2. Joe Louis (63-3, 49 KO)

Born: May 13, 1914

Died: April 12, 1981

 

It has been 55 years since 'The Brown Bomber' graced the squared circle and his reign as heavyweight champion remains the standard by which all others are measured.  Louis ruled the heavyweights for 11 years 8 months and 7 days and defended his title 25 times.  Who knows how many more he could have racked up had it not been for World War II?  Forty doesn’t seem out of the question.  It’s just as well that Louis didn’t get the chance to try because the heavyweight division, even at its best, was never 40 fighters deep.

 

Joe Louis is the single greatest champion boxing ever produced.  He bossed the heavyweight title for an astonishing twelve years between 1937 and 1949.  Nor was he a champion who, like John Sullivan or Jack Dempsey, racked up championship years in inactivity.  Rather he was the most fightingist champion of them all, boxing twenty-five successful defenses despite the rude interruption that was the Second World War, a conflict that Louis famously claimed the inevitability of victory in because “ we’re on God’s side.”  No figure was capable of discharging the wired racial tensions that ruled USA in this time completely, but Joe came close; a legitimately beloved American hero.

 

And one of the very greatest boxers to have ever drawn breath.

 

Louis has a single prime loss, if a fighter who has spent fewer than two years boxing as a professional can be considered primed, to former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in 1936.  He avenged it in utterly devastating fashion two years later by way of a first round knockout in what may be the single most significant prizefight in history, fought close to the eve of the outbreak of war between a black American and Nazi propaganda puppet Max Schmeling (who in reality was a decent, moral man).  Still celebrated as one of the greatest displays of controlled savagery in ring history, Louis may even have bettered it, albeit in less dramatic circumstances, against the 250-pound Buddy Baer.  Outweighed by more than forty pounds, Louis slaughtered Baer in a more cultured fashion than he had slaughtered Schmeling.  Enlisting in the army days later, Louis went slightly stale during his enforced ring exodus, raising the terrifying prospect that like his lone heavyweight peer Muhammad Ali, Joe’s absolute peak may have been sabotaged by wider conflict.

 

Before he even lifted the title Louis had defeated former champions Max Baer, Jack Sharkey and Primo Carnera, all by devastating knockout and in one-sided fashion.  Taking the title from Jim Braddock, he twice defeated his successor, Jersey Joe Walcott having met all but one of the men to even briefly hold the #1 contendership to his title, defeating all of them. He retired (briefly) in 1948 as the undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.  His comeback two years later was doomed from the beginning, but even devoid of his legendary speed he was so superb a boxer as to be able to decision the top contenders he faced, men like Jimmy Bivins and Cesar Brion.  Only other all-time great fighters were able to defeat him, Ezzard Charles outboxing him to a decision, and a superb Rocky Marciano forcing a heartbreaking stoppage.

 

It is very possible that the heavyweight capable of beating him in his devastating prime of 1938-1942 had not yet been born.

 

Louis’ greatness wasn’t just about how many fights he won but the way he won them.  His punches were short, crisp and delivered straight from the shoulder with perfect leverage and balance.  His footwork was economical and his ring intelligence was underrated.  He knocked out fighters small and tall, fat and thin and no matter what his opponents tried, they knew even before the fight they couldn’t win.  His was a style that could have thrived in any era and that’s something that can rarely be said of any fighter.

 

Undoubtedly deserves to dine at boxing's top table.