The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [40]
Then, in the sixth, there was blood all over Walcott’s white trunks and Marciano’s matted chest. It didn’t show on Marciano’s trunks, which were black, or Walcott’s torso, which was nearly so. Walcott, I could see with the glasses, had a cut over his left eye. Marciano was bleeding, too, but from an unlikely place—the top of his head. You could figure how head and eye must have come together. Marciano, an inch or so shorter than Walcott, accentuated the difference by fighting out of a crouch; his game was to get his head in against the bigger man’s chest, where Walcott couldn’t hit it, and then punch up, and when he stepped back out of one clinch, his head had come up hard. This accident, the crowd thought, would hasten Walcott’s end. In the seventh, though, it was, unaccountably, Marciano who began to flounder. He wavered and almost pawed the air, although he had not been hit by any one particular big punch. He seemed to be coming unstuck, and in the eighth it was the same. Walcott’s seconds had closed his cut after the sixth round, using one of those mysterious astringent solutions trainers treasure. And Marciano’s corner had closed the wound on his scalp. But now Marciano’s right eye had been cut by a punch. (Late that night, or early next morning, at a party given by a man called Jimmy Tomato, who had won a good bet on Marciano, I was told by Weill and Goldman that Rocky, nestling his brow against Walcott’s chest early in the seventh round, had got a liquid in both eyes that blinded him. They did not know whether it was some of the astringent solution, dripping from the cut above Walcott’s eye, or just liniment, well spiked with capsicum, which Walcott’s seconds had sloshed on their man as a form of chemical warfare. “He fought four rounds that he couldn’t see the guy,” Weill said. I thought this an exaggeration, because in the ninth Marciano had recaptured the lead, which was pretty good going for a blind man.)
In nine rounds the lead changed hands three times—Walcott to Marciano in the third round, Marciano to Walcott in the seventh, Walcott to Marciano in the ninth. You don’t see many fights like that. In the tenth, which was the hardest-fought round of all, Marciano stayed on top. But somehow the calculations had gone awry; the old fellow looked further from collapse now than he had six rounds earlier. It might go to a decision, after all. I thought with pity of my Brocktonians on the train. If it was close, I felt, Walcott would get the decision. It is traditional not to take a championship away on a close one, and Philadelphia was virtually his home.
Then Walcott, as if bolstered by the certainty that he could last, came out for the eleventh and had his best round of the fight, except for the opener, when he had floored Rocky. It was the fourth switch in the plot. In the twelfth, he looked not only more effective but stronger than the challenger. Up to then I had had the feeling that if Marciano did land flush on the jaw, he could take the champion with one punch. Now his arms and legs seemed a trifle rubbery. He was swinging wildly, and missing by absurd margins. At the end of the twelfth, Walcott was well ahead and looked stronger than ever.
In the thirteenth the fighters disappeared momentarily from my view behind that steel mast. They were doing nothing particularly exciting. Walcott was giving ground slowly, backing toward the ropes, as he had done repeatedly. Whenever he reached the ropes, he would start a rally; it was a habitual tactic of his. Marciano was following—hopelessly, it seemed. He had to keep moving in, because if he stayed away Walcott, who had a much longer reach, could hit him without return. I wasn’t as quick going into my own crouch with the binoculars as I had been in the early rounds; perhaps I was feeling slightly rubbery myself. Then I heard one of those immeasurable shouts that follow a ball over the fence in a World Series. And I could see Walcott’s legs protruding to the right of the mast. The fellow next to me, who thought he had seen