pleasure human beings give and take from one another when they are in love.”
    “That’s good news,” Max said. “Not to make light of your brother’s death, Joleen, but I can buy what you’re saying about regret. I can buy that big-time.”
    He chucked me gently on the cheek, then took Joleen’s hands in his.
    “I’m real sorry for your loss, and for what you lived through,” he said to her. “So what I’m gonna do, see, is when I fight the fight that’s gonna make me heavyweight champion of the world, I’m gonna dedicate the fight, and my victory, to your brother James. That’s what I’m gonna do.”
    Max was true to his word. While he trained for the championship fight against Carnera, who had won the title a year earlier by knocking out Jack Sharkey with an uppercut that, according to those at ringside, never touched Sharkey’s jaw, he talked about James every day. “I’m gonna win the fight for James, and for your wife,” he would say. “I’m gonna turn that simple-minded lug to ashes—and when I say ashes I don’t mean the kind they haul away after a night with a lady friend.”
    Carnera, however, fifty pounds heavier and five inches taller than Max, was an early favorite, the bookmakers setting the odds against Max at more than two to one, and with reason. Following on his victory against Schmeling, Max was having too good a time to be bothered by working out regularly. Once the championship bout was scheduled—a first for him—Max went an entire year without fighting a single fight. And while Max was staying away from the ring, Carnera was busy defending his title, going the distance of fifteen rounds against two excellent boxers—Paolino Uzcudun, former European heavyweight champion, and Tommy Loughran, former world light-heavyweight champion—thereby demonstrating how seriously he took his conditioning, and the responsibility to be a fighting champion.
    Six weeks before the title fight, we set up our training camp in Asbury Park, on the New Jersey shore, but beginning with our first day there Max was more interested in the women who walked the boardwalk than in his speed bag or sparring partners. Even when William Brown, a member of the New York State Boxing Commission, arrived to see if rumors he was hearing were true—that Max was turning our training camp into a circus—Max continued to be Max. When Brown threatened to cancel the fight, and declared Max “a bum,” Max laughed. “I got some ancient wisdom for you, my friend, to help you with the little woman you got waiting for you at home,” he said to Brown, when a group of reporters had gathered around. “And here it is: ‘Confucious say that foolish man give wife grand piano, but wise man give wife upright organ.’”
    A few minutes later, as if to prove how fit he was, Max, already in a dapper outfit—blue blazer, fawn-colored slacks, black-and-tan dancing shoes—proceeded to lift his brother Buddy, who weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds, above his head, spin him around, set him down, and do so without even breathing hard. The following afternoon, Max held court as he did most afternoons, and when a writer who had been covering Carnera reported that Carnera was in top-notch condition, Max said that was fine with him, because it meant he’d get more credit when he licked him. “Listen, if it wasn’t meant for me to be heavyweight champion of the world, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “No kidding.” And then, quietly, what he had said to me in private, but had never said to others: “I don’t like fighting, you know.”
    Astonished by Max’s statement, the writers tried to get him to explain what he meant, but the only thing Max did was to repeat what he had said, without apology, and to add, as if he were