The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [89]
The twelfth was good Moore, although he did not seem too brisk, and then, in the thirteenth, he began to play that loud part, with the two-handed bangs on the keyboard, that even to the musically uninitiated always portends the windup of a concerto. He opened the counter-fighter’s mouth with punches between the thorax and the abdomen, and closed it with hooks to the lower maxillary. He moved him around as if he were trying to see where he would look best, and he ducked under that weaver’s-beam right arm like a small girl jumping under a skip rope. He rubbed his bushy hair on all lacerated portions of Johnson’s face, and he buffeted the sore nose with short lateral punches thrown from a polite bow. When the counter-fighter sat down after the thirteenth round, he no longer looked like a possible winner. If Moore finished the last two rounds at the same pace, he was bound to take the decision and retain his title.
That ending did not accord with Moore’s new, mature conception of how to render Johnson, however. He was tired of him. (“Johnson makes you do all the fighting,” he told a Post reporter afterward.) Watching the men fight on the side of the ring away from me, with Johnson retrograding in my direction at a speed ordinarily observed within town limits, I noted a sudden acceleration of his rearward approach. The synergetic effect of his own withdrawal and the forward propulsion imparted by Mr. Moore’s right hand sent him into a spin, which failed to impair Mr. Moore’s calm aim. In the gymnasium, Mr. Johnston had informed me, Moore hits the light bag eight hundred times in three minutes, which figures out to almost five times a second; Johnson was moving more like a heavy bag, equipped with loose elbows. The scene reminded me of the immortal Egan’s description of how Dutch Sam finished Tom Belcher: “The ferocity of Sam was tremendous in the extreme; he followed his opponent to all parts of the ring, putting in dreadful facers and body-blows, dealing out death-like punishment till his brave opponent fell, quite exhausted.” That was about the way it happened, except that Johnson, who had fallen sitting in his own corner, where he could help himself with the ropes, got to his feet at five, though quite exhausted, and Goldstein, perhaps feeling he owed him a break, stepped in front of him and counted to eight. But Johnson was so nearly helpless that the referee stopped the bout a few seconds later.
Getting out of the Garden, I had to walk around Tiny Payne. “They got to match them in the Orange Bowl at Miami,” he said. “They got a new public, you understand me? They draw a million-dollar gate.”
“Who?” I said, to tease him. “Moore and Patterson?” Patterson is a promising light heavy who turned pro two years before. He was born at about the time Moore was breaking into the record book.
“Moore and Marciano!” Tiny shouted down at me. He must be about six feet four.
But it was certain that Marciano wouldn’t fight him during the current tax year. Also, Marciano is the kind of fighter it is sometimes more advantageous to be in the position of challenging than fighting, even for a virtuoso.
Wunderkind
One of the greatest men I ever knew was the celebrated middleweight Philadelphia Jack O‘Brien—“Philadelphia Jack O’Brien from Americaw” was the way he liked best to hear it. He would say it that way aloud to cheer himself up when his spirits flagged. “That was how they introduced