Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

  “Is Marciano the dirtiest fighter you ever fought?” Cockell was asked as he sat in his dressing room. He is a sturdy, proud, touchy man, who seemed not to like the fresh or direct questions of his American interviewers. Cockell resented this one. He rose and started to walk away. He alone of the British party had not complained.

  Peter Wilson, who set the tone of indignation for the whole British contingent, summed it up for all of them when he said, “We still conduct boxing as a stylized sport under a formal set of rules. Here it is legalized cobblestone brawling. The methods used are unimportant. Winning is.”

  Thus, even in these days of NATO and Anglo-American brotherhood, the Revolutionary War crackles on.

  If this one-sided match should be made again, even on Cockell’s home grounds with a neutral referee, it is my humble, star-spangled opinion that Rocky will drape him over the ropes like wet laundry again, formal rules and all.

  [May 1955]

  A Champion Proves His

  Greatness

  IN THIRTY YEARS of sitting near the fighters, I’ve seen some of the great natural matches—boxers in there with sluggers, punchers in there with defensive virtuosos, mean guys in there with boys you would gladly invite home for dinner. But Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore, in their memorable encounter for the championship of the world last week, provided a truly classic study in contrast. Their careers, their personalities, their backing, their styles of fighting were as sharply differentiated as mountains are from valleys, as water is from rock.

  Contrast makes conflict and conflict makes drama, and the struggle at Yankee Stadium in the presence of a throat-tightened audience of 61,000 was a beautiful spectacle of pain and skill and endurance and die-slow courage and a resoluteness that makes champions and wins wars. The protagonists pitted against each other for the highest stakes in pugilism combined to make a nine-act play of violence that followed a tragic pattern. The Greeks would have understood the grim necessity of Marciano’s triumph. And they would have wept for Moore, the oldest man ever to seek the laurels, who did almost everything he said he would do. Almost—therein lay his tragic flaw.

  Before we review the battle, with its thrilling but inevitable ending, its moments of surprise and passion, let us quickly tick off the differences between champion and challenger that caught the imagination of the fans as have only two other rivalries, the Dempsey-Tunney and the Louis-Conn. Moore, as everyone knows, is a true master of self-defense, a science he has developed in twenty years of barnstorming. Marciano is the master of no defense, who moves in swinging punches like all the club fighters of all time, only more so. Moore is in the tradition of the tough colored middleweights, kept out of the big clubs, who roam the world in quest of eating money. Marciano’s is the legend of the poor boy who hitchhikes to New York and strikes not gold but something of equivalent value in the person of Al Weill, later to be the Garden matchmaker. Weill was impressed by Rocky’s strength, signed him to a contract, and placed him in the knowing hands of old bantam-weight Trainer Charley Goldman. Rocky delivered, and for the last five years he’s been on the golden road (better known as the inside track), with every move thought out for him by one of the shrewdest and best-connected businessmen in boxing.

  Archie, meanwhile, was fighting his way into old age on $300 purses in the tank towns. As if to shore up his confidence and his dignity, Archie is a boastful, somewhat overarticulate man who, on the eve of the fight, could elaborate on the subject of Marciano’s inability to hit him. Rocky, on the other hand, belying his aggressiveness inside the ropes, is a modest and soft-spoken fellow who will say without apology: “You know how awkward and clumsy I am,” and who would much rather talk about his Red Sox or about his father in the shoe factory and the fabulous eating contests in his Italian neighborhood than about his powers or his intentions in the ring.

  As they climbed through the ropes a week ago, their differences were vividly revealed in their appearances. Rocky wore a blue cloth robe trimmed in white. But Archie Moore was resplendent in a robe of black brocade trimmed in gold, with Louis XIV cuffs and a brilliant gold lining. No Othello was ever more lavishly costumed. Archie had come through ulcers and years of tough fights and poverty to reach this moment of glory in the ball park, and his manner seemed to say, I am going to dress and act the part. He glared across the ring at Marciano like some South Sea emperor staring down an unruly subject. But Rocky doesn’t play those games, he just comes to fight; and Archie’s evil eye played no part in the events that followed.

  The delay before an epic fight is always tantalizing. Most of the spectators have been waiting for the fight all week, talking it up all day, betting it, masterminding it, until they have brought themselves to an exquisite peak of anticipation. The crowd is both festive and tense and so much resembles the Pierce Egan descriptions of bareknuckle fight crowds that you know there is a consistent line of boxing enthusiasm up through the centuries. The impatient thousands cheer their old champions, Dempsey and Louis and Walker and Canzoneri, and then at last the ring is cleared and the two men are left alone to face the demands the night has in store for them. The significance of it presses on the crowd and it falls silent, grave. The stadium seems to hold its collective breath. Will Rocky, the 4-to-l favorite, preserve his legend of invincibility? Can Archie Moore, the young old man of forty-two, make good his boast, “I’m a stylist, I can cope with any situation”?

  So we have come to one of the good, nerved-up moments in heavyweight history. The champions touch gloves and are at each other, Archie moving nicely out of danger and jabbing as he promised to do, Rocky lumbering forward in his crouch. Marciano is starting slowly, as usual, but there is just a touch more finesse to his bulling ways than meets the back-seat eye. Weaving and bobbing, always moving forward, he is not as easy to hit as Archie had figured. He’s catching punches on the shoulders and the gloves.

  It’s in Round 2 that Archie nearly lives up to his own descriptions of his abilities. Here is old-time boxing such as the good ones practiced before and after the First World War. Archie is feinting with his hands, his head, his shoulders—it is so good that he can’t resist a little self-satisfied smile. He anticipates Rocky’s lead and counters sharply—scientific fighting at its best. Rocky lunges in again and Archie times a masterful right-hand counter. Down, to the amazement of everybody including Marciano, goes the Rock.

  There was blood on Rocky’s left eye as he knelt on the canvas. Blood seemed to be oozing through the flesh of his nose. In my notes for this round I jotted, “Rocky cut, hurt, dazed.” As the champion rose on the count of 2, I scratched out “dazed,” replaced it with “startled.” I was close enough to the ring to see their eyes and again there was a study in contrast. When Rocky unexpectedly had dropped, a flush of excitement and self-satisfaction had made Archie’s eyes bright. Now he was watching Rocky carefully, perhaps remembering Walcott’s mistake in not following through after felling Rocky in the first round the night Rocky got up and won the championship. Archie had announced publicly that if ever he had Rocky on the floor he would not let the champion escape. “Once I have my man hurt I know how to finish him,” he liked to boast. Rocky was hurt but he was barging in again. He looked both wary and determined beyond your ordinary man’s determination. It was a look that promised trouble for Archie Moore, and yet the Marciano fans held their breath and some later reported a feeling of pressure around their hearts because Rocky was clearly in need of recuperation and Archie was hurting him again with a wise selection of punches, stiff jabs, straight rights, and a well-executed left uppercut. Marciano’s body seemed to shudder, but his eyes were sharply fixed on Archie and he kept coming in, landing a hard right to Archie’s chin just before the bell ended a momentous round.

  In years to come Archie may ask himself: “When I finally came to the moment I had been dreaming of for twenty years, what did I do wrong?” I think the answer is, nothing. The answer is that Rocky rose with his legs a little rubbery, but with his will to win challe
nged but unbending. Some unique power in him was refusing to lose, no matter how badly he might be outboxed or outhit. A boxing match is a test of will power, perhaps the supreme test; and in this vital department he excels any fighter I have ever seen.

  In the next round we began to see the Marciano of the Walcott and Charles ordeals, a terrible figure immune to blood and pain, accepting hard blows casually, as if they were a trivial price to pay for the glory and wealth that ride with the title. Rocky was stalking Archie, missing three out of four but shaking the old campaigner when he landed. Archie Moore was employing all the skills he had accumulated and they were wonderful to watch. There were moments when he played with Rocky and made him look amateurish. That little smile would spread across his face as he slipped Marciano’s blockbusters and countered with quick-handed combinations. But this round was a turning point, for it proved that no matter how brilliantly Archie boxed he could not stop the champion’s forward progress. He could not prevent the champion from jarring him. The science of self-defense was inadequate to the problem of how to stop a human tank like Marciano from running over him.

  It was a vicious Marciano that sprang forward in the fourth, a bareknuckle throwback hurling at Archie’s head a relentless stream of clumsily effective punches. Archie knows a dozen ways to avoid a punch, ducking, slipping, rolling with a punch, picking it off; and over and over again he would bring his right arm up just in time to block a clubbing left hook.

  But to boxing’s science we may now have to add the Marciano law of saturation. You may get out of the way of nine punches but the tenth will break through and find you. Marciano, wild and clumsy though he may be, is such a voluminous puncher that the cleverest of his opponents has to be hit and hurt every so often. Rocky wears his men down like a hydraulic drill attacking a boulder. But the challenger was an elusive target in the fifth round, making Rocky miss and peppering him with straight lefts, reminding the audience once more of his boxing superiority. He was making all the right moves and the champion, after two strong rounds, seemed to be floundering. “Keep boxing him, boy, you can take him,” Featherweight Champion Sandy Saddler shouted to his stablemate as Moore moved back to his corner.

  When the sixth round started, it was still a close fight. When the round was over, after Marciano had punched from bell to bell as if he were working out on a heavy bag, it was no longer. Archie was a battered, beaten pugilist. He had been knocked down twice, one eye had been closed, and the right side of his face was painfully swollen. His right arm was too weary to rise to the occasion of Rocky’s vicious left hooks, and he had caught dozens of them as the champion turned on a demonstration of continuous punching that had to be seen to be believed. The Moore-Marciano fight may prove to the buffs that there is simply no defense for this kind of pressure. The tiring challenger rose gallantly to face his punishment. Only generous supplies of courage and defensive wisdom allowed him to stagger back to his corner. Oddly enough, Rocky was staggering too. Try punching a heavy bag for three minutes as fast as you can without stopping and you’ll know why.

  Archie Moore sagged onto his stool and there was Dr. Vincent Nardiello leaning over him, suggesting that the fight was over. But Archie is a prideful man. Pride was the only stake he had to hold on to through the frustration years. So he invoked it now, and asked for the privilege of being counted out. “Like a champion,” he said. He did not want to be waved out of the ring on a doctor’s certificate. And as if to prove his right to continue, he carried the fight to Marciano in the seventh with a series of slick combinations.

  But the Rock is well-named, a discouraging man to fight, taking your best punches and then walking into you with both hands swinging. “He’s a tank. A monster,” people around me were saying. He knocked Archie down again, but Referee Kessler ruled it a slip. It didn’t matter. Archie could sneak-punch and flurry, and it was a brave thing to see, but the sick-sad look of defeat had begun to shadow his eyes.

  The last four minutes of the fight provided a cruel, crescendoing coda. Marciano was a battering ram and old Archie was a crumbling wall. “How long can he stand that punishment?” was the only question remaining to be decided. A merciless right hook drove the battered challenger back to the canvas, where he was still squatting, an abject figure of defeat, when the harsh bell prolonged the ordeal by ending the round a bare four seconds before the count of 10.

  A dying tiger, still dangerous in his final few seconds of life, Archie fought back in the ninth, but Rocky closed in, broadsiding ponderous rights and lefts until at last the remarkable middle-aged light-heavyweight champion slumped down in his own corner, exactly where his stool would have been at the end of the round, a fatally wounded animal crawling back to its lair. There he was counted out, conscious but with the will to fight on beaten out of him at last.

  It is a humiliating experience to be knocked into a stupor in public, and it was interesting to see how quickly Archie Moore reassembled the blocks of his dignity. Putting aside his agony and disappointment, he strode into his dressing room like a dramatic star coming in after the final curtain call. “Gentlemen, I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said with a jauntiness that belied his appearance. Then he was back, standing on a table like the Chautauqua character he is, insisting that he enjoyed the fight. “I think Rocky enjoyed it,” he added. “I hope the public enjoyed it too.”

  Rocky talks more plainly. He didn’t enjoy the fight. He just wanted to win it, as he had every one of his forty-nine battles. The experts still fault him for his lack of finesse, but right now we see him, a year or two hence, as the only American heavyweight champion ever to retire without a defeat. The old-timers talk of Sullivan and Jeffries and Dempsey. We may have another such immortal slugger in our midst. Are we too close to his shortcomings to recognize his incomparable virtues?

  [October 1955]

  The Comeback:

  Sugar Ray Robinson

  IN A PERIOD WHEN THE art of boxing was sliding into its decadence, Sugar Ray Robinson boxed like a throwback to the brilliant 1910s and ’20s. In those days when you described a man as a great boxer, you didn’t mean that he was merely an elusive footwork artist and rapid but delicate jabber like our Zulueta or Johnny Gonsalves. When you boxed well, you knew not only how to avoid punishment but how to deal it out strategically.

  That was the way of Sugar Ray. I first saw him nearly fifteen years ago when he was only a year and a dozen fights out of the amateurs. But he was one of those naturals, like Joe DiMaggio and Ernest Hemingway. He had speed and grace and cleverness and power and endurance and passion. In his second year as a pro he had beaten Sammy Angott, Marty Servo, and Fritzie Zivic. His twenty-seventh fight, nearly fourteen years ago, was a return match with Zivic, and he let the fight game know he was ready for the welterweight title by knocking out the ex-champion.

  Sugar Ray was a picture fighter in those early ’40s. He had the long, slender, rippling-muscled legs of a dancer. If you wanted to box, he outboxed you, and if you wanted to fight, he outfought you. There was not a welterweight in the world who could touch him then; perhaps there never was. They wouldn’t let him fight for the title because, held officially by a vincible champion called Red Cochrane, it was the personal property of the boys in the back room. To get work, Ray moved in on the middleweights. He beat Jake LaMotta in October 1942. Ray had to fight four more years and win thirty-eight more bouts before they finally let him try for the welterweight title. Red Cochrane had ducked him and retired. His successor as “champion,” Marty Servo, had ducked him and retired. Now Tommy Bell, a colored welterweight trial horse, met Sugar in an “elimination” bout for the title. Ray was knocked dizzy in the second round. He looked all in at the end of four. It took him a few more rounds to pull himself together again. By the eleventh he was the Sugar Ray the Garden regulars had learned never to bet against. After five and a half years of dreary run-arounds, the welterweights had a champion who won his fights in the ring. It was a refreshing change.

  There was th
at winter night in Chicago when Ray challenged LaMotta for the middleweight title. The experts had faulted Robinson as one great welterweight who was too frail, too slight, too short on ruggedness, ever to stay up there with the best of the middleweights. But that night in Chicago against the vicious bull of the Bronx he fought beautifully, fiercely, until the thirteenth round, when he hit Jake with enough combinations to drop a dozen middleweights. Jake didn’t drop; he just stood there, a bloody, stubborn heap of flesh waiting for more.

  Sugar Ray toured Europe, a golden boy with black skin. He was the darling of Paris. They mobbed his fuchsia Cadillac. It was a wonderful spring and summer in Zurich, Antwerp, Liège, Turin—until Randy Turpin, awkward, hard-hitting, a lesser playboy, took his title way in London.

  I saw Ray, with a bloody eye, take the title back from Turpin with a passionate outburst in the tenth round in the New York return match. This was a rich, slipping, aging Ray Robinson. Good enough, though, to take the measure of the fading Graziano and an up-and-coming Bobo Olson. Good enough to look like a shoo-in to turn the trick no middleweight champion has ever been able to do: win the light-heavyweight crown. After twelve rounds in Yankee Stadium he was so far in front of Joey Maxim that he couldn’t lose unless he were knocked out. But it was 130 degrees under the lights on an airless summer night, and at the end of the thirteenth, with punchless Joey as an innocent bystander, Ray collapsed from the heat.

  Retirement. Honor. Money. I’ll know when I’m through, Robinson had boasted. But the big pay nights and the fickle idolaters sing a siren song.

  Joe Rindone, who fights as if he were born to suffer, was chosen as victim No. 1 on Ray’s retread hit parade. Joe obliged by getting himself knocked out in the sixth round. The durable, forward-moving, uninspired but unintimidated Tiger Jones was nominated as foil No. 2, but this sturdy second-rate Tiger forgot to read the script. He plain beat the starch out of the disenchanted Sugar Ray. Finally they put Ray in with the leading middleweight contender, the slippery and overcautious Castellani. Ray won on spirit and some two-handed flurries, but his legs were dragging at the end of ten.