The noble fistic science
In a New Yorker piece titled "The Moralist", David Remnick asks: Can Britain's Lennox Lewis redeem professional boxing? He uses the recent bout in Memphis where Mike Tyson challenged the world heavyweight champion Lewis, and lost, as a vehicle for his musings. It's a tribute to the New Yorker's iconoclasm that Remnick can pose such a question at all, given the state of the "sport" and the scandals surrounding the participants, the promoters and the associations that oversee the awarding of titles. But then again, the New Yorker has a venerable tradition of writing about "the noble science of boxing", to use Hazlitt's phrase.
If you do read the Remnick article (it's very good, by the way) there's an extra treat in store for you in the form of a link to a New Yorker article by A. J. Liebling describing the 1963 heavyweight title fight in which Floyd Patterson lost a rematch to the champion Sonny Liston. Liebling, who was a New Yorker writer for twenty-seven years, covered the boxing scene for the magazine from the nineteen-thirties to the sixties with a grace that has not been seen since. Here he is writing about Cus D'Amato, Patterson's then manager and the later discover of Mike Tyson:
"I made inquiries for D'Amato every time I met some member of the Fancy and sat down for the inevitable glass of iced tea and accompanying anecdote. But I did not catch up with him until late that afternoon, in his room at the Tallyho, a new hotel that has the unique distinction of having no gambling devices on the premises. Las Vegans other than the proprietor consider this innovation too startling to succeed. Cus has a round head with a snow-white crew cut - the head of a Roman bust or an elegant Fratellini. He is a nimble man; he jumps into his trousers with both feet in the morning to protect his joints against rust. His clothes are sombre but expensive, his language frequently ornate. He is in his mid-fifties now, and full of theories about boxing, one being that the famous men of old were overrated, which he loves to demonstrate by showing films of old fights. He used to run a small gymnasium over a poolroom on Fourteenth Street, near Luchow's, and he still owns it. Cus encouraged neighborhood boys to box, but he had the gym for many years before he found the one apostle who could assimilate the style he taught and win with it (or, in the opinion of some critics, in spite of it) consistently. Patterson was the kid apostle, and D'Amato and the boy worked their way up through the minor and the better-class amateurs..."
