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By Root 532 0

to affect American boxing when the draft came along in 1940, stopped the development of new talent. This permitted aging prewar boxers like Joe Louis and Joe Walcott to maintain their dominance longer than was to be expected under normal conditions. By the late forties, when the first few postwar fighters were beginning to shine, television got its thumb on the Old Sweetie’s windpipe, and now there are no clubs to fight in. But in between these catastrophes Rocky Marciano appeared out of the shoe-manufacturing town of Brockton, Massachusetts, and Sandy Saddler, the pikelike featherweight, out of Harlem. Randy Turpin looked, briefly, like the first Heroic British fighter since Jimmy Wilde. Marcel Cerdan made an unforgettable impression before his premature death in an airplane accident. (He is not in this book, because he died too soon.) Archie Moore, a late-maturing artist, like Laurence Sterne and Stendhal, illuminated the skies with the light of his descending sun, and Sugar Ray Robinson proved as long-lasting as he had been precocious—a tribute to burning the candle at both ends.

It was in June of 1951 that it occurred to me to resume writing boxing pieces, and that was only four months before Marciano, then an impecunious, or “broken,” fighter, arrived, as narrated early in this volume. There was no particular reason that I came back to boxing—“Suddenly it came to me,” like the idea to the man in the song who was drinking gin-and-water. It was the way you take a notion that you would like to see an old sweetheart, which is not always the kind of notion to act on.

I had written a number of long boxing pieces for The New Yorker before 1939, but I dropped them then, along with the rest of what Harold Ross used to call “low-life,” in order to become a war correspondent. Low-life was Ross’s word for the kind of subject I did best.

When I came back from the war in 1945 I wasn’t ready to write about the Sweet Science, although I continued to see fights and to talk with friends in Scientific circles. I became a critic of the American press, and had quite a lot of fun out of it, but it is a pastime less intellectually rewarding than the study of “milling,” because the press is less competitive than the ring. Faced with a rival, an American newspaper will usually offer to buy it. This is sometimes done in Scientific circles, but is not considered ethical. Besides, the longer I criticized the press, the more it disimproved, as Arthur MacWeeney of the Irish Independent would put it.

My personal interest in La Dolce Scienza began when I was initiated into it by a then bachelor uncle who came east from California when I was thirteen years old, which was in 1917. He was a sound teacher and a good storyteller, so I got the rudiments and the legend at the same time. California, in the nineties and the early 1900s, had been headquarters: Corbett, Choynski, Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Abe Attell, and Jimmy Britt were Californians all, and San Francisco had been the port of entry from Australia, which exported the Fitzsimmonses and Griffos. Uncle Mike could talk about them all. After my indoctrination I boxed for fun whenever I had a chance until I was twenty-six and earning sixty-three dollars a week as a reporter on the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin. I continued to box occasionally for many years more, generally just enough to show I knew what was all about it, as the boys say. I went shorter rounds every time. The last was in about 1946, and the fellow I was working with said he could not knock me out unless I consented to rounds longer than nine seconds.

When I returned to the realms of higher intellection in 1951 Joe Louis was entering his eighteenth year as the most conspicuous ornament of the “fancy”—the highest feather in its hat. Within a few months Marciano appeared. This began a new cycle: Marciano and the Old Men, like Louis and the Old Men in 1934–38. During the immediately subsequent episodia, to borrow a word from Colonel Stingo, Marciano knocked out three world’s heavyweight champions, Louis, Walcott, and Ezzard