Braddock Beat Baer, and Also Beat the Odds

It wasn’t a great fight and neither participant could be called a great fighter.

But the fact that it was James J. Braddock who won the world’s heavyweight championship on this date remains one of the most inspiring stories of 20th century American sports.

One year before the fight, Braddock was a down-and-out soldier of the Great Depression, a stevedore, unable to find work, heavily in debt, trudging the streets of Jersey City, N.J.

He was 29, seeking out small menial labor jobs. His family--he had a wife and three small children--was subsisting meal to meal.

He was under court order to pay a delinquent $35 milk bill. He had been a heavyweight fighter for nine years but had given up trying to break into big-money fights. In 1932 and ’33 alone, he lost nine times.

He turned to boxing one last time, and in 1934 beat contenders Corn Griffin and John Henry Lewis, enabling him to get a title fight with the champion, Max Baer. It was supposed to be an easy one for Baer.

The two met before 30,000 at the Jersey Bowl, with Baer an 8-1 favorite.

Braddock easily won a 15-round decision, exposing Baer as a stylish, laughing, smirking champion who couldn’t fight a lick.

In covering the fight, Ring magazine editor Nat Fleischer called it boxing’s greatest upset since James J. Corbett had upended John L. Sullivan in New Orleans in 1892.

History today portrays both Baer and Braddock as among the nondescript champions between the eras of Jack Dempsey/Gene Tunney and Joe Louis.

Braddock, in his first defense, lost his title when knocked out by Louis the following year. He died in 1974 at 68.

Baer fought six more years, retiring in 1941. He died at 50 in 1959.

Also on this date: In 1912, New York Giant pitcher Christy Mathewson, 31, won his 300th game. . . . In 1985, golfer T.C. Chen scored a double-eagle at the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills Country Club in Birmingham, Mich. On the par-five, 527-yard second hole, Chen’s 255-yard second shot rolled in.