The Sweet Science

by A.J. Liebling

Book Overview

A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was.

The Sweet Science depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374272271
• ISBN13: 9780374272272
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Rest In Peace;Floyd....

The late,great Floyd Patterson,who became the first heavyweight to regain the title after losing it,is as good a reason as any to name a book about boxing,'The Sweet Science'.In this particular case,'A.J. Liebling's masterpiece about boxing(mostly in the fifties)was voted the best sports book ever, by Sports Illustrated.The incredibly colorful characters Liebling focuses on would be hard to beat by any writer in any field,even if he may not have gotten all of it right.For example,he seems to actually get along with Rocky Marciano's manager,Al Weill,even though evidence elsewhere suggests that Rocky may have retired to get away from him.And I think he resorted to cliche in describing Irish Billy Graham as as "good as a fighter can be without being a hell of a fighter"(p.250);Graham is a Hall of Famer who was robbed in a welterweight title fight against Kid Gavilan-and my (Jewish) uncle idolized him.But Liebling,who wrote on "serious subjects" for 'The New Yorker'and was an award winning war reporter, attended the first fight ever held in Yankee Stadium in 1923-and remained optimistic about the future through the lens of boxing,concludes,"I reflected with satisfaction that old Ahab(Archie)Moore could have whipped all four principals on that card within 15 rounds,and that while (Jack)Dempsey may have been a great champion,he had less to beat than Marciano.I felt the satisfaction because it proved that the world isn't going backward,if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was rewally like when you were really young."

Great Stuff!

I've been searching for this book for years. I'm from Brockton, MA and I certainly appreciate great boxing prose. The new intro really adds nothing to the book and Mr.Anasi even gets Ezzard Charles' name wrong--calls him "Ezra" in the intro--which also indicates poor editing. Leibling gives you the total world of a great fight--not just whats going on in the ring but the world surrounding the fight. Very real, often funny, thoroughly engaging. I want to read more of his stuff.

a terrific read

When I first read this collection of essays about boxing, I thought I noticed a certain sameness about them. Most of the essays follow a pattern - Liebling visits the boxers while they're training, he goes to the bout and describes the fight in some detail, then leaves for home, or often for a bar and reflects on the fight. But the book is so good that immediately after finishing, I felt compelled to read it for a second time, and I noticed that each essay has its own theme, a slightly different and interesting take on the sport. Liebling was an expert on boxing history, and when he wrote these essays had been attending bouts for over thirty years. Often the essays feature names still familiar today - Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano. Liebling is erudite and opinionated. He sympathises with the older boxers, and prefers guile to raw punching power. He also dislikes television and cultivates a humourous disdain for fans who go to boxing matches only to be seen. He's the sort of fellow you would like to drink with in a bar because he's utterly fascinating. The whimsical quality of some of his writing is apparent in the following excerpt, when he's describing how putting sparring partners on the preliminary card makes for bad fights: "Sparring partners are endowed with habitual consideration and forbearance, and they find it hard to change character. A kind of guild fellowship holds them together, and they pepper each other's elbows with merry abandon, grunting with pleasure like hippopotamuses in a beer vat." That's great writing. A final note; this book is a window into an different world, the age just before television took hold, when many people still took their amusement outside their homes. Unfortunately, that world is gone, but you can explore it in this wonderful book.

A Must-Read

Sportswriting is generally shlock. But A.J. Liebling was no sportswriter. Perhaps the finest reporter ever, certainly one of The New Yorker's shining lights, Liebling wrote with equal grace on the swaggering cons of Broadway, his misspent youth in pre-war Paris, blood pooled in a landing craft off Omaha Beach, just about anything that caught his sharp eye and florid pen. And because Liebling wrote what he loved, he also wrote boxing. Whether he was at an obscure club fight or a marquee bout, Liebling never saw his subjects as muscled automata. His boxers were people, every fight a story, and the stories collected in the Sweet Science form a classic work of sport that no cigar-chewing sports hack ever tossed on a wire.