A. J. Liebling's Classic "Poet and Pedagogue"

Cassius Clay (Photo from The New Yorker}

As a result of seeing A. J. Liebling’s classic “Poet and Pedagogue” listed in Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: First Encounters with Legendary Figures” (newyorker.com, May 24, 2020), I decided to revisit it. What a great piece! It’s an account of the Cassius Clay-Sonny Banks fight at Madison Square Garden, February 10, 1962. It originally appeared in the March 3, 1962, New Yorker and is included in Liebling’s posthumous 1990 collection A Neutral Corner.

Liebling begins with visits to both boxers’ training camps a week or so before the fight. His description of Clay reciting a poem while doing sit-ups is inspired:

At the gym that day, Cassius was on a mat doing situps when Mr. Angelo Dundee, his trainer, brought up the subject of the ballad. “He is smart,” Dundee said. “He made up a poem.” Clay had his hands locked behind his neck, elbows straight out, as he bobbed up and down. He is a golden-brown young man, big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth, rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles. He is twenty years old and six feet two inches tall, and he weighs a hundred and ninety-five pounds.

“I’ll say it for you,” the poet announced, without waiting to be wheedled or breaking cadence. He began on a rise:

“You may talk about Sweden [down and up again],
You may talk about Rome [down and up again],
But Rockville Centre is Floyd Patterson’s home [down].”

He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.

Clay went on, continuing his ventriflexions:

“A lot of people say that Floyd couldn’t fight,
But you should have seen him on that comeback night.”

There were some lines that I fumbled; the tempo of situps and poetry grew concurrently faster as the bardic fury took hold. But I caught the climax as the poet’s voice rose:

“He cut up his eyes and mussed up his face
And that last left hook knocked his head out of place!”

Cassius smiled and said no more for several sit ups, as if waiting for Johansson to be carried to his corner. He resumed when the Swede’s seconds had had time to slosh water in his pants and bring him around. The fight was done; the press took over:

“A reporter asked: ‘Ingo, will a rematch be put on?’
Johansson said: ‘Don’t know. It might be postponed.’ ”

The poet did a few more silent strophes, and then said:

“If he would have stayed in Sweden,
He wouldn’t have took that beatin’.”

Here, overcome by admiration, he lay back and laughed. After a minute or two, he said, “That rhymes. I like it.”

That “He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try” made me laugh. That’s the thing about this piece; it’s still as fresh and vital as the day Liebling wrote it. It puts me squarely there with Clay (as he was then known), at the Department of Parks gymnasium, as he trained for his New York debut as a professional against Detroit heavyweight Sonny Banks.

It also puts me there at Harry Wiley’s Gymnasium, where Banks was training. Liebling writes,

By the time I got up the stairs, the three fellows who were going to spar were already in the locker room changing their clothes, and the only ones in sight were a big, solid man in a red jersey, who was laying out the gloves and bandages on a rubbing table, and a wispy little chap in an olive-green sweater, who was smoking a long rattail cigar. His thin black hair was carefully marcelled along the top of his narrow skull, a long gold watch chain dangled from his fob pocket, and he exuded an air of elegance, precision, and authority, like a withered but still peppery mahout in charge of a string of not quite bright elephants. 

Liebling has a jeweller’s eye for telltale boxing details. He says of Banks,

Banks, when he sparred with Jones, did not scuffle around but practiced purposefully a pattern of coming in low, feinting with head and body to draw a lead, and then hammering in hooks to body and head, following the combination with a right cross. His footwork was neat and geometrical but not flashy—he slid his soles along the mat, always set to hit hard.

Liebling’s description of the fight is excellent. This particular bout is historically significant as the first time in Clay’s professional career that he was knocked down. Here’s the moment:

When the bell rang, Banks dropped into the crouch I had seen him rehearse, and began the stalk after Clay that was to put the pressure on him. I felt a species of complicity. The poet, still wrapped in certitude, jabbed, moved, teased, looking the Konzertstück over before he banged the ivories. By nimble dodging, as in Rome, he rendered the hungry fighter’s attack quite harmless, but this time without keeping his hypnotic stare fixed steadily enough on the punch-hand. They circled around for a minute or so, and then Clay was hit, but not hard, by a left hand. He moved to his own left, across Banks’s field of vision, and Banks, turning with him, hit him again, but this time full, with the rising left hook he had worked on so faithfully. The poet went down, and the three men crouching below Banks’s corner must have felt, as they listened to the count, like a Reno tourist who hears the silver-dollar jackpot come rolling down. It had been a solid shot—and where one shot succeeds, there is no reason to think that another won’t.

It was not to be. Clay quickly recovers, and in the next round “jabbed the good boy until he had spread his already wide nose over his face.” Liebling says of Banks, “He kept throwing that left hook whenever he could get set, but he was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.”

The fight is stopped in the fourth round, with Banks staggered and helpless. The piece ends memorably. Instead of going to Clay’s dressing room for a post-fight interview with the winner, Liebling seeks out Banks. He writes,

When I arrived, Banks, sitting up on the edge of a rubbing table, was shaking his head, angry at himself, like a kid outfielder who has let the deciding run drop through his fingers. Summerlin was telling him what he had done wrong: “You can’t hit anybody throwing just one punch all the time. You had him, but you lost him. You forgot to keep crowding.” Then the unquenchable pedagogue said, “You’re a better fighter than he is, but you lost your head. If you can only get him again . . .” But poor Banks looked only half convinced. What he felt, I imagine, was that he had had Clay, and that it might be a long time before he caught him again. If he had followed through, he would have been in line for dazzling matches—the kind that bring you five figures even if you lose. I asked him what punch had started him on the downgrade, but he just shook his head. Wiley, the gym proprietor, said there hadn’t been any one turning point. “Things just went sour gradually all at once,” he declared. “You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”

I think this is one of the all-time great endings in sports writing. As Fred Warner says in the Afterword of A Neutral Corner,

Like the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he [Liebling] can joke because he is so serious, as he is at the end of “Poet and Pedagogue,” where he describes the beaten and now forgotten fighter who had nearly beaten Cassius Clay and was faced with a lifetime of remembering what might have been. That sad tableau reveals a lot about what made Liebling such a good writer. None of the taints of the sports page are there – hyperbole, cynicism, or sentimentality. It is heartbreaking, emblematic, and just right.