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Introduction

‘Sweet Science of Bruising!’

– Boxiana, 1824

‘I had heard that Ketchel’s dynamic onslaught was such it could not readily be withstood, but I figured I could jab his puss off … I should have put the bum away early, but my timing was a fraction of an iota off.’

– PHILADELPHIA JACK O’BRIEN, TALKING, IN 1938, ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAD HAPPENED LONG AGO

It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying-on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light-heavyweight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. I wonder if Professor Toynbee is as intimately attuned to his sources. The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.

I find it impossible to think that such a continuum can perish, but I will concede that we are entering a period of minor talents. The Sweet Science has suffered such doldrums before, like the long stretch, noted by Pierce Egan, the great historian of Boxiana, between the defeat of John Broughton in 1750 and the rise of Daniel Mendoza in 1789, or the more recent Dark Age between the retirement of Tunney in 1928 and the ascension of Joe Louis in the middle thirties. In both periods champions of little worth succeeded each other with the rapidity of the emperors who followed Nero, leaving the public scarce time to learn their names. When Louis came along he knocked out five of these world champions – Schmeling, Sharkey, Carnera, Baer, and Braddock, the last of whom happened to be holding the title when Louis hit him. A decade later he knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott, who nevertheless won the title four years afterward. His light extended in both directions historically, exposing the insignificance of what preceded and followed.

It is true there exist certain generalized conditions today, like full employment and a late school-leaving age, that militate against the development of first-rate professional boxers. (They militate also against the development of first-rate acrobats, fiddlers, and chefs de cuisine.) ‘Drummers and boxers, to acquire excellence, must begin young,’ the great Egan wrote in 1820. ‘There is a peculiar nimbleness of the wrist and exercise of the shoulder required, that is only obtained from growth and practice.’ Protracted exposure to education conflicts with this acquisition, but if a boy has a true vocation he can do much in his spare time. Tony Canzoneri, a very fine featherweight and lightweight of the thirties, told me once, for example, that he never had on a boxing glove until he was eight years old. ‘But of course I had done some street fighting,’ he said to explain how he had overcome his late start. Besides, there are a lot of unblighted areas like Cuba and North Africa and Siam that are beginning to turn out a lot of fighters now.

The immediate crisis in the United States, forestalling the one high living standards might bring on, has been caused by the popularization of a ridiculous gadget called television. This is utilized in the sale of beer and razor blades. The clients of the television companies, by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills. Consequently the number of good new prospects diminishes with every year, and the peddlers’ public is already being asked to believe that a boy with perhaps ten or fifteen fights behind him is a topnotch performer. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, and least of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Science back into a period of genre painting. When it is in a coma they will find some other way to peddle their peanuts.

In truth the kind of people who run advertising agencies and razor-blade mills have little affinity with the Heroes of Boxiana. A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization. A fighter’s hostilities are not turned inward, like a Sunday tennis player’s or a lady M.P.’s. They come out naturally with his sweat, and when his job is done he feels good because he has expressed himself. Chain-of-command types, to whom this is intolerable, try to rationalize their envy by proclaiming solicitude for the fighter’s health. If a boxer, for example, ever went as batty as Nijinsky, all the wowsers in the world would be screaming ‘Punch-drunk.’ Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn’t there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs. If a novelist who lived exclusively on applecores won the Nobel Prize, vegetarians would chorus that the repulsive nutriment had invigorated his brain. But when the prize goes to Ernest Hemingway, who has been a not particularly evasive boxer for years, no one rises to point out that the percussion has apparently stimulated his intellection. Albert Camus, the French probable for the Nobel, is an ex-boxer, too.

I was in the Neutral Corner saloon in New York a year or so ago when a resonant old gentleman, wiry, straight, and white-haired, walked in and invited the proprietors to his ninetieth birthday party, in another saloon. The shortly-to-be nonagenarian wore no glasses, his hands were shapely, his forearms hard, and every hair looked as if, in the old water-front phrase, it had been drove in with a nail. On the card of invitation he laid on the bar was printed:

Billy Ray

Last surviving Bare Knuckle Fighter

The last bare-knuckle fight in which the world heavyweight championship changed hands was in 1882. Mr Ray would not let anybody else in the Neutral buy a drink.

As I shared his bounty I thought of all his contemporary lawn-tennis players, laid away with their thromboses, and the golfers hoisted out of sand pits after suffering coronary occlusions. If they had turned in time to a more wholesome sport, I reflected, they might still be hanging on as board chairmen and senior editors instead of having their names on memorial pews. I asked Mr Ray how many fights he had had and he said, ‘A hundert forty. The last one was with gloves. I thought the game was getting soft, so I retired.’

When I was last in Hanover, New Hampshire, faculty members were dropping on the tennis courts so fast that people making up a doubles party always brought along a spare assistant professor.

This discussion of the relative salubrity of the Sweet Science and its milksop succedanea is what my friend Colonel John R. Stingo would call a labyrinthian digression.

It is because of the anticipated lean aesthetic period induced by television that I have decided to publish this volume now. The transactions narrated in it happen to comprise what may be the last heroic cycle for a long time. The Second World War, which began to affect American boxing when the draft came along in 1940, stopped the development of new talent. This permitted aging prewar boxers like Joe Louis and Joe Walcott to maintain their dominance longer than was to be expected under normal conditions. By the late forties, when the first few postwar fighters were beginning to shine, television got its thumb on the Old Sweetie’s windpipe, and now there are no clubs to fight in. But in between these catastrophes Rocky Marciano appeared out of the shoe-manufacturing town of Brockton, Massachusetts, and Sandy Saddler, the pikelike featherweight, out of Harlem. Randy Turpin looked, briefly, like the first Heroic British fighter since Jimmy Wilde. Marcel Cerdan made an unforgettable impression before his premature death in an airplane accident. (He is not in this book, because he died too soon.) Archie Moore, a late-maturing artist, like Laurence Sterne and Stendhal, illuminated the skies with the light of his descending sun, and Sugar Ray Robinson proved as long-lasting as he had been precocious – a tribute to burning the candle at both ends.

It was in June of 1951 that it occurred to me to resume writing boxing pieces, and that was only four months before Marciano, then an impecunious, or ‘broken’, fighter, arrived, as narrated early in this volume. There was no particular reason that I came back to boxing – ‘Suddenly it came to me,’ like the idea to the man in the song who was drinking gin-and-water. It was the way you take a notion that you would like to see an old sweetheart, which is not always the kind of notion to act on.

I had written a number of long boxing pieces for The New Yorker before 1939, but I dropped them then, along with the rest of what Harold Ross used to call ‘low-life’, in order to become a war correspondent. Low-life was Ross’s word for the kind of subject I did best.

When I came back from the war in 1945 I wasn’t ready to write about the Sweet Science, although I continued to see fights and to talk with friends in Scientific circles. I became a critic of the American press, and had quite a lot of fun out of it, but it is a pastime less intellectually rewarding than the study of ‘milling’, because the press is less competitive than the ring. Faced with a rival, an American newspaper will usually offer to buy it. This is sometimes done in Scientific circles, but is not considered ethical. Besides, the longer I criticized the press, the more it disimproved, as Arthur MacWeeney of the Irish Independent would put it.

My personal interest in La Dolce Scienza began when I was initiated into it by a then bachelor uncle who came east from California when I was thirteen years old, which was in 1917. He was a sound teacher and a good storyteller, so I got the rudiments and the legend at the same time. California, in the nineties and the early 1900s, had been headquarters: Corbett, Choynski, Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Abe Attell, and Jimmy Britt were Californians all, and San Francisco had been the port of entry from Australia, which exported the Fitzsimmonses and Griffos. Uncle Mike could talk about them all. After my indoctrination I boxed for fun whenever I had a chance until I was twenty-six and earning sixty-three dollars a week as a reporter on the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin. I continued to box occasionally for many years more, generally just enough to show I knew what was all about it, as the boys say. I went shorter rounds every time. The last was in about 1946, and the fellow I was working with said he could not knock me out unless I consented to rounds longer than nine seconds.

When I returned to the realms of higher intellection in 1951 Joe Louis was entering his eighteenth year as the most conspicuous ornament of the ‘fancy’ – the highest feather in its hat. Within a few months Marciano appeared. This began a new cycle: Marciano and the Old Men, like Louis and the Old Men in 1934–38. During the immediately subsequent episodia, to borrow a word from Colonel Stingo, Marciano knocked out three world’s heavyweight champions, Louis, Walcott, and Ezzard Charles, and wound up beating Moore, the heavyweight-light-heavyweight, who challenged for the title at thirty-nine. Marciano was then himself thirty-one, which was a fairly advanced age for a boxer, but all his big fights have been against men still older, because nobody was coming up behind him. With the Moore fight on September 16, 1955, the cycle was complete. It is certain that neither Hero will ever be better than on that night, and highly improbable that either will be again that good.

All the Heroic transactions recorded within this book thus occurred within the four-and-a-fraction years, June, 1951–September, 1955, and they have a kind of porous unity, like the bound volumes of Boxiana Egan used to get out whenever he figured he had enough magazine pieces about the ring of his day to fill a book. There is as main theme the rise of Marciano, and the falls of everybody who fought him, and there are subplots, like the comeback of Sugar Ray after his downfall before Turpin, and his re-downfall before Maxim, but not his current re-comeback. There is some discussion of the television matter, and there are exploits of minor Heroes like Sandy Saddler, the featherweight champion, and a lot of boys you never heard of. The characters who hold the book, and the whole fabric of the Sweet Science together, are the trainer-seconds, as in Egan’s day.

Egan, to whom I refer so often in this volume, was the greatest writer about the ring who ever lived. Hazlitt was a dilettante who wrote one fight story. Egan was born probably in 1772, and died, certainly, in 1849. He belonged to London, and no man has ever presented a more enthusiastic picture of all aspects of its life except the genteel. He was a hack journalist, a song writer, a conductor of puff-sheets and, I am inclined to suspect, a shake-down man. His work affords internal evidence that he was self-educated; if he wasn’t he had certainly found a funny schoolmaster. In 1812 he got out the first paperbound installment of Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism; from the days of Broughton and Slack to the Heroes of the Present Milling Aera. For years before that he had been writing about boxing for a sporting magazine called the Weekly Despatch. The unparalleled interest in the Sweet Science aroused by the two fights between Tom Cribb, the Champion, and Tom Molineaux, an American Negro, in 1811, inspired Egan to launch a monthly publication confined to milling.

He covered the historical portion of his self-assigned program in his first few numbers, and after that Boxiana became a running chronicle of the Contemporary Milling Aera. As the man with the laurel concession, he became a great figure in the making of matches, the holding of stakes, the decision of disputes, the promotion of banquets, and all the other perquisites of eminence.

‘In his particular line, he was the greatest man in England,’ a memorialist wrote of him long after his death. ‘In the event of opposition to his views and opinions, he and those who looked up to him had a mode of enforcing authority which had the efficacy without the tediousness of discussion, and “though,” says one who knew him, “in personal strength far from a match for any sturdy opponent, he had a courage and vivacity in action which were very highly estimated both by his friends and foes.” …

‘His peculiar phraseology, and his superior knowledge of the business, soon rendered him eminent beyond all rivalry and competition. He was flattered and petted by pugilists and peers: his patronage and countenance were sought for by all who considered the road to a prizefight the road to reputation and honor. Sixty years ago [that would have been 1809], his presence was understood to convey respectability on any meeting convened for the furtherance of bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cudgelling, wrestling, boxing, and all that comes within the category of “manly sports”. If he “took the chair”, success was held as certain in the object in question. On the occasions of his presence he was accompanied by a “tail”, if not as numerous, perhaps as respectable as that by which another great man was attended, and certainly, in its way, quite as influential.’

Egan brought out his first bound volume, comprising sixteen numbers, in 1813, although the title page reads 1812. (It had gone to the subscribers with the first installment.) He did not put out another bound volume until 1818. There was a third in 1821, a fourth in 1824, and a fifth in 1828. By that time the Sweet Science was entering one of its periodic declines. Too many X (Egan’s way of writing crooked) fights had disgusted backers and bettors, and there was a lack of exciting new talent. The Science was not to reach another peak until the rise of Tom Sayers, in the late 1850s, which would culminate in Tom’s great fight with the American, John C. Heenan, in 1860. Egan abandoned Boxiana after the 1828 volume.

A great charm of Boxiana is that it is no mere compilation of synopses of fights. Egan’s round-by-round stories, with ringside sidelights and betting fluctuations, are masterpieces of technical reportage, but he also saw the ring as a juicy chunk of English life, in no way separable from the rest. His accounts of the extra-annular lives of the Heroes, coal-heavers, watermen, and butchers’ boys, are a panorama of low, dirty, happy, brutal, sentimental Regency England that you’ll never get from Jane Austen. The fighter’s relations with their patrons, the Swells, present that curious pattern of good fellowship and snobbery, not mutually exclusive, that has always existed between Gentleman and Player in England, and that Australians, Americans, and Frenchmen equally find hard to credit. Egan is full of anecdotes like the one about the Swell and his pet Hero, who were walking arm-in-arm in Covent Garden late one night, when they saw six Dandies insulting a woman. Dandies were neither Gentlemen nor Players, and Egan had no use for them. The Swell remonstrated with the Dandies and one of them hit him. The Swell then cried, ‘Jack Martin, give it them,’ and the Hero, who was what we today would call a light-heavyweight, knocked down the six Dandies. From Egan’s narrative it is impossible to tell which performance he considered more dashing, the Swell’s or the Hero’s.

That particular Hero, by the way, was known as the Master of the Rolls, because he was by trade a baker. ‘Martin is very respectably connected,’ Egan wrote, ‘and, when he first commenced prize pugilist, he had an excellent business as a baker; but which concern he ultimately disposed (or got rid) of, in order, it seems, to give a greater scope to his inclinations.’ Egan’s cockney characters, and his direct quotes of how they talked, were a gift to Dickens, who, like every boy in England, read the author of Boxiana. In the New York Public Library catalogue there is listed a German monograph, circa 1900, on Egan’s influence on Dickens, but I know of no similar attempt at justice in the English language.

Egan’s pageant scenes of trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers, all setting off for some great public, illegal prize-fight, are written Rowlandson, just as Rowlandson’s print of the great second fight between Cribb and Molineaux is graphic Egan. In the foreground of the picture there is a whore sitting on her gentleman’s shoulders the better to see the fight, while a pickpocket lifts the gentleman’s reader (watch). Cribb has just hit Molineaux the floorer, and Molineaux is falling, as he has continued to do for a hundred and forty-five years since. He hasn’t hit the floor yet, but every time I look at the picture I expect to see him land. On the horizon are the delicate green hills and the pale blue English sky, hand-tinted by old drunks recruited in kip-shops (flophouses). The prints cost a shilling colored. When I look at my copy I can smell the crowd and the wildflowers.

Egan could be stately when he wanted, as you can see from the following sample taken from the dedication of the first volume of Boxiana:

To those, Sir, who prefer effeminacy to hardihood – assumed refinement to rough Nature – and whom a shower of rain can terrify, under the alarm of their polite frames, suffering from the unruly elements – or would not mind Pugilism, if BOXING was not so shockingly vulgar – the following work can create no interest whatever; but to those persons who feel that Englishmen are not automatons … Boxiana will convey amusement, if not information …

I can think of nothing more to say in favor of the Present Extension of the GREAT HISTORIAN’S Magnum Opus.

A. J. LIEBLING
Paris, 1956

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

THE SWEET SCIENCE

THE BOY FROM SOUTH MAIN STREET

A. J. Liebling

THE SWEET SCIENCE

Boxing and Boxiana: A Ringside View

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Introduction

THE BIG FELLOWS

THE MELTING MIDDLEWEIGHT

THE BIG FELLOWS AGAIN

OTHER FRONTS

AHAB AND NEMESIS