Max Baer and the Star of David Read Online Free PDF Page A

desire for it. On this evening, however, he desired only consolation, and when the desire for consolation waned, vengeance. What he wanted was nothing less than to destroy Tillie “Kid” Herman. Herman, however, was not his opponent.
    Campbell was, and that evening, in the second round of the bout, after Campbell had clipped Max a glancing blow on the chin, and Max had slipped to one knee, Campbell, assuming Max would stay down for a count of five or six, made the mistake of waving triumphantly to the crowd, which ignited the full fury of Max’s rage. Rising swiftly from the canvas, Max flew at Campbell just as Campbell turned back from the crowd to the ring, and smashed a mighty roundhouse right to the side of Campbell’s head that turned Campbell around in a full circle and sent him sprawling onto the canvas.
    We later learned that between rounds Campbell told Herman, “Something feels like it broke in my head,” but that Herman paid no heed to this, and sent Campbell back into the ring for round three. Campbell seemed fine for the next two rounds, staying away from Max while scoring decisively with swift, sharp jabs. Before the fifth round, however, Herman began taunting Max, jeering at him and calling him a sheenie clown with the brain of an ox, and even before the bell rang for the fight to recommence, Max, eyes blazing, had kicked away his stool and water bucket, pushed me and his other handlers aside, stood, and, pounding his gloves one against the other, chest level, taken three steps forward. I was thrilled to see him like this, for I knew he felt most truly himself in these moments—lost in a reverie wherein his body and hands had a life of their own and he had no idea of what they were doing, and little memory afterwards of what they had done. Thrilled as I was when he was this way, though, I also feared for the other fighter who, in the most literal sense, I knew, would soon, his lights extinguished, not know or recall what had befallen him.
    Max plowed forward like the ox Herman had said he was, and in a matter of seconds had Campbell against the ropes and was hammering him relentlessly, blow after thundering blow, as if Campbell’s head were a speed bag. One of Campbell’s eyes closed and swelled with such swiftness it seemed a hand grenade had been surgically inserted behind it. Herman might have thrown in the towel then, as a responsible trainer should have, but he chose not to. Nor did the referee or attending physician stop the fight as those in the crowd who were not screaming for blood were urging them to do. Only when Campbell’s head clanged against one of the metal turnbuckles that connected the ropes to the ring posts, and it was clear that only the ropes and Max’s repeated blows to Campbell’s head—which had become a bloody, puffed pulp—were holding him up, did the referee step between the fighters. Had he not, Max, so enraged and inspired was he—so lost in the sheer, brute joy of smashing blow after blow at Campbell in a futile attempt to exact a vengeance that would never be his—that he might have gone on throwing punches forever.
    When the referee stepped in, and Max stepped away, Campbell fell forward face first to the canvas and lay there unconscious while the referee counted him out, after which I rushed into the ring, turned Campbell over, lifted his head, placed a towel under it, and poured water onto his face. Campbell did not stir or open his eyes. We called for an ambulance, and while Campbell lay on the canvas, immobile, for half an hour—the ambulance became stuck in traffic, we were informed—boxing fans crowded into the ring to gawk at him, and neither police nor boxing officials did anything to clear the ring or to initiate other ways of removing Campbell from it. When at last an ambulance from St. Joseph’s Hospital arrived, Max helped carry Campbell out on a stretcher. A few hours later we received a telephone call informing us that Campbell was near death.
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