Braddock - Shameless defamation of Max baer !!!!!

I hate Braddock the movie.............Not only is it a sentimental puke but it really is complete b*****t too.............

Braddock was such a simple man that the makers forgot to mention he took a clump out of Joe Louis future salaries after losing the belt and made a fortune at the Brown bomber's expense...........That piece of garbage trainer of his was an other source of irritation.....Threatening Max Baer.......... leave it out....

However the most scandalous aspect was the complete defamation of an American hero...........

1. Baer never bragged about killing two boxers in the ring....On the contrary he was very upset by it.......

2. No proof that he was ever anything but gentlemanly to the opposite sex.............and no reports of having Braddock's wife chucking wine all over him..

Baer was just a harmless playboy heavyweight champion with bags of charisma.........."Last one up is a sissy" against Carnera.........When he was dying in his hotel room and the bell boy asked If he wanted the house doctor......"No I'd rather see a people one"............

Maybe someone should do a film about the producer's mother......depicting her as a prostitute who didn't give value for money........see how he likes it....

Max Baer jr has spent the time since the movie apparently trying to defend his father and put the record straight.....

Anyone who hasn't seen I suggest you don't....anyone who has don't believe it....

Correct (as usual)

Braddock taking Louis money like that was not mentioned in the movie but in reality it was'nt just him fleecing the first black heavyweight champion since Johnson. The IRS (Government) practically ruined Louis's retirement by hunting him down for tax forgetting the fact that Louis did more then his part contributing to the war effort not to mention that he gave away his entire purse for 2 fights he had during the war time period.

Louis was treated like sh*t.......but remembered fondly.

Ernie schaaf actually died two fights after he fought Baer...........

Baer was dangerous, Schemling thought he was trying to kill him when they fought, but the movie was just pure Hollywood photoshop.

It was made as an up lifting, inspirational movie so they twisted the truth a bit and presented a movie about a working class hero fighting to put food on the table for his family. Baer was a perfect baddie as he was seen as an undisciplined fighter who cared more for money and broads then fighting.

They even made the Baer-Braddock fight look interesting..........

Stinker of all stinkers.............

Fairly entertaining underdog feel good movie, but I agree... When something is presented as a true story bio pic, its cheap to wrongly depict someone... especially someone deceased, who cant defend the defamation... just to juice up a storyline. Tough and unfair on baer's family.

If you watch the Baer v Schemilng fight you would see how crude a boxer Baer was. Pure entertainment. His fight with Carnera did as much to humiliate the Mussulini lead fascist dictatorship as Louis's 1st round blow out of Schmeiling did to humiliate the Nazi's of Germany.

Baer does not get enough respect for it.

Between rounds Baer was messing about in Carnera's icebucket for a joke...

Max Baer documentary on youtube for any interested types...

A character for sure.............

On the downside he did have it in for schmelling.

It certainly was a time for the exploited fighter.

Louis was exploited by the US, Schmeling by the Nazi's but imo Carnera was made to look like a circus freak. Terrible what happened to the big guy.

Manufactured heavy..........In the same way Valuev is...........

In more exploitive times...........

Carnera's is a tragic story

Well they made Micky Ward's defeat of Shay Neary in "The Fighter" look like it should be second only to the "Rumble..." in boxing's greatest fights.

The people who watched the film are either A/ Fight fans who know a bit more than the director assumes or B/ People who haven't the first interest in boxing and forgot about the movie ten minutes after they got home.

As you allude to, Truss, the way 'Cinderella Man' portrayed both Joe Gould and Baer (being ridiculously kind to one, ridiculously harsh on the other) was not far off outrageous, really. It's a good film, but would be better if only hardcore boxing fans were allowed to see it, because for the casual it's really going to paint some false pictures which they'll be oblivious to!

I'm in the middle of reading David Margolick's 'Beyond Glory - Max Schmeling vs Joe Louis, and a World on the Brink' at the moment (and it's top class, to boot) and naturally it covers Baer in a fair bit of detail at various points, seeing as both men fought him and also as the question of whether or not he was Jewish, half-Jewish or not Jewish at all was regularly pondered within the boxing press at the time.

Margolick basically paints Baer the way everyone else did; as a bit of a playboy who hid his softer, more pensive side with a larger-than-life personality. Not mean, just daft more than anything else.

Benny Leonard was good friends with Baer and apparently said that, after the two deaths he was a part of, once Baer had his man hurt he'd often "stop being a fighter and become a friend, or a lover or something." Baer said himself that he had "a million dollar body, with a ten cent brain." The book talks about how Maxie enjoyed wisecracking and joking more than fighting (apparently, when he first arrived in New York, he convinced Jimmy Johnstone to give him his first Madison Square Garden booking by hitting his head against a radiator over and over again in order to prove his durability!).

It's often forgotten that, between the reigns of Tunney and Louis, Baer was the only Heavyweight champion who refused to sell himself over to Owney Madden, who pretty much controlled the whole Heavyweight scene at the time. By rights, Baer really should have given Braddock a bit of a tanning when they fought, but I tend to think that, while it might not have been a fix in the sense of money being passed etc, Baer may well have been quite happy to lose so that he didn't have to deal with the pressure coming from Madden as champion anymore. After the final bell, he reportedly said to Braddock "I hope you enjoy the title more than I did", which might have something to do with how hard it'd been to stay away from Madden's influence at the time. Baer clearly didn't think too much of Braddock in Heavyweight title terms either, because when asked how long the 'Cinderalla Man' would hold the title, Baer said "Until he fights someone else."

Braddock's manager / trainer Gould was pretty close to Madden and his mob - according to 'Jacobs Beach', when Madden was released from prison in 1923 it was Gould who was waiting to pick him up - and I think there's evidence which seriously suggests that Baer might have had good reason to deliberately surrender the title as meekly as possible to Braddock, as he was fighting a battle outside the ring which he could never hope to win.

Great character, it seems, and a real 'what if?' story.

An American Movie twisting the truth for a feel good effect. Never. Reminds me of a film:

"Don't look for a happy ending. It's not an American story. It's an Irish one. "

Excellent offering chris..........

Baer really should have beat Braddock.........Too much clowning and an Eddie Futch gameplan...

Read this after the film http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/culturebox/2005/06/fight_snub.html
Attentive viewers of the climactic fight of Cinderella Man, Ron Howard's Depression-era crowd-pleaser, will notice a Star of David on the red trunks of Max Baer, the lethal opponent of Jim "Cinderella Man" Braddock. The star is significantly less prominent than the one that the real Baer wore in the 1935 fight. It's no surprise that Howard would obscure this detail, as it would complicate his film's Rocky-meets-Seabiscuit narrative. What's funny, and ironic, is that by downplaying Baer's Star of David, Howard may be making an accurate historical comment: Baer was the only self-proclaimed Jew to ever claim the heavyweight crown. But was he really even Jewish?

To be sure, Cinderella Man's fleeting portrait of Baer as a skirt-chasing playboy, notorious for clowning in the ring, is consistent with published accounts. Baer was also a ferocious hitter—a "larruping thumper," in the Times' gloriously redundant formulation. In his early career, he secured a fearsome reputation on the West Coast, killing a boxer named Frankie Campbell during a 1930 bout. The tragedy so rattled Baer that he lost four of his next six fights. In the film, the death of Campbell is used to build up Baer as a remorseless killer. One movie's terrifying thug, however, is another man's father. "It was after he killed Campbell that he started clowning," Maxie Baer Jr. said in a recent telephone conversation from Las Vegas. "He started smoking cigarettes and he had nightmares for years."

Advertisement

After Campbell's death, Baer decided to move east and train under the tutelage of Jack Dempsey. It was in 1933, when Baer was 24, that he came out as a Jew and wore the Star of David on his trunks for the first time. His opponent was Max Schmeling, the "Black Uhlan of the Rhine" and a reluctant standard-bearer for Hitler's Third Reich. "That one's for Hitler," Baer snarled between blows to the stumbling Schmeling. He knocked him out in the 10th round. It was his finest hour in the ring.

In the post-fight coverage, however, Baer's new "racial" identity raised eyebrows. As reported in the New York Times:

[Baer] explained yesterday, however, that he wore this insignia for the first time, because he is partly Jewish. "My father is Jewish and my mother is Scotch-Irish," said Baer. "I wore the insignia because I thought I should, and I intend to wear it in every bout hereafter."

Over the years, the significance of Baer's gesture has been dismissed as a publicity stunt in a sport that thrives on racial and ethnic conflict. Jeremy Schaap, the author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History, takes a more nuanced view. Schaap establishes that Baer's father was at least half-Jewish before arguing that Baer's manager, Ancil Hoffman, stoked his boxer's ethnic consciousness as a motivating tool. Baer Jr. confirms this view. "My dad didn't know who Hitler was. He only read the sports pages, but Hoffman kept drilling it into his head, 'You're fighting for the Jews.' "

Baer's prominent display of the Star of David came at a time of continuous bad tidings from Germany. Anti-Jewish boycotts were under way, Jews were being expelled from official positions, and Dachau had opened for the internment of communists. A day after the Schmeling fight, a Times dispatch from Berlin reported that the German papers were reticent about their countryman's defeat. "All papers ignore the fact that Schmeling was beaten by a man who in Germany would be classified as a Jew," the unnamed Times correspondent wrote. One can only imagine the propaganda uses Joseph Goebbels would have found had Schmeling defeated Baer.

By disposing of Schmeling, Baer earned his title shot against another unfortunate show horse for European political fashion, Primo "the Ambling Alp" Carnera, a 6-foot-6-inch, 263-pound former circus strongman and a mobbed-up mascot for Benito Mussolini. This 1934 fight—briefly but vividly re-enacted in Cinderella Man—was a frightful affair in which Baer knocked down the clumsy giant 11 (or 12) times, despite being outweighed by 53 pounds.

The heavyweight title now belonged to Baer, who would hold it for 364 days of nightclub carousing and adoring magazine articles. In a 1934 Vanity Fair profile, Baer is described by a bemused Westbrook Pegler in strikingly Gatsby-like terms, a striver taking "dago-singing" lessons and "long-wording people into a daze" from a pocket dictionary. More presciently, Pegler also wrote, "Baer is a fast swinger and he probably will keep the title until frivolity, late hours and cigars abate his speed by the fraction of an instant. Then, presumably, a scientific boxer will beat him. …"
That studiously determined upstart turned out to be gritty Jimmy Braddock from the Jersey docks, known by the more fitting "Plain Jim" before Damon Runyon tagged him "Cinderella Man." Braddock's tale is indeed inspiring: He had a family to feed while Baer's expenses ran mostly to his wardrobe and his mistresses. Baer Jr. cheerfully admits that his father was woefully unprepared. "He didn't take Braddock seriously, he didn't train, and he got a b.j. before the fight," he says, apparently listing the offenses in ascending order of gravity.

Despite the star on his trunks that night, Baer was never a practicing Jew. His tenuous claim, however, seems to have been good enough for Jewish fight fans. Schaap writes that, on the night of the Braddock fight, "Of the 30,000 people in the Bowl, virtually everyone except the Jews was cheering for Braddock."

Stepping back, Baer's "Jewishness" was only one aspect of his elaborate self-invention. In 1933 he starred with Myrna Loy and his upcoming opponent Primo Carnera in The Prizefighter and the Lady, in which he played an all-American underdog who challenges Carnera for the championship. The film was a success and Baer received good reviews for a role that included singing and dancing. It played for a while in Germany, until Goebbels banned the film because Baer was in the cast. But his most enduring film is the 1956 anti-boxing exposé The Harder They Fall, adapted from a Budd Schulberg novel. The film is a virtually undisguised scandal-mongering account of events leading up to the Baer-Carnera fight of 1934. While the justifiably aggrieved Carnera sued Columbia Pictures and Schulberg, Baer gamely played a vicious caricature of himself, a portrait not unlike the Baer we see in Cinderella Man. Schulberg slammed The Harder They Fall as naively sensationalistic, singling out the film's use of Baer: "Maxie Baer, who queens through this incredible part, may have been a tamed tiger but he wasn't a monster."

Even though Baer underachieved as a boxing talent, he still has the distinction of being a feared fighter who wore a conspicuous Star of David on his trunks in the dangerous years of the 1930s. He died of a massive heart attack at the age of 50 in 1959. (Among other things, he didn't live to see his son achieve television celebrity as Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies.) Cinderella Man may reduce Baer to a crude and simplistic villain, but Baer probably would have enjoyed the movie anyway—he despised boxing. "He thought it was horseshit," says his son. "He really wanted to be an actor."

Well done Sean...Interesting stuff.

All boxing movies are adjusted top make them more palatable to the general viewer though.

Like in every war the history is written by the winner in boxing movies every story seems to be re-written by the producer.

Ali - how this modern day saint wasn't given the 'king of the world' title I'll never know.

Ward / Gatti - the only two real warriors to have fought in a ring (until Froch the movie comes out anyway!).

Even Raging Bull which seems pretty honest has apparently made LaMotta out to be both better and worse than he apparently was.

Don't think many boxing fans enjoy these movies as anything more than fiction but it is a shame that it is those not so knowledgeable about our sport that are being lied to.

LaMotta admitted to his flaws and was still alive..........

Baer was completely character assassinated............

TRUSSMAN66 wrote:LaMotta admitted to his flaws and was still alive..........

Baer was completely character assassinated............

I completely agree but was pointing out that they don't let accuracy get in the way of making a good film and never have.

They do If someone is around to sue..

I'm pretty sure the movie tells you about Braddock cut of Joe Louis earnings in the text prior to the closing credits. Making the point he won't go broke again. But hey ho, truth and good stories...

Didn't Richie out of happy days direct that movie. He was mates with fonzy. The guy can do no wrong in my eyes.

seanmichaels wrote:An American Movie twisting the truth for a feel good effect. Never. Reminds me of a film:

"Don't look for a happy ending. It's not an American story. It's an Irish one. "

American movies and truthful depictions of history do not go together. I can't even bring myself to watch Enigma!!

jimdig wrote:I'm pretty sure the movie tells you about Braddock cut of Joe Louis earnings in the text prior to the closing credits. Making the point he won't go broke again. But hey ho, truth and good stories...

Didn't Richie out of happy days direct that movie. He was mates with fonzy. The guy can do no wrong in my eyes.

Wasn't there a rumour that Henry Winkler had made inappropriate advances to "Joanie" during their time on set?

DAVE667 wrote:

jimdig wrote:I'm pretty sure the movie tells you about Braddock cut of Joe Louis earnings in the text prior to the closing credits. Making the point he won't go broke again. But hey ho, truth and good stories...

Didn't Richie out of happy days direct that movie. He was mates with fonzy. The guy can do no wrong in my eyes.

Wasn't there a rumour that Henry Winkler had made inappropriate advances to "Joanie" during their time on set?

He is a patron of the 'Love our Children USA' charity.

seanmichaels wrote:

DAVE667 wrote:

jimdig wrote:I'm pretty sure the movie tells you about Braddock cut of Joe Louis earnings in the text prior to the closing credits. Making the point he won't go broke again. But hey ho, truth and good stories...

Didn't Richie out of happy days direct that movie. He was mates with fonzy. The guy can do no wrong in my eyes.

Wasn't there a rumour that Henry Winkler had made inappropriate advances to "Joanie" during their time on set?

He is a patron of the 'Love our Children USA' charity.

Something he allegedly started in earnest when making overtures to the underage female co-stars on Happy Days

However, let's not dilute this thread with "the Fonz is a nonz" related gossip

Write a piece about Baer-Braddock and get..............

The Fonz.............

TRUSSMAN66 wrote:Write a piece about Baer-Braddock and get..............

The Fonz.............

FFS I did apologise and try get it back on track

Make me a cup of and we'll forget it..

Write an article about how many people at the gym you think are secretly or openly jealous of you and I'll think about it

How much time have you got??

Christ on a bike, you've seen how much time I spend on here. Work clearly isn't a priority.

This article gets better every time I read it, it's been on 6 month rotation for the last 5 years.

As long as you enjoy it...that's the main thing..