“You can’t go too far into books about fighting without running into this one over and over.
Like a lot of older books, you can feel the vintage on this one. For me, it’s about three things: Descriptions of people, descriptions of places, and a careful catalouging of what everybody is eating.
The first serves the book well. Getting a description of the different boxers is helpful, especially because it seems like most descriptions of the time are strongly influenced by whether or not the writer is a fan of an individual.
The second is alright, but every bout the guy attended was prefaced by a description of the crowd and the venue. There was some pretty good material about people seat-hopping and the way they would try to pretend like they had no idea what they’d done, but ultimately it got to be just another part of another chapter.
The third, I could care less. Eat an egg hard boiled or soft. Just eat the damn egg already.
Probably the most interesting part of this book, to me, was that Liebling made a pretty good case for television ruining boxing. It would go against logic in a lot of ways. You’d think the increased chance for exposure would be huge. But in fact, television killed amateurism, which killed the sport.
The problem, as he put it, was that time was a young fighter would fight in small clubs, clubs spectators would pay to enter. This meant that a young fighter could get quite a bit of experience before stepping into the ring for a full-length match against a dangerous opponent. Television, however, only featured big fights, which meant that a lot of fighters had to either be pushed into the big time way before they were ready or figure out how to make their money elsewhere.
He probably put it best, saying that television’s not concerned with the sport, only the sale of beer and razor blades.
I don’t think much has changed, sadly. Most fighting sports are amped up artificially with layers of invented grudges and so on that are supposed to heighten the drama, but to me they just cheapen the whole thing and are meant to sell energy drinks.
Hell, at least when they were selling razors and beers they were selling products I could get behind.
I guess the book also makes a case against television in that it is very descriptive of a world that existed around a sporting event. Through the long descriptions of New York City, the ways Liebling got to the fights and the bars he visited afterward, you got the sense of these fights being big events, a full night out for a lot of people. There’s a positive to being able to see every major league game in your living room, but there’s also a price, and that price is the loss of a sense of community around sports. At least for me. I could watch 100 games on tv, but I’m way more likely to remember actually going to ONE because of the people I’m there with and what we might have talked about.
This might be why people are always wanting to talk about sports. Maybe if everyone was actually going to stuff, they could talk to the people there and leave me the hell alone about it.
Anyway, I would skip this one unless you’re just a huge fan of 1950’s boxing. It’s a bit of a slog, and to me there’s a lot about it that’s very dated. It’s about a golden era, and it’s got some cleverness to it, but it’s just not that great a read, start to finish.”