'He Was Going to Lose Four Hundred Shoeshines'

On the morning of May 15, 1953, A.J. Liebling leaves his hotel in Chicago’s Loop and walks two and a half miles to the Chicago Stadium where that evening Jersey Joe Walcott would attempt to reclaim the world heavyweight boxing crown from Rocky Marciano. Being Liebling, he turns what could be a tedious travelogue gingerbreaded with "local color" into an escorted tour of the human comedy. He passes the Morrison Hotel, where Marciano and most of the press corps are staying, and the Civic Opera House, “with a sign on it proclaiming the imminent arrival of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman.” He crosses the “piddling” Chicago River (the New York-City-born author of Chicago: The Second City takes a gratuitous swipe) and enters “the most readable thoroughfare in America . . .”

“. . . the part of West Madison that has the flophouses and the signs—‘Second Shot Your Favorite Whiskey ½ Price,’ ‘Mamie’s Day Old & Fresh Broken Bakery Goods,’ ‘We Dare Them! The Largest and Best Bowl of Soup in Town,’ ‘Our 20-Ounce Schooner, 15 cents,’ ‘Jesus Saves—Are You Saved?’ ‘Pants $1.00 Up,’ ‘2 Strickly Fresh Eggs Tost and Buter, 25 cents.’”

Like any good journalist, Liebling is a scrupulous detail man. He gets the little, easy-to-ignore things right. He may be covering a boxing match but he’s not too busy to relish the swarm of life outside the ring:

“Before a shack bearing signs that read, ‘Shine 25c’ and ‘First Class Shine 20c,’ I stopped. I knew from the street numbers that I was now at about the three-quarter pole, and any kind of chair looked good. ‘I want a first-class shine,’ I said. ‘Twenty cents.’

“’We sold the last first-class shine yesterday,’ the shoeshine man said. ‘Got only twenty-five-cent shines left.’”

Liebling tells us the shoeshine man is going to the fight and is putting his money on Walcott: “‘I bought two tickets for me and my wife. I also got a hundred up against a hundred fifty that Joe will go twelve rounds. The bell rings for the end of the twelfth round, I win.’ I figured he was going to lose four hundred shoeshines.”

Liebling was right. In the first round, Marciano hit Walcott with a left hook followed by a powerful right uppercut. Walcott landed flat on his back, feet in the air. Marciano was winner by a knockout at 2:25. Liebling’s account, “Long Toodle, Short Fight,”was published in the May 30, 1953 issue of The New Yorker and collected in The Sweet Science (1956). In the Library of America volume that includes that collection of boxing pieces, Liebling’s report – article? story? essay? – is thirteen and a half pages long, roughly the length of Hazlitt’s “The Fight.” I’m not a fight fan. I’m a prose fan. I vote for "essay." Purists will argue but journalism-as-literature doesn’t get much better than this.