The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [125]
One reminded me that I had seen the first boxing show ever held in the Yankee Stadium—on May 12, 1923. I had forgotten that it was the first show, and even that 1923 was the year the Stadium opened. In my true youth the Yankees used to share the Polo Grounds with the Giants, and I had forgotten that, too, because I never cared much about baseball, although, come to think of it, I used to see the Yankees play occasionally in the nineteen- ’teens, and should have remembered. I remembered the boxing show itself very well, though. It happened during the spring of my second suspension from college, and I paid five dollars for a high-grandstand seat. The program merely said that it had been “an all-star heavyweight bill promoted by Tex Rickard for the Hearst Milk Fund,” but I found that I could still remember every man and every bout on the card. One of the main events was between old Jess Willard, the former heavyweight champion of the world, who had lost the title to Jack Dempsey in 1919, and a young heavyweight named Floyd Johnson. Willard had been coaxed from retirement to make a comeback because there was such a dearth of heavyweight material that Rickard thought he could still get by, but as I remember the old fellow, he couldn’t fight a lick. He had a fair left jab and a right uppercut that a fellow had to walk into to get hurt by, and he was big and soft. Johnson was a mauler worse than Rex Layne, and the old man knocked him out. The other main event, ex aequo, had Luis Angel Firpo opposing a fellow named Jack McAuliffe II, from Detroit, who had had only fifteen fights and had never beaten anybody, and had a glass jaw. The two winners, of whose identity there was infinitesimal preliminary doubt, were to fight each other for the right to meet the great Jack Dempsey. Firpo was so crude that Marciano would be a Fancy Dan in comparison. He could hit with only one hand—his right—he hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do in close, and he never cared much for the business anyway. He knocked McAuliffe out, of course, and then, in a later “elimination” bout, stopped poor old Willard. He subsequently became a legend by going one and a half sensational rounds with Dempsey, in a time that is now represented to us as the golden age of American pugilism.
I reflected with satisfaction that old Ahab Moore could have whipped all four principals on that card within fifteen rounds, and that while Dempsey may have been a great champion, he had less to beat than Marciano. I felt the satisfaction because it proved that the world isn’t going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.
By A. J. Liebling
They All Sang (with Edward B. Marks)
Back Where I Came From
The Telephone Booth Indian
The Road Back to Paris
Republic of Science
The Wayward Pressman
Mink and Red Herring
The Honest Rainmaker
Normandy Revisited
The Sweet Science
The Earl of Louisiana
The Press
The Most of A. J. Liebling
Between Meals
Mollie & Other War Pieces
Chicago: Second City
A Neutral Corner
Liebling at The New Yorker
Notes
1
The balance of the essays are collected in A Neutral Corner (1990).
2
This is no longer true. A friend outraged at this omission has contributed to the Neutral a photograph of the Dewey Dog, a white bull terrier which won sixty-five fights in and around 1900.
3
Sanders himself died after a televised bout in Boston on December 11, 1954. He had been knocked out in the eleventh round of a feature scheduled for twelve rounds. It was only his ninth professional fight, and he had been a professional for only nine months. In more normal pre-television times a fellow out of the amateurs