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and when I turned my binoculars on Charlie Goldman’s face, he was grinning. Louis was apparently clearheaded when he came out for the second, but he didn’t do much. I thought he won the next three rounds, jabbing Marciano’s face and jolting him with rights in close. But the rights didn’t sicken Marciano, as they had sickened Louis’s opponents from 1935 to 1940; he reacted as if he were being hit by just an ordinary fighter. Marciano was missing almost all his own swings, and Goldman, between the rounds, was looking very serious as he talked to his pupil. Also, he was working on Rocky’s brows with cotton-tipped toothpicks that had been steeped in some astringent solution. The jabs had cut. But Rocky came out for each new round very gay, as Egan would say, and went across to Louis as if to ask for a light.

When the fifth round ended, marking the halfway point of the fight, I felt that it would be a long way home but that Louis would make it. He had hardly used his left hook, which was now his best punch. Critics had been saying for years that his right had lost its authority, but the hook had existed in all its pristine glory as recently as the Savold bout, and he had had it in the training camp when I was watching him. (“It would take a Goliath to withstand a couple of those,” old Colonel Stingo had said solemnly.) The way I figured it, Louis was being so careful about that crazy Marciano right that he was afraid to pull his own left back to hook. He would just jab and drop his forearm onto Rocky’s right biceps, so he couldn’t counter. Sooner or later, Joe would throw the hook, I thought, and that would end the fight. It looked like a fight between two men with one good hand apiece.

In the sixth, things started to go sour. It wasn’t that Marciano grew better or stronger; it was that Louis seemed to get slower and weaker. The spring was gone from his legs—and it had been only a slight spring in the beginning—and in the clinches Marciano was shoving him around. A man can be as strong for tugging and hauling at thirty-seven, or for that matter at forty-seven, as he was in his twenties, but he can’t keep on starting and stopping for as many minutes. And even grazing blows begin to hurt after a while. Near the end of the round, Marciano hit Louis another solid one.

The seventh was bad for Louis. Marciano didn’t catch him with one big punch, but he was battering at his body and arms, and shoving him around, and Joe didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Then, toward the end of the round, Joe threw the hook. It was beautiful. It hit Marciano flush on the right side of the jaw, but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit. I knew then that Joe was beaten, but I thought that it might be only a decision. Three rounds don’t seem forever, especially when you’re just watching.

Then, in the eighth round, as you probably read in the daily press, Marciano, the right-hand specialist, knocked Louis down with a left hook that Goldman had not previously publicized. When Louis got up, Marciano hit him with two more left hooks, which set him up for the right and the pitiful finish.

Right after Marciano knocked Louis down the first time, Sugar Ray Robinson started working his way toward the ring, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, and by the time Rocky threw the final right, Robinson’s hand was on the lowest rope of the ring, as if he meant to jump in. The punch knocked Joe through the ropes and he lay on the ring apron, only one leg inside.

The tall blonde was bawling, and pretty soon she began to sob. The fellow who had brought her was horrified. “Rocky didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “He didn’t foul him. What you booing?”

The blonde said, “You’re so cold. I hate you, too.”

Two weeks later, I stopped by the offices of the International Boxing Club to ask Al Weill how he felt about things now. “What did I tell you?” he said. “You want to look out for them broken fighters. The way things look now, the kid could make a fortune of money.”

The Melting Middleweight

Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove

Part of the pleasure of