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fortune, and ours, rests in the fact that The New Yorker of his day trusted its top writers to expound upon whatever inspired them. While The Sweet Science focuses mostly on title fights, the outcome is less important than the route Liebling takes to get there. So he toddles over to Ireland for a modest bout simply because it’s being held in the town that gave its name to every all-out brawl—Donnybrook. Such whimsy is rarely visible in today’s celebrity and scandal-driven market, where every article must reduce to a one sentence “idea,” and fact is king. The rare opportunities writers have to treat their subjects goes a long way toward explaining their compressed, overheated prose—they know they aren’t likely to get the chance again, and only have a few thousand words to fit everything in. By contrast, the Liebling pace is leisurely. What he can’t treat in one essay can be easily taken up in the next; themes evolve and intertwine throughout the eighteen pieces. Celebrities are disdained, scandals absent. By the time Sonny Liston became heavyweight champion in 1962, he had attracted notoriety equal to that of Mike Tyson today, yet Liebling barely refers to Liston’s criminal past. The rough champion is humanized through his exchanges with a sympathetic Liebling. The obvious goes unmentioned.

To most contemporary Americans the customs and traditions of fighters appear as bizarre and savage as those of Kandangai headhunters. In the 1950s, however, boxing was much closer to the general public. This familiarity, and Liebling’s own boxing experience, allowed him to represent the sport as sport. His stance toward its sometimes disturbing violence might seem blase to us—as when he describes Ezra Charles’s disfigurement at the hands of Rocky Marciano—but Liebling saw boxing as the pros do: a job, more difficult than most but also more rewarding. He doesn’t make the ring over into the setting for a morality play or an alternate site for Armageddon (he had witnessed the real thing on the battlefields of Europe).

This is not to say that Liebling didn’t take boxing seriously. As far as he was concerned, boxing deserved to be called “science.” He understood the intellectual and physical effort necessary to master the craft. Although he recognized the brute force of a Marciano, he preferred technicians to sluggers—a suitable predilection for one of the great stylists of his generation. Hence his disapproval of Ingemar Johansson’s lax training methods and his appreciation of the shrewd old artist Archie Moore, whom he called “a boxer’s boxer, as Stendhal was for a long time a writer’s writer.” Liebling rarely covered unproven fighters, but his eye for talent was acute enough to recognize, in late 1961, the aura around a brash young heavyweight named Cassius Clay (he also enjoyed Clay’s verbal prowess).

Liebling knew he was covering a sport in decline. He had watched boxing descend from a pinnacle in the 1920s, when it rivaled baseball as a national pastime and Jack Dempsey garnered more headlines than Babe Ruth. Even during the Depression-era doldrums of 1938, New York City counted more than a thousand registered professional boxers who performed weekly at seven city clubs, while amateurs fought as often as every other day for prizes that could easily be pawned (a useful quality in the twentieth century’s worst economic crisis). When Liebling returned to the beat fourteen years later, New York had only 241 pros; all but one of the clubs had shut down, and the old Madison Square Garden, world capital of boxing, was a ghost kingdom with spectral tiers of empty seats.

Liebling’s prose is shaded by the recognition that his time is passing. Time hangs over all of us, but it strikes no one more swiftly than boxers, who can become old men in three minutes. Even the great champions, men who have defeated every other opponent, are helpless against this threat. The Sweet Science opens with the last stand of Joe Louis, hero of Liebling’s young manhood, and closes with a thirty-nine-year-old (at least) Archie Moore succumbing to Marciano. The succession