There are few biographies that opt to feature a parallel
chronology of the lives of two people. Such are the demands placed on the
author to deliver a meaningful enough summation on one character that the
addition of a second seems at once a daunting, near impossible concept.
In
many ways such an undertaking will lack a central focus unless both
protagonists are linked inextricably in their raison d'etre or their rivalry or
other binding phenomena as were say Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Both of the
subjects must be similar yet paradoxically they must be sufficiently
dissimilar, if not discordant, in order for the author to wax and weave
grandiloquent on coincidences and ironies which will litter the narrative.
Award
winning sports author, Donald McRae chooses this format for his recently
released treatment of the life and meanings of two of the greatest sporting
icons of the twentieth century; Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. For if Muhammad Ali
and Pele bear the mantle of greatest athletes in the second half of that
century, then as surely Louis and Owens bestride the first fifty years.
Joseph
Louis Barrow and James Cleveland Owens were born eight months and a few miles
apart in the southern state of Alabama. They would die a year apart, Owens in
1980 and Louis in 1981. Both had antecedents enmeshed in the brutal history of
slavery and the painful world of sharecropping.
Both
men rose virtually from the depths of nothingness to ascend the dizzyingly,
rarefied heights of world fame by virtue of their athletic prowess, Louis with
the crushing fury of his fists and Owens with the velocity of his legs.
One
quiet and seemingly diffident, the other ebullient and never complete without a
trademark smile. One was a phenomenal boxer while the other was a peerless
athlete but both were linked in the maelstrom of the social and political
evolution of African-Americans for they both transcended the veneer of being
mere sportsmen to bear the burdens of and inhabit the sort of status reserved
in the past for political figures.
Although
McRae does not mention it, both men were known better to the white American public
than black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois. What McRae reminds us of, is just
how important these men were.
But
although McRae's title refers to the 'Untold Story,' there is little here that
the discerning boxing aficionado does not already know about Joe Louis. From
his glorious, record setting title reign to his inglorious descent into tax
difficulties and mental maladies.
It
is Owens who probably is the lesser known of the two and McRae does well to
focus, diary style, on both men's highest points in the 1930s. For Owens, it
was his extraordinary performance at the summer Olympic games held in Berlin in
1936 where before the Nazi elite, then in the midst's of fashioning an
idealized racial state, he conquered all opposition to win a then unprecedented
four gold medals.
Louis,
who just weeks earlier had been shockingly defeated by the German fighter Max
Schmeling, would vindicate himself two years later by battering Schmeling in a
single round.
By
their deeds both men finally put to rest Hitlerian notions of Aryan superiority
and Black inferiority. Yet as McRae, a man of white South African origin
recounts, both lived in a racially segregated America, which perpetuated and
reinforced assumptions of Black inferiority.
It
was Louis and Owens, we are reminded, who paved the way for the unbanning of
blacks from baseball, basketball and American Football. Yet, these truly
revolutionary figures were not revolutionary enough for their sporting
descendants of the 1960s who derogatorily labelled them as 'Uncle Toms;'
pacified stooges of the white establishment never mind that the circumstances
of the times in Louis and Owens heyday dictated that militant stances within
the sporting field were virtually impossible to contrive.
If
by 'Untold Story' McRae is referring to the personal friendship between both
men, then only few would be impressed by the revelation that Louis introduced
Owens to his high class tailor or that both men were inducted simultaneously
into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.
Nevertheless,
it is as a sympathetically written record of the lives of both; sporting gods
on the one hand and fallible men on the other, that McRae's book succeeds.
There is Owens, impecunious even after his Berlin victory, and hounded out of
amateur athletics by the despotic machinations of Avery Brundage, the patrician
chairman of the International Olympic Committee and aptly referred to as
'Slavery Avery.'
Owens was forced over the next few years to race trains and horses
in a series of grotesque exhibitions. Which reader can fail to travel in time
forty years ahead and then weep at the thought of lesser men earning million
dollar cheques?
Read
about Louis combating the American Inland Revenue for a spiralling amount of
income tax back payment and empathize with the man who donated whole portions
of his ring earnings to an Armed Service of the United States military which
employed persons of his race only as cooks and mess boys.
The
reader, however, can hardly fail to chastise Louis for his childlike ineptitude
in taking care of his finances when his earning power was at its zenith. There
are anecdotal vignettes like where Owens steps in front of Louis who is being
confronted by a redneck who wants to add the 'Brown Bomber' to his self-styled
'Hit-a-Nigger-a-Week' list. It is Louis who has to hold his friend back when
the normally calm Owens takes umbrage at his slurs and smashes a bottle on a
table in anticipation of 'glassing' his foe.
In
Black and White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens ultimately is
an expertly crafted narrative of the lives of two of the foremost sportsmen of
recent times and although it unearths little of which is unknown about both
subjects, it melds the stories of two icons from a bygone age whose excellence
in their chosen professions and wider importance in terms of the development of
race relations in the United States cannot be dimmed by the passage of time.
Adeyinka
Makinde (2002)
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