What I watched: The heavyweight world title fight between champion Ezzard Charles and Joe Louis, called by Ted Husing. The fight took place at Yankee Stadium on September 27, 1950, and was broadcast on CBS. It is available to view on YouTube.
What happened: Ted Husing introduces us to the fight, which is part of the Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts series that aired on Wednesday nights. He describes the fight as the “battle of the ifs” because of the questions around Louis’ age and Charles’ quality. The fight is taking place at Yankee Stadium, and a number of local politicians are in attendance, including almost-President Thomas Dewey.
Charles and Louis are in the ring at the start of the broadcast, and stand at attention as the national anthem plays and the ring announcer does his thing. The first round starts out tentative, until Charles starts lunging in with a few 1-2s. Husing notes that Louis’s nose is reddened, although it doesn’t really show up on the black-and-white footage. Louis goes for a big overhand right but Charles ducks under it, and closes in for some clinch work.
Things get a bit more feisty in the second, as Louis starts landing with some combinations. Charles connects with a mean uppercut to the body at the start of round 3. Husing reminds us that no heavyweight champion has ever regained his title. (This trend would not hold.) Louis scores with a right hook, and then follows it up in the fourth round with a good combination. He starts to settle into his groove. In round 5, Charles starts throwing with some real intent, but mostly misses.
At the start of the sixth stanza, Charles gets in close and lands some uppercuts, bruising Louis under the eye. He starts targeting the eye with his right cross in the next round, and there’s a visible difference in hand speed. Louis does connect with an uppercut, and Charles suffers a similar mouse under his left eye. In round 8, Charles takes more of an outfighting approach, although occasionally closing in to clinch before he can be countered. Louis has developed a cut in addition to the bruise on his face.
Charles lands two hard right hands early in the ninth, and then sneaks a left up the middle. Louis is having a hard time, bust does manage to bust up his opponent’s nose with an uppercut (a “tremendous rush of claret”, as the announcer says.) We get a glimpse of the boxers getting sips of water in their corner, which leads to a plug for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Hipsters, am I right? Louis starts coming in more in the next round, encouraged by his success, and starts tagging Charles with his jabs and clubbing him with right hooks.
In round 11 Charles starts coming back with his own punches, and more and more of the fight seems to happen in the clinch. He connects with a stiff right straight in the twelfth which seems to visibly hurt a slowing Louis. That would be the end of a modern fight, but since this is olden times, we’re going fifteen. The thirteenth round is much the same, with Charles also seeming to let up a bit. Joe is hurt again in the next stanza, and offers little back while Ezzard pummels him against the ropes. He lands his best punch after the bell, with Charles retaliating.
Louis gets through the final round, but he’s surviving, not winning. The final ring announcements are “simulcast” on TV and radio. The announcer thankfully cuts off the commentator who is making a comment about Louis being a “credit to his race.” The three judges have it 13-2, 12-3, and 10-5 for Ezzard Charles, who retains his title. Ted tries to get an interview with Louis first, but he’s not interested. Instead, he talks with the actual winner, who gives the usual comments about thanking God and his trainers and puts over Joe Louis a bit. He also interviews his trainer Ray Arcel, who had previously cornered ten different failed challengers to Louis. Nobody beats him twelve times in a row, I guess.
What I thought: Every fighter dreams of leaving on top. Rocky Marciano, who we’ll see later on, did, as did Floyd Mayweather, although he has been lured back for a series of increasingly insulting exhibitions. The dream is to retire as an undefeated champion, but few achieve it. There’s always another payday, another contender, another chance to be in the spotlight. False retirements are de rigeur among athletes — as I write this, Tom Brady has just come out of his short-lived retirement a few weeks ago, with a couple months on the couch apparently being enough of civilian life for him. As long as there’s still a smidgen of athletic ability left, there’s the lure of one more run.
So it was for Joe Louis. Louis was one of the biggest sports stars of the 1930s and 40s, becoming a beloved figure across a still widely-segregated America. When he retired after his second fight with “Jersey” Joe Walcott, it was a fairytale ending. Louis was never inactive, though, continuing to fight exhibition bouts, and in 1950 he decided to finally return to the pro ring against the newly-crowned champion Ezzard Charles. (Louis’s well-publicized tax issues probably contributed to the decision.) A sentimental public made Louis a 2-to-1 betting favourite.
The fight itself is a classic contrast between speed and power. Charles is essentially a blown-up light heavyweight, and is at a notable size disadvantage to Louis. None of his punches seem to put the legend in danger of hitting the canvas. But he lands more, and is better at managing the distance, always out of reach of Louis’s swipes. Louis acquits himself well, and I had him winning 4 of the 15 rounds, but he visibly tires late on and is barely in the last third of the fight. Joe Louis had finally pushed his aging body too far, and taken his first loss in over a decade. It’s a pretty good fight, but also in a way a tragic one.
The general narrative going into the fight was that it was a question of how much Louis had deteriorated. Louis was 36, which is not that old for a heavyweight fighter (current heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is 33), but he had kept a furious pace in the 1930s, fighting once every month or two, with the Charles bout being his 60th. In a rather insulting New York Times column, Arthur Daley wrote that “A youthful Louis would have murdered Charles.” I don’t think this is entirely true — Charles was a good fighter, and has certainly impressed me more than most of Louis’s opponents I’ve seen on film. But the perception was that, if Louis lost, it was a loss to Father Time moreso than to Ezzard Charles.
The fight was also a big occasion for television. CBS paid $140, 000 for radio and television rights to the bout, the equivalent of $1.6 million today, which would still be modest compared to modern sports rights packages. The fight was carried by over fifty stations extending to the Mid-West, and on tape delay elsewhere. At the time, many were still worried that airing sporting events on television would hamper ticket sales, and the fight was seen as a test of this principle. Television was blamed for the relatively disappointing crowd of 22, 000 inside Yankee Stadium, but over the coming decades promoters would come to realize that TV coverage would only enhance the allure of live attendance.
Perhaps because of the effort that went into this broadcast, we actually have the version that aired on TV available 72 years later, instead of a newsreel version like with the last few Joe Louis fights. The YouTube version seems to have been clipped from a ESPN Classic airing, meaning that much of the time between rounds was cut, but we still get the vintage PBR ad reads. The fight was intended as the debut of a new boxing series, and was certainly a hell of a season premiere, although I’m not sure how many would stick around for the more ordinary fight next week. As for the broadcast itself, the play-by-play is good, but the crowd audio is a little quiet. The fight comes off like it’s taking place in a studio instead of Yankee Stadium. In fairness, mic’ing a crowd to the correct levels is still something many modern broadcasts struggle with.
Louis announced his retirement after the fight, although he would be back in the ring two months later. (Fool me twice, shame on me.) We’ll see him again. Charles gained the claim of being the lineal champion, the “man who beat the man”, but didn’t quite find the respect he was looking for. The result was largely blamed on Louis’ decline. The Times reported “He didn’t have a chance because his marvelously muscled body and his nervous system responded to the natural disintegration that comes with age.” (The sports pages really editorialized a lot more in those days, it seems.) Fans would criticize Charles for not knocking Louis out, seeing it as an intentional strategy to humiliate the legend. Charles, like the fifteen years of heavyweight champions that would follow him, still ran into an insoluble problem: he could beat Joe Louis, but he would never be Joe Louis.
What Else Was On: Nobody really put up much opposition to the heavyweight fight. NBC aired Break the Bank with Bert Parks and a short film, while ABC aired an hour of Chicago wrestling (presumably the same Chicago promotion we’ve seen in this column), and Dumont aired something called Broadway to Hollywood. In the New York area, you could also see the film Why Girls Leave Home or Wrestling from Coney Island (possibly a predecessor to the WWF), but would you want to? Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts was the only program in this time slot to finish in the season-end top 30, tied for 26th, although I imagine the actual viewership differed a lot depending on what the fight was.
Coming up next: The puppets get fashionable.
The Eternal Couch Potato 