AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2008 > February > 22 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USHard to feel too sorry for Joe Louis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
L
Look, nobody sends Valentine cards to the IRS — as in Internal Revenue Service. No contest, America’s No. l Favorite Enemy. But to blame this federal agency for the financial woes of Joe Louis, the great heavyweight, is sort of piling it on. It’s the popular way to go, for who’s going to make any defense for the IRS? Such is the theme of “Joe Louis: America’s Hero … Betrayed,” an HBO production given a preview in Atlanta this week.
Betrayal? I’m not positive that’s the proper term, in terms of the IRS. Yes, he was betrayed, but first by the various characters “in his corner,” so to speak. Jimmy Cannon, the columnist who first wrote of Louis, “He was a credit to his race — the human race,” also wrote that before the IRS ever got him, the bloodsuckers in his corner, the guys manipulating the books, split him up.
“He made four million dollars [in his ring career] but this was cut up many ways,” Cannon wrote.
You know what four million bucks looked like in those days? It was a king’s fortune, and yes, much of it never reached the champion’s pocket. I read this thing several years later, after Louis had defended his title against Billy Conn, and won twice, the two of them sat at a table in Las Vegas, both broke, both working as greeters at casinos on the Strip. The owner handed a stooge $300, told him to bet it for Joe, and when the stooge came back with a fistful of cash, the owner said, “Don’t let him near a table again.”
In my eyes, Joe Louis brought a fresh degree of popularity to the black athlete. No rip-rap, hip-hop and gangsta trash infected his life. He arose from Alabama poverty, did his stretch in World War II, fought Abe Simon and George Nicholson for the Army and Navy Relief Funds, and kept fighting on, mainly exhibitions, for spending money. But the more he made, the more he made for the IRS. They never let up, and that it is brutal, but that’s the USA. You earn it, you pay taxes.
Boxers have become virtually extinct in the order of sports prominence. Louis, though, represented another level, an American hero. A genuinely warm and likable fellow well met. Strange as it may seem, he had a warm friendship with Max Schmeling, the German heavyweight to whom he lost, then decked in the first round of the rematch. When Las Vegas staged a star-spangled event honoring Louis, Schmeling flew in from Germany to appear with him. And another time. They held a deep admiration for each other. When Louis died in 1981, through the influence of President Reagan, a place was made for him in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most moving services I’ve ever attended. Supreme Court justices, congressmen, old sports stars wearing team jackets, entertainers, Frank Sinatra for one, came to the chapel. Joe Louis resting there among generals, admirals, leaders of men and winners of wars.
One of Louis’ other hazards to his bank account was the golf course. So often pride influences a serious player to assume a handicap that he can’t play to. Louis was not immune. It is written that Bill Spiller, the first black professional of note, once took him for $20,000. He played in several PGA pro-ams on the West Coast, as an amateur, while black pros were shunted aside.
Muhammad Ali sometimes took vocal jabs at this man he should have been applauding, instead leering and calling him an “Uncle Tom” in some of his degrading ragings. But as time passed, as Ali aged and came to his senses, he once whispered in Louis’ ear, “You are really the greatest.”
A stroke of irony is that Joe Louis’ most prominent legacy to sport of the day is centered in golf. He was born Joe Louis Barrow, and today Joe Louis Barrow Jr., an attorney in Denver, is president of the First Tee foundation. “My father gave a greater sense of hope for black Americans in the military beyond what he did in the ring,” he said, and First Tee is aimed at paving a path in golf for young Americans, black and white.
Joe Louis Barrow Jr. takes great pride in the father he came to know in his teens. “My parents were divorced when I was a child,” he said. “I’m tremendously proud of my father, and the sense of hope he gave black Americans.”
An American hero, beyond a doubt. But don’t blame all his travails on the IRS, not one of America’s favorite sets of initials.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Furman Bisher
Comments
By KDC
February 23, 2008 3:00 AM | Link to this
It is often said that a player is “in the zone”. For as long as I can remember, Bisher has been “in the zone”. Keep up the good work, you are an Atlanta treasure
By Al Taylor
February 23, 2008 8:21 AM | Link to this
rip rap,hip hop gangsta trash? Was that part necessary, hiphop was not around then, you just had to show your old southern whitemans mentality and say something to entertain your old racist buddies
By CoastDog
February 23, 2008 8:38 AM | Link to this
Wow, that chip on your shoulder must get heavy.
By Lee
February 23, 2008 9:39 AM | Link to this
Joe Lewis, a guy who blew through a fortune and neglected his son - didn’t know his son until the boy was a teenager.
Yeah, that’s someone we need to put on a pedestal.
By Ken Stallings
February 23, 2008 3:31 PM | Link to this
The IRS shouldn’t get off as easy as you let them. The definition of income tax is to tax money that a person actually receives. For every swindler who absconded with Lewis’ money that represents an actual loss of money, in other words a tax deduction.
But the IRS didn’t choose to see it that way. Instead, they wanted taxes on the purses that Lewis earned, deliberately blind to the reality that Lewis actually recieved but a small percentage of that money.
When Lewis lived tax laws were far less reasonable toward income and many businesses and individuals were unfairly put to the screws.
During the same timeframe, the founder of Consolidated Aviation simply up and resigned from his company and dissolved it! He claimed with considerable logic that it was immoral for a man to pay 90% of his earnings to the federal government.
He argued that if such a system existed then there was no moral basis for a man to work hard. He was right, of course. Joe Lewis earned purses that constituted a lot of money and put him in those insanely high tax brackets. Often, the money he actually took home was less than what the IRS wanted to consider his tax liability!
Lewis suffered this criminal negligence with muted acceptance. He was too dignified a man to engage in scorched earth acts of protests. Eventually, society and government recognized the stupidity of the tax levels worked up during World War II.
It was President John F. Kennedy who finally reversed the insanity and cut the tax percentages on higher income people. But this was all too late to help Joe Lewis.
An honorable burial in Arlington was deserved. But it would have been better still for our federal government to have allowed the man to live his final years with more dignity than the efforts of the IRS allowed.
Books written to reveal the evil the IRS put upon Joe Lewis serve a valuable purpose. It reminds people who work in government that getting away with an action isn’t the same thing as morality. No one in the IRS will ever be charged with crimes.
But at the same time, they should never confuse their works as moral. They earned the rebukes offered in those books and they should be made to live with it!
By ch
February 23, 2008 6:17 PM | Link to this
Excellent comments by Ken Stallings. I don’t think Joe Louis lived his life asking for pity, Mr. Bisher. He endured the best he knew how. Remember he was an uneducated man who knew very little about finances and did a poor job of surrounding himself with financial advisors who had little or no ethical values at all.
By vagabond
February 23, 2008 7:29 PM | Link to this
I used to admire you, now you are just bitter & your writing reflects this.
By maxsportz
February 23, 2008 9:52 PM | Link to this
Joe Louis was betrayed by a govt who used him up when they needed him then sucked every dime off him when he was of no value in the ring to them. The fact that he mishandled his finances does not negate the fact that he was harassed by one of the most despicable organization on earth (you said as much yourself). Let’s pretend for a moment that we are free creatures and do not “owe” taxes. Your statement about “you earn it yo pay taxes” would make the founding fathers throw up. If Joe Louis had never stepped into the ring and earned all that money then the money would have not been there to take. What gives the IRS the right to take something they had ZERO influence on? The answer is of course they have more guns and the veil of legitimacy to use them. I understand there is a need for roads, sewer systems, etc but to be taxed overall at 40 - 50% (do some adding if you doubt it) is the same as being 50% slave. maxsportz.com
By vnjagvet
February 23, 2008 10:06 PM | Link to this
I am in the “he got screwed” camp.
His third wife(an attorney)finally negotiated a fair deal in the fifties(not unusual in cases like his) to waive penalties and interest in exchange for strict future compliance.
By that time, though, he was pretty much a broken man.
Reagan recognized that he was a hero.
By KO
February 23, 2008 10:24 PM | Link to this
You poor, poor little man. Have you freely given small fortunes to your government’s defense agencies in order to show support of your country? What have you done to boost our country’s morale? Who will come to your funeral? Okay, I might—if only to play some “rip-rap, hip-hop gangsta trash” and dance on your grave.
By Steve Montbriand
February 23, 2008 10:42 PM | Link to this
I thought Furman had retired. After reading his weak analysis of what really happened between the IRS and Louis, I’m sorry he hasn’t!
By Billy
February 24, 2008 12:18 AM | Link to this
Wow. I see that the racists have decended on Mr. Bisher’s page. Did Mr. Bisher say anything that wasn’t a fact?
I don’t know much about Joe Louis, other than he was a great fighter. Furman’s article did nothing to change my opinion.
After reading the first few comments, though, I realize that it’s a racist situation…just like EVERY OTHER THING in Atlanta.
Furman is the only reason that I come back here. It’s almost not worth it, though.
By Billy
February 24, 2008 12:24 AM | Link to this
Wow. Well the apologists are all out in force, apparently. Joe Louis is a saint, and Furman Bisher is the devil. I’m so glad that I don’t live with you people in ATL.
By GJvR
February 24, 2008 1:00 AM | Link to this
The documentary does say the Louis spent money like water and did not gloss over his weaknesses—however to overlook the gift of 200,000 to the war effort and forget he took 21.00 a month, was a bit much. That is the issue here. That issue is hard to understand. So let’s stop all the Bold Statements.
By gary
February 24, 2008 1:01 AM | Link to this
I concure billy
By Adam
February 24, 2008 1:31 AM | Link to this
This is a sad article. A legendary writer no more. I could write pages on how wrong and pathetic Furman Bisher is for writing this article, but he doesn’t deserve any of my time.
By JFR
February 24, 2008 1:58 AM | Link to this
The truth to the matter is that Joe Louis was living a life that could only be earned by his own making. According to my father, he was possibly the greatest fighter that ever boxed! “Hands down!” And he was doing this during a period in time that because of his color the media was portraying him with every racial slur possible to describe his success. And even when his country needed him more for the war, he ceased to exist as a famous boxer and became an infantryman. This is the lesson we can extract from his life…A man that believed so strongly in his country and the opportunity that he had as an American. We can’t forget that despite the negative media coverage he received back then and now by this article. If he were alive today, he would simply read this analysis and remember that he served his country to protect this very freedom that you greatly use now to shame his legacy.