Notes From the Great Chronicler of the Silver Age of Boxing

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The New York Sun

Boxing nowadays scarcely qualifies as even a marginal sport. Yet “The Sweet Science” grows in stature. An end-of-the-millennium poll by Sports Illustrated ranked it the no.1 sports book of all time – which is remarkable because only a quarter of a century ago, just before Raymond Sokolov’s Liebling biography “The Wayward Reporter” helped revive his reputation, neither “The Sweet Science” nor a single other one of Liebling’s books was in print.


That Liebling’s masterpiece – the subtitle of which, “Boxing and Boxiana: A Ringside View” is curiously omitted in the new North Point Press edition (288 pages, $15) – has not only endured but prevailed is testament to the power of word of mouth. Like Ring Lardner’s in the previous generation, Liebling collections didn’t sell because most of the audience interested had already read them in magazine form (in Liebling’s case, in the New Yorker in the mid-1950s).


And, when it came to writing on boxing, Liebling left no disciples, partly be cause there was no other place that offered writers the expansive format of the New Yorker and partly because boxing was in decline at the time Liebling did his best work. “I will concede,” he wrote in 1956, “that we are entering a period of minor talents.” Indeed, he missed the golden age of boxing by a good 20 years.


There are other reasons why the next generation of literary boxing enthusiasts didn’t follow Liebling’s path, most of them summed up in a famous putdown by Joyce Carol Oates in her stuffy and joyless “On Boxing” (1987). “I sense myself,” she wrote, “uneasily alone in disliking much of Liebling, for his relentlessly jokey condescending and occasionally racist attitude towards his subjects.” She found “The Sweet Science” “a peculiarly self-conscious assemblage of pieces, arch, broad in its humor, rather like situation comedy in which boxers are ‘characters’ depicted for our amusement. … The problem for Liebling and for The New Yorker must have been how to sell a blood sport like boxing to a genteel, affluent readership.”


Some of that is true, particularly “broad in its humor” (the “racist” and “condescending” comments can be written off to peevish P.C.-ness). What doesn’t ring true is the way Ms. Oates exempts herself from the problem she attributes to Liebling – or did she really think the fight night crowd down at Runyon’s had read her books? Ms. Oates also says she doesn’t “‘enjoy’ boxing in the usual sense of the word.”


What, I wonder, is the “usual” sense of “enjoy” when applied to boxing? Liebling’s, I fear, and probably mine, meaning the nuts-and-bolts of the sport itself, the painfully acquired mechanics, skills, and strategies of boxing. Liebling wrote about boxing not as a later literary generation would see it, as an event, with big fights serving as metaphors for sociopolitical punditry – take a bow, Mr. Mailer – but as a sport practiced by fighters and trainers who did it for a living, not to create spectacle.


In Liebling’s time, fighters still had to fight regularly in order to maintain their edge, and fans had to watch the fights in person to keep a sharp eye: “Before television, a prize-fight was to a New Yorker the nearest equivalent to the New England town meeting. It taught a man to think on his seat.” And a journalist on his. There being no ESPN back then, or in fact replays of any kind, a good fight writer had to be looking for the right moves and to recognize them instantly when he saw them.


Here is Liebling focusing on a key moment in Archie Moore’s heavyweight championship fight with Rocky Marciano:



He hit him right if ever I saw a boxer hit right, with a classic brevity and conciseness. Marciano stayed down for two seconds. I do not know what took place in Mr. Moore’s breast when he saw him get up. He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore’s statue grabbed at him – startled because he thought he had killed the guy already.


And on Sugar Ray Robinson’s opponent in a middleweight title bout, British champion Randy Turpin: “When Turpin did hit … it was always at some curious angle. One punch for the body looked like a man releasing a bowling ball; another, a right for the head, was like a granny boxing a boy’s ears. His jab was like a man starting his run for the pole vault.”


And on veteran light-heavyweight Harold Johnson decking Archie Moore:



But near the end of the round Moore was pressing in to get in one more combination of punches before the round ended, and Johnson hit him with a beautiful overhand right on the left side of the head and knocked him flat. It was as if Vladimir de Pachmann had been assaulted by a piano stool. It was an event so unexpected, so unprecedented that even the referee, Ruby Goldstein, lost his head. Goldstein’s first impulse must have been to help Moore to his feet and apologize on behalf of the management.


Liebling’s focus and attention to detail illustrates perfectly what was missing in so much of the “big event” boxing writing of the next generation: the boxing and the writing. It has often been lamented that Liebling, who died in 1963, did not live long enough to see Cassius Clay evolve into Muhammad Ali, though he did write about one of his early fights, a piece collected in Northpoint’s recent collection “Just Enough Liebling.”


But maybe that was for the best. Liebling was the great chronicler of the silver age of boxing, and what Ali promised was a false rebirth of the golden age. Liebling probably didn’t have it in him to satisfy a generation that cared more about Ali as a symbol than as a fighter. Symbols don’t sweat or bleed or slip a left jab.


Mr. Barra last wrote for these pages on Jack Johnson.


The New York Sun

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