Next up on the essays shelf:
The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker
The Only Game in Town is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. So far, I have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories (profiles), The Fun of It (Talk of the Town pieces), and The New Gilded Age (financial writing), and Secret Ingredients (food writing).
A.J. Liebling wrote for The New Yorker for thirty years. He is included in the other two collections as well, and I love it because it shows the breadth of his topics: He wrote about young Orson Welles’ production of Julius Caesar in 1937 (pre-Kane), and a piece about the food situation for Paris in the horrible year of 1939. Fantastic. His main loves were food, France, and boxing. He went to fights his whole life. His favorite sport. An obsession.
In 1955, he went to the boxing match held at Yankee Stadium, between Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore. Marciano brought something new to the world of boxing, and Moore, signing off in a letter he wrote to Liebling, wrote, “The most underappreciated boxer in the world, Archie Moore”. As the September 21, 1955 bout approached, Liebling considered both boxers. He knew both of their teams, the coaches and trainers, he knew the background of each. He saw Marciano as an intelligent unassuming guy, and he started to conceive of the melancholy Moore as Captain Ahab, traveling the world in search of his White Whale. Marciano was his Whale, his Big Fish. The fight was an event. It had had to be postponed for a day because a hurricane had threatened to hit, so that meant that New York was filled to the brim with visiting fight fans, journalists, promoters. Everyone had to stay longer, extending their reservations. You couldn’t get a room in a hotel in any of the five boroughs if you tried.
Marciano was defending his heavyweight champion title, and had already done so five times, successfully. The fight, as described by Liebling, was gripping, with Marciano being knocked down in round 2. But he got up. The fight went on. It was two different styles on display, and Liebling tries desperately to analyze their facial expressions throughout, in the ring, and when they came back to their corners. What were they thinking? What were they experiencing?
Moore and Marciano, Sept. 21, 1955, Yankee Stadium
Marciano won the fight, knocking Moore out in round 9. (The entire fight is on Youtube.)
Marciano retired the next year at age 32.
Here’s an excerpt from Liebling’s lengthy piece. While it’s an obsessive journal of what happened before the fight, as well as the events OF the fight, it’s also a meditation on the sport itself, and what it brings to its fans. It ends on a surprisingly emotional note. I read the last paragraph of the piece and thought, “Ahhh. Yes. That’s where he was going on all along.” It is an ending that satisfies.
The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker
A moment later the bell rang and the Heroes came out for the first round. Marciano, training in the sun for weeks, had tanned to a slightly deeper tint than Moore’s old ivory, and Moore, at 188, looked, if anything, bigger and more muscular than Marciano; much of the champion’s weight is in his legs, and his shoulders slope. Marciano advanced, but Moore didn’t go far away. As usual, he stood up nicely, his arms close to his body and his feet not too far apart, ready to go anywhere but not without a reason – the picture of a powerful, decisive intellect unfettered by preconceptions. Marciano, pulling his left arm back from the shoulder, flung a left hook. He missed, but not by enough to discourage him, and then walked in and hooked again. All through the second, he threw those hooks, and none of them grazed Moore’s whiskers; one even hit him on the side of the head. Moore didn’t try much offensively; he held a couple of times when Marciano worked in close.
Marciano came back to his corner as he always does, unimpassioned. He hadn’t expected to catch Moore with those left hooks anyway., I imagine, all he had wanted was to move him around. Moore went to his corner inscrutable. They came out for the second, and Marciano went after him in brisker fashion. In the first round, he had been throwing the left hook, missing with it, and then throwing a right and missing with that, too. In the second, he tried a variation – throwing a right and then pulling a shoulder back to throw the left. It appeared for a moment to have Moore confused, as a matador might be confused by a bull who walked in on his hind legs. Marciano landed a couple of those awkward hooks, but not squarely. He backed Moore over toward the side of the ring farthest from me, and then Moore knocked him down.
Some of the reporters, describing the blow in the morning papers, called it a “sneak punch”, which is journalese for one the reporter didn’t see but technically means a lead thrown before the other man has warmed up or while he is musing about the gate receipts. This had been no lead, and although I certainly hadn’t seen Moore throw the punch, I knew that it had landed inside the arc of Marciano’s left hook. (“Marciano missed with the right, trun the left, and Moore stepped inside it,” my private eye, a trainer named Whitey Bimstein, said next day, confirming my diagnosis, and the film of the fight bore both of us out.) So Ahab had his harpoon in the Whale. He had 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 – or like Ahab when he s aw the Whale take down Fedallah harpoons and all. Anyway, he hesitated a couple of seconds, and that was reasonable. A man who took nine to come up after a punch like that would be doing well, and the correct tactic would be to go straight in and finish him. But a fellow who came up on two was so strong he would bear investigation.
Aft er that, Moore did go in, but not in a crazy way. He hit Marciano some good, hard, classic shots, and inevitably Marciano, a trader, hit him a few devastating swipes, which slowed him. When the round ended, the edge of Moore’s speed was gone, and he knew that he would have to set a new and completely different trap, with diminished resources. After being knocked down, Marciano had stopped throwing that patterned right-and-left combination; he has a good nob. “He never trun it again in the fight,” Whitey said the next day, but I differ. He threw it in the fifth, and again Moore hit him a peach of a right inside it, but the steam was gone; this time Ahab couldn’t even stagger him. Anyway, there was Moore at the end of the second, dragging his shattered faith in the unities and humanities back to his corner. He had hit a guy right, and the guy hadn’t gone. But there is no geezer in Moore, any more than there was in the master of the Pequod.
Both came out for the third very gay, as Egan would have said. Marciano had been hit and cut, so he felt acclimated, and Moore was so mad at himself for not having knocked Marciano out that he almost displayed animosity toward him. He may have thought that perhaps he had not hit Marciano just right; the true artist is always prone to self-reproach. He would try again. A minute’s attention from his squires had raised his spirits and slaked down his hair. At this point, Marciano set about him. He waddled in, hurling his fists with a sublime disregard of probabilities, content to hit an elbow, a biceps, a shoulder, the top of a head – the last supposed to be the least profitable target in the business, since, as every beginner learns, “the head is the hardest part of the human body,” and a boxer will only break his hands on it. Many boxers make the systematic presentation of the cranium part of their defensive scheme. The crowd, basically anti-intellectual, screamed encouragement. There was Moore, riding punches, picking them off, slipping them, rolling with them, ducking them, coming gracefully out of his defensive efforts with sharp, patterned blows – and just about holding this parody even on points. His face, emerging at instants from under the storm of arms – his own and Rocky’s – looked like that of a swimming walrus. When the round ended, I could see that he was thinking deeply. Marciano came back to his corner at a kind of suppressed dogtrot. He didn’t have a worry in the world.
