The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [119]
The main bout proved an even less grueling contest. Valdes, eager to get out of the chill, struck Cockell more vindictively than is his wont, and after a few gestures invocative of commiseration the fat man settled in one corner of the ring as heavily as suet pudding upon the unaccustomed gastric system. He had received what Egan would have called a “ribber” and a “nobber,” and when he arose it was seen that the latter had raised a cut on his forehead. At the end of the third round, his manager withdrew him from competition. It was not an inspiring occasion, but after the armistice eight or nine shivering Cubans appeared in the runway behind the press section and jumped up and down to register emotion and restore circulation. “Ahora Marciano!” they yelled. “Now for Marciano!” Instead of being grateful for the distraction, the other spectators took a poor view of it. “Sit down, you chaps!” one of them cried. “We want to see the next do!” They were still parked out there in the rain when I tottered into the Shepherd’s Bush underground station and collapsed, sneezing, on a train that eventually disgorged me at Oxford Circus, with just enough time left to buy a revivifying draught before eleven o’clock, when the pubs closed. How the mugs I left behind cured themselves I never knew. They had to do it on Bovril.
Because I had engagements that kept me in England until a few days before the Encounter, I had no opportunity to visit the training camps of the rival American Heroes. I knew all the members of both factions, however, and I could imagine what they were thinking. In the plane on the way home, I tried to envision the rival patterns of ratiocination. I could be sure that Marciano, a kind, quiet, imperturbable fellow, would plan to go after Moore and make him fight continuously until he tired enough to become an accessible target. After that he would expect concussion to accentuate exhaustion and exhaustion to facilitate concussion, until Moore came away from his consciousness, like everybody else Rocky had ever fought. He would try to remember to minimize damage to himself in the beginning, while there was still snap in Moore’s arms, because Moore is a sharp puncher. (Like Bill Neat of old, Marciano hits at his opponent’s arms when he cannot hit past them. “In one instance, the arm of Oliver [a Neat adversary] received so paralyzing a shock in stopping the blow that it appeared almost useless,” Egan once wrote.) Charlie Goldman would have instructed Marciano in some rudimentary maneuver to throw Moore’s first shots off, I felt sure, but after a few minutes Rocky would forget it, or Archie would figure it out. But there would always be Freddie Brown, the “cut man,” in the champion’s corner to repair superficial damage. One reason Goldman is a great teacher is that he doesn’t try to teach a boxer more than he can learn. What he had taught Rocky in the four years since I had first seen him fight was to shorten the arc of most of his blows without losing power thereby, and always to follow one hard blow with another—“for insurance”—delivered with the other hand, instead of recoiling to watch the victim fall. The champion had also gained confidence and presence of mind; he has a good fighting head, which is not the same thing as being a good mechanical practitioner. “A boxer requires a nob as well as a statesman does a HEAD, coolness and calculation being essential to second his efforts,” Egan wrote, and the old historiographer was never more correct. Rocky was thirty-one, not in the first flush of youth for a boxer, but Moore was only a few days short of thirty-nine, so age promised to be in the champion’s favor if he kept pressing.
Moore’s strategic problem, I reflected on the plane, offered more choices and, as a corollary, infinitely more chances for error. It was possible, but not probable,