Oleksandr Usyk faces Anthony Joshua against the backdrop of war but in 1938 the heavyweight rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling became known as the ‘undercard to World War II’

When Oleksandr Usyk makes the first defence of his heavyweight titles against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he will be driven to use his platform to continue condemning the war, and to heighten awareness of the atrocities unfolding in his home country.

The Ukrainian is in Jeddah for his rematch with the 32-year-old Anthony Joshua, who he so convincingly outboxed in London in September, and like another fine heavyweight before him, the late Joe Louis, does so in the knowledge that he has become a significant symbol of hope.

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Usyk, 35, returned to his home country in February to contribute to their attempts to resist the Russian forces, before more recently receiving permission to defend his titles against Joshua, and then messages of support from Volodymyr Zelensky, the widely admired president of Ukraine.

In 1938, it was another heavyweight rematch, between America’s Louis and Max Schmeling, that became so meaningful it later became known as 'the undercard to World War II', and when then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler were vocal in their support.

Where two years earlier, owing to what continued to be a time of racial tension across the US, the white Schmeling had been supported by many Americans when unexpectedly stopping Louis in the 12th round of their fight at the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, by 1938, amid the growing realisation of the threat posed by Hitler, Roosevelt said Louis had: “The kind of muscle we’ll need to beat Germany.”

Hitler had, in 1937, passed the Nuremberg Race Laws which involved black people, Jews and those of Roma descent being categorised within the Reich as legally inferior to whites. In 1936 the overtones between Louis and Schmeling had been of black versus white; by 1938 they had unwillingly come to symbolise the fight between democracy and freedom and totalitarianism; the western world versus the Aryan race.

Tales persist of Americans dressed in Nazi uniforms going to the training camp of Louis – a sharecropper’s son from Alabama – to taunt him, and of Schmeling’s resentment for the Nazis and their exploitation of him as a propaganda tool being such that his wife and mother were refused permission to travel to support him in case he defected to the US. 

Louis, 24, had long been a hero to those in the African-American community challenging the gross inequality and climate that existed after the Great Depression. None other than Ernest Hemingway, when Louis was an unbeaten 22-year-old, described him as “too good to be true, and absolutely true”. It was Schmeling, when sent to the US to charm America ahead of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, who had inflicted his first, and by the time of their rematch, only defeat.

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In the months before that rematch the fighters’ sporting ambitions were surpassed when Germany annexed Austria. The perception of America versus Germany was then heightened when quotes attributed to Schmeling – which he always denied making – spoke of his desire to stop the American; the black man; to prove the superiority of his race. 

The American press that had once warmed to him viewed the 32-year-old Schmeling as a villain; he also became the target of protests from anti-Nazi groups in New York. There is perhaps no more accurate a description of the tension surrounding and gravity of their second contest than the words of Maya Angelou, the author and civil rights activist who wrote that if Louis lost it “might be the end of the world”.

“If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help,” she continued. “It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings.”

Louis later wrote in his autobiography: “White Americans – even while some of them were lynching black people in the south – were depending on me to K.O. a German. I knew I had to get Schmeling good. I had my own personal reasons, and the whole damned country was depending on me.” In his, Schmeling, describing the walk to the ring that was targeted by cigarette packs, soda cups, banana peels and spit, wrote: “Never in my life did 100 meters seem this long.”

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Even after victory over “The Cinderella Man” James Braddock, Louis had previously suggested he couldn’t be considered champion until he had avenged his defeat by Schmeling, who largely because Braddock had refused to fight him had fought just three times since. 

On the night of June 22, 1938, again at the Yankee Stadium, a gate in excess of $1m was taken from a crowd of 70,000 that included Hollywood celebrities Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Gregory Peck, and J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. Louis, having evolved as a fighter and discovered a greater focus since losing to Schmeling – to which he responded by winning 11 fights, the victory over Braddock to become champion included – proceeded to stop his perceived great rival in 124 one-sided seconds that included Schmeling’s corner throwing in the towel.

Where once Louis had continually seen his jab countered by Schmeling’s right hand and in their entertaining first fight suffered two knockdowns, he first hurt the German to the body, dropped him once with a right to the jaw, dropped him again with a combination, and finally stopped him with a left, a right to the body, a left to the chin, and a right to the head. A momentous symbolic defeat for Nazism, the German radio broadcast quickly ended; rumours even followed that he had been killed.

Schmeling was instead taken to a hospital in Manhattan, where it was discovered he had suffered two broken vertebrae. His ambulance had avoided travelling through Harlem, where tens of thousands filled the streets in celebrations that were echoed across every major black community in the US. For two weeks he remained there until travelling back on a stretcher to Germany, where unlike two years earlier he wasn’t welcomed home.

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“Victory would perhaps have made me into the toast of the Third Reich,” Schmeling later reflected. “After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.”

There was a time he had dined with Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, but defeat further harmed his reputation with high-ranking members of the Nazi Party, who had already objected to his relationship with Jewish-American manager Joe Jacobs and marriage to Austrian Anna Ondra, an actress who had also worked with Jews. 

During the war he was drafted as a paratrooper and injured during the Battle of Crete. Before it, during the Kristallnacht pogrom – the purge of Jews throughout Germany – of November 1938, he sheltered two Jewish boys, the sons of an old friend, in his apartment to save their lives.

The fighters’ fortunes, in many ways appropriately, remained contrasting. After the war they became good friends, and to the extent Schmeling assisted Louis financially after the latter’s fall from grace. He even contributed to the cost of Louis’ funeral, after he died in 1981 at the age of 66. 

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