Free Max Baer and the Star of David by Jay Neugeboren Page A

talking about going out to buy a cup of coffee or a morning newspaper, that if the main idea was to go out there and knock the other guy down—well, he could do that.
    “So if you bozos don’t have any more questions,” he said, “I’m gonna head out now and show my brother how to have a good time in this town.”
    At the weighing-in ceremony four days before the fight, Max, arriving late, and in his finest white linen outfit, sat down next to Carnera, who, stripped to the waist, was sitting on an examining table. Max winked at the reporters, plucked a hair from Carnera’s chest and held it up for all to see. “ He loves me! ” he proclaimed. And before Carnera could respond, Max had plucked a second hair from Carnera’s chest. “Aw,” he said, “he loves me not…”
    In truth, although I enjoyed Max’s antics, like others, I was concerned, for not only was he seemingly disinterested in the fight itself, but the part of him that feared inflicting harm on others was showing itself forth with alarming frequency. Before sleep each night and upon waking each morning, he talked with me about Joleen and her brother James. How could it be, he would ask, that human beings could hurt one another in the ways they did. How could it be that a father could burn his own son to death, and how could a good woman like Joleen live with the knowledge she had made her own father—despicable and deserving of punishment though he was—blind? Then, sensing my unease about his readiness for the upcoming fight, he would reassure me, saying that there was nothing to worry about because he knew exactly what he was doing and why. When he entered the ring against Carnera, he was going to be thinking not of what he had done once upon a time to Campbell and Schaaf, but of what Joleen’s father had done to James, and this would enable him to be every bit the monster Carnera was said to be.
    Despite constant pleas from his trainer, Cantwell, and his manager, Hoffman, to attack his sparring partners, when he had one of us on the ropes (I continued, occasionally, to spar with him), or had stung one of us with a crushing blow that left us helpless, Max would simply back away. When a reporter accused him of lacking the requisite “viciousness” to be a true champion, Max replied with a simple statement, and without the least bravado: “Hey—I feel great. I’m no gymnasium fighter, see—so I don’t want to hurt any of my sparring partners.” He shrugged, and continued in a low, even voice: “But I’ll go after Carnera all right. You can count on it. I’m going to be the champion, and don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
    Before dawn on the day of the bout, his head resting on my chest, Max said that although what he’d been saying—that he didn’t like boxing, and that he didn’t want to hurt others—was true, because of what he’d done to Campbell and Schaaf, who would ever believe him? So what he wanted to know—the only thing that truly mattered to him—was this: if he won the fight in memory of Joleen’s brother, would she understand that he’d done what he’d done not out of some eye-for-an-eye thirst for revenge, but out of love and respect for her , and a desire to ease her pain?
    On the evening of June 14, 1934, while more than seventy thousand raucous fans in the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City waited for the championship bout to begin, the same men said to have paid for Sharkey’s magical fall to the canvas against Carnera entered our dressing room, informed Max that they represented Owney Madden’s interests, patted bulges in their jacket pockets, and said that Madden was seeking assurances that by the end of the evening Carnera would still be heavyweight champion of the world. Max, on the massage table, face down, getting a rubdown, didn’t even look up. “You take care of this, okay, Jerry?” he said, and Max’s bodyguard, Jerry “Iron Neck” Cassell, opened his jacket to reveal the pistol