The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [86]
On the night of the fight, when Moore came to the center of the ring without the cover of the charitable woolens, his age showed. The weight hoax had exploded. In the office of the Athletic Commission, at noon, Moore had weighed a hundred and seventy-three pounds, and admitted he had eaten breakfast. Johnson had weighed a hundred and seventy-two and a half, but as they stood in the ring at fight time, he looked bigger and solider than the virtuoso. Johnson has a heavy, uncertain face, square jowls, and a thick neck, like old Joe Walcott. His body is like Walcott’s, too—rounded, heavy-thighed, the diaphragm corded with muscle, the arms good for dock work—and I knew that, like Walcott again, he was a counter-fighter, durable but cautious. He had been knocked out just once in his life, when he was twenty-two, by Walcott himself, who was then about forty. Walcott, though, had been a big heavyweight—a two-hundred-pounder—and a good enough puncher to put Louis, Charles, and Marciano on the floor in their turns. (Of the three, only Charles had stayed there.) Moore didn’t look capable of that kind of hitting. His body appeared commonplace. The arms, I reckoned from what I had seen in the gym, were tireless; nobody could know about the legs. Under the circumstances, he would be doing well to outgeneral, bluff, outjab, and cuff Johnson, and that’s what I expected him to do, although the way the challenger was made dismayed me. In one sense, I was glad Johnson was a counter-puncher, because it meant Moore could make his own pace, staying away when he wanted to, unless his legs folded irrevocably under him.
The crowd, to my amazement, liked Johnson. I myself have a great prejudice in favor of boxers who are skillful and daring. I wouldn’t give the time of day to a professional who won’t lead; if he doesn’t want to fight, what is he there for? But there are Lumpen who come to a fight to see a good boxer beaten. It is an anti-intellectual attitude. There were eight thousand in the audience that night, which is quite a crowd nowadays, although it is not even half capacity. The spectators had all heard of Moore, I suppose, and thought he was a kind of phony, or else why hadn’t he been in the Garden before? Also, the touffe de barbe sous le men - ton may have struck them as an affectation. Furthermore, he had come into the ring wearing a black silk mandarin robe with gold piping—the sort of touch that probably goes over in Cordoba but is a bit lush for the big time. Moore was old, but the people in the crowd wanted to see him knocked out. When Joe Louis was old, they wanted to see him win. Perhaps it was because Louis was a slugger. He was a pretty good boxer, too, but they forgave him for it. Maybe they hadn’t noticed.
For this fight I had cadged a seat in the working-press section, with a shelf in front of it on which I could take notes. I kept track of the fight on a score sheet, marked off in separate boxes for the fifteen rounds, but on looking at it now I find my notes discouragingly fragmentary. My memories, while fuller, are perhaps less accurate; my notation for the first round, “J—2gr,” means that I thought Johnson won it, and that he landed two good rights, but it is an unimportant part of what I saw. To make a nice-looking fight against a man who won’t lead, and beat him, is a pretty severe test of a fighter’s technical resources, and it was what Moore plainly had in mind. Instead of flicking, moving around, and so piling up enough unhurting points to goad Johnson into some possible late activity, he was reconnoitering in close, looking the challenger over as if he had never seen him before. So the true artist takes up a work he has laid aside for years, and attempts a fresh approach. I suspected that Moore was not satisfied with the way he had handled Johnson the first four times they boxed—an aggregate of forty rounds. He had done some nice things,