The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [56]
In the second round—to my amazement and, apparently, to Charles’s—the champion began to use a straight left, jabbing to the face with jolting force and then crossing a right, exactly as they teach in boxing school. (“He is not calculable,” as Dr. Moreno had it.) For years little Charlie Goldman had refrained from trying to teach Rocky anything so fancy, on the ground that it might “spoil his natural leverage.” It was as fancy as A B C. Goldman must finally have decided it was safe. Before Charles could react to this treacherous attack of orthodoxy, Rocky landed a right to his zygomaticus, and he went sprawling down, forgetting to tread water, until he hit the bottom of the pool. The referee, Al Berl, counted to two, and Charles got up. (“In the second or third round, Marciano … will suddenly take over the offensive.”) When Charles went down, I had a feeling he would stay there, like Walcott in Chicago, but he didn’t. He had too much self-respect. However, he didn’t take the count of nine, to which he was entitled, and this may have been because he didn’t trust his self-respect that far. Marciano, moving in and swinging, the fancy stuff forgotten, appeared to have him headed for a quick knockout, but Ezzard rid himself of his emotional blocks for a fleeting second. He hit Marciano two dazzling left hooks, which, coming from a fighter apparently on his way out, gave the only intimation, however brief, that this could be a good fight.
Between the second and third rounds, inhibitions coagulated in Charles. In the third round, Marciano plodded after him, sometimes landing and more often missing, but Charles’s intuitive resentment of violence had set in like ice on a pond. Understanding the psychiatric problem, Marciano concentrated intensely. Meanwhile the battle of Al Columbo continued, but the inspector couldn’t get at him without climbing over Jack E. Leonard, the fat comic who missed the fight at Chicago. In the fourth round, my score card recalls, Marciano feinted a left beautifully and followed with a right hard enough to rearrange anybody’s emotional pattern, and, sure enough, in the fifth Charles displayed a pinch of spontaneity. I thought he won the round, but I also thought it was academic.
The sixth round brought Freddie Brown his chance to operate. Marciano, for all his toughness, cuts easily, and in the first Charles fight got a long cut over the left eye. In this fight, Charles’s right elbow collided with the champion’s nose, inflicting a deep, wide cut along its bridge. Marciano came back to his corner with an embarrassed grin, as if asking to be excused for putting his seconds to so much trouble. Brown, after stopping the chink with a quick-setting plastic called Thromboplastin, topped it off with a generous handful of Vaseline, which made the champion look as though he were wearing a Halloween false nose. Even this, however, failed to unleash the tiger in Charles. Once, when Marciano stuck out that rudimentary jab again, Charles countered with a fine right to the champion’s head, delivered over Marciano’s arm. But this was an intellectual rather than an emotional response. He wasn’t weak—once he grabbed Marciano by the back of the neck and spun him—and he wasn’t entirely unresentful; when Marciano hit him after the bell, he hit back. I remember thinking, as I looked at him in his corner after the sixth round, that he was strong and unmarked, but I was perfectly sure he would be knocked out, and sure that he was sure of the same thing.
The two men wallowed through the seventh round—Marciano slugging away, the Vaseline dissolving in blood, and Charles intuitively resenting the primitiveness of it all. Early in the eighth, Marciano caught Charles with a series of blows that knocked him down. He took four this time, rose, and reeled away, with Rocky hitting at him. The knockdown was on the side of the ring to the left of the champion’s corner; Charles staggered across the base of the triangle, and there