I recently posted a short piece about the best boxing books, a list that included “The Sweet Science,” a collection of A.J. Liebling’s articles from the New Yorker that constitutes a kind of cultural history of boxing in mid-century. Now one of the best-known pieces from “The Sweet Science,” “Ahab and Nemesis,” about the 1955 heavyweight title fight between Archie Moore and Rocky Marciano, is the subject of an insightful essay by Carlo Rotella in the recently-published “A New Literary History of America.” It is gratifying that the editors of “A New Literary History” recognize the place of boxing in American cultural history, and Rotella’s gloss on Liebling’s account of a classic fight is worth a few words of discussion here.
As we know, Marciano defeated Moore by 9th round knockout, wearing down the older fighter with a relentless assault, just as he had done to Walcott, Charles, and Louis before him. Liebling frames the fight in “Ahab and Nemesis” less in boxing terms — though he elegantly renders Moore’s 2nd round knockdown of The Rock as “a crisp right thrown within the arc of Marciano’s left hook” — than as a clash of personal styles, of two men who stand in starkly different relation to their work. As Rotella puts it, “Liebling stages Marciano’s defeat of Moore as a resonant confrontation between force and intellect.” For Liebling, Moore represents a hard-won mastery of the self, Marciano a kind of cheerful atavism. Liebling would later apply this same conceit to his account of the three title fights between Floyd Patterson, whom Liebling admired extravagantly as a man and as a fighter, and Ingemar Johansson, whom he thought likable but basically unserious — a “slugger.”
Rotella, who is Professor of American Studies at Boston College and the author of “Cut Time: An Education at the Fights,” adroitly connects Liebling’s feeling for Moore’s plight against Marciano to Liebling’s own ongoing problems of craft. Literature, as the critics tell us, always refers to the problems of its own making, and Liebling had perfected as a writer a wry and subtle tone that constantly risked misreading. Rotella is very sharp on this point:
The slippery work of extracting nuggets of meaning from a fight is Liebling’s great subject, the problem that shapes not only the themes but also the form of his writing about boxing. He mixes registers and allusive gestures up and down the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, assembling an interpretive repertoire suited to the challenge posed by the fights.
The Marciano-Moore confrontation might have been an interpretive conundrum, but for Liebling it also represented a cultural moment, the coming of a cruder tone to American life. Moore, with his long forced apprenticeship as the uncrowned light heavyweight champion, and his hard-won mastery of the subtleties of the game, was linked imaginatively to a broader philosophical tradition of craftsmanship and self-reliance. Marciano, by contrast, was pure power, the machine to Moore’s John Henry. If this characterization is unfair to Marciano, who never asked to be a cultural symbol, it nonetheless speaks to our collective sense of the mythological freight of the heavyweight championship, its place in the vocabulary of the masculine American ethos.
As Rotella points out, Liebling was writing as an elegist, marking the passage of the organic tradition of small fight clubs and live attendance in favor of what he thought of as the grosser spectacle of a television sport dominated by the needs of advertisers. The impact of the age of television on boxing has been written about in many places since, but Liebling remains the standard, in this as in so many other things. In linking Moore’s defeat at Marciano’s hands to the rise of television, Liebling perhaps betrays a certain anxiety regarding the place of his own kind of writing in a country grown louder and coarser than the one he thought he knew.
What Liebling could not have known as “Ahab and Nemesis” went to press was that he had witnessed Marciano’s last fight. The champion announced his retirement six months after knocking out Moore, toyed briefly with a comeback fight against Johansson, and then gave up the game for good. Perhaps in destroying Louis, Walcott, Charles, and Moore — the best fighters of a very good era for heavyweights — he felt that he had made his definitive statement. The Rock retired young, and he would die young, in the company of a gangster in an Iowa plane crash on the way to a surprise party for Marciano’s 46th birthday. Moore, meanwhile, would fight on, becoming a beloved champion and living into the late 1990s as a bebop icon and community activist. So perhaps, in “Ahab and Nemesis,” at least, Liebling was too much the pessimist. Perhaps the old values do sometimes endure.
