The morning after, with A.J. Liebling
It was definitely worth getting up at 5 am to watch. Apart from Becks and Brangelina at ringside, there was the boxing. On our scorecard, Ricky Hatton won the first eight rounds. His harrying, scrapping style earned him the points and the benefit of the doubt. Then, in the ninth, Floyd Mayweather hurt him with a series of jabs. The tenth round: Mayweather floors Hatton with a left hook. No sooner is he on his feet than he's sent back down to the floor with a left-right combination. It's all over. The morning will be spent reading what the commentators had to say, and when that's done, we'll dip into The Sweet Science, an immortal work by A.J. Liebling.
"Part of the pleasure of going to a fight," he wrote," is reading the newspapers the next morning to see what the sportswriters think happened. This pleasure is prolonged, in the case of a big bout, by the fight films. You can go to them to see what did happen. What you eventually think you remember about the fight will be an amalgam of what you thought you saw there, what you read in the papers you saw and what you saw in the films."
Television had not remade boxing in its image when Liebling wrote that, and the era of pay-per-view fights like Mayweather-Hatton was still some decades away, but he anticipated the coming of the change. The stimulus was provided by a transatlantic affair in the style of Hatton-Mayweather in 1951. In July that year, in London, Sugar Ray Robinson lost the world middleweight title to Randy Turpin on points after fifteen rounds. In New York on 12 September, Robinson regained the title. Here is Liebling balancing what he saw in the cinema and in the stadium after the second bout:
"The films are especially insidious. During the last twenty seconds or so of the fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin, for example, it seemed to me from where I sat, in the lower stand at the Polo Grounds, that Robinson hit the failing Turpin with every blow he threw — a succession of smashing hits such as I had never before seen a fighter take without going down. The films show that Robinson missed quite a few of them, and that Turpin, although not able to hit back, was putting up some defensive action until the last second — swaying low, with his gloves shielding his sad face, gray-white in the films. It was the face of a schoolboy who has long trained himself not to cry under punishment and who has had endless chances to practice, like an inmate at Dotheboys Hall."
That last sentence is a miniature work of art. Later in the week here, A.J. Liebling on language.
