The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [122]
The procession of other fighters and former fighters to be introduced was longer than usual. The full galaxy was on hand, including Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, and Joe Louis, the têtes de cuvée of former-champion society; ordinary former heavyweight champions, like Max Baer and Jim Braddock, slipped through the ropes practically unnoticed. After all the celebrities had been in and out of the ring, an odd dwarf, advertising something or other—possibly himself—was lifted into the ring by an accomplice and ran across it before he could be shooed out. The referee, a large, craggy, oldish man named Harry Kessler, who, unlike some of his better-known colleagues, is not an ex-fighter, called the men to the center of the ring. This was his moment; he had the microphone. “Now Archie and Rocky, I want a nice, clean fight,” he said, and I heard a peal of silvery laughter behind me from Mr. Wilson, who had seen both of them fight before. “Protect yourself at all times,” Mr. Kessler cautioned them unnecessarily. When the principals shook hands, I could see Mr. Moore’s eyebrows rising like storm clouds over the Sea of Azov. His whiskers bristled and his eyes glowed like dark coals as he scrunched his eyebrows down again and enveloped the Whale with the Look, which was intended to dominate his will power. Mr. Wilson and I were sitting behind Marciano’s corner, and as the champion came back to it I observed his expression, to determine what effect the Look had had upon him. More than ever, he resembled a Great Dane who has heard the word “bone.”
A moment later the bell rang and the Heroes came out for the first round. Marciano, training in the sun for weeks, had tanned to a slightly deeper tint than Moore’s old ivory, and Moore, at 188, looked, if anything, bigger and more muscular than Marciano; much of the champion’s weight is in his legs, and his shoulders slope. Marciano advanced, but Moore didn’t go far away. As usual, he stood up nicely, his arms close to his body and his feet not too far apart, ready to go anywhere but not without a reason—the picture of a powerful, decisive intellect unfettered by preconceptions. Marciano, pulling his left arm back from the shoulder, flung a left hook. He missed, but not by enough to discourage him, and then walked in and hooked again. All through the round he threw those hooks, and some of them grazed Moore’s whiskers; one even hit him on the side of the head. Moore didn’t try much offensively; he held a couple of times when Marciano worked in close.
Marciano came back to his corner as he always does, unimpassioned. He hadn’t expected to catch Moore with those left hooks anyway, I imagine; all he had wanted was to move him around. Moore went to his corner inscrutable. They came out for the second, and Marciano went after him in brisker fashion. In the first round he had been throwing the left hook, missing with it, and then throwing a right and missing with that, too. In the second he tried a variation—throwing a right and then pulling a shoulder back to throw the left. It appeared for a moment to have Moore confused, as a matador might be confused by a bull who walked in on his hind legs. Marciano landed a couple of those awkward hooks, but not squarely. He backed Moore over toward the side of the ring farthest from me, and then Moore knocked him down.
Some of the reporters, describing the blow in the morning papers, called it a “sneak punch,” which is journalese for one the reporter didn’t see but technically means a lead thrown before the other man has warmed up or while he is musing about the gate receipts. This had been no lead, and although I certainly hadn’t seen Moore throw the punch, I knew that it had landed inside the arc of Marciano’s left hook. (“Marciano missed with the right, trun the left, and Moore stepped inside it,” my private eye, Whitey Bimstein,