The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [57]
After the fight I shared a cab with a friend, and we rode all the way down to the Artists’ & Writers’ Restaurant, formerly Club, on 40th Street, and had a beer. On the way, he said that Marciano was a travesty of a champion, but that it was all right; one great champion was all a man could expect in a lifetime, and he had seen Joe Louis at his best. I said that Marciano was so good, in his peculiar way, that there should be a law against allowing him to fight return bouts. “He takes it out of them,” I said. Neither of us was happy. It just hadn’t been a good fight.
It wasn’t until I dropped in at Stillman’s the next day that I got a reasonable non-Freudian explanation of Charles’s conduct. Freddie Brown and Whitey Bimstein were sweating a number of their future champions between calls on what is known in Stillman’s as the long-distant phone. Hurricane Tommy Jackson, the colored heavyweight with the double uppercut, was hitting the big bag on the gymnasium balcony. Mr. Jackson, a temperamental young man while on a winning streak, had been a model pupil ever since the unfortunate termination of a bout with a Cuban heavyweight named Nino Valdes; the referee stopped the bout and awarded it to Valdes at a moment when, according to Hurricane, “that man was so tired he was staggling.”
Mr. Bimstein was, as usual, bemoaning the effect of television on the development of new talent. At nine-tenths of the boxing shows nowadays, he said, you might as well be fighting in a telephone booth, and only the feature bout is televised. Fighters in the preliminaries, therefore, labor practically in private, unremarked even though they perform prodigies.
I congratulated Mr. Brown on his job on Marciano’s nose, which had at least remained attached to the champion’s face, and he said it had been an unusual kind of injury but one that had not found him unprepared. When I propounded Dr. Moreno’s theory of the caged tiger within Charles’s breast, it met with polite skepticism from Mr. Brown. “Why did he fight that way, then?” I asked.
Mr. Brown looked at me with placid, obliging condescension. “He fought the way he fought because Marciano fought the way he fought,” he said. “Charles come in in a good mental condition, and he started right in to execute—biff!” Mr. Brown here took the stance of a confident, standup boxer. “But Rocky is coming in.” Mr. Brown here came in, and I stepped back. “It is very hard to think when you are getting your brains knocked out,” Mr. Brown said. “So Charles withdraws back to consider the situation.” Mr. Brown withdrew. “That puts him further from a position where he can execute. Meanwhile, Marciano is still coming in. He is cruel. Charles hits him a good right to the jaw, and Rocky hits him with a left hook and a right. First thing Charles knows, he is grabbing, and then he is just trying to hang on. Why? He don’t know why. It is not like football,” he said, kindly, like one trying to convey truth to little children. “Rocky never gives you the ball.”
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The Boy from South Main Street
Like every American city, the capital of Rhode Island cherishes its sporting celebrities. When I worked as a reporter on the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, in the late twenties, one of the walking monuments of the town was Norman Taber, a trustee of Brown University, who soon after graduating from Brown had set the world’s record for running a mile—4:123/5, I think it was. Another monument