The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [34]
“And who do you want next?” I inquired.
“I’d like that Walcott or Marciano,” Dr. Kearns replied bravely. “I’ll fight anybody in the world.”
Since then Robinson has come back, at least as far as being middleweight champion again. After the Maxim fight he retired, and a fellow named Bobo Olson won the title after an elimination tournament among the inept left-overs. Robinson returned to the ring and stopped Mr. Olson in two rounds at Chicago, which was nice going, and the Cadillacs are back at his door. One fight writer, reporting the victory, said Olson was a “burned-out hollow shell,” which is like merging Pelion and Ossa, or Ford and General Motors, in the cliche business. He must have meant the shell of a broiled lobster after a shore dinner.
Maxim lost his title to a great man, who will be introduced in a later chapter of this book, named Archie Moore, but Dr. Kearns did not say after the bout, “Moore licked me.” He said, “Moore licked Maxim.”
The Big Fellows Again
New Champ
Before Marciano fought and beat Louis, Charlie Goldman told me that Rocky was in what he called “an improving phase.” “He’s still six months—maybe a year—away,” Goldman told me. Almost a year passed before Marciano was matched to meet Jersey Joe Walcott for the heavyweight championship. “The great thing about this kid is he’s got leverage,” Goldman kept saying in the time between. “He takes a good punch and he’s got the equalizer.” By this last, he meant that Marciano had the ability to equalize—or cancel out with one solid punch—the advantage in points piled up by a more skillful opponent in the rounds preceding equalization.
Marciano knocked Louis out in the eighth round after wearing the older man down. But there was a trace of intellection in the way he finished off the former champion. His right hand had received all the advance publicity, and during the fight he threw it so often, usually missing, that Louis paid less and less attention to the left. Then, in the eighth, Marciano knocked him out with three left hooks and an almost redundant right. The progress of an education, whether that of a candidate for the Presidency or that of a candidate for the heavyweight championship, always interests me. So when I read in a newspaper that Marciano had been matched to fight Jersey Joe Walcott for the title in the Philadelphia Municipal Stadium on the night of September 23, 1952, I went.
A boxer solidly constructed, intelligently directed, and soundly motivated is bound to go a long way. I had not seen Marciano since the Louis bout, but I knew that in the interim he had knocked out several lesser heavyweights to keep his hand in. In the first of these bouts, against Lee Savold, he had seemed to some of the experts to be regressing. I ran into Goldman after that one, and he said, “Yeah, we let him lay off a couple months after Louis, and he went back. He’s the kind you got to keep working. We won’t make that mistake again.” Mr. Goldman added, “After all, they call him crude because he misses a lot of those punches, but it’s his style. I could teach him to punch short—across his chest—but to tell the truth it wouldn’t be very effective. So let him throw them old Suzi-Qs.” In his subsequent fights, Marciano, I noted in the newspapers, finished his chaps off in fast time, winding up with a fellow named Harry Matthews, a clever sort, whom he knocked out in the second round. Matthews’ manager, Jack Hurley, had predicted a contrary result, basing his forecast on a mysterious strategy he said he had imparted to his fighter. “Hurley wanted to be a Swengali but the strings broke,” Al