The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [2]
His nostalgia, however, encompasses more than a fading generation of fighters. A much larger world was disappearing, that blue-collar, urban America Liebling covered in the 1930s and left for the Second World War. Boxing was that era’s canary in the coal mine. Like Kerouac with his railroad hobos and skid-row mantras, Liebling laments the vanishing underworld of the Depression, although in rather a different context. Liebling blamed boxing’s suffocation on an invention he had little use for: “a ridiculous gadget called television … utilized in selling beer and razor blades.” (Liebling had commensurate disdain for baseball and Chicago, Illinois, which he famously dubbed “the Second City”). Television, for Liebling, had strangled boxing by taking audiences from the boxing clubs and paydays from club fighters. As he put it: “Television gives so plausible an adumbration of a fight, for nothing, that you feel it would be extravagant to pay your way in … Men are becoming slaves of their shadows.”
In postwar America, boxing was losing its audience for the very same reasons cities were losing their inhabitants. The new Levittown culture was killing the community that sustained Liebling. For Liebling the city was the center of American life, and New York was America’s central city. Yet the New York he walked through was at the grim commencement of a forty-year decline. Postwar America was trending away from the city of pedestrians toward the isolation of the suburbs, where TV screens and passenger automobiles filtered reality. (One woman who spent the fifteen years after the war abroad told me, “When I came back, all everyone talked about was their lawn and their car.”) This exodus transformed cities from communities to wastelands, and new suburbanites looked at those left behind not as fellow citizens but as criminals and murderers. Boxing has always been a primarily urban pastime (whereas the defining suburban sport is auto-racing, in which the machine and its anonymous mechanics hold far greater importance than the driver). When white Americans left the cities, they left boxing as well.
One of my great literary regrets is that Liebling didn’t live to cover Cassius Clay’s triumph over Liston and Clay’s subsequent transfiguration into Muhammad Ali—Liebling died a few months before their first bout. The world Ali ushered in was a new one, its Day-Glo struggles more in tune with Tom Wolfe’s hyperkinetic prose. Yet, like all true artists, Liebling looked forward as well as back, and would surely have kept his equipoise through the turmoil of the ’60s. Literary journalism is as old as newspapers, but what Wolfe dubbed “New Journalism” can be directly traced through Liebling and his brittle colleague Joseph Mitchell. Moving beyond the clever parochialism of The New Yorker and the false objectivity of traditional news writing, Liebling helped to legitimize a narrator whose subjective stylings enrich reality. Early Tom Wolfe reads a lot like Liebling on speed.
I can only surmise about what Liebling would make of today’s pugilistic dark ages. In his era, fighters fought rematches of close fights, even title fights, almost automatically. Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met six times, inconceivable for champions today. In the 1950s a quality pro thought himself underemployed if he had only eight or ten bouts a year, and the amateur scene was thriving. Nowadays pros who make a living from boxing are about as common as Yetis, and amateurs can’t get enough fights to learn the rudiments of the craft. It has been several generations since the tinsel meccas of Las Vegas and Atlantic City displaced the Garden as showcases of the sweet science. My own experiences as an