Joe Louis Wrestles With “Cowboy” Rocky Lee and Reality

By Chris “Man of Few Words” Benedict

“The top of 1956. I’m married. I’m broke. I’m still catching hell from the tax people,” bewailed Joe Louis.

A soft touch with a wandering eye for the ladies and terrible business sense, the Brown Bomber had made a back-room deal with James Braddock and Joe Gould which gave him a shot at the heavyweight title, borrowed against future winnings from Mike Jacobs while serving in the U.S. Army, been taxed on the purses from his championship fights against Buddy Baer and Abe Simon which had been donated in full to the Army and Navy, spent lavishly on golf outings and flings with women, opened a restaurant and whiskey distillery which were both destined to be short-lived failures, endorsed beer and cigarettes, loaned his name and likeness to milk and fruit punch and cologne, and rarely listened to a sob story from some hard luck case without slipping a couple of bucks into their palm while shaking hands.

Joe’s IRS debt had risen to more than a million dollars and boxing had five years before ceased to butter his bread. In one of prizefighting’s sorriest spectacles, Rocky Marciano had pounded Joe Louis through the Madison Square Garden ropes and into a pathetic heap on the ring apron after which the Brockton Blockbuster, a lifetime fan of the Brown Bomber, had wept guiltily in Louis’ dressing room in the presence of the similarly despondent Sugar Ray Robinson and Ezzard Charles. Thirteen months before, Ezzard had been Joe’s successor as heavyweight champion and beaten Louis, who was returning to the ring for the first time since retiring after the second Jersey Joe Walcott fight more than two years prior, by virtue of a 15-round unanimous decision at Yankee Stadium. Two of Joe Louis’ three conquerors were there to shed tears at the sad demise of a legend that they both had a hand in dismantling. No doubt a deep melancholy also shadowed the heart of Max Schmeling upon witnessing from his home in Hamburg, Germany what had become of the foe he now called friend.

Divorced from Marva for the second time following a brief reconciliation and newly married to beauty parlor owner Rose Morgan, Louis had trust funds set up in the amount of $66,000 for his children Jacqueline and Joe Jr. seized by the IRS in 1956. His reaction was one of child-like simplicity. Louis ran away to join the circus. Joe’s stint as an elephant herder and lion tamer beneath the big top was relatively and mercifully brief and was bookended by his involvement with show business of a likewise ostentatious variety. It is entirely possible that Louis rediscovered a measure of contentment back inside the confines of the squared circle even if it was the cold comfort of refereeing professional wrestling matches. In February 1956, Joe made the acquaintance of Philadelphia wrestling promoter Ray Fabiani who signed Louis to a $100,000 contract to trade in his striped shirt for a pair of trunks and jock strap to take some bumps with the big boys on the “grunt and grapple circuit”.

Temperatures rose sufficiently during the day on March 16, 1956 to transmute the morning snow which had blanketed Washington D.C. to a freezing evening rain which was bad for business. The airplane hangar-shaped Uline Arena (constructed in 1941 to house a hockey rink for the amateur Washington Lions and would host the Beatles first American concert in 1964) could accommodate 9,000 patrons but only 4,179 braved the elements to witness Joe Louis’ professional wrestling debut. His opponent was the 320-pound “Cowboy” Rocky Lee who bore facial characteristics which seemed a curious mix of Charles Laughton and Lon Chaney Jr. and rounded out his villainous ring persona with a black Stetson and matching fringed jacket. A more familiar face, that of Joe’s two-time heavyweight title challenger Jersey Joe Walcott, would preside over that evening’s strange goings-on. Louis would greet his former nemesis in the dressing room by confiding, “I’m glad I got you in that ring with me tonight, Joe.” Walcott laughed, “Yeah, I’m gonna be on the floor more times than you.”
“This is a crazy fucking business,” muttered Louis.

Sporting a bald spot which was less considerable than his paunchy midsection, Joe would receive a friendly reminder on his way to the ring to pull his punches from Buddy Rogers, best known for his bleach-blonde coiffure and figure-four leg lock, both of which would decades later be co-opted by Ric Flair in addition to assuming Buddy’s nickname “Nature Boy”. Buddy may also be remembered by wrestling fans of my generation as the host of “Roger’s Corner”, a popular interview segment on early 1980s WWF broadcasts, one of which launched a plotline wherein he seized control of Jimmy Snuka from Captain Lou Albano, transforming the “Superfly” from heel to baby face. The sparse audience would cheer each time Louis would strike a pugilistic stance of old, forcing Cowboy Lee to shrink back into a corner in mock horror. Rocky was a well-traveled if not road-weary veteran accustomed to chewing the scenery and putting the good guy over when necessary. It could not be more obvious, however, that Joe was a terrible actor and found it difficult to sell the artificial violence and elaborate gesticulations called for in his new line of work. Jersey Joe was twice tossed across the ring by Lee and would take an additional tumble after an imaginary altercation. The ghost of a Brown Bomber right cross sent Cowboy Rocky flying through the ropes and into the ringside seats in a parody of what had happened to Joe against Marciano. Walcott ordered Louis to a neutral corner (in far more efficient fashion than he did Ali against Liston), counted Lee out and raised Joe’s hand in victory.

That night’s paycheck allowed Louis to relieve himself of $1,050 worth of his IRS debt-a mere grain of sand on the shore of a beach that stretched to the horizon and beyond-after first pocketing enough to treat Rose to dinner at Randolph’s in New York City. “Watching Joe Louis wrestle is like watching the President of the United States wash dishes,” Rose declared remorsefully. “Well, it ain’t stealing,” was all the former heavyweight champion of the world could think to reply. Fabiani convinced Louis that eighty to ninety outings a year was sure to earn Joe $150,000 or more if he could once more sell out large arenas like Madison Square Garden.

For the time being, Louis would accompany Buddy Rogers on a six-city tour of Florida. Things got off to a bad start in Tampa when they were promptly escorted to a table at the rear of a restaurant, the inference not exactly subtle or difficult to decipher. “I lost my appetite,” said Joe before walking out. Joe was advertised each night to wrestle “The Black Panther” Jim Mitchell, one of the leading black trailblazers in pro wrestling who had famously done battle with the great Gorgeous George in 1949 and was still considered a fan favorite and big draw. Trading on the anticipation of matching Louis and Mitchell was a duplicitous ticket-selling ruse as the audiences in Tampa, Lake Worth, St. Petersburg, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, and Daytona Beach would all be made aware that “The Black Panther” was unable to appear and that his replacement was the rotund Shag Thomas who preferred to remain in the desegregated Pacific Northwest territory run by Don Owen but ventured south to walk away with a paltry $100 a night for playing the Brown Bomber’s patsy.

After two profitable outings, the paid attendance at St. Petersburg’s Gable Armory was a mere 800, bringing Joe’s cut of the gate to $248 which he donated to the Miami chapter of the NAACP. Milton Gross of the New York Post visited the dressing room shared by Louis and Rogers and brought to Joe’s attention newspaper ads stating that “Negro spectators will not be allowed into the arena because of lack of facilities”. Buddy, whose wife was black, swore that he was ignorant of any such stipulation and that any future booking which failed to be racially all-inclusive would be canceled. His word was good enough for Louis who only then agreed to perform. Joe had refused to box for the Army at camps with non-integrated onlookers and had canceled a 1949 exhibition upon learning that blacks had been barred from ringside seating, stopped by instead to watch a Negro League baseball game and meet with the New Orleans Creoles’ second baseman Toni Stone, the first woman to take the field for the league with the San Francisco Sea Lions in 1949. A photograph taken that night shows a broadly beaming Stone standing next to Louis who is decked out in a casual suit and fedora and wearing Toni’s glove, shaking hands.

Shag Thomas put on a hell of a show for his lousy hundred bucks, though you would hardly know it from the crowd reaction. He gouged Joe’s eyes and made an exaggerated display of biting his ear before being pinned at the 14-minute mark to almost dead silence from the meager congregation of all-white faces. “Louis is not a wrestler. He never will be,” wrote Milton Gross, filing his report for the Post. “He’s in a phony business but, fundamentally, Louis cannot be a fake. He may fumble at his new trade. He does not fumble at being a man. His tax burden made him do the first. It cannot change the second.”

“Not everyone agrees with my idea of what I’ve done,” Louis offered by way of self-defense during a televised interview, “but I’m sure that more people do agree with me than the ones who don’t.” Laying dubious claim to a daily training regimen of three to four hours per day with Buddy Rogers as opposed to the hour and a half required during his pugilistic career, Joe joked that “I don’t have to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do roadwork. That’s wonderful with me.” As for the prospect of winning a world title in the wrestling ring, Louis good-naturedly cracked, “Well that would be an honor, but I think Lou Thesz (the legendary six-time heavyweight champion who held dominion over the NWA for a sum total of 10 years and would later become a prominent promoter and color commentator) is a little too tough for me right now.”

Joe’s pro wrestling career-and, but for a near miss, almost his life-would abruptly terminate on May 31 in Columbus, Ohio. An overenthusiastic “Cowboy” Rocky Lee threw Louis to the canvas during their choreographed tussle and proceeded to stomp full force on the Brown Bomber’s chest with both boots, cracking three ribs. One shard thrust upward and pierced Louis’ cardiac muscles but fortunately failing to puncture either his heart or lung. What went through Joe’s mind at that exact moment? “Oh shit. There goes that good dollar.”
Joe and Rose won substantial cash prizes as participants on quiz shows, all of which went to Uncle Sam, and Louis later worked the door as a greeter at Caesars, rubbing elbows with high rollers and Ordinary Joe’s to lift him from the doldrums of drug addiction, depression, paranoia, and psychiatric confinement. Joe’s final years are tough to think about and worse to write about.
We wish to remember him not as the ceremonial scarecrow with an ill-fitting coat, almost comically large cowboy hat, and useless legs, withered away by a series of strokes and hunched inside the wheelchair rolled to ringside, folded over at the waist around which was worn for 12 years the heavyweight title belt now being fought over by Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick before Joe’s rheumy eyes. We choose instead to freeze him within our minds in a particular and more appropriate place and time, perhaps conquering Max Schmeling or staging a zero-hour comeback to beat Billy Conn.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom and faded glory. An avid golfer for decades (having spent more time on the links than in the gym prior to the first Schmeling fight), Joe would be the first black man permitted to play in a PGA tournament, receiving an amateur exemption for the 1952 San Diego Open. His third and final wife, attorney Martha Malone Jefferson, was able to reach a settlement with the IRS whereby they would forgive Louis’ past debts and tax him only on future earnings. Already on the Caesars payroll for the purpose of shaking hands, signing autographs, posing for photos, and finding a diplomatic response to kids’ questions about whether he could beat Muhammad Ali (“eventually I’d get him and knock him out”), Joe was also free to take turns at the roulette wheel or pull the arms on the slot machines to his heart’s content on company time and on the company dime.

One of the surprise guests to materialize from behind the curtain during Louis’ 1961 appearance on This is Your Life was Max Schmeling who shared not only a genuinely warm embrace with his former rival during the taping, but also some much needed money every now and then in the two subsequent decades when Joe was faltering and Max succeeding handsomely with a Coca Cola bottling business back home in Germany. When President Reagan waived the criteria for burial in Arlington National Cemetery after the Brown Bomber’s death in the wee hours following the Holmes and Berbick title fight, Schmeling not only contributed generously toward the expense of Louis’ ceremony and headstone, but served alongside Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra as one of the pallbearers.

“I’ve been in a whole lot of fights inside the ring and outside the ring too. I like to think I won most of those battles,” Joe Louis concludes his autobiography. “I danced, I paid the piper, and left him a big tip.”

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