Man of the day, lord of the ring

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that the hero and poet exist in a symbiotic relationship. Without the hero, the poet does not have a job, but without the poet, the hero (pugilists included) slides into oblivion. Until the ‘80s, a Mt. Rushmore for heavyweights would have included Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano. But in the ‘90s, Marciano started slipping from our short long-term memory. Enter his poet, Russell Sullivan. In his meticulously researched “Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times,” Sullivan reminds us that the preternaturally powerful Marciano was one of the sweetest of the sweet scientists to ever practice the art of bruising.

The son of an immigrant shoe mill worker, Marciano was born in 1923 in Brockton, Mass. Rocky was a standout baseball and football player in high school, but, to the consternation of his parents and coaches, he dropped out in his sophomore year. He was drafted and went overseas in 1943. In the service he was cajoled into lacing up the gloves and, clumsy as he was, it was clear that he had the right hand of Thor. After his discharge from the service and a bumbled professional baseball tryout in 1947, Marciano answered his calling as a boxer. Despite his very late start in boxing at 23 and his two left feet, he won a couple of amateur titles.

Then, like something out of the “Rocky” movies, Marciano called Al Weill in New York City. Weill, the chief boxing impresario of his day, and his genial trainer Charley Goldman agreed to set up an audition for the diminutive Marciano, who at 5 feet, 11 inches and 185 pounds would have been a cruiserweight today. They put him in with a big seasoned heavyweight, Wade Chancey. As Sullivan vividly recounts, there were chuckles as Rocky launched wild haymakers and tripped over himself, but then he landed a right hand and, as the chorus of his faithful New England fans would soon learn to shout, it was “Timmmmmberrr!” Weill agreed to keep an eye on Rocky but sent him back to the pugilistic minors in Providence, R.I. Marciano, who may have had the best right hand in heavyweight history, a punch he dubbed “Susie Q,” continued to turn on the black lights for everyone he faced. Weill and Goldman were sold, and from there they marched Marciano straight to the title.

On the way, when Marciano was 37-0, he took on his guiding star, Joe Louis. Marciano starched Louis in the eighth, jumped for joy at the fact that he had arrived and then, sensitive hard guy that he was, went to his locker room and wept for Louis. A year later in 1952, Marciano was in Philadelphia to challenge Jersey Joe Walcott for the title. A master boxer, Jersey Joe took Marciano to school for 12 rounds but then in the 13th the Brockton Blockbuster separated Walcott from his senses with a cannon shot that should be in the Louvre of stylized violence.

Freddie Brown, the legendary cut man for Marciano, worked out of the gym where I trained. I used to press him for stories. Once he told me about the night Marciano was getting cut to pieces by the crafty Ezzard Charles. Brown said that Marciano’s nose was cut so badly that it looked as though it might come off. Rocky’s corner was thinking about tossing in the towel when their man told everyone to calm down because he was going to put Charles to bed in the next round. Marciano kept his word. I was eager to see whether Sullivan would capture this moment in the net of his narrative. He did.

After dispensing with Charles and a few other contenders, there were no serious challengers left and Rocky quit boxing in 1956 with a record of 49-0, the only heavyweight champion to retire undefeated. Marciano died in a plane crash in 1969.

Sullivan argues that Rocky was the perfect icon for his times. The table of virtues for the Cold War era included loyalty, simplicity, patriotism and a respect for authority. Rocky was a paragon of all these virtues. Yet as Sullivan contends, Marciano was also more complex than he seemed. Beneath the easygoing surface, he was driven by a heavyweight ambition to walk out of the invisibility of poverty and become somebody. Though he was famous for his obedience to his manager and trainers, he resented that his acceptance of authority suggested to many that he could not string together a combination of thoughts. Marciano was one of those rare individuals about whom it seems no one has a bad word to say. Even the fighters that he iced loved Marciano.

Sullivan acknowledges that Rocky “had a bizarre obsession with money.” When I talked with Freddie Brown, he blessed Marciano a thousand times but could not help but add, “Rocky was the cheapest guy I ever met. He would not pay for anything and kept every penny he earned.” But Rocky knew the story of Joe Louis and of other palookas, and his dogged fears of being fleeced and ending up with nothing but a pocketful of mumbles may not have been paranoia.

While you would have to have a taste for the sweet science to savor the delectable stories Sullivan spins around Marciano’s big fights, his book offers many illuminating glances into the world around the ring. For a prime example, Sullivan explores the subtext of race in the ‘50s by registering the views of the African American press on Marciano (by and large, black writers applauded Marciano’s power but rooted for Walcott, Charles and Archie Moore). Like Roger Kahn’s magisterial history of the ‘20s (“A Flame of Pure Fire”) as seen through the discerning eye of someone studying the heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, Sullivan’s book is not just a perfect paean to a pugilistic hero but also to a history of mid-century America as glimpsed from the corner window of what was then America’s second most popular sport, professional boxing.

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From ‘Rocky Marciano’

Thirty-five seconds into round six Marciano knocked Layne out.... What happened next was stunning. Everything seemed to stop. Then, after two or three seconds of suspended animation, with each fighter remaining motionless, Layne began to sink to the canvas with delayed-action effect, slowly at first and then much more rapidly. According to several ringside observers, the falling Layne looked “like an elephant collapsing from a rifle shot” or “a ship sinking into the sea.” He dropped to the canvas face forward in a hunched position. Once he hit the floor, he rolled over to his side and curled up. He was out.