July 26, 2010 Issue

My idea of a good fight story is one that gives me the whole “going to a fight” experience, makes me feel I’m on a night out. A. J. Liebling’s great “Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove” (The New Yorker, September 29, 1951; also included in his brilliant collection of boxing essays The Sweet Science) creates this feeling. Liebling says, “On the night of the fight, I started out early….” And he proceeds to make his way to the Polo Grounds, first stopping at Sugar Ray’s, which is Sugar Ray Robinson’s bar, for a drink and a bite to eat (“I dined on bourbon and the largest, pinkest pork chops I have ever seen, priced at a dollar-sixty-five”). Liebling describes not only the fight (between Sugar Ray Robinson and Randy Turpin) but also the preliminary bouts, the crowd, the ceremonial entrances, the main event (“Robinson acted like a young, nervous fighter; Turpin, eight years his junior and fighting for the first time in this country, was calm as a Colchester oyster”), a post-fight drink in Harlem, and a cab-ride past Sugar Ray’s. What put me in mind of Liebling’s piece is Kelefa Sanneh’s “Boxed In” in this week’s issue. It’s about the fight between Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather. I like the opening scene in which Sanneh takes us to a room on the fifteenth floor of the HBO offices in midtown Manhattan, where three hundred and twenty red boxing gloves are laid out on a conference table for Mosley to sign – part of the promotional campaign for the fight, which is two months off. Mayweather has already signed the gloves with a big, flamboyant autograph that leaves little room for Mosley’s signature. The scene is illustrative of the difference between Mosley and Mayweather: Mosley is unassuming; Mayweather is brash. I also enjoyed Sanneh’s description of a press conference, which involved a mock scuffle between the two fighters. Sanneh stitches a brilliant bit of dialogue into this scene: Mayweather looks at Mosley’s suit and says, “That’s off-the-rack.” And Mosley says right back: “This is custom, right here.” For some reason, that “right here” cracks me up – it sounds so grounded and real. As for Sanneh’s description of the actual fight itself, it’s just so-so in the pungent detail department. Sanneh does throw a great one-two combo when he says, “Mosley could see Mayweather’s punches coming, but he couldn’t move quickly enough to avoid them; in the slow-motion replays, you could sometimes see Mosley watching Mayweather’s fist heading toward him. It’s hell to have something all your life and then not have it.” That last sentence is a great line. It’s the reason I stick with Sanneh’s writing. I just wish he wouldn’t be so shy about putting an “I” in his stories now and then.