In Black and White: the untold story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, by Donald McRae

American heroes - when it suited America

When rudimentary television pictures of the 1936 Olympics were beamed around Berlin halls, The New York Times reported that white athletes "were vague blurs in the milky mess". Their black counterparts were more easily picked out. Three decades later, when American networks refused to air the documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, the erstwhile Fastest Man in the World asked: "Why don't we show the negatives, so that I'll be white and the Nazis black?"

In Black and White – a double biography of Joe Louis, who successfully defended his world heavyweight boxing title 25 times, and Owens, who won four Olympic golds – is full of incidents like that, heavy with metaphorical significance. Another is the episode that set Donald McRae to work on this fine book, investigating a claim that the two friends once raced each other.

They did, indeed, compete in a humiliating sprint, in the interval of a double-header baseball game. Owens, hounded out of organised athletics for cutting short a gruelling tour designed to bolster US Olympic Committee finances, had been forced to pass himself off as a clown of track and field. Sometimes he simply gave a long-jump exhibition (his world record stood for 25 years), but too often he lined up against "polo ponies and trap horses, greyhounds and double-decker buses".

McRae charts their intertwined narrative arcs. Both from Alabama sharecropping communities, they met at the start of their careers: a year before Owens was to beard Hitler in his lair, three before Louis took the world title from the Führer's favourite boxer, Max Schmeling.

But Owens's career was only "stellar" in the shooting sense. The US authorities, led by "Slavery" Avery Brundage, saw to that. A few months after his Olympic triumphs, he was just another negro looking for a job. Via laundry businesses and spells as a playground inspector and MC for the Harlem Globetrotters, he became an athletics official while maintaining a Stakhanovite schedule as a motivational speaker and doer of good works.

Louis, the "jungle primitive" hated by most boxing writers, remained champion until 1948. But, partly thanks to his failure to pay tax on purses donated to the war effort, he spent his life in hock to the IRS. Owens also ran into trouble with the taxman and, for all his good deeds, narrowly escaped jail. Louis was not to extricate himself from his tax nightmare until he married a lawyer. He never found a job to match his dignity: Las Vegas casino greeter and failed wrestler were the acme of his record.

This is an atmospheric triumph of a book, though this reviewer experienced a certain unease over the verbatim accounts of so many conversations. How much imaginative putty is filling in the gaps? Suspicions are allayed by McRae's fanatically detailed "Sources and Acknowledgements".

There is another powerful metaphor in the book. Owens's first coach instructed him to "Imagine you're sprinting over a ground of burning fire". Owens and Louis, as black sportsmen made to stand for their race, or for America when it suited America, were continually treading on hot coals.