But for one underground
enclave of fanatics Liebling is more than distinguished. For many a fight fan he
is a monarch of scholarship, the graceful historian and hilarious high priest of
their peculiar passion. A.J. Liebling is a rollicking god among boxing writers.
Liebling was the most
civilized man who ever put patent-leather pump to pavement and bloodied a
friend's nose with tutorial intent. He was a boxing fan -- all humor and
intelligent enthusiasm, with stabs of excruciating insight. He was a boxer of
the white-collar fitness variety. "The Sweet Science," he called it, or
sometimes, "The Old Sweety." The reference is to the European tradition in which
gentlemen were schooled in the "sciences" of sword, gun, and fistfighting.
Fisticuffs, being the least lethal, was called "The Sweet Science." This volume
consists of a series of essays that appeared in The New Yorker between
June of 1951 and September of 1955.
Sports Illustrated
dubbed The Sweet Science as "the best American sports book of all time"
for good reason. These essays are not just reports of boxing matches. They are
anthropological expeditions, human core samples, and hours spent in Liebling's
diverting company. He conveys the flavor of the gyms, training camps, and arenas
as well as the characters who inhabit them. His bent is discursive and the
stories, or at least the punch lines, of significant fighters and trainers crop
up in the process.
As Liebling's
introduction explains: "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."
Liebling's language uses
its own portly dignity as a perpetually renewable joke. When strung up around
the non-Ivy League types and topics of the ring world, it makes a happy
dissonance not unlike Laurel and Hardy, or a Clydesdale in love with an alley
cat. In this tone, The Sweet Science offers useful advice for the
peripheral joys of the boxing fan. Liebling's strategies in getting taxis
outside the arena when the fights are over, elbowing techniques for a closer
approach to the ring or the bar when the crowd is thick, and how to stare down
an interloper who insists that your seat is actually his, are ingenious as well
as entertaining. But his rooting techniques as revealed in this volume are of
particular interest to those who may find themselves ensconced in the folding
chairs at what Liebling would call "the local fistic recitals."
"When I watch a fight, I
like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution
vocally. On occasion my advice is disregarded, as when I tell a man to stay away
from the other fellow's left and he doesn't, but [...] some fighters hear better
and are more suggestible than others. [...] For example, Joe Louis. 'Let him
have it, Joe!' I would yell whenever I saw him fight, and sooner or later he
would let the other fellow have it. [...] Besides, when you go to a fight you
are surrounded by people whose ignorance of the ring is exceeded only by their
unwillingness to face facts -- the sharpness of your boxer's punching, for
instance. Such people may take it upon themselves to disparage the principle you
are advising. This disparagement is less often addressed to the man himself (as
in 'Gavilan, you're a bum!') than to his opponent, whom they have wrong-headedly
picked to win. ('He's a cream puff, Miceli!' they may typically cry. 'He can't
hurt you! He can't hurt nobody! Look -- slaps! Ha,ha!') They thus get at your
man -- and by indirection, at you. To put them in their place you address
neither them nor their man but your man. ('Get the other eye, Gavilan!' you
cry.) This throws them off balance, because they haven't noticed anything the
matter with either eye. Then, before they can think of anything to say, you
thunder, "Look at that eye!" It doesn't matter whether or not the man has been
hit in the eye; he will be."
It is typical of the sad
state of American letters that The Sweet Science has actually been out of
print since a brief comeback in the early 1980s and was unavailable for 20 years
before that. The existing copies are treated with reverence. I have participated
in the cautious sharing process in which a fragile paperback, wrapped in layers
of plastic to ward off the damp, is tenderly delivered along with threats about
what will happen to the borrower if any mishap befalls the precious relic.
Borrowing a fight fan's Liebling is a responsibility akin to baby-sitting a new
Dalai Lama. Fortunately the shortage has now been remedied by the people at
North Point Press, who have performed a major service by reissuing the book. The
cover of this new paperback edition features a critical moment between Sugar Ray
Robinson and Jake LaMotta. The North Point version also provides a smart
introduction by boxer and writer Robert Anasi. Explaining what Liebling is
definitely NOT, Anasi lands verbal uppercuts on those who depict the sport as
tragic metaphor, morality play or miniature Armageddon. "Liebling saw boxing as
the pros do" writes Anasi, "a job, more difficult than most but also more
rewarding."
In this timorous era,
it's rare to find boxing dealt with as a genuine sport. The sparse elements of
humor derive from cynical assessments of corruption or depravity. Liebling faced
similar obstructions but persisted in enjoying the human comedy. Still, he was
often driven to attack the prejudices against boxing that are promulgated by the
ignorant and constipated. This is Liebling, the Defender of the Faith: "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 survive outside an
organization. A fighter's hostilities are not turned inward like a Sunday tennis
player'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 apple cores won the Nobel Prize,
vegetarians would chorus that the repulsive nutrient 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."
Liebling's most sustained
joke is to refer to boxers as artists, to analyze their creative genius as well
as their physical capacities, and to determine the power of the muse revealed in
their various performances. On going to see Sugar Ray Robinson, he says, "I knew
nothing of the opponent, but I felt confident that Robinson would interpret him
in an interesting way."
The
pugilistic artist as revealed may convince you that it's no joke at all -- or
less than some wit dropping a load of gravel off a dump truck and claiming
mystical inspiration for the act. In fact, Liebling may give us some good news
about art and sports in the form of questions such as 'which is which?' And 'is
there any difference?' Except that you have to murmur elegantly in a gallery
while you are free to express yourself at full volume at a prizefight.
