CALL ME FISHMEAL:

Ahab and Nemesis (A. J. Liebling, 1955-10-08, The New Yorker)

Back in 1922, the late Heywood Broun, who is not remembered primarily as a boxing writer, wrote a durable account of a combat between the late Benny Leonard and the late Rocky Kansas for the lightweight championship of the world. Leonard was the greatest practitioner of the era, Kansas just a rough, optimistic fellow. In the early rounds, Kansas messed Leonard about, and Broun was profoundly disturbed. A radical in politics, he was a conservative in the arts, and Kansas made him think of Gertrude Stein, les Six, and nonrepresentational painting, all of them novelties that irritated him.

“With the opening gong, Rocky Kansas tore into Leonard,” he wrote. “He was gauche and inaccurate, but terribly persistent.” The classic verities prevailed, however. After a few rounds, during which Broun continued to yearn for a return to a culture with fixed values, he was enabled to record: “The young child of nature who was challenging for the championship dropped his guard, and Leonard hooked a powerful and entirely orthodox blow to the conventional point of the jaw. Down went Rocky Kansas. His past life flashed before him during the nine seconds in which he remained on the floor, and he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”

I have often thought of Broun’s words in the three years since Rocky Marciano, the reigning heavyweight champion, scaled the fistic summits, as they say in Journal-Americanese, by beating a sly, powerful quadragenarian colored man named Jersey Joe Walcott. The current Rocky is gauche and inaccurate, but besides being persistent he is a dreadfully severe hitter with either hand. The predominative nature of this asset has been well stated by Pierce Egan, the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring, who was less preoccupied than Broun with ultimate implications. Writing in 1821 of a “milling cove” named Bill Neat, the Bristol Butcher, Egan said, “He possesses a requisite above all the art that teaching can achieve for any boxer; namely, one hit from his right hand, given in proper distance, can gain a victory; but three of them are positively enough to dispose of a giant.” This is true not only of Marciano’s right hand but of his left hand, too—provided he doesn’t miss the giant entirely. Egan doubted the advisability of changing Neat’s style, and he would have approved of Marciano’s. The champion has an apparently unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion (Egan would have called him an “insatiable glutton”) and inexhaustible energy (“a prime bottom fighter”). “Shifting,” or moving to the side, and “milling in retreat,” or moving back, are innovations of the late eighteenth century that Rocky’s advisers have carefully kept from his knowledge, lest they spoil his natural prehistoric style. Egan excused these tactics only in boxers of feeble constitution. I imagine Broun would have had a hard time fitting Marciano anywhere into his frame of reference.

Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, who hibernates in San Diego, California, and estivates in Toledo, Ohio, is a Brounian rather than an Eganite in his thinking about style, but he naturally has to do more than think about it. Since the rise of Marciano, Moore, a cerebral and hyperexperienced light-colored pugilist who has been active since 1936, has suffered the pangs of a supreme exponent of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout. As a sequel to a favorable review I wrote of one of his infrequent New York appearances a year ago, when his fee was restricted to a measly five figures, I received a sad little note signed “The most unappreciated fighter in the world, Archie Moore.” A fellow who has as much style as Moore tends to overestimate the intellect—he develops the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion, or of how to pick horses first, second, third, and fourth in every race. Archie’s note made it plain to me that he was honing his harpoon for the White Whale.

MORE:
Archie Moore’s Remarkable Run at the Heavyweight Championship (B. R. Bearden, East Side Boxing)

It’s 1954 and Archie is making some noises towards a possible Marciano fight but nobody is listening. Not yet. [...]

In a campaign of harassment that would make a celebrity stalker proud, Moore goes after the heavyweight champion where it hurts the most; his pride. He takes out adds in papers calling for Rocky to fight him, he gives interviews where he outlines his strategy to defeat the Rock, he has wanted posters printed and placed where Marciano will see them, he sends him notes on the golf course, “Are you afraid to fight an old man?”. Even the Ring is suggesting Moore has a chance to dethrone the Rock “if Marciano gives him a shot”. Called out in such a sustained, public manner, Rocky shelves his retirement plans (which are unknown to the public or Moore) and agrees to answer the challenge of the Old Mongoose.

The resulting fight starts off as if Moore’s master plan were flawless. In the second round he drops Marciano with a perfect right for only the second time in the Rock’s career. For a brief moment, a twinkling in the eye of fate, it appears Archie will hold both the light heavyweight and the heavyweight belts. But the moment is a mere two seconds and Marciano is back on his feet, taking no count, and coming after Moore with a savagery he might not have unleashed on the amiable Moore otherwise. Archie later admits the mistake he made was to drop Marciano early, noting that the heavyweight champ was a slow starter and he meant to get the early rounds in the bank as Walcott had done. By dropping him in the second round, he’s roused the smoldering fire that always burned in Marciano and the result is a relentless, merciless assault. All Archie’s great boxing skill, his cross-arm defense, his feints and moves, can’t keep off him a man he would refer to later as “a bull with boxing gloves”. For eight rounds Moore takes a terrible beating, knocked down three times, saved by the bell in the eighth, and when he returns to his corner with the assist of a compassionate referee it’s obvious the end is near. Between rounds the referee comes to Moore’s corner and offers to stop the fight, the outcome of which is no longer in doubt, and Archie replies, “I too am a champion, and I want to go out like a champion.”

The courageous words of a great fighter, the final defiant gesture from a man who worked so hard for his shot at the heavyweight title. The ninth round starts, Marciano is a whirlwind of fury, and Archie is down for the fourth and last time. In defeat he is as endearing as in triumph; he says he hopes the fans felt they got their money’s worth and he thanks Marciano for giving him the shot.

Archie Moore would have one more shot at the title, fighting Floyd Patterson for Rocky’s vacated title. It is Marciano himself who names Patterson and Moore as the men most deserving to fight for the belt. Moore fights a torrid schedule leading up to the Patterson fight, eleven bouts in eight months, seven of them against heavyweights. It’s too much, and Archie isn’t in the shape for Patterson that he was for Marciano. The result is a 5th round KO and the end of Archie’s heavyweight championship dreams.

The incredible Archie Moore finished with a record of 183-24-10 with at least 141 KOs (some historians state it at 145, but either way it’s the most of any fighter in the history of gloved boxing). He fought 61 times against Top Ten fighters and 15 times against future Hall of Famers. Archie may not have grasped the golden ring he wanted so badly, but it wasn’t for lack of courage or the will to reach for it.

-Moore packed a lethal punch (Ron Flatter, ESPN.com)

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2004 12:39 PM