The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [0]
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
The Big Fellows
Boxing with the Naked Eye
Broken Fighter Arrives
The Melting Middleweight
Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove
Kearns by a Knockout
The Big Fellows Again
New Champ
Long Toddle, Short Fight
Charles I
Charles II
Other Fronts
The Boy from South Main Street
Nino and a Nanimal
Soirée Intime
The Neutral Corner Art Group
Debut of a Seasoned Artist
Wunderkind
Great-and-a-Half Champion
Next-to-Last Stand, Maybe
Donnybrook Farr
Ahab and Nemesis
Ahab and Nemesis
By A. J. Liebling
Notes
Copyright Page
Foreword
by Robert Anasi
No one wrote about boxing better than A. J. Liebling. This is saying something, as the competition is pretty fierce, running as it does through Norman Mailer all the way back to The Aeneid. Liebling’s first boxing essays appeared in the 1930s, but his great run didn’t start until 1951. Between that year and 1963, he churned out thirty-four pugilistic masterpieces for The New Yorker, a publication that cared little for the “sweet science of bruising” but appreciated Joe Liebling.1 Liebling wasn’t a boxing writer per se; a man of commodious inclination, he wrote with equal facility about the racetrack, World War II, France, the press, politicians (and other con-men), the low-life, and food. Yet boxing held a particular allure for him. He had boxed enough to enjoy the niceties of the sport, and the characters of the prize ring provided abundant material for his writing. I like to think that Liebling was foreordained to write about boxing: the first newspaper article he remembered reading, at age seven, was about an Oklahoma fighter. Tellingly, boxing analogies and anecdotes permeate his non-boxing books such as Between Meals and The Telephone Booth Indian.
On boxing Liebling is a joy to read. It would be redundant to list the many virtues of his prose—like handing out an instruction manual for a sunset. More useful, perhaps, is to mention what he doesn’t do. These essays avoid the dazzled mystification of much “literary” boxing prose and the hard-boiled sentimentality of the sports journalism of Liebling’s day. From time to time Liebling’s erudition will send you running for the dictionary—choice mots include pyknic and succedaneum, and there are oddball references to Greek tragedy and an Arab philosopher named Ibn Khaldun. The intent, however, is not to overawe but to entertain (he calls one Southern politician “a peckerwood Caligula”).
Although Liebling’s observations are suffused with humor, generally at the expense of his principals—fighters and trainers, managers and fans—his drollery is never malicious. As often as he satirizes fight people, he credits them with shrewdness and insight, though often it may filter through a guttural idiom. Liebling writes with bemused tolerance, the hallmark of an artist whose work took him through every stratum of urban life to Indian reservations and the D-Day beaches of Normandy. One thing Liebling certainly is not is a racist, although no less an authority than Joyce Carol Oates makes a claim to the contrary. Liebling does refer to African-Americans as “colored” or “Negro,” but that is simply the diction of his period. What Oates fails to realize is that Liebling had more empathy for fighters than he did for anyone else. Compared to how Liebling treats southern politicians and prudes, boxers get off easy.
Liebling’s voice is urbane, his tastes cosmopolitan. He appreciates the crowd and is attuned to the minute interactions and exchanges of city life. Like a man out for a weekend stroll, Liebling takes his time; the typical essay meanders from gym to training camp and through the city, making stops at various centuries and continents. Liebling is the educated stand-in for the man on the street, delighted to take the time to look at what’s happening around him—though he is also entirely capable of taut, dramatic writing (best demonstrated in “Charles I,” the book’s shortest essay).
Liebling’s good