One of the obvious insights from rereading AJ Liebling’s The Sweet Science is that while much has changed in sports over the past sixty years, some things haven’t changed at all. In Liebling’s day, boxing was more than the niche entertainment it is today; it was part of the cultural fabric of North America. More tellingly, being a champion meant a lot more then than it does now. On the other hand, the golden rule held true in the 1950s as it does in the 21st century: the sexier the main event, the poorer the card. Other constants include the desire of aging warriors to continue to beat their expiration date and the challenges managers face in nurturing young talent.
But above all, it is the humanity that underlies all pugilism that can never be dismissed and that ultimately gives the sport its power to both compel and repel. The author of The Sweet Science was not only aware of this fact, but as a scribe for The New Yorker in the mid-20th century, he was in an enviable position to explore the subject. Each person found in this wonderful book, whether fighter, trainer, manager, fellow journalist, or boxing enthusiast, is always a true individual with hopes and frustrations, a past and a present, a mind and a character.
When it comes to the “sweet science of bruising,” the author’s taste is discriminating; perhaps unsurprisingly, he prefers brains to brawn. This is evidenced in the essay “Ahab and Nemesis”, which documents the battle between Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore for the heavyweight crown in 1955. In Liebling’s opinion, he is better than Marciano, aka “The Brockton Blockbuster”, don’t get bogged down in trivia. of defense, since he could “spoil his natural prehistoric style” of him. On the other hand, “The Old Mongoose” has “suffered the pangs of a maximum exponent of bel canto who finds himself expelled from the opera house by a guy who only knows how to scream”. In other words, Moore is the cerebral boxer, relying on intelligence and craft, versus Marciano’s wild and forceful style. The author backs Archie, despite the odds, and through five falls, all the way to the bitter end and Moore’s account.
Analogies proliferate in Liebling as all the parallels between boxing and other human activities appear. One of the most concise examples:
[Boxing] managers, like book publishers, get most of the money, but trainers, like publishers, are more directly involved in the work of artists. bimstein and brown [trainers of Tommy Jackson] they are boxer editors. Mediocrity depresses them; they are excited by talent, even latent. What they dream of is genius, but unfortunately, that’s harder to identify. Technically, they can do a lot for a redundant gesture of extirpating fighters and imposing a severe logic of punches…
“Broken Fighter Arrives,” the story of that great ‘torch-passing’ fight in 1951, Joe Louis vs. Rocky Marciano, serves as an adorably simple explanation of people’s love of sports, as it is directly based on the connection made between those who do and those who watch. Without the element of recognition and attachment that arises between boxer and fan, we are left with mere entertainment. But once the connection is made, a boxing match can become an integral part of who the fan is. In this way, sports are no different than the arts.
Liebling identifies with Joe Louis because he is the champion who ruled during his best years, and inevitably, the decline of “The Brown Bomber” mirrors the decline of Liebling himself. Watching the great Louis fall to the young Marciano may have been the saddest moment in Liebling’s life as a boxing fan. With the fight over, she channels his mood by quoting an exchange from a couple sitting near him:
The tall blonde was crying, and soon she began to sob. The guy who had brought her was horrified. “Rocky didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “He did not commit a foul. What are you booing?
The blonde said, “You’re so cold. I hate you too.”
Two of the book’s pieces revolve around the great Sugar Ray Robinson. The first, “Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove,” describes his victory in the rematch against Randy Turpin and includes Liebling’s musings on how perception affects our memory: “What you think you eventually remember about the fight will be an amalgamation of what you he saw there, what he read in the newspapers he saw and what he saw in the movies.”
The second is “Kearns by a Knockout”, in which Maxim’s manager, Jack Kearns, quickly hijacks Joey Maxim’s stoppage of an exhausted Sugar Ray. “Next time I’ll knock him out quicker,” Kearns is heard saying after Maxim’s victory. But Liebling doesn’t let the manager’s hypocrisy go unpunished and closes the chapter: “Maxim lost his title to…Archie Moore, but Dr. Kearns didn’t say after the fight, ‘Moore licked me.’ He said, ‘Moore licked Maxim’.”
“Nino and a Nanimal” is an alternate take on the conflict between boxing intellect and misguided brute power, featuring Nino Valdes and Tommy Jackson. “Debut of a Seasoned Artist” depicts the late-blooming Archie Moore as an attraction in a story of talent toiling in relative obscurity. “Donnybrook Farr” is a light-hearted account of the author’s trip to Dublin to see local favorite Billy Kelly overtake Ray Famechon, only by a decision to go the wrong way in front of a raucous Irish crowd, with the expected consequences.
Throughout these stories we make a vibrant journey through the scenarios in which boxing life was lived. We can visit the original Yankee Stadium and the venerable Madison Square Garden, learning what it was like to see a fight amidst all the glamor of ringside. We passed a crowded “Sugar Ray’s,” Robinson’s nightclub in Harlem, with Cadillacs double-parked blocking its entrance after a Robinson win. We took the disciplined, hardened atmosphere of the legendary Stillman’s Gym, and the tension and focus that prevailed in resort training camps isolated from urban distractions and temptations. And we make several visits to “The Neutral Corner,” the cafe run by boxing retirees and stockholders where you can hear the latest fight game gossip.
When you choose The Sweet Science, don’t expect a detailed account of a fight, or a treatise on boxing strategy and tactics, although you will find some of that. What you should expect is excellent storytelling and compelling prose about some of the greatest figures the sport has ever seen. Liebling was well aware of the fact that the people who lace up the gloves are different from the rest of us, and therefore inherently interesting to the rest of us. What won Liebling recognition as a writer may have been his erudite, witty, and highly accessible style, but what provided the raw subject matter of his writing was his ability to identify the human element at the heart of his work. every story. The sweet science is definitive proof of that.
– Rafael Garcia
The Sweet Science post first appeared in The Fight City.
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