The Fight of the Century: Louis vs. Schmeling

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The Fight

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The official program for the second Louis-Schmeling fight.

Library of Congress

The official program for the second Louis-Schmeling fight.

Library of Congress

The Joe Louis-Max Schmeling Boxing Match, Broadcast June 22, 1938

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The Contenders

American boxer Joe Louis (1914-1981) was heavyweight champion of the world for 11 years.

Library of Congress

German boxing legend and heavyweight champion Max Schmeling (1905-2005).

Library of Congress

The Florida-Based Writer

Joe Louis Barrow, Jr. is the son of boxer Joe Louis and a director of the National Golf Foundation and the First Tee program.

War Contributions, IRS Woes

"[Louis] fought two championship bouts and he donated the proceeds to funds in support of the war and his belief in supporting this country."

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The Illinois-Based Writer

Lewis Erenberg is a historian and author of The Greatest Fight of Our Generation, Louis vs. Schmeling.

The Idolization of Louis

"The black press said that Louis put the best foot of African Americans forward for white America to see..."

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The Ireland-Based Writer

Patrick Myler is a boxing historian and author of Ring of Hate, Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling: The Fight of the Century.

The 1938 boxing rematch between American Joe Louis and German Max Schmeling is believed to have had the largest audience in history for a single radio broadcast. In 2005, the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry.

NBC radio announcer Clem McCarthy delivered the blow-by-blow account of the fight, which lasted just two minutes and four seconds. But it was a historic milestone — one that an estimated 70 million people listened to on their radios.

The fight was a rematch of a 1936 bout in which Schmeling defeated Louis, who had never before been beaten.

After that upset, says sportswriter Patrick Myer, "Schmeling was feted in Germany, especially by the Nazis. You know, they trumpeted him as the perfect specimen of the Arian superiority — beating the black American, of course — and he was the Nazi hero."

The broadcast of the second fight, and other sounds of American history, are being preserved by the National Recording Registry. The group identifies 50 recordings to be placed in its care each year.

"There are some events and some broadcasts, some sporting activities, that reach out to millions of people and touch them in a very deep way and express a lot of their deepest cultural, racial, political hopes and aspirations," historian Lewis Erenberg says. "And this is one of those events, and we have it preserved here and I think that's a wonderful thing."

As Joe Louis Barrow, the son of Joe Louis, says, "In those days, the most powerful individual in the world was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.... When the heavyweight championship was fought, millions upon millions upon millions of people listened simultaneously by their radios all across the world."

And this match, coming just months after Adolf Hitler's army marched into Austria, meant even more.

"It had tremendous political implications in the battle of democracy against fascism," says Erenberg. "And it had tremendous implications about race and racial ideology."