A fight to relive and revere.(Television Program Review)

On the 28th of September, Max Schmeling celebrated his 99th birthday at home in Hamburg, Germany. A reporter, Florian Kalle, quoted Schmeling as saying that the word "celebrated" is not quite right. "I am getting older," he said. "It's not a reason to celebrate." He did allow, though, that he has a goal in life. "Now I want to make the 100."

So, on the 18th of October, go to your television.

Find your PBS station.

Watch The Fight.

You'll meet Schmeling in 1936, then 30, slick and handsome, a groomed, tailored sophisticate fashioned by Berlin's cabaret society of the 1920s. The world heavyweight boxing champion from 1930 to '32, Schmeling was a national hero who carried German guarantees to the U.S. Olympic Committee that Berlin's 1936 Olympics would be fair to Jewish athletes, Americans and all others. Later, over lunch, Adolf Hitler thanked Schmeling for helping prevent an Olympic boycott. The Fuhrer gave the fighter an autographed picture of himself. It went up in Schmeling's study.

You'll see Joe Louis not as a piece of ancient sports history but vividly alive, 22 years old, rosy youth shimmering on his face, a silent kid up from an Alabama sharecropper's cotton field. He is not yet the heavyweight champion but already the best fighter in the world. He is not yet, in Jimmy Cannon's phrase, "a credit to his race, the human race." He is something less, as the 1930s most famous sports journalist, Paul Gallico, wrote after seeing Louis train:

"I felt myself strongly ridden by the impression that here was a mean man, a truly savage person, a man on whom civilization rested no more securely than a shawl thrown over one's shoulders, that, in short, here was perhaps for the first time in many generations the perfect prizefighter. I had the feeling that I was in the room with a wild animal."