Pen picture of Max Baer

WESTBROOK PEGLER

An inquiry into the manners and mores of a fabulous gentleman who doesn't realize his own strength

One way to do a piece about Max Baer, the young hunk who now holds the

heavyweight championship of the world, is to interview him in his quarters, talk to his manager, look him up in the guides and clippings, check your facts and figures, then throw it all away and write by ear.

Mr. Baer is fiction. He is strictly incredible, so that anything you might write about him would still he well within the boundaries of the fairway.

The first systematic publicity that was released on the subject of Max Baer came off the mimeograph at Gus Wilson's training camp. This is a sort of farm, rest-cure and post-graduate school for pugilists, a few miles up the Hudson, and a drive-andpiteh inland from New York. It is fondly known to the profession as Goofeycrest.

Mr. Gus (pronounced Gooze) Wilson (pronounced Veelzon) is a patient Alsatian who was introduced to prominence as the trainer of Georges Carpentier when the elegant young breaker-hoy from Lens came over to show his war-medals in the historic Battle of the Foregone Conclusion with Jack Dempsey at Boyle's Thirty Acres, the first of the million-dollar prizefights. The Wilson retreat in the country is just a little hit of Madison Square Garden that fell from out of the sky one day. In his time, Gus has been host to many curious patients but to none who could out-curious Max Baer.

When Mr. Baer first came to New York about four years ago to exchange furious lefts and rights to the face and body with various young aspirants of the moment, the Madison Square Garden Corporation sent him to Goofeycrest and sent a press-agent with him. The press-agent was James Jennings, an honest, temperate young journalist with family responsibilities and a reputation to maintain. Mr. Jennings is neither a drinker nor a romancer.

There is an amusing little theory in the prizefight industry that if a prizefighter he sent out to the country to train he is more important as news than one who holes up in a modest hotel on Broadway and goes through the same motions in a city gymnasium. He may he only another summer hoarder among many at the rural retreat hut nevertheless the place becomes a training camp and the fighter's daily trivialities acquire a certain prestige on the sport desk.

In a few days, out of Goofeycrest, there began to issue a series of weird communiques.

Mr. Jennings wrote essays about Max Baer's love affairs which read as though Mr. Jennings were trying to he fresh at the expense of an innocent crack-pot. lie sent down items claiming that his subject was taking singing lessons from an Italian operatic coach. Mr. Baer, he said, liked to knock his head against the ring-posts and steam-pipes to toughen it so that he would he impervious to the puny clouts of his colleagues. He called this his skull-practice. Mr. Baer also carried a pocket dictionary and was long-wording people into a daze around the Wilson estate.

Very little of Mr. Jennings' literature made the papers. The sports editors thought he was writing fiction. In a way he was, for the man of whom he was writing wasn't really real. He was just a character that somebody had thought up. Max Baer thought him up, himself.

The Garden Corporation's editorial staff down in the city, not averse to a certain element of light humor in its press matter, thought that Mr. Jennings was over-clowning his assignment. Mr. Jennings tried moderation hut still he was writing fantastics.

"Honest to God," Mr. Jennings would explain, "I am not making things up out of my head. Sometimes I read my compositions over and say to myself, 'Jennings, you are a liar.' Then I check my facts and realize that I have been holding hack, not exaggerating."

Running through his living, human documents those days were persistent references to the lady with whom this strange new pugilist was in love. She was always described as a snooty and exclusive society divorcee and belle of the hon ton.

"But those aren't my words; they're his," the press-agent would insist. "He leans over me when I am writing and says, 'Don't for-

get to put it in your write-up about how my girl is a real society divorcee, Jimmy, just like you see in the papers.'

"And he goes around reading that dictionary and popping away at strangers with words like 'fiduciary' and 'infinitesimal.' And after one of these dago singing lessons, he will go out in the yard and yell 'mi-mi-mi-mi-mi' till it drives you crazy. Gus Wilson's cat and dog ran away and they say the cow will not give any milk for six weeks."

Max was cutting across lots to refinement. He had seen Adolphe Menjou in the movies and lie wanted to lie like that. He got there, too. He married the lady and became, by diligent study and ready imitation, a moving-picture gentleman. There was a divorce in due time hut Max did not revert. On the contrary he continued to refine until he finds himself just now a perfect specimen of the suave and graceful night-club master of ceremonies.

He did quit the dago singing-lessons, however. His manager, Mr. Ancil Hoffman, explained that he abandoned this art when he learned that the diaphragm and the stomach were about the same thing. He had been told that singing would develop his diaphragm and thought that this was his voice. When lie learned the truth he told Mr. Hoffman that a fighter was silly to do anything which would tend to develop his stomach.

"That," said Max, "is what a fighter wants to train off."

Max killed a man with his fists once and it is probable that he contributed to the death of another. Frankie Campbell of California died from the effects of a terrific slugging-about the head which Max dealt him as he lay helpless on the ropes. It scared Baer. He didn't realize that he could hit that hard. Later, lie hit Ernie Schaaf in the closing seconds of a ten-round fight in Chicago after catching Schaaf's leather on his countenance all the way, and Schaaf was unconscious for an hour. A short while after that, Schaaf tumbled over backward from the force of an ordinary left-hand pop on the mouth fetched him by Primo Camera and died of an injury to his brain.

Schaaf was a moral, ambitious young man from Boston whose body was so beautiful that he was selected to pose for the figure of the prizefighter which adorns the column of the Tunney-Muldoon trophy, emblematic of the heavyweight championship of the world. This is a rather pathetic little monument which is constantly being shifted from corner to corner and from pillar to post in the lobby of Madison Square Garden, ft gets in the way and irreverent parties have a tendency to write critical remarks in pencil on the bronze tablets which contain the names of the champions. It would be an appropriate marker on the grave of old William Muldoon or perhaps on Ernie Schaaf's grave.

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After Schaaf died, Mr. Muldoon issued a ruling that Primo thereafter must not be allowed to fight anyone but super-heavyweights weighing upward of 225 pounds. Mr. Muldoon decided that Camera was too big and strong for two-hundred-pounders and some of the English journalists who had seen him bounce about the ring in London thought so, too. One of the English writers, in fact, had written an hysterical appeal to the Home Secretary to take up Primo's license and rule him out of pugilism altogether on the ground that Camera wasn't able to pull a punch and was always a potential killer.

The American experts did not think so. lie wasn't a puncher but a pusher and even when Jack Sharkey swooned before him, following a right-hand flick on the lips, yielding up the heavyweight championship to Primo, the critics in the United States insisted that he could not punch.

Like all his other rulings, Mr. Muldoon's verhoten against Camera was forgotten in time and Baer, having destroyed Max Schmeling professionally with his great swings to the head, was matched to meet him. lie weighed about 216 pounds to Primo's 260 and 1 looked the part of a human sacrifice.

Mr. Bill Brown, succeeding Mr. Muldoon on the prizefight commission, tried to postpone or cancel Baer's opportunity with Camera on the ground that Baer was not fit to fight a man so mighty. Baer had not ceased to smoke cigars or take drams while he was training, and this conduct horrified Mr. Brown, who runs a suburban drydock for tired business men.

Then Baer, the puny man, entered the ring to knock Primo down eleven times and annihilate him in the wildest prizefight which the ring has revealed to the trade since Luis Angel Firpo knocked Dempsey out of the ring. A natural fighter and therefore a swinger, Baer pitched long, whistling throws at Primo's chin and body with such terrific speed and force that the enormous stranger forgot all his teaching and neglected to remain down for the conventional nine-seconds' rest when he found himself on the floor. In this way he denied himself the advantage of a total of ninety-nine seconds' convalescence which might have done him no particular good in the long run but certainly would have done no harm.

There had been some question up to this time regarding Baer's appetite for punishment but he answered that one in round eight when he was hit under the chin with a right uppercut which seemed likely to snap his neck. Baer was stunned for an instant but the strength, which Mr. Brown, the expert, had doubted, was there in abundance and his courage was more than sufficient to cover the demand. He shook his head, grinned a savage grin and tore back in, punching madly at the fighter whose merest dab on the mouth had caused the death of one man and knocked Jack Sharkey out.

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 by moving quickly inside the arc of his swings as Tunney did to Dempsey, when Dempsey had declined a little.

Mr. Hoffman, his manager, is a short, delicatessen type with little showmanship or imagination, wdio wotdd look entirely at home in straw cuffs and white apron in a New York sandwich parlor. He holds a 25 per cent share of Max Baer. Mr. Ham Lorimer of California claims another 25 per cent and is suing for an accounting at the moment. Baer's father owns 10 per cent and a further 15 per cent is allotted to other participants. Jack Dempsey also lays claims to some interest in the Baer property but apparently will be content with a lien on his services.

If Mr. Lorimer's claim is proved, Baer thus will have retained for himself only 25 per cent of himself. If the suit is disallowed, Max will be halfowner of himself, subject to the Dempsey lien. Mr. Baer explained his early recklessness with regard to shares in himself to a California journalist some time ago.

"I thought," he said, "that there was a thousand per cent in anything, like in the baseball percentages. So I figured that although 1 had dished out 75 per cent I still had 925 per cent to go. Boy, was I surprised?

"Per cents drive me nuts anyway. I can remember two halfs or three thirds or four fourths. They look like pieces of pie. But thirty-seven and a half per cents do not look like pie."

The young man is less fantastic than he was. He is beginning to hide away some money now, hut not by any stingy self-denial. He had fifty suits, and he knocked out Primo and bought fifty more the next w'eek. He also bought a hundred shirts and neckties, thirty-five pairs of shoes, and hats by the dozen, much of which truck he undoubtedly will give away or just lose without ever wearing it at all.

On the stage he is a ham, but in the close quarters of a night club he sings, dances and banters as well as any of the masters of this lucrative art; and he has shown himself to be a better actor on the air than the professionals who are hired as his supporting cast. He also plays contract bridge, tells a story well, performs ably in the movies, and can knock a golf ball around a standard acreage in 85 taps.

If there is anything else you wish to know about him, just make it up vourself—and it will be true.