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This is from a piece Lebling wrote reflecting on Archie Moore's second loss to Marciano. Trust me, it's worth the read.
"[...] I got out my copy of the official program of the fight and began to read the high class feature articles as I munched my sandwich. One reminded me that I had seen the first boxing show held at Yankee Stadium-on May 12, 1923. I had forgotten it was the first show, and even that 1923 was the year the stadium opened. In my true youth the Yankees used to share the Polo Grounds with the Giants, and I had forgotten that, too, because I never cared much about baseball, although, come to think of it, I used to see the Yankees play occasionally in the nineteen-teens, and should have remembered.
I remember the boxing show itself very well, though. I happened during my second suspension from college, and I paid five dollars for a high grand-stand seat. The program merely said it had been an "all-star heavyweight bill promoted by Tex Richard for the Hearst Milk Fund," but I found I could still remember every man and every bout on the card.
One of the main events was between old Jesse Willard, the former heavyweight champion of the world, who has lost the title to Jack Dempsey in 1919, and a young heavyweight named Floyd Johnson. Willard had been coaxed from retirement because there was such a dearth of heavyweight material that Rickard though he could still get by, but as I remember the old fellow, he couldn't fight a lick. He had a fair left jab and a right-uppercut that a fellow had to walk into to get hurt by, and he was big and soft. Johnson was a mauler worse than Rex Layne, and the old man knocked him out.
The other main even, ex aequo, had Luis Angel Firpo opposing a fellow named Jack McAuliffe II, from Detroit, who had only fifteen fights and had never beaten anybody, and had a glass jaw. The two winners, of whose identity there was infinitesimal preliminary doubt, were to fight each other for the right to meet the great Jack Dempsey. Firpo was so crude that Marciano would have been a Fancy Dan by comparison. He could hit with only one hand-the right-he hadn't the faintest idea what to do in close, and he never cared much for that business anyway. He knocked McAuliffe out, of course, and then, in a later elimination bout, stopped poor old Willard. He subsequently became a legend by going one and a half sensational rounds with Dempsey, in a time that is now represented as the golden age in American boxing."
I reflected with satisfaction that old Ahab Moore could have whipped all four principals on that card within fifteen rounds, and that while Dempsey may have been a great champion, he had less to beat than Marciano. I felt the satisfaction because it proved the world isn't going backwards, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.
"[...] I got out my copy of the official program of the fight and began to read the high class feature articles as I munched my sandwich. One reminded me that I had seen the first boxing show held at Yankee Stadium-on May 12, 1923. I had forgotten it was the first show, and even that 1923 was the year the stadium opened. In my true youth the Yankees used to share the Polo Grounds with the Giants, and I had forgotten that, too, because I never cared much about baseball, although, come to think of it, I used to see the Yankees play occasionally in the nineteen-teens, and should have remembered.
I remember the boxing show itself very well, though. I happened during my second suspension from college, and I paid five dollars for a high grand-stand seat. The program merely said it had been an "all-star heavyweight bill promoted by Tex Richard for the Hearst Milk Fund," but I found I could still remember every man and every bout on the card.
One of the main events was between old Jesse Willard, the former heavyweight champion of the world, who has lost the title to Jack Dempsey in 1919, and a young heavyweight named Floyd Johnson. Willard had been coaxed from retirement because there was such a dearth of heavyweight material that Rickard though he could still get by, but as I remember the old fellow, he couldn't fight a lick. He had a fair left jab and a right-uppercut that a fellow had to walk into to get hurt by, and he was big and soft. Johnson was a mauler worse than Rex Layne, and the old man knocked him out.
The other main even, ex aequo, had Luis Angel Firpo opposing a fellow named Jack McAuliffe II, from Detroit, who had only fifteen fights and had never beaten anybody, and had a glass jaw. The two winners, of whose identity there was infinitesimal preliminary doubt, were to fight each other for the right to meet the great Jack Dempsey. Firpo was so crude that Marciano would have been a Fancy Dan by comparison. He could hit with only one hand-the right-he hadn't the faintest idea what to do in close, and he never cared much for that business anyway. He knocked McAuliffe out, of course, and then, in a later elimination bout, stopped poor old Willard. He subsequently became a legend by going one and a half sensational rounds with Dempsey, in a time that is now represented as the golden age in American boxing."
I reflected with satisfaction that old Ahab Moore could have whipped all four principals on that card within fifteen rounds, and that while Dempsey may have been a great champion, he had less to beat than Marciano. I felt the satisfaction because it proved the world isn't going backwards, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.
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