Letter From the Archive: A. J. Liebling on Boxing

Letter From the Archive A. J. Liebling on Boxing

I first read A. J. Liebling’s “Between Meals,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1959 as the series “Memoirs of a Feeder in France,” after I found it in my parents’ library, sandwiched between “The Art of Eating” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A meditation on food and memory, “Between Meals” chronicles the time Liebling spent in Paris, and his encounters with fellow gastronomes. But Liebling, I soon discovered, wrote about more than food: he was, as the New Yorker editor William Shawn put it, “the most protean of scholars,” able to write fluidly and elegantly about subjects as diverse as the Louisiana governor Earl K. Long, Alger Hiss, the Harlem minister Father Divine, the American media, and boxing.

Liebling joined the magazine in 1935, after stints at the World and the World-Telegram, and he went on to contribute more than five hundred pieces before he died, in 1963. No other writer could so eloquently compare the legendary prizefighter Archie Moore to the prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn—and make the comparison stick.

For this weekend’s reading, here are two of Liebling’s pieces on the “sweet science”: “The Morest” and “Ahab and Nemesis.” “The Morest” describes the infamous two-minute-and-six-second knockout fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, in 1962. Liston and Patterson met in Chicago for the fight, which sparked controversy and a slew of conspiracy theories. Some writers called the bout a “con job,” but Liebling disagreed. Patterson was ultimately overpowered, he writes, by Liston’s “glancing, clublike punches”; the fight was like a dispute in a saloon between two unequal opponents. All in all, Patterson would have done well to heed the words of the boxing manager Al Weill, who, Liebling notes, once said, “You want to look out for the broken fighters. Them type guys is hard to get outa there.” Liston turned out to be one such fighter:

[Liston’s] bare legs were thinner and looked longer as he jumped rope (always to a record of “Night Train,” which he must consider lucky), but where in the Catskills he had jumped only two records’ worth—eleven minutes in all—he now jumped a full four, or twenty-two minutes without stopping. He jumped with a rapt look, his lips folded inside his mouth, his feet still treading somebody invisible into the ground, as they had seemed to be doing in June.

For Liebling, every conversation about boxing was a chance to explore not just the style and range of the athletes but also the vivid travelling circus surrounding them. “The Morest” is as much a portrait of the sportswriters covering the event, and even of the city of Chicago itself, as it is of the boxers at the center of the tale.

“Ahab and Nemesis,” meanwhile, published in 1955, describes a bout between the then-reigning heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano and his challenger Archie Moore. Liebling sees Moore as a modern-day Ahab, and Marciano as his inscrutable White Whale. Moore’s style, Liebling writes, is all panache and technique—the picture of “a powerful, decisive intellect unfettered by preconceptions.” The fight is slow to take off, and then Moore strikes:

He had hit him right if ever I saw a boxer hit right, with a classic brevity and conciseness. Marciano stayed down for two seconds. I do not know what took place in Mr. Moore’s breast when he saw him get up. He may have felt, for the moment, like Don Giovanni when the Commendatore’s statue grabbed at him—startled because he thought he had killed the guy already—or like Ahab when he saw the Whale take down Fedallah, harpoons and all.

Liebling recounts the dynamic and spirited fight that followed. Marciano volleyed punches so quickly, he thought, that Moore simply tired of getting out of their way. The piece, ultimately, is an exploration of style and intellect in the ring—and how they are sometimes no match against pure brawn.

The Morest” and “Ahab and Nemesis” are both available in their entirety in our archive. If you’d like to read more of Liebling’s work, you can take a look at “Starting All Over Again,” about the rematch between Liston and Patterson, and “The Soul of Bouillabaisse Town,” on the classic French dish (both now unlocked).

Photograph by Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty.