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

he kept in his waistband. “Get out,” he said, and Madden’s men, seasoned thugs that they were, did. As soon as they were gone Max sat up and said something other fighters in similar situations had said before him—words first made famous by the great Barney Ross—“What are they gonna do—kill me?” he laughed. “Hey—everybody dies.”
    An hour later, to deafening cheers and thunderous foot stamping, Max climbed through the ropes and entered the ring, and he did so wearing a silk robe not with his own name on its back, but with the name “Steve Morgan,” the character he had played in The Prizefighter and the Lady , embroidered there. And on his trunks, as in the fight against Schmeling, but on the left leg this time, was a glistening, coal-black Star of David.
    Despite all those who had doubted his conditioning and his will, or perhaps to shame those who had questioned both, he proceeded to destroy Carnera, knocking him down three times in the first round and three times again in the second. Carnera stumbled around the ring like a drunken clown, trying in vain to protect himself, and grabbing onto the ropes constantly, thereby leaving his large body open to the lightning fury of Max’s blows. Between rounds, Max joked with people at ringside, and waved to the crowd, and once, when he had leveled Carnera with a one-two combination—a solid smash to the gut, and a clean right hook to the jaw—and Carnera, falling, had pulled them both to the canvas, Max shouted out for all to hear, “Hey—last one up’s a sissy!”
    In the tenth round, Max hammered Carnera to the canvas three more times, and begged the referee, Art Donovan, to end the fight. “Hey Art,” he said. “Please stop it. Please? Carnera’s helpless.” Despite Max’s plea, Donovan let the fight continue. In the eleventh round, however, when Max had, without savagery but with crisp efficiency, floored Carnera yet two more times, Donovan, who would later claim it was Carnera who asked him to stop the fight, was left with no choice but to step between the fighters (Carnera, sobbing away afterwards, something no one had ever seen a champion do, denied he had made the request, and swore he would never have given up). Seconds later, the ring announcer took Max’s right hand in his own, raised it high, and declared Maximilian Adelbert Baer the new and undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
    The crowd chanted its approval—“ Max! Max! Max! ” they cried out again and again—and Max skipped around the ring, blew kisses to everyone, and even performed a quick, graceful soft-shoe dance of the kind he’d done in The Prizefighter and the Lady. In our dressing room a few minutes later, he continued to have the time of his life, joking with reporters and, with mock seriousness, telling them he was truly glad he hadn’t been up to commissioner Brown’s conditioning standards or there might have been a real tragedy in the ring. And when reporters asked him who his current sweetheart was—Jean Harlow or June Knight, Bee Star or Shirley La Belle—Max declared that his only sweetheart was his mother.
    “And what a sweetheart she is,” he went on. “Wouldn’t think of suing me for breach of promise. And boy, what an advantage that is since dames have already cost me more than a hundred thousand bucks!”
    When asked if rumors were true that he’d taken up with Dorothy Dunbar again, he said that he thought their having been separated seven times was enough. “Besides,” he laughed, “I’m too young to get married again.”
    Then Max put on a fawn-colored gabardine suit, a brown-and-white striped shirt, a brown-and-white striped necktie, a new pair of tan toe-cap oxford shoes, and, with Buddy, Jack Dempsey, Jerry Cassell, me, and the rest of our entourage, he went out on the town—to the Stork Club, Toots Shor’s, the Cotton Club, and other favorite haunts, where, on that night, and all day the next day, and on the days and nights that