June 13, 1935, 90 years ago: James J. Braddock knocks Max Baer out, and becomes the Heavyweight Champion of the World. It is considered an upset of such proportions that journalist Damon Runyon nicknames Braddock "The Cinderella Man."
He was born James Walter Braddock on June 7, 1905 in Manhattan, and moved across the Hudson River to North Bergen, Hudson County, New Jersey with his family when he was a child. His dream, as a man who was, literally, fighting Irish, was to play football for the University of Notre Dame under head coach Knute Rockne. It didn't happen, because, by his own admission, he had "more brawn than brains."
So he turned to boxing, where he showed he had enough brains to use the name "James J. Braddock," using a fake initial to invoke former Heavyweight Champions James J. Corbett (1892-97) and James J. Jeffries (1899-1904).
But he lost a lot of fights, injuring his hands in the process, and so, like Marlon Brando's character Terry Malloy in the 1954 film On the Waterfront, he went to work for lean wages on the Jersey side of the Hudson docks. And this was during the Great Depression. He had to go on government relief to feed his family. At a time when even high-ranking boxers fought much more frequently than they do today, Braddock went without a single fight from September 25, 1933 to June 14, 1934.
When the building that would eventually be known as "the old Madison Square Garden" opened in 1925, it had no air-conditioning. And so, the Garden's boxing promotion company couldn't book fights in the arena in the Summer. It was just too hot. So they looked for outdoor venues. But renting the baseball parks -- Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field -- was expensive.
So they built their own venue, the Madison Square Garden Bowl, a 72,000-seat octagonal structure at 48th Street and Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens. It was cheap to build, cheap to maintain, and they owned it all.
But strange things happened. The Heavyweight Championship of the World was conducted there once a year, and the titleholder kept losing. On June 21, 1932, Jack Sharkey won a split decision over Max Schmeling. On June 29, 1933, Sharkey was knocked out there by Primo Carnera. And on June 14, 1934, Carnera was knocked out by Max Baer. At that point, somebody said, "The joint is jinxed!"
On the undercard of the Carnera-Baer fight, Braddock was finally back in the ring after 9 months, and he upset John "Corn" Griffin. He then won unanimous decisions over John Henry Lewis, who later won the Light Heavyweight Championship, and Art Lasky. That gave him a shot at the title, against Baer, at the Bowl, on June 13, 1935.
There is a legend about Baer, which is not true: Actually being Jewish, he would have known enough to make the story impossible. A sportswriter walked into a gym on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and saw Baer training. He had often seen Baer fight with a Star of David on his trunks, so he knew Baer was Jewish.
Writer: Max, what are you doing here today?
Max: I'm training to fight Primo Carnera.
Writer: But what about Yom Kippur?
Max: I'll fight him next!
Baer's handlers chose Braddock because they thought he would be easy for their man. The oddsmakers agreed, as they made Baer a 10-1 favorite. But after 15 rounds, the judges gave Braddock a unanimous decision.
Like baseball's St. Louis Cardinals "Gashouse Gang," and the later race horse Seabiscuit, Braddock became one of the scrappy sports heroes of the Depression, a stand-in for people who were having such trouble fighting for themselves. He became a hero in ways that the previous Champions of the 1930s couldn't: The foreigners Schmeling and Carnera, the Jewish Baer, and the comparatively charismaless Sharkey. Certainly, none of them, not even Braddock, had the star quality of Jack Dempsey, who dominated boxing in the 1920s.
Braddock's next fight was supposed to be against Schmeling. But there were money issues. Both Braddock and Schmeling thought they could make more money fighting rising black boxer Joe Louis than by fighting each other. Schmeling fought Louis, and won. So Schmeling was again set up as Braddock's 1st title defense, on June 3, 1937, nearly 2 years after he won the title, at the Madison Square Garden Bowl.
But Braddock's camp balked. Again, they were sure that they wouldn't make as much money in a fight against Schmeling than they would in a fight against Louis, who had bounced back with 7 straight wins, including a 3rd-round knockout of Sharkey. There was also concern that if Schmeling won, the government of Nazi Germany would deny American fighters opportunities to take the title back.
So the fight against Schmeling was dropped, and a fight was set up with Louis, on June 22, 1937, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Louis knocked him out in the 8th round. Braddock fought only once more, a split decision over Tommy Farr in 1938, and retired, with a record of 52-26-7. Despite all his losses, Louis was the only man ever to knock him out.
Braddock and Louis saw each other frequently over the years, and the Brown Bomber always greeted him the same way: "Hello, champ." As Jeremy Schaap wrote, "He fought 8 World Heavyweight Champions, more than any other fighter ever, but he never called anyone but Jim Braddock 'Champ.'"
Braddock served in the U.S. Army in World War II. Rising to the rank of 1st Lieutenant, he trained men in hand-to-hand combat. After the war, he went back to blue-collar work, and was part of the construction team that built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened between Brooklyn and Staten Island in 1964.
He died on November 29, 1974, and was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Tenafly, Bergen County, New Jersey. North Hudson County Park in his hometown of North Bergen was renamed James J. Braddock Park in his memory. It includes the athletic fields of North Bergen High School.
In 2005, Russell Crowe was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for playing Braddock in the film Cinderella Man. His real-life granddaughter, Rosemarie DeWitt, played the Braddocks' neighbor, Sara Wilson. The movie received good reviews, but there was one complaint about historical accuracy: As played by Craig Bierko, Baer was depicted as a nasty, heartless boxer who showed no remorse after killing a man in the ring. In reality, Baer was terribly remorseful over it, and, despite going on to win the title by knocking Carnera out, people who knew him said he was never the same fighter.
Baer died in 1959, and, today, is probably best known as the father of actor Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro Bodine on the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies.
The Madison Square Garden Bowl never hosted another championship fight. The Garden's boxing promotion company sucked it up, and paid the rent for Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds for Summer fights. The Bowl was torn down for scrap during World War II. An auto dealership and a strip mall are on the site now.
