The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [14]
“The old fellow looked pretty good tonight,” I said. “Had those combinations going.”
“Fight over?” the driver asked. If there had been television, or even radio, he would have known about everything, and I wouldn’t have had the fun of telling him.
“Sure,” I said. “He knocked the guy out in the sixth.”
“I was afraid he wouldn’t,” said the driver. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said, after we had gone on a way, “but I been twenty-five years in New York now and never seen Joe Louis in the flesh.”
“You’ve seen him on television, haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But that don’t count.” After a while he said, “I remember when he fought Camera. The celebration in Harlem. They poisoned his mind before that fight, his managers and Jack Blackburn did. They told him Camera was Mussolini’s man and Mussolini started the Ethiopian War. He cut that man down like he was a tree.”
Broken Fighter Arrives
When Louis knocked Savold out, I came away singularly revived—as if I, rather than Louis, had demonstrated resistance to the erosion of time. As long as Joe could get by, I felt, I had a link with an era when we were both a lot younger. Only the great champions give their fellow citizens time to feel that way about them, because only the great ones win the title young and hold on to it. There have been three like that among the heavyweights in this century—Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey, and Louis. Jeffries won the championship in 1899, when my father was a footloose young sport, and was beaten, after a period of retirement, by Jack Johnson in 1910, when Father was a solemn burgher with a wife, two children, and three twelve-story loft buildings with second mortgages on them. Dempsey beat Jess Willard in 1919, when I was in short pants. He lost the second decision to Gene Tunney in 1927 (I had believed that the first was an accident, and so I had continued to think of him as champion), and by that time I had written half a novel, spent a year at the Sorbonne, and worked on two newspapers.
Louis was the champion, in the public mind, from 1935, when he slaughtered Primo Camera and Max Baer, until 1951. Technically, his span was slightly shorter, because he didn’t beat Jim Braddock for the title until 1937, but everybody knew from 1935 on that he would beat Braddock whenever he got the match. And he lost the championship by a decision to Ezzard Charles in 1950, but Charles was subsequently knocked out by old Jersey Joe Walcott, whom Louis had flattened a while back. When the three were introduced from the ring before the bout between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin in September, 1951, the crowd left no doubt that it still considered Louis the leading heavyweight.
At about that same time, I learned that Louis, who was thirty-seven, had been “made” with a new heavyweight, Rocky Marciano, who was twenty-seven and a puncher. I didn’t think much about it then, but as October twenty-sixth, the date set for the fight, approached, I began to feel uneasy. Marciano, to be sure, had never had a professional fight until shortly after Louis first announced his retirement, in 1948. (Joe had subsequently, of course, recanted.) In addition, Marciano had beaten only two opponents of any note, both young heavyweights like himself, who were rated as no better than promising. He was not big for a heavyweight, and was supposed to be rather crude. What bothered me, though, about the impending affair was that Marciano was, as he still is, steered by a man I know, named Al Weill, who is one of the most realistic fellows in a milieu where illusions are few. Marciano was already a good drawing card and would continue to be as long as he was unbeaten, and Weill, I was sure, would never risk the depreciation of an asset unless he felt he had a good bet.
Weill is at present the matchmaker of the I.B.C., which controls boxing here in New York and in a dozen other large cities, and his son, Marty Weill, is