Risko isn’t smart, but then Schmeling isn’t either. This statement will probably surprise a lot of people who figure him to be pretty shrewd-headed in the ring. Outside the ring, Max is intelligent enough. I make no aspersion against his brains when I say he isn’t smart, for I mean it entirely in a boxing sense. Put the most erudite college professor you ever saw in the ring and he would be a complete dumb-bell while he had the gloves on. Some people have an instinct for doing the right thing when they are boxing. Schmeling hasn’t. For one thing, he becomes dazzled by the crowd and the lights and excitement. It takes time for him to get his bearings. He is too stirred by his imagination. Before the Sharkey fight, the physician who examined him found his blood pressure extremely high and his heart action far beyond normal. The Germans are supposed to be phlegmatic and coldblooded, but this is not true of the Black Uhlan. I assume that he has been that way before all his bouts. Risko took the fight to Schmeling just as he does to everyone else. He never had any finesse. All his battles are waged along the same lines. Max knew that. He had seen Johnny fight, but through the earlier rounds he didn’t know exactly what was the best thing to do. This is not an indication that the German is a good student of the game.

Though the records show that Max scored a knockout in the ninth round, the whole story isn’t told by that. Up until the final minute, Risko didn’t have any the worst of it. In spite of the fact that he is easy to hit, Max didn’t land on him nearly as much as he should have. He missed plenty. Frequently Risko made the Uhlan fight the way he wanted him to. Then, zowie! The right hand landed on the button. It hit the exact spot where it would do the most damage. That punch nearly knocked Johnny’s brains out. He was rocky, half blind, hadn’t any defense left. Max had a dead target to shoot at. He just whanged away with both hands at the helpless baker until the referee stopped the fight. Schmeling is supposed to have a great right. I’ll admit that he has a good one, but he slammed Risko on the chin half a dozen times when John was in no shape to protect himself, and couldn’t drop him. You’ll have to take some of the credit away from his punch on that performance. Do you think that Johnny would have kept on his feet under similar conditions if Dempsey had hit him? like that?—or Bob Fitzsimmons?—or Jim Jeffries?

Not so you could notice it. But my opinion isn't based on that alone. Schmeling hits hard enough with his right. He can hurt a man plenty with it, which is more than you can say of a lot of other heavyweights who talk big and do little. But, though he was acclaimed to the skies for his technical knockout of Risko, it seemed to me that Max's very evident faults more than overbalanced his good points at that time. Suppose that wallop had missed. In that case, Johnny might have won or gained a draw. Even if he lost the decision, it wouldn't have mattered much, for he had dropped plenty of others. But Schmeling would have missed the biggest ballyhoo of his life. That's what they sold him on—his knockout of Risko. Without that golden mark in the record books he would have been just another heavyweight.

I don't mean to say it was a lucky punch. It wasn't. Max had been throwing right hands all night, and a number of others had landed. Knocking out an iron man like Risko isn't just a question of getting to his chin. The blow has to be perfectly timed and land in exactly the proper spot. It did just that—and made Max Schmeling's fortune for him. The Uhlan showed that he had a powerful right, but his left was nothing to rave about, and the usual flaws of a comparatively inexperienced boy were evident in his work. Still he showed enough to make his friends enthusiastic. If he could do that well so early in his career, there were high hopes that he would add a lot to what he had already shown.