Boxing.com

Once upon a time, being able to write well was worth its weight in gold. Writers were, if not revered, at least respected, and they returned that respect by respecting their readers by not treating them like chumps.

George Plimpton was one such writer. Although he pitched products on TV, to the dismay of some, he also pitched a baseball to Willie Mays, to the dismay of no one. Not only that. He played goalie for a day with the Boston Bruins. He was in a pro-am golf tournament. He tried out for quarterback of the Detroit Lions. He played percussion with the New York Philharmonic. He performed as a trapeze artist in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. And, last by not least, in 1959 he climbed into a ring for three rounds of sparring with the Old Mongoose, Archie Moore.

Moore was light heavyweight champ from 1952-1962 and a cunning ring presence. His record at the time of Plimpton’s challenge was 171-22-9 (123 KOs). Plimpton was a champion on the page, but somewhat less so in the ring, where he was nevertheless undefeated with a record of 0-0-0 (0 KOs).

Plimpton was developing material for a Sports Illustrated feature, which was later expanded into his book “Shadow Box” (1977). To make the venture worthwhile, Plimpton had to take a risk, and who better to take a risk with than the incomparable Archie Moore?

“I am not properly constituted to fight,” Plimpton wrote. “I am built rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety—the avocets, limpkins, and herons. Since boyhood my arms have remained sticklike: I can slide my watch up my arm almost to my elbow. I have a thin, somewhat fragile nose which bleeds easily.”

In addition to having a nose that bled, Plimpton had the misfortune to have eyes that emitted tears.

“I suffer from a condition which the medical profession refers to as ‘sympathetic response,’ which means that when I am hit or cuffed around, I weep. It is an involuntary response. The tears come and there is nothing I can do except dab at them with a fist.”

Skinny guys with noses that bleed and eyes that tear are a dime a dozen in the fight game. The great boxing trainer Charlie Goldman once said, almost as if alluding to Plimpton, “You know them fighters with long necks and them long, pointy chins. They cost you more for smellin’ salts than they do for food.”

To prepare himself for his epic three rounds with the champion, Plimpton knew he had to, at the very least, learn the basics, and at the recommendation of Ernest Hemingway he contacted the trainer George Brown.

“Hemingway spoke of his skills with awe,” Plimpton remembered, “saying that he could never remember having landed a good punch during a sparring session with Brown.”

Plimpton telephoned Brown, mentioned the fight with Moore, and the trainer wanted no part of what sounded like a dangerous stunt.

“Well, what am I going to do?” Plimpton asked. He told Brown that Martin Kane over at Sports Illustrated suggested he might go to Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue and try to find himself a trainer there.

“Brown was appalled. ‘Stay out of Stillman’s,’ he warned Plimpton. ‘You’ll get some awful disease fooling around there. Stillman and his people don’t know what a mop looks like, much less how to push such a thing through the crud in that place…Listen, most of the trainers you’ll find as Stillman’s don’t have the brains God gave a goat. Maybe they’ll give you one lesson—how to lace on the gloves—but then they’ll get you up there in the ring for their bums to maul you around so you can ‘learn experience.’”

Brown was silent for a moment. “Listen,” he said, “if you have to go to Stillman’s, go and work on the light bag, the heavy bag, but don’t get yourself pushed into the ring if anyone else is fooling around in there. Go into the ring when it’s empty—alone—shadowbox, get the feeling of the canvas, and get out if anyone starts climbing through the ropes. I don’t care if it’s Lou Stillman himself, or someone who looks like your grandmother…get out!”

Plimpton could take a hint, but wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Fortunately for Plimpton, Brown took pity on the skinny writer and agreed to teach him what he could in the brief time allotted.

“George Brown went to work,” Plimpton wrote. “He got me to stop smoking—from two or three packs to nothing, cold turkey, pointing out that it was not likely that I would ever find a better excuse for quitting (short of lung disease) than having to get into condition to fight the light-heavyweight champion. In the Racquet Club gymnasium he began showing me the boxing fundamentals themselves—how to throw the jab and duck slightly behind the right to protect oneself from the counterpunch. Though he taught me one or two combinations, and we worked on the heavy bag, he said we would ‘rely’ mostly on the jab. ‘No man, I don’t care who he is,’ Brown explained, ‘likes to have a glove flicking around his eyes. It’s like a fly up there. So we’re going to stick him—peck, peck, peck; just keep that glove in his face.’”

In addition to working out in the gym, Brown had Plimpton do roadwork. Although difficult for a man his age and from his background to run through Central Park at dawn, it was one of the things Plimpton liked best about training, and he told Brown how beautiful the park was at that time of day.

Brown was not impressed. He “made a face and said I was not tending to business. Always I had to remember why I was out there—and that I should try to work up a controlled rage against Archie Moore, seeing him always in my mind’s eye, shadowboxing as if his presence were just beyond reach…He told me that when Gene Tunney was training for Dempsey, he would take time off to play golf, but even on the course he would tag after his drive, shuffling and feinting and shadowboxing, and his caddy, hurrying after him, could hear him muttering between his teeth, ‘Dempsey…Dempsey…Dempsey.’”

Plimpton took Brown’s words to heart and began muttering “Moore…Moore…Moore” during his morning jog, “but the picture that hastened into my mind was not a reassuring one at all: a mental vision of Archie Moore glowering down over his gloves, and enormous, dwarfing the ring as if he had been pumped up with helium and steadied in his corner of the ring with guy ropes.”

Brown enlisted a former Golden Glover named Peter Gimbel, who was also Plimpton’s friend, to introduce the writer to sparring.

After one of their sparring sessions, the three men rode uptown in a taxi, and Brown and Gimbel engaged in the age-old game of What If? “The two of them would argue about boxers,” Plimpton remembered, “most often about the relative merits of Joe Louis versus Jack Dempsey. George Brown said that Dempsey could have licked anybody in the modern era easy as pie; he was just the greatest tiger there had been, ‘except for this tiger we got sitting here in this cab,’ and he would laugh and dig me in the ribs. ‘Why this tiger could take Dempsey and Louis in one afternoon and chew up Gene Tunney in the evening time,’ and I would look out the window at Third Avenue in the rain and think how much I enjoyed being called ‘Tiger.’”

Plimpton’s exhibition against Archie Moore was to take place at Stillman’s Gym, “the famous and rickety boxer’s establishment on Eighth Avenue just down from Columbus Circle. A dark stairway led up into a gloomy vaultlike room, rather like the hold of an old galleon. One heard the sound before one’s eyes acclimatized: the slap-slap of the ropes being skipped, the thud of leather into the big heavy bags that squeaked from their chains as they swung, the rattle of the speed bags, the muffled sounds of gym shoes on the canvas (there were two rings), the snuffle of the fighters breathing out through their noses, and, every three minutes, the sharp clang of the ring bell. The atmosphere was a fetid jungle twilight.”

When Gene Tunney trained at Stillman’s he could not believe the awful stench. “‘Let’s clear this place out with some fresh air,” he said, and Johnny Dundee, who the featherweight champion at the time, responded, “Fresh air? Why, that stuff is likely to kill us!’”

Stillman’s was owned by Lou Stillman, whose real name was Lou Ingber. He changed his name after he won the gym in a game of cards. Stillman had what Budd Schulberg described as a “garbage-disposal voice.” He also had a way with words: “Big or small, champ or bum, I treated ‘em all the same way—bad.”

Plimpton told Stillman that he and the Old Mongoose needed the gym for an hour. “I told him about Archie Moore and what we hoped to do. Sports Illustrated would pay him a small sum for the inconvenience. He did not seem especially surprised. An eyebrow might have been raised. It turned out that he condoned almost anything that would break the dreary tedium.”

Even while dining at this club or that, Archie Moore was never far from Plimpton’s mind: “During lunch I kept wondering what Archie Moore was up to. I knew that he was in town, not far away. I thought of him coming closer all the time, physically moving toward our confrontation, perhaps a quarter of a mile away at the moment, in some restaurant, ordering a big steak with honey on it for energy, everyone in the place craning around to stare at him, and a lot of smiles because a month before he had won an extraordinary fight against Yvon Durelle, a strong pole-axer French Canadian, in which he pulled himself up off the canvas five times, eventually to win, so the applause would ripple up from among the tables as he left the restaurant.”

Literary flights of fancy are great on the page, but not so hot in the squared circle. While Plimpton was rumminating over an expensive meal, Archie Moore was across town asking Peter Maas, another friend of Plimpton’s, what kind of skills his challenger possessed. Maas had a perverted sense of humor and told Moore that Plimpton was an “intercollegiate boxing champion…He’s a gawky sort of guy, but don’t let that fool you, Arch! He’s got a left jab that sticks, he’s fast, and he’s got a pole-ax left hook that he can really throw. He’s a barnburner of a fighter, and the big thing about him is he wants to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world. Very ambitious. And confident. He doesn’t see why he should work his way through all the preliminaries in the tank towns: he reckons he’s ready now.”

After hearing Maas’ description of Plimpton, Archie Moore said, “If that guy lays a hand on me I’m going to coldcock him.” Then Moore cracked his knuckles.

The day of the fight arrived. Plimpton and his trainer arrived at the gym and Stillman led them to the dressing room, “an arrangement of cubicles as helter-skelter as a Tangier slum.” Brown sat Plimpton down and started wrapping his hands.

Archie Moore appeared at the door of Plimpton’s cubicle. He was wearing street clothes, and was carrying a kit bag and a pair of boxing gloves. He looked at Plimpton briefly, and turned away.

Archie Moore started to undress. He put on his foul-protector. He put on his boxing trunks and boots. Then “he offered us a curious monologue, apparently about a series of victories back in his welterweight days: ‘I put that guy in the hospital, didn’t I? Yeah, banged him around the eyes so it was a question about whether he could ever see again.’ He looked at me again. ‘You do your best, hear?’ I nodded vaguely. He went back to his litany. ‘Hey, Doc, you remember the guy who couldn’t remember his name after we finished with him…just plumb banged that guy’s name right out of his skull?’”

That was not what George Plimpton hoped to hear.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Brown told Plimpton. “Just remember what we’ve been doing all this time. Move, and peck at him.’”

Plimpton and Moore climbed through the ropes and met at center ring.

“I had read somewhere that if one were doomed to suffer in the ring, it would be best to have Archie Moore as the bestower. His face was peaceful, with a kind of comforting mien to it—people doubtless fell into easy conversation with him on buses and planes—and to be put away by him in the ring would not be unlike being tucked in by a Haitian mammy.”

The opening bell sounded and the two men got to work. “He came at me quite briskly,” Plimpton wrote, “and as I poked at him tentatively, his left reached out and thumped me alarmingly. As he moved around the ring he made a curious humming sound in his throat, a sort of peaceful aimless sound one might make pruning a flowerbed, except that from time to time the hum would rise quite abruptly, and bang! He would cuff me alongside the head. I would sense the leaden feeling of being hit, the almost acrid whiff of leather off his gloves, and I would blink through the sympathetic response and try to focus on his face, which looked slightly startled, as if he could scarcely believe he had done such a thing.”

Moore had no problem knocking men out. Making them cry was another matter.

Plimpton continued: “Halfway through the round Moore slipped—almost to one knee—not because of anything I had done, but his footing had betrayed him somehow. Laughter rose out of the seats, and almost as if in retribution he jabbed and followed with a long lazy left hook that fetched up against my nose and collapsed it slightly. It began to bleed.”

Plimpton was now crying and bleeding in front of Archie Moore and a gym full of giddy spectators.

“We went into a clinch; I was surprised when I was pushed away and saw the sheen of blood on Moore’s T-shirt. Moore looked slightly alarmed. The flow of tears was doubtless disarming. He moved forward and enfolded me in another clinch. He whispered in my ear, ‘Hey, breathe, man, breathe.’ The bell sounded and I turned from him and headed for my corner, feeling very much like sitting down.”

Moore toyed with Plimpton in round two.

“In the third round Brown began to feel that Moore had run through as much of a repertoire as he could devise, and that the fighter, wondering how he could finish the thing off aesthetically, was getting testy about it.”

An early bell rang to end the “fight” and saved Plimpton from more embarrassment.

“That round seemed awfully short,” he told Brown.

“I suppose you were getting set to finish him.”