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.

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.