The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [20]
When I entered Madison Square Garden on the night of the fight I couldn’t help hoping that Marciano was still too far away to demolish Louis. His day was bound to come anyway, if Goldman was right, and I wanted to see Louis get by once more. My seat was about where I had sat when I watched Louis beat Savold. I was sitting well forward in the mezzanine on the 49th Street side, midway between the east and west ends of the ring, at a point where I could watch crowd as well as fighters.
There were the usual introductions from the ring of white and colored men in knee-length jackets with flaring shoulders—rough, tough Paddy DeMarco, Philadelphia’s undefeated Gil Turner, Sugar Ray Robinson, former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles, and, finally, Jersey Joe Walcott, the reigning champion, as old as Louis by his own statement, several years older by popular report. (“I’m not old,” he told a sports writer in 1947. “I’m just ugly.”) The names of the judges and referee were announced: Joe Agnello, Harold Barnes, Ruby Goldstein—no surprises. And then the two factions were in the ring—Louis’s in the northwest corner, Marciano’s in the southeast. Mannie Seamon and a couple of fellows I didn’t know were with Louis; Goldman and Marty Weill were with Marciano, together with a fellow New Englander named Al Columbo. Weill, a thin, pale young man with rumpled hair, seemed more awed than his fighter. Marciano was bouncing on his thick legs and punching the air to warm up. A tall, ash-blond woman near me was saying, “I hate him! I hate him! I think he’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.” This struck me as being hard on Rocky; he didn’t look particularly repulsive. Husky as he was, he looked slight compared to Louis, who was three inches taller and, according to the announced weights, twenty-five pounds heavier. When the fighters were introduced, it was evident that if Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Massachusetts were not completely empty, their populations were at least substantially depleted for the evening. The Marciano supporters were cheering him as if he were a high-school football team. But Louis got an even bigger welcome.
And then, as the immortal historian of the British ring, Pierce Egan, wrote of the third fight between Dan Mendoza and Dick Humphries, in 1789, “The awful set-to at length commenced—when every eye beamed with anxiety—the moment was interesting and attractive, and each party was lost in suspense.” I had a pair of pocket binoculars, 6 x 15s, and I kept them trained on Louis for the first half minute. His face was impassive, as usual, but his actions showed that he wasn’t taking the strong boy lightly. Instead of moving relentlessly forward, as in his great days, he seemed to be waiting to see what he was up against. In the first clinches, it was he who shifted Marciano, and not the other way about; Louis was stronger than the strong boy—at the beginning, anyway. He could outbox him at a distance, and if he could continue to smother him in close, I thought he would get by. Up to the last five seconds of the round, I noted, glancing at the ringside clock, neither of them had done anything remarkable, and that was all right with me. I had had a feeling that Marciano might rush out of his corner throwing punches and try to take Louis by storm. Then Marciano threw one of those rights, and it landed, it seemed to me, just under Louis’s left ear. Louis had dropped his left shoulder after jabbing—an old fault, which brought about most of the bad moments of his career. This was the kind of punch that addles a man’s brains, and if it had happened thirty seconds earlier and Marciano had pressed his advantage, he might have knocked Louis out in the first round.
I think that punch was the one that made Joe feel old. Between the rounds, I could see Seamon pressing an ice bag against the back of Louis’s neck,