The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [37]
Then Marciano did two rounds with Keene Simmons, a colored heavyweight every bit as big and rugged as Walcott, and much younger. Simmons had once given Marciano a pretty good fight in public. His imitation of Walcott was good—he would throw quick sneak punches, some of them right-hand leads, and slide away. When he didn’t slide away, he clinched. He even did the kind of jig-step shuffle Walcott uses to disconcert his opponents, although there is no particular reason it should. Marciano, I noticed, wasn’t throwing as many long, looping punches as he threw the previous year. He couldn’t afford to be caught off balance by a sharpshooter like Walcott, who could move in fast on any mistake. But I remembered what Goldman had said about Rocky’s ineffectiveness with short punches. I wondered what he would use against Walcott in place of “them Suzi-Qs.” His boxing had improved vastly—from terrible to mediocre—but I couldn’t imagine him outpointing Walcott. He would have to keep crowding—pushing him around until the spring went out of the old man’s legs and arms and it was safe to revert to the Suzi-Q.
After the workout, a fellow drove Rocky back to the house—a distance of a few hundred yards—and Goldman and Columbo and I followed on foot. When we got there, the boxer was already lying on a bed in a second-floor room, warmly covered to keep him sweating. “This is the best part of boxing,” he said. Goldman talked to him about old fighters; I noticed that, unlike veterans, who want to talk about anything but boxing, Marciano was intensely interested. He seemed to be trying to build up background for the position he felt he had been called to. When Marciano went downstairs for his shower, Columbo told me how they had come out of the Army together when they were both twenty-two, and how Rocky had started boxing in amateur tournaments in New England. “He was crude, but there was one move he would wait for the other fellow to make, and when he made it, Rocky would swing and knock him out,” Columbo said. “He must have knocked out a hundred. Half the time he would hit them on top of the head. One time he broke his right thumb on a bird with a hard head, and they laid him off at the shoe factory where he worked. So he knew he would have to make up his mind—either give up boxing or the shoe factory. By that time, Weill had seen him, and he offered to carry him along for the first year or so if he would turn pro, until he started to earn real money. So he turned.”
The fighter came back and Goldman rubbed him down. I asked him again how he felt, and he said, “Peufict.”
Rocky’s father, addressed as Pop by the trainers and sparring partners, ate supper with us, at five-thirty. His name is Pietro—or, affectionately, Pietrone—Marchegiano. (“Marciano” is a contraction adopted for the convenience of fight announcers.) He is a small, thin man, gravely polite, with a heavy Italian accent and a most un-Italian reserve. From the day of his arrival in America until recently, he cobbled shoes in his own one-man shop in Brockton. Only in his large, strong hands does he resemble his son. While we ate—a good-sized steak apiece, with bread and butter, string beans, and potatoes—the telephone rang almost continuously. Most of the callers were well-wishers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, asking for blocks of good tickets to sell to friends. One said the Mayor of Brockton was coming to the fight and was bringing the Governor of Massachusetts and Adlai Stevenson as his guests.
While waiting for an automobile to