FAMOUS WRITERS ON BOXING. Ladies and gentlemen, Vintage Boxing Photos Archive continues its series on great pieces of boxing writing with three excerpts from the New Yorker penned by the incomparable A.J. Liebling. Robert Anasi said it best, No one wrote about boxing better than A.J Liebling. This is saying something, as the competition is pretty fierce, running as it does through Norman Mailer all the way back to The Aeneid. On boxing Liebling is a joy to read. It would be redundant trying to list the many virtues of his prose - like handing out an instruction manual for a sunset. Ive chosen these excerpts of Lieblings writing as they convey his wit, powers of observation and his love of the Sweet Science of Bruising. So, without further ado let us begin. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have over the years. - Roy Bennett 1) 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 in 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. 2. It is through Jack OBrien, the Arbiter Elegantarium 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 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 mans arm to his shoulder. 3. 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 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 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 top-notch 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 peanuts.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:19:12 +0000