The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [96]
A protracted terra-cotta-colored prizefighter named Sandy Saddler, whose physique and profile remind me of a praying mantis, has labored under this handicap since the evening of October 29, 1948, four days before the Truman election, when he knocked out a quick-moving Italian named Willie Pep, of Hartford, in Madison Square Garden, and won the featherweight championship of the world. Pep was a 1—3 favorite going in; Dewey, as I remember it, was 1—15. It was to be a week of surprises, and the blushing experts never forgave either winner. Saddler, five feet eight and a half inches tall, was twenty-two and weighed a hundred and twenty-four pounds. Pep, who was twenty-six, is of a height more usual among featherweights—five feet five. Like Saddler he was under a hundred and twenty-six pounds; he had to be, because that is the class limit. Saddler floored the Hartford man twice in the third round and knocked him out with a left hook to the jaw in the fourth. Pep, after the third knockdown, was the theater of a visible psychomachy, or struggle between body and soul. Body won, and he stayed down. Knowing coves—in Egan’s phrase—who on the afternoon of the fight had coupled Pep and Sugar Ray Robinson as twin pinnacles on the horizon of the Sweet Science, announced after Pep’s defeat that he had been a hollow shell, which is a traditional ex-post-facto metaphor. They even suggested that he had feigned, although his record made this implausible. He had won a hundred and thirty-four fights out of a hundred and thirty-six.
To me Saddler appeared to be what Egan would have called a first-rate bit of fighting stuff, but he never succeeded in making his detractors admit it. He fought Pep three more times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951. In the last two annual renewals he knocked the old champion out, but the critics said that the Pep of 1950 was the mere shell of a shell, while the Pep of 1951 was not even that; he was more like the murmur you hear when you hold a shell to your ear. By that time, Pep admittedly was a bit worn between the shoulder blades, but he was still the second-best featherweight in the world. Part of the public reluctance to accept Saddler is attributable to his height, which spectators feel gives him an undue advantage over his opponents. A moment’s cogitation on observed phenomena would tell them the opposite.
There are plenty of tall, skinny kids, but few of them are fighters, because the tubular torso of the asthenic male renders him peculiarly vulnerable to pounding in the middle. His higher center of gravity is a disadvantage in the ring, permitting the other boy to spin him like the lady in a ballroom-dancing act, and his swanlike neck is an overextended line of neural communication, allowing him to be knocked out by a tap that would hardly jog the rudimentary mental processes of a bull-necked lad. Most such physical types, when misplaced ambition brings them to the ring, rely on their reach to peck at opponents and on their legs to keep them out of trouble; in close, they wind their arms about their adversaries’ like spaghetti around the tines of a fork. (The United Kingdom has suffered so severely from heavyweight champions of this construction that British growers have now developed a midget heavyweight strain.) Saddler, on the contrary, is relentlessly aggressive. He seldom takes a step backward, and if an opponent occasionally gets a foot under one of his descending ring shoes, he hospitably