A recent PBS documentary on the bitter Joe Louis-Max Schmeling
rivalry brought to my mind another larger-than-life boxer named
Max. He was a Polish-American from Chicago who earned a Notre
Dame football scholarship in 1933, the same year he beat Joe Louis
in the Golden Gloves finals in Boston. He thereafter billed himself
as "The Man Who Beat Joe Louis."
In the 1930s, Max Marek looked like a young Brando, deeply tanned
and muscular, with curly dark-brown hair. One of his Notre Dame
roomies was my cousin, Tom Cassidy '37, '38M.A., a slight, bookish
but spirited redhead from Long Island, New York. I was only 7
years old when Max Marek visited our family there in the summer
of 1934. To this day, seven decades later, I can still vividly
recall Max doing road work at Jones Beach on the Atlantic shore
of Long Island. At one point Max swept up me and my 5-year-old
brother, John David, on each of his broad shoulders and bounded
along the vast boardwalk. He later demonstrated his incredible
arm strength to us at a nearby archery range.
Back at Notre Dame, Max fought successfully in the school's traditional
amateur Bengal Bouts, which helped finance Catholic missions in
Bangladesh. After leaving in 1935 to turn pro, Max took on the
likes of veteran Bob Pastor, a respectable contender, and lost
a close 1936 decision to John Henry Lewis, the light-heavyweight
champ, in Comiskey Park. He rejected Jack Dempsey's early advice
to quit the ring "lest you get your brains scrambled." At one
point he was ranked as No. 10 heavyweight, compiling an overall
record of 33 wins (10 by KO), 20 losses (only one by TKO), and
11 draws before his 1939 retirement.
I saw Max again after a football game at Notre Dame in autumn
1947. By then he had been the Coast Guard's chief boxing instructor
in World War II and staged fight cards for that service branch.
We met in the campus quarters of my cousin Tom, who had returned
from the Army in 1946 and was now a well-liked English instructor
at Notre Dame. I had just come back to South Bend from the Army
and was an English major senior.
No longer an Adonis, gregarious Max had put on about 50 pounds
over the years; his nose was considerably flatter than I remembered.
Now sporting a thick brown handlebar moustache, he wore a flashy
suit and a floor-length blue woolen overcoat, topped by a rakish
fedora. He looked like someone out of Guys and Dolls
or, more appropriate to Chicago, The Sting.
Max regaled us with stories of his experiences as proprietor
of two Chicago "joints." Max Marek's Café on West 63rd
Street featured its wisecracking, raunchy owner as emcee. Female
guests headed for the powder room were often raucously taunted
by the house band singing and playing "We know where you're going."
A year later, late in 1948, I was back east in New York City
working briefly for an insurance broker whose informal placement
office for Notre Dame alumni was listed in the phone book. Coincidentally,
a Life magazine researcher called seeking to track down
a Notre Dame alumnus who may have beaten Joe Louis in a long-ago
amateur bout. I eagerly told her what I knew about Max and put
her on his trail. Life soon ran a profile on him.
Max Marek, who died in 1977 at age 63,
has earned a profile in Chicago Boxing by J.J. Johnston
and Sean Curtin, a book newly published by Arcadia. The authors
describe Max as handsome, charismatic and "not only a good boxer
but also one of the greatest characters in Chicago . . . a relentless
'ribber.'"
Curtin, a noted referee and former Illinois boxing commissioner,
recalls that as a teen he often saw moustachioed Marek standing
outside an antiques shop he operated near Wrigley Field circa
1955-62. In the same period, he says, Max turned to pro wrestling
as the "Polish Pride."
Curtin later found that Max was a warm, breezy hunt-and-peck
letter writer. Of his 1936 loss to John Henry Lewis, for example,
Marek candidly wrote to a girlfriend: "He was too fast for me,
yet I believe under better conditions of heat and training, I
can lick the fellow. . . . I had all to gain and little to lose
as the prospect of boxing Joe Louis was in sight, had I whipped
Lewis."
In a recent Internet search I learned that in his boxing days,
Max corresponded with a young fan named Bill Rintoul, a California
teenager who had sought an autographed photo. After a few exchanges
Max told the youngster that they needed to discuss something more
substantial than boxing. In an interview late in his career with
journalist Bob Christie, Rintoul (by then the state's foremost
oil-industry columnist) said Max's advice led him to drop Zane
Grey pulp novels in favor of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and
the writings of muckraker Upton Sinclair ("who really opened my
eyes").
There were, after all, many sides beyond boxing to "The Notre
Dame Man Who Beat Joe Louis."
(April 2005)
