The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [49]
I stopped briefly in the lobby of the Morrison, where friends and admirers of Marciano were giving a party to celebrate his victory. A couple of the kids in green jackets were standing there when Al Columbo breezed in, straight from the Stadium. “He didn’t butt him this time!” Mr. Columbo yelled.
I decided I didn’t want to go to a party, and went on to my hotel and bed.
Next morning, I bought an armful of Chicago newspapers at the airport and read them on the plane going home. The first columnist I turned to, naturally, was Duggan, and he was as omniscient as if he had been right. “If the Illinois Boxing Commission has the guts God gave a lazy white dog,” he began, “they’ll hold up those purses till they get a look at the films of last night’s fiasco to determine what knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott … . Out here in a hick town like Chicago, I guess anything can happen. Everybody knew the fight had no business here in the first place. It was a natural for New York in June. But say what you want about New York, you can be sure they wouldn’t stand for the exhibition we put up with last night.” I have never seen the man, but I make him no worse than even money to wind up as mayor. He had proved that, like everything else that goes wrong in Chicago, it was New York’s fault. We had planted that fight on them like a road company of The Student Prince.
Charles I
In my study I have a print by Thomas Rowlandson of a milling match between Tom Cribb, the champion of England, and Tom Molineaux, an American Negro, at Thistleton Gap, in the County of Rutland, on September 28, 1811. This was a return fight; Molineaux had very nearly won the first, and Pierce Egan, the Froissart of the London prize ring, wrote concerning the second match, “It is supposed that near 20,000 persons witnessed this tremendous mill”—which, since it was an illegal event and all the customers had to dodge the constabulary to get there, denoted a high intensity of interest. Cribb won the fight at Thistleton, and there were bonfires in the streets when the news reached London. Rowlandson’s picture was turned out with journalistic speed to profit by the public excitement. Cribb has just landed a mighty right to the jaw, stepping in with the punch in smashing style, and Molineaux is falling. There have been few artists like Rowlandson for catching action without arresting it. But the detail I recall first when I think of the picture is the face of Bill Richmond, one of Molineaux’s seconds and also an American Negro, as he sees his man go. He is following Molineaux down with his eyes, bending as the challenger falls, and his face is desolate.
I sat in the fourth row behind Ezzard Charles’s corner when he fought Rocky Marciano at the Yankee Stadium on the night of June 17, 1954, and what I shall remember about that fight longer than anything else, I imagine, is also a face. It was not Charles’s—although that became a memorable sight in itself as the fight wore on—but the face of a plump, light-colored man named Jimmy Brown. Charles, like Molineaux long ago, is a Negro, and Brown, like Richmond in my print, was a second. There is much about Marciano, with his square torso, short, heavily muscled arms, and granite jaw, that recalls the Cribb of the picture, and he is as appallingly discouraging to fight. Each time Charles came back to his corner after a round, his seconds took the same positions about him, to save time and eliminate confusion. Brown was in front of him, facing the crowd as he bent over the seated fighter. Before Charles went out for the first round, Brown pressed his hand reassuringly on the challenger’s left knee, and when Charles came back to his corner after drawing first blood from Marciano’s nose, there was a look on Brown’s wide, oval ecru face that said, “There, now, it wasn’t so bad after all, was it?” It seemed to me—and, as it turned out, to both judges, the referee, and all the press—that Charles