Joe Louis (1914–1981)

Contents

Foreword
Mind discipline
Elementary training
Equipment
The proper stance
Correct punching
Footwork
Punching the bag
Training
The left jab and left hok
The right cross
The strainght right
The uppercut
The one tow
Defense and attack
Come out fighting!
Joe Louis' title defenses
Heavyweight champions
Light heavyweight champions
Middleweight champions
Welterweaight champions
Lightweight champions
Featherweight champions
Bantamweight champions
Flyweight champions… (meer)

He was born in 1914 on an impoverished farm in Alabama, the son of a penniless sharecropper. He was two years old when his father was put in a home for the Negro Insane. He grew up in the slums of Detroit, standing on soup lines with his family, unable to get past the sixth grade. He started boxing when he was 17, using the money his mother gave him for violin lessons. But from then on the life and career of Joe Louis Barrow sky-rocketed. Winning fight after fight, Joe knocked his way to the top-by 1937 he was the heavyweight champion of the world; his boxing talent was recognized as the greatest of the century. And along with the championship came fame and glamour-Hollywood appearances, meetings with Presidents dates with film stars. By the time of the second Louis-Schmeling fight Joe Louis personified all of pre-war America in his dramatic knockout ofthe German fighter. Joe Louis was the Brown Boomber; he was America.

Joe's story-in his own words-encompasses all the action of this career, and all the personalities he encountered, along with some of the best fight descriptions ever published. But the book is the total picture of the man: after his retirement from the ring a terrible series of catastrophies resulted in the first in a series of breakdowns. The women and drugs, his failures in buisness, his exhausting battles witht he U.S. Government over taxes, the collapse of his first marriage-all of these are told with startling frankness, revealing Joe's attempts, and failures, to create more for himself than a reputation as a boxer.

Joe Louis: My Life is a moving autobiography of strength pervaded by frailty. It is the personal, intimate, hard-hitting story of Joe Louis-one of the tragic-heroic figures of our time.

Edna and Art Rust Jr. are married and live in New York Citiy. Art Rust Jr., a former sportscaster for NBC-TV, is the author of Get That Nigger Off the Field.

Contents

1914-Alabama
1926-Detroit
1934-Chicago
1935-New York: Carnera adn Baer
1936-First Schmeling fight
1937-Heavyweight champion of the world
1938-Second Schmeling fight
1939-1942-Wartime
1942-1946-Army years
1946-1947-Out of the army
1948-1951-Retirement and return
1951-1960-After the ring
1960s-Taxes, women, and marriage
1970s-Up to the present
Ring record of Joe Louis… (meer)