Quote of the Day (A.J. Liebling, on Unsolicited Fan Advice at Boxing Matches)

“Watching a fight on television has always seemed to me a poor substitute for being there. For one thing, you can't tell the fighters what to do. When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally. On occasion my advice is disregarded, as when I tell a man to stay away from the other fellow's left and he doesn't, but in such cases I assume that he hasn't heard my counsel, or that his opponent has, and has acted on it. Some fighters hear better and are more suggestible than others--for example, the pre-television Joe Louis. ‘Let him have it, Joe!’ I would yell whenever I saw him fight, and sooner or later he would let the other fellow have it. Another fighter like that was the late Marcel Cerdan, whom I would coach in his own language, to prevent opposition seconds from picking up our signals. ‘Vas-y, Marcel!’ I used to shout, and Marcel always y allait. I get a feeling of participation that way that I don't in front of a television screen. I could yell, of course, but I would know that if my suggestion was adopted, it would be by the merest coincidence.”—American journalist A.J. Liebling (1904-1963), “Boxing with the Naked Eye,” in The Sweet Science (1956)

Tweet of the Day (Kimmy Monte, on Being ‘Down for the Count’)

“I hate when boxing announcers say a boxer is ‘down for the count.’ I don't care that he loves Dracula; I just want to know who's winning.”— @KimmyMonte, tweet of June 9, 2014

Joke of the Day (George Carlin, on Boxing)

“Don't you think it's funny that all these tough-guy boxers are fighting over a purse?”—American comedian George Carlin (1937-2008), Napalm and Silly Putty (2001)

This Day in Boxing History (Sugar Ray, LaMotta in “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’)

Feb. 14, 1951—“I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabetes,” Jake LaMotta has marveled in old age. In their sixth and final bout, Robinson pummeled LaMotta, a tough adversary who had closely contested their prior matches, winning on a technical knockout (TKO) in the 13^th round to take the middleweight crown from the "Bronx Bull."

This was their first fight with a title at stake. Robinson was the reigning welterweight king, and LaMotta had been the middleweight champ for the last year and a half. With so much on the line, each fighter gave it everything he had, with Robinson, recently acclaimed “the greatest all-around fighter pound-for-pound in any division” by sportswriter Nat Fleischer, dishing it out and LaMotta, to an extent that even surprised longtime observers of his style, taking it.

The bloodletting, combined with the Chicago locale, quickly led boxing fans to label this the sport’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” 

The denouement of the fight became the subject of one of the most memorable scenes of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film classic, Raging Bull. When the referee mercifully stops the match, Robert DeNiro’s LaMotta stands bloody but unbowed in the ring, staggering over to Ray Barnes’ Robinson and saying, “You never got me down, Ray.”

When one thinks of the great boxing rivals, Robinson and LaMotta rank with Tunney and Dempsey or Ali and Frazier. The post-career relationship, however, resembled more of the mutual respect between Tunney and Dempsey than the animosity between Ali and Frazier. “Sugar Ray was the greatest fighter who ever lived,” LaMotta recalled in a January 2013 Esquire interview. After their September 1945 bout, a split decision for Robinson, the winner from Harlem acknowledged about his rival, “LaMotta is the toughest man I’ve ever fought. I’ve fought him five times and hit him with everything I know how to throw, but he still stands up.”

It was not really an ability to take a punch that aided LaMotta, however, but rather the instinct to avoid the worst of the blow. “Lot of guys can take punches,” LaMotta told Esquire. “The idea is not to take unnecessary punishment. I explain taking a punch this way: In baseball, when someone throws a hardball at you and you don't have a glove, if you want to catch it, your palm moves back with the ball at the last second. That slight movement saves you from taking a hard blow. If you move the same way when a fist comes at you, it takes away more than 50 percent of the power. The secret is to move with the punch.”

LaMotta dealt Robinson the first loss of his career, after 40 fights, in a unanimous decision in their second encounter, in February 1943. But in that earlier match, Robinson, a natural welterweight, was outweighed by 16 pounds by LaMotta. Eight years later, LaMotta was only five pounds heavier. More crucially, he had slowed down in the last six years, making him an easier target for Robinson—and, after eight rounds that were pretty even, that latter disadvantage would prove decisive. 

The four-minute Raging Bull scene I mentioned above captures the atmosphere of the bout’s last stage: the blood that splattered onlookers, the horrified fascination of a larger audience (it was the first and only one of their bouts ever aired on television), and the manner in which time held momentarily still for LaMotta as he awaited the final onslaught from Robinson. 

Just how much he endured might best be described by sportswriter Red Smith:

In the third minute of the 13th round Ray Robinson hit Jake LaMotta for-what was it? – the thousandth time? The five thousandth? Jake was hung on the ropes like a picture on the wall, like an old, wrinkled suit in the attic closet. Now he came off the hook, sagged forward, bent double at the waist. He embraced Robinson about the drawers and the referee, Frank Sikora, pushed in between them and motioned to Robinson to desist. The greatest fist fighter in the world was middleweight champion of the world, and one of the toughest had suffered the first believable knockout of his life.

LaMotta, Smith practically gasped, had been “slugged, tortured, flayed, bloodied and bludgeoned… stripped of his title and nearly detached from his intellect as well.” What was surely on the mind of Smith and other observers was Robinson’s successful defense of his welterweight crown in 1947 against Jimmy Doyle. The latter, who had defied doctors’ orders not to fight again after being knocked unconscious for 15 minutes in a prior bout, ended up going to the hospital again, where he died the afternoon after his eight-round loss to Robinson.

Perhaps what has allowed LaMotta to live into his 90s was not just his ability to “move with the punch,” but also the sense of when to get out. He lasted another three years and 10 bouts (including four losses) before deciding to leave the ring. Robinson, two months older, did not stop until 1965, 24 years after he began. (He needed the money badly: he had not been attentive to the side businesses he had started, and in the mid-1950s the Internal Revenue Service came after him, even garnishing some of his earnings.)

That almost certainly was a mistake. In 1989, he died of what was diagnosed at the time as Alzheimer’s Disease. More recently, however, his case has given rise to speculation that he might have fallen victim to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease that has come into the news because of its impact on football players.

Robinson and LaMotta had the mental toughness that made them champions. Unfortunately, they could not control outside the ring the aggression that brought them to the top of their profession. Raging Bull detailed in unmistakable and unflattering terms the domestic violence that LaMotta inflicted on his beautiful second wife Vikki, and his younger brother and manager Joey. (After seeing the movie, the boxer asked Vikki if he had really been that bad. "Even worse," she replied.)

It was less well known that Robinson did the same against his beautiful second wife, Edna Mae, when she discovered his flagrant infidelity. The African-American sportswriter Sam Lacy expressed his dismay about this behavior this way:  “I have said many times that Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest athlete in a given field I have had the pleasure of observing. I have also said many times that he can be one of the most disgusting figures one is compelled to meet in his business.”

This Day in Boxing History (Death of Ezzard Charles, The ‘Cincinnati Cobra’)

May 28, 1975—Ezzard Charles, a boxer of superior skills, who despite winning the heavyweight crown for two years, was overshadowed by two others he faced in the ring, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at age 53.

Charles was just one of several prominent sports figures who, over the years, have been diagnosed with this neuromuscular condition, including baseball pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter, British soccer player Don Revie, American football player Steve Gleason, Life Fitness chief executive Augie Nieto, and the man most associated with the disease, baseball slugger Lou Gehrig.

Though born in Georgia, Charles moved as a youngster with his family to Cincinnati. His undefeated, 42-0 amateur record as a teen led observers to tout him early on as “The Cincinnati Cobra.” Turning pro in 1940, he proceeded methodologically through the middleweight and light heavyweight divisions, dismantling opponents even when they enjoyed the advantage in experience over him.

Becoming a heavyweight in 1949, he stepped into the vacuum left by the retirement of Joe Louis to take the National Boxing Association crown, beating Jersey Joe Walcott in a 15-round decision. The following year, when Louis came out of retirement, Charles beat him in a decision.

By all accounts gentlemanly and thoughtful, Charles did not display a killer instinct in outpointing the slow, heavy, and aging Lewis, nor did he seem to relish being champ. Both might have had something to do with one of his last fights as a light-heavyweight.

In 1948, Charles had stopped Sam Baroudi with a rain of blows so devastating that the 21-year-old had fallen into a coma by the time the referee counted to 10. Charles traveled to the hospital, where he kept vigil until Baroudi died the next day. Though the distraught Charles was talked out of his initial decision to retire after the bout, many observers agree that something had gone out of him after the untimely death of his opponent.

Unlike Emile Griffith after his 1962 bout with Benny Paret, Charles was not blamed by fans for the tragedy in the ring. But neither did they embrace him as they had Louis, a symbol of racial and even national pride, or Jack Dempsey, renowned for his slugging style. 

Instead, a number of fans failed to appreciate his slow but certain exposure of his rivals’ flaws through his fast jab and quick right cross, or belittled him as not being a “real” heavyweight because he had beefed up from his time as a middleweight and light-heavyweight. (He never, in fact, exceeded 200 pounds while boxing.)

The history of boxing is filled with improbable outcomes, and few more so than the 1951 match that saw Charles, who had beaten Walcott twice before, lose in the rematch, making the 37-year-old challenger the oldest man up to that time to have won the heavyweight title. Charles would never reclain the crown, despite three more tries in title bouts.

But, though he fell short each time, Charles gave fight fans some of the most memorable minutes in history—particularly so against the successor to Walcott, Rocky Marciano.

In their first bout, it took Marciano 15 rounds to beat Charles, who performed especially adeptly in rounds seven and eight, according to A.J. Liebling: “The bounce and snap had left him for good now, but his determination was unbelievable. His face, rather narrow with a high curved nose, changed in shape to a squatty rectangle as we watched. It was as though he had run into a nest of wild bees.”

The return match, in September 1954, at Yankee Stadium, was not as long, but perhaps more remarkable. Whether from an elbow or a punch, the heavily favored champion emerged from his corner in the sixth round with blood running freely from his split nose—so heavily that his cutman could not stanch the bleeding. The only alternative for Marciano was to take out Charles before he himself was counted out. That he accomplished, with a knockout, in the eighth round.

Somewhat like Louis, financial problems kept Charles in the ring well past his physical prime. From 1955 until his retirement in 1959, Charles would fight 24 times, and only win 10 of those bouts. After leaving the ring, he tried to make ends meet variously through professional wrestling, selling cemetery lots, working for a wine company, and working with youth programs in Cincinnati. He was diagnosed with ALS in 1968.  

Charles was a great deal better than his lifetime 93-25 record would indicate, according to sportswriter Red Smith: “Someday, maybe, the public is going to abandon comparisons with Joe Louis and accept Ezzard Charles for what he was---the best fist-fighter of his particular time.”