Mitch Levin, dapper in a purple shirt and dark tie, stands in front of a sparse audience at the Sulzer Public Library, talking about boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. From the back of the room, Mitch’s younger brother Joel yells corrections and additions. Then the lights go down and Robinson does a job on Jake LaMotta in the 1951 “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” at the Chicago Stadium–the fight immortalized in the film Raging Bull.
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Like his favorite pugilist, Stanley Ketchel, it takes Mitch a while to warm up. He’ll talk for hours about boxing but put up his guard once the questions turn to him. By the end of the program, he’s waxing poetic about Robinson’s charisma and penchant for becoming friends with his opponents. Then it’s on to Robinson’s 1958 fight against Carmen Basilio at the Chicago Stadium, in which Basilio nearly loses an eye and even the referee takes a punch. Basilio’s final beating is repeated in slow motion. “Look at the fantastic close-up of that all-important eye,” intones the announcer.
This Saturday the Levins will show films of Joe Louis, “the Brown Bomber,” in observance of Black History Month. Included in the program will be Louis’s 1938 one-round rematch against Germany’s Max Schmeling. Louis won in one minute and 20 seconds, dealing a blow to Hitler’s notion of the master race and cracking several of Schmeling’s ribs in the process. “No World Series or anything can equal the drama of Louis beating Schmeling the Aryan,” says Mitch. “Schmeling was not technically a Nazi, but after becoming the first man ever to knock out Louis in 1936, he sort of became their man by default. After he lost, it was another story.” Indeed, after that fight Louis became a hero, and the streets of Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville filled with revelers. Schmeling later turned against the Nazis and was sent to the front lines of World War II as punishment. After the war he became an executive for Coca-Cola. Louis, a former sharecropper and World War II veteran who would often donate his entire purse to the army during the war years, died in 1981 owing a fortune to the IRS.
