He gave the purses away and was billed for them anyway

Most champions become inaccessible. Joe Louis became a fixture you could walk up to, and he did it because he had no choice.

Two fights, both given away

On 9 January 1942 Louis defended his title against Buddy Baer at Madison Square Garden and knocked him out in the first round. The winner's share was $65,200. After training expenses he gave $47,500 to Navy Relief.

He enlisted in the army the following day.

On 27 March, now a private earning twenty-one dollars a month, he fought Abe Simon and gave $36,146 of a $45,882 purse to Army Relief.

At that moment he personally owed something like $217,000, more than half of it claimed by the Internal Revenue Service in back taxes. He gave the money away regardless.

The deal that was broken, and by whom

The version usually told is that the tax authorities destroyed him. The more careful account is worse, because it was not really them.

There had been an arrangement. With his induction imminent, Louis's manager reached an agreement with a War Department representative: the two bouts would be staged as charity events, with Louis, his manager and his promoter all donating their earnings, and Louis would enter the military with his tax position cleared.

His promoter, Mike Jacobs, kept his own share of the receipts.

That single fact undid the whole thing. A fight where the promoter takes his money is not a charity event; it is a prize fight. Which made Louis's purses taxable income, on which tax was due before any donation, on money he had already handed to the Navy and the Army.

He was also refused a deduction for three thousand dollars of tickets he had bought so soldiers could attend.

So he was taxed on income he never kept, because somebody else broke the terms.

The arithmetic that followed

The rates did the rest. When Louis turned professional in 1931 the top marginal rate was 24 per cent. By 1937 it was 79. Through the 1940s it reached 90.

He had no shelters, no municipal bonds and no clever accountant, and the interest compounded annually.

By the late 1940s the debt was over half a million dollars. By the end of the 1950s it had passed a million. His career earnings were more than five million dollars before tax, and none of it was enough.

He retired as undefeated champion in 1949 and came out of retirement the following year because he had to. He fought Ezzard Charles and lost. In 1951 he fought Rocky Marciano for a $300,000 purse and was knocked out in the eighth. Technically the whole purse was owed, and it barely moved the balance.

His own summary of it was short: "the more I worked, the less I had."

Two details give the scale of what collection looked like. In 1953 his mother died leaving him $667, and the IRS took it. In 1955 it attached trust funds totalling $65,668.

Eleven years in a casino lobby

Boxing was finished for him and the debt was not, so he did whatever paid. He refereed wrestling matches. He appeared on quiz shows. He wrestled professionally into his fifties.

And from 1970 until his death he was a greeter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, shaking hands with gamblers arriving at the door.

It is usually told as a humiliation, and there is no getting around what it was. But it is also the reason a great many people met him. Eleven years, in one building, in a city everybody passes through, being introduced to strangers as a job.

A heavyweight champion is normally protected by handlers and hotel floors. Louis spent the last decade of his life standing in a lobby, available to anyone who walked in.

What that means for his signature

This site keeps arriving at the same conclusion from different directions: what a signature costs is mostly a fact about how available the person was, and availability is usually a fact about their circumstances rather than their character.

Honus Wagner's autographs are plentiful because the Depression took his sporting goods business and he went back to coaching the Pirates for eighteen years, in a ballpark, in reach of anyone with a pen. Louis was in a casino lobby for eleven years for a related reason.

The documented results this index records for him are all signed cards from the late 1940s and early 1950s, the years when American companies were still making boxing sets. The signatures on them could have been applied at any point in the following thirty years, and a considerable number of Joe Louis signatures were applied during the Caesars years to whatever people brought with them.

The end, and who paid for it

Louis died on 12 April 1981, still in debt.

Max Schmeling was a pallbearer at his funeral and helped pay for it. The German fighter Louis had beaten in 1938 in the most politically loaded bout ever staged, who had become his friend, settled the bill for his burial.

There is no tidy way to put that.

The thing worth sitting with

A man gave two fight purses to the American armed forces in the year his country entered the war, was taxed on both because his promoter took his cut, spent the rest of his life working off the resulting interest, and ended up greeting tourists in Nevada.

The autographs exist because of it.

Every signature is a record of somebody being available, and the reasons people are available are not usually flattering to the circumstances that made them so.

This index records documented sales of his signed material, and there is a companion piece on Honus Wagner, whose autographs exist for a related reason. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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