The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

After some wandering, I've gotten to the place that was supposed to be the beginning. Well, in this particular omnibus: a dead writer's "beginning" is anywhere you want it to be.

I've been reading A.J. Liebling's work in the Library of America volume The Sweet Science & Other Writings - from the title, you can tell the editors (newspaperman Pete Hamill is credited in the book; I bet some functionaries at LoA hired him and kibitzed, at least) thought that was the top selling point and/or the most important book of Libeling's. 

Well, I'm ornery, I guess. I read The Jollity Building first; I liked the opening. And then I read Between Meals, maybe because I was hungry. But I suppose I was pugnacious enough now to read The Sweet Science, Libeling's most famous book and (according to Sports Illustrated, anyway) the best book of sports reportage ever written.

Sweet Science is a 1956 collection of reportage - I think all from The New Yorker, with which Liebling was associated from 1935 to his death - of boxing matches. There are eighteen pieces, and they're all - as they must be - the story of one fight, between two fighters. Libeling usually sets the scene a bit, explaining who the two guys are and how they fit into the current and historical scene for their weight class, then drops in some quotes from Pierce Egan's Boxiana (Liebling's lodestar in boxing writing, a comprehensive history of early 19th-century bouts in England) before preferably visiting both fighters' training camps and finally providing a fairly detailed round-by-round summary of the fight.

All of these fights were within the previous roughly five years; this is very much reportage - what the boxing world was like in the early TV era, soon after the War. Liebling wasn't fond of TV: he saw fewer places putting on bouts because the televised cards got all the attention, and the attendance in the hall dropped a lot for both televised (they can watch at home!) and blocked-out (it must not be worth seeing!) bouts. So that's one major theme here, reminiscent of Between Meals: everything is getting worse, in this specific area in this specific way. It's a middle-aged guy's pose, that grumpy backwards look, and I don't know if it's purely characteristic of Liebling or just his post-war work. (I'm starting to think what I really want to read of his is more of the low-life stories of his early New Yorker days, just before the war.)

In this book, we see the end of Joe Louis and the rise of Rocky Graziano (on the heavyweight side), some Sugar Ray Robinson in the middle tiers, and occasional lightweights as well. There's eighteen fights in all - a few are return bouts, so we see some of the same guys punching each other in the same or different permutations over the course of a few years.

Liebling turns a phrase well, and was always a lively, engaging writer. I am perhaps not as invested in the idea of two half-naked guys whacking each other for three minute intervals until one of them falls over as he was, but I can appreciate his knowledge and enthusiasm even as many of the technical details are lost on me. If you like boxing more than I do, this is unquestionably the most literarily famous book of the field ever written, and an important historical record as well.