One evening last week 8,327 live fight fans and some 20 million TV viewers around the country watched the Madison Square Garden debut of old Archie Moore, the goateed tumbleweed from San Diego, St Louis, Toledo, Baltimore or wherever the pickings look good. As debuts go, it was eminently successful, for the oldest headliner in the business caught up with his No. 1 challenger, 26-year-old Harold Johnson, in the 14th round with a series of beautifully timed and perfectly thrown right hands that reminded one of well-told stories, short and to the point.
The only trouble with this debut is that Moore was closing in on that age at which Dr Pitkin argued, questionably, that Life Begins. Archie Moore had to wait until he was 37 years old to see his name go up on a Garden marquee. It had taken him almost 18 years of barnstorm campaigning, from North Adams, Massachusetts, to Panama, from Newark to Tasmania. The boxing story today is often told through likely looking preliminary kids a year or two out of the amateurs who are hustled into Garden main events to keep those razor blades moving. But there was nothing hurried about this maiden appearance of our light heavyweight champion. Behind him were 141 battles with the toughest middleweights, light heavies and heavyweights of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
Putting Archie Moore into his first Garden main event at the age of thirty-seven is something like signing Caruso for the Metropolitan Opera in 1920 instead of 1903 when he actually scored the first of his New York triumphs. If Caruso had had to tour the tank towns in moth-eaten opry houses for petty cash while third-raters unfit to carry his music case were pulling down the big notices and the heavy sugar at the Met, he would have become as cynical and money-hungry and unthrilled as Archie Moore seemed to feel in the Garden last week.
When Moore first climbed through the ropes as a pro back in the middle ’30s, a 21-year-old Joe Louis was waiting for his chance to come to New York. FDR was still promising to pull us out of the Depression. Carole Lombard was a national idol. Adolf Hitler was training his Arbeitssoldaten with shovels. Mussolini was kicking up a rumpus in Ethiopia. People were singing ‘Goody, Goody’. The Oakies were pushing their rattletraps along Highway 66. Mickey Mouse and Joe DiMaggio were hitting their strides. And when you said McCarthy, it meant little Charlie the puppet.
Nearly all the people who were making history when Archie was fighting up and down the West Coast in the late 1930s and early ’40s have gone back into the ground and the history books. The men who were in there with Moore in the years before Pearl Harbor are old men with stomachs hanging over their belts and balding heads, living off their scrapbooks and their memories of trial and glory.
Watching old Archie coming on in the later rounds against Harold Johnson, a quality opponent who had taken Ezzard Charles and Nino Valdes and who was nine years old when the champion was belting out tough boys for peanuts in San Diego, you had to admire the old-time moves, the way he got up from an off-balance knock-down and took the fight to the younger man, careful to offer only the smallest pieces of himself and watchful for mistakes on which he could capitalise.
Years ago he had crowded Ezzard Charles, knocked out Jimmy Bivins and worked with the tough ones nobody wanted – Charley Burley, Lloyd Marshall, Holman Williams, Curtis Sheppard, Billy Smith. He was good enough in those days to be the light heavyweight champion of the world, but everybody was looking the other way.
If it had been tennis, his ranking would have top-seeded him into a shot at the champions. But this was boxing, a bitter and slippery business, where the challenger your manager picked for you was the one who guaranteed the high money – and who didn’t figure to be as tough as Archie Moore. An ageing Gus Lesnevich would rather have the mob-hyped Billy Fox, or the run-down limey Freddie Mills. And when Mills got his hands on the title, would he rather fight Archie, still the No. 1 at age 33, or Joey Maxim, the Kearns concoction, who never resembles a fighter so much as when he’s sitting down between rounds?
It was 1952 and Joey Maxim was in the book as the light heavyweight champion of the world. At an age (36) when the best fighters in the world can’t find their legs or their reflexes, Moore finally got Maxim into the ring with him. The expected happened. It was one of those nights when Moore was in there for the glory alone, and Maxim and Kearns got all the money. There wasn’t another light heavyweight around who could bring in a dollar, so the Moore–Maxim thing became a travelling circus – in Ogden, in Miami. And now they’re talking Omaha. And six figures for Archie.
At the end of his long and rocky road, Archie is finding the golden vein that eluded him through the best of his fighting days. Last week he and manager Charley Johnston were calling the turn and taking home all the money – around $40,000, including, rumour had it, a fistful out of Johnson’s purse.
Moore didn’t bother to pick up his cheque. He’s off in his Cadillac and big black cowboy outfit, a dark-skinned, pugnacious Burl Ives, gypsying around the country talking about fighting Rocky Marciano. Or the top heavyweight contenders Valdes and Cockell.
What he’s really saying is that after all those years in the financial desert he’d like to linger around the International Boxing Club’s oasis. More paynights like that debut in the Garden. There were times last week when he walked back to his corner like an old man waddling home from a tour of the gin mills. But he’s the last of the great journeymen, and it’s still a pleasure to watch someone who knows his business in a day when underdeveloped and oversold kids bob up and down the ladder like the popular songs you can never remember once they’ve slipped off the hit parade.
[1954]
If Archie Moore does what he keeps saying he’ll do – relieve Rocky Marciano of his heavyweight title – he’ll be the first man to write as well as fight his way to the championship. When he climbs into the ring, sporting his resplendent robe and Mephistophelian moustache on the night of the 20th, it will not only climax a notable 20-year career but a personal publicity campaign that has poured across the desk of American sportswriters literally bushels of telegrams, letters, posters, circulars – some $50,000 worth of words calling all sports editors to come to the aid of Archie Moore in his quest to tangle with Rocky for the championship of the world.
The stuff that cascaded from Archie’s headquarters was, by turn, witty, indignant, insulting, bombastic, factual, imaginative – the super press agent from Steve Hannagan to Russell Birdwell could hardly have done it better. If Archie wins this fight it would seem only simple gratitude that the Post Office issue an Archie Moore commemorative stamp, for in a nine-month campaign Archie has written hundreds of sportswriters and sportscasters two or three times a week and has single-handedly swelled the coffers (I’ve always wanted to set eyes on a coffer, by the way) of the US mails. And Western Union could afford to declare a special dividend for Archie, who fires telegrams with the speed and cuteness he employs in throwing left and right hooks. The Bell Telephone Company hasn’t done too badly either, for Archie is an articulate refutation of the stereotype pug who grunts ‘Hokay’ when the manager gives him the old line, ‘You do the fightin’ and I’ll do the managin’.’ Archie, who was fighting for money when Marciano was 12 years old, handles the fighting, the training, the promoting and the talking.
Six months ago, when Al Weill was giving Archie Moore the usual brush and trying to decide which bum – Nino Valdes or Don Cockell – was the best meat for Rocky, Moore started talking up his rights again. He ridiculed Weill’s hand-picked opponents by offering to fight Valdes and Cockell the same night. Archie is a throwback to the good old days when boxers really challenged each other and matches weren’t booked mechanically in offices as vaudeville acts are. Archie phoned Pat Harmon, sports editor of the Cincinnati Post, saying he would be flying into Cincinnati to launch a petition of 100 sports editors willing to plump for Marciano to meet Mr Outside-Looking-In instead of trumped-up importations like Valdes and Cockell.
Harmon enlisted in the Archie Moore Association for the Advancement of Archie Moore and blasted Weilly Al for ignoring the only man in the heavyweight ranks who seemed to have a reasonable chance of standing up to the bruiser from Brockton. But despite the verbal fireworks, Archie was seemingly getting no closer to the pot of gold at the end of the heavyweight rainbow. The AMA for the AAM faced a sturdy roadblock in the chesty-close-to-the-vesty Mr Weill. In the dressing-room after the depressing Cockell affair, Al looked his interviewers in the eye and allowed as how the next logical opponent for Rocky might be Bob Baker. But Archie Moore had knocked Baker out and had beaten Valdes twice? Weill switched off the question as if he were wearing an invisible hearing aid.
But Archie Moore is a stubborn, patient man. A formidable middleweight whose only shot at the middleweight championship was cancelled by ulcers, the No. l light heavyweight contender carefully bypassed by the light heavyweight champions a decade or so ago, Archie had learned the hard way that the better you were, the less chance you had to get in there for the big one. It had happened to Harry Wills and George Godfrey. The fight game always has had a tough club of guys-ya-want-no-part-of – Charlie Burley, Curtis (Hatchet Man) Sheppard, Holman Williams, Lloyd Marshall. In California we had Jack Chase who met Archie Moore half a dozen times between 1942 and ’47 – 69 rounds of the toughest fighting you’ll ever see. Year after year, fighting into his deep 30s, Archie handled the ones nobody wanted no part of – guys you never heard of who would chase Bobo Olson out of the ring. Fought ’em with everything he had for no money until one day he got to Toledo to fight somebody they billed as the Alabama Kid. It had taken Archie 12 years and nearly 100 fights to get to Toledo. The purse for the Alabama Kid thing was a lousy $300. ‘Let’s face it, I was never going to get a shot at the title,’ Archie has written of those hungry days. ‘I was never going to be a champion, except in my heart.’
What Archie didn’t know, the night he bowled over the Alabama Kid for nickels, was that Toledo housed a fellow by the name of Bob Reese, a prosperous Ford dealer who was waiting to play Fairy Godmother to Archie’s Cinderella. Archie had seven fights in Toledo in twelve months, batting 1.000 with five knockouts, including such eminent victims as Bob Satterfield and Jimmy Bivins. But he won more. He won the support of this Bob Reese, whose motor company eventually became the headquarters for his publicity campaign. Reese bankrolled the Archie Moore Story. He wrote a lot of the copy, set up a staff of secretaries to keep the letters and wires flowing, issued catchy posters such as ‘Wanted – Wanted – Wanted – REWARD for Capture and Delivery of Rocky Marciano to Any Ring in the World for the Purpose of Defending His Heavyweight Championship against the Logical contender, Archie Moore. Reward: the Boxing Public Will See a Great Fight and Witness the Crowning of a New Champion. Advise (Sheriff) ARCHIE MOORE.’
Archie’s career has been a study in irony, and never more so than two months ago when his fortunes took a sudden upward turn. He had been knocking out overrated heavyweights and light heavyweights for years, but his unprecedented $50,000 publicity campaign might have gone down the drain if he had not disposed of Bobo Olson, a run-of-the-mill middleweight champion who borrows the mantle of greatness in a day when TV and uninspiring promoting has brought us down to what might be called the Chuck Davey–Tommy Collins Era. Archie had knocked out scores of fighters better than Bobo, but at the propitious moment Olson provided the ideal sacrifice to the gods of public opinion.
All his fighting life Archie was kept out of the big arenas on the spurious argument that he was long on ability but short on box office appeal. Now, largely through his efforts, he and Marciano figure to draw the biggest gate since the golden days of Louis. He may not win when he finally gets in there with Rocky, two weeks from next Tuesday night. But win or lose, Archie Moore is the all-time communications champion of the world of sport.
[1955]
P.S. Half a century later how vividly I remember the dramatic ending of Archie’s quest. The astonishing old light heavy knocked the champion down with his classic one-two and had the Brockton bruiser in serious trouble in the second round. But as they fought on, age and Marciano caught up with the gallant old man, who took a painful beating until he finally succumbed in the ninth. But the Great Communicator wasn’t finished. With his face battered but his pride undaunted, our prize-ring Othello stood on his rubbing table in his gold silk robe, a true King of Fistiana, greeting his subjects, the working press. ‘Gentlemen, it was a very entertaining evening. I hope you enjoyed it. I know Rocky Marciano enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too. And now, are there any questions . . . ?’ The challenger may have gone down. But the Master of Communications was still standing tall.
[2006]