Joe Louis Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
59 free Joe Louis trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Joe Louis trivia quiz covers the heavyweight champion who held the title longer than anyone in boxing history and became the first Black American to be embraced as a national hero. The easy questions are ones any fight fan can attempt: his nickname, his home city, the German he knocked out in 124 seconds in 1938, the man he beat for the title and the man who ended his career. From there it moves through his record: 25 defences, the Bum of the Month Club, the two Conn fights, the Walcott scares, the Farr decision that the crowd booed and the He can run but he can't hide line. The harder end is for boxing historians: his real name and Alabama birthplace, the violin case that hid his gloves, the $59 debut purse, the Seven Commandments his managers wrote, the Carnera fight and Ethiopia, the golf that cost him the first Schmeling bout, FDR's remark about muscles, the wartime charity fights that the IRS taxed, Jackie Robinson's officer application, the pro wrestling, the PGA breakthrough and the friend who paid for his funeral at Arlington. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Louis and his opponents before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our boxing, heavyweight champions and 1930s sport quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Joe Louis's famous nickname?
The Brown Bomber
The Brown Bomber. Sportswriters ran through alliterative coinages such as the Mahogany Mauler and the Chocolate Chopper before this one stuck.
Q 02What was Joe Louis's full birth name?
Joseph Louis Barrow
Joseph Louis Barrow. In one telling he wrote his first two names so large on an amateur entry form that the surname would not fit; in another he dropped it so his mother would not learn he was boxing.
Q 03Louis and Jesse Owens were born eight months apart in which state?
Alabama
Alabama. Both sharecroppers' sons went north as boys in the Great Migration, and each later embarrassed Nazi racial theory: Owens on the track in 1936, Louis in the ring in 1938.
Q 04To which city did Louis's family move in 1926, where he grew up and learned to box?
Detroit
Detroit. His stepfather had gone ahead for work in the car plants, and the family followed in the Great Migration when Joe was 12; he took up boxing at the city's Brewster Recreation Center.
Q 05Which instrument was Louis meant to be learning with the lesson money he secretly spent on a boxing gym?
Violin
Violin. His mother paid for the lessons to keep him off the streets, and he reportedly boxed as plain Joe Louis so that she would not find out where the money was going.
Q 06Which car company employed Louis for a time at its River Rouge plant?
Ford
Ford. He worked as a labourer at its vast Rouge works, then quit factory life at 20 to box for money; three years later he was heavyweight champion of the world.
Q 07Before he ruled boxing's top division, Louis won his 1934 national amateur title in which weight class?
Light heavyweight
Light heavyweight. He took the national AAU title at 175 pounds in 1934, turned professional the same year and fought as a heavyweight from his first paid bout.
Q 08How much did Louis earn for his professional debut, a first-round knockout of Jack Kracken on 4 July 1934?
$59
$59. His next purses were $62 and $101, yet within two years he had earned about $370,000 in the ring, a fortune in the Depression.
Q 09Who was Louis's trainer, nicknamed Chappie?
Jack Blackburn
Jack Blackburn. A former lightweight who had served time for manslaughter, he doubted a Black heavyweight would get his chances, yet he and Louis grew so close that each called the other Chappie.
Q 10Which rule was among the Seven Commandments Louis's managers set for his conduct?
Never be photographed with a white woman
Never be photographed with a white woman. His managers gave the list to the press; it also told him never to gloat over a beaten opponent and to keep a dead pan for the cameras.
Q 11Which earlier Black fighter's flamboyant lifestyle cast a shadow that Louis's handlers worked to counter?
Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson. The first Black heavyweight champion had gloated over the white opponents he beat, and the backlash kept Black fighters from a title shot for 22 years, until Louis.
Q 12Louis's 1935 knockout of Italy's Primo Carnera was cheered by Black Americans as a symbolic win for which threatened nation?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia. Mussolini was preparing to invade one of the few independent Black-ruled countries, so the giant Carnera stood in for fascist Italy when Louis stopped him in six rounds.
Q 13What did Louis do just hours before knocking out former champion Max Baer in September 1935?
Got married
Q 21Which president is said to have felt Louis's biceps and told him America needed such muscles to beat Germany?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. They met in the spring before Louis's 1938 rematch with Germany's Max Schmeling, over three years before America entered the war, and his win made him a hero to Black and white Americans alike.
Q 22About how long did Louis need to beat Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch?
About 2 minutes
About 2 minutes. It took 124 seconds: Schmeling was knocked down three times before his corner threw in the towel, in front of a crowd of more than 70,000.
Q 23Max Schmeling, who later helped pay for Louis's funeral, grew rich in postwar Germany from which drinks company?
Got married. He wed Marva Trotter in a Harlem apartment a few hours before the bell, then stopped Baer in four rounds with his bride watching from ringside.
Q 14Promoter Mike Jacobs signed Louis in 1935 as his weapon against which venue's monopoly on big-time boxing?
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden. Jacobs ran a rival club set up with Hearst sportswriters, among them Damon Runyon, and Louis was the star attraction he needed to break the Garden's hold on the sport.
Q 15Which flaw in Louis's style did Max Schmeling exploit to knock him out in 1936?
A low left hand
A low left hand. Schmeling told reporters beforehand that he had seen something: Louis dropped his left after jabbing, and right-hand counters over it put him down for good in the 12th round.
Q 16What new hobby distracted Louis from training before the first Schmeling fight?
Golf
Golf. He took it up in camp and spent long hours on the course, then entered the ring a 10-to-1 favourite and suffered the first defeat of his professional career.
Q 17Whom did Louis knock out in the eighth round on 22 June 1937 to win the world heavyweight title?
James Braddock
James Braddock. He floored Louis early and was knocked out in the eighth, but lost well: his deal for the fight gave his camp a 10 percent cut of the winner's promotions for the next ten years.
Q 18In which city did Louis win the world heavyweight title in June 1937?
Chicago
Chicago. A New York arena held a contract on the champion's next defence, against a different challenger, so the fight was taken west to Comiskey Park, home of baseball's White Sox.
Q 19Which Harlem Renaissance writer recalled marching, cheering, yelling and crying at Louis's victories?
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes. He wrote that thousands on relief poured into the streets after each win, and that no one else in America had ever had such an effect on Negro emotions, or on his own.
Q 20How did Louis's first title defence, against Welshman Tommy Farr in 1937, end?
A 15-round decision
A 15-round decision. Louis won it on points: the Welsh coal miner had been lined up to fight Max Schmeling until Louis's promoter outbid the German, and he became one of only three challengers to last the distance.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola. The man once paraded as proof of Nazi racial theory ran a West German bottling franchise for the American giant, and sent money to his old rival when Louis fell on hard times.
Q 24About how many Americans heard the 1938 Louis-Schmeling rematch on the radio?
70 million
70 million. By the usual estimate more than half of a nation of 130 million tuned in, because the bout had been built up as a battle between democracy and Nazism.
Q 25What collective nickname was given to the opponents Louis beat in his defences between January 1939 and May 1941?
The Bum of the Month Club
The Bum of the Month Club. The joke hid a record: at the height of the run Louis defended his title once a month, a schedule no heavyweight champion had ever attempted.
Q 26Which two-ton challenger knocked Louis down with a left hook in June 1939 before being stopped in the fourth?
Tony Galento
Tony Galento. The New Jersey tavern owner trained for the cameras on beer and cigars and promised to 'moider da bum', then really did put the champion on the canvas before the referee rescued him a round later.
Q 27Which former champion of the next division down led on two scorecards before Louis knocked him out late in round 13?
Billy Conn
Billy Conn. The lighter man outboxed Louis for 12 rounds, then ignored his corner and tried to slug it out for a knockout; two seconds from the bell, he was the one counted out.
Q 28Weeks after Pearl Harbor, Louis risked his title against Buddy Baer and gave his whole purse to which cause?
The Navy Relief Society
The Navy Relief Society. He knocked Baer out in the first round and the fund received $47,000; two months later he put the title up again, this time for the Army's relief fund.
Q 29Which famous boxing line did Louis coin before a title fight?
He can run, but he can't hide
He can run, but he can't hide. Louis said it of a lighter, faster challenger who planned to outbox him, and backed it up by knocking the man out.
Q 30Joining a segregated Army in 1942, Louis said America had plenty wrong with it, but nothing which dictator could fix?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler. Louis enlisted as a private soon after Pearl Harbor, and used his fame inside the Army to press for fairer treatment of Black soldiers.