Sports -- Boxing

It's almost the 25th anniversary of the month I read a boxing article the title of which really stuck in my craw. That title was "Rocky Marciano Was Better Than Joe Louis!" (Boxing Today; July 1982). Now, July 1982 was the month I turned 14, but I was an avid and knowledgeable boxing historian even in my early teens. The article really suprised me on two counts. First of all, at the risk of telegraphing the direction of this particular diatribe, the writer was flat-out wrong. Full-of-crap wrong. Marciano was most assuredly NOT better than Joe Louis. The second surprising thing, and this was actually, if anything, MORE surprising than the writer's ultimate conclusion, was that the article was written as if he was correcting a widely-held, though mistaken, belief. I thought at the time, and subsequent conversations with casual boxing fans over the years have confirmed, that Marciano was generally regarded as the better fighter.

The support for Marciano is easy to understand on a superficial level; Marciano was, as many people know, the only heavyweight champion to go through his entire career having won every fight. A perfect 49-0 with 43 knockouts. It's an impressive record. Louis had an impressive record, too: 69-3 with 55 knockouts. But anything other than a zero in that loss column just sort of seems to pale in comparison. Given that the won-loss record does favor Marciano, though, we can try to peek behind the curtain and see if there's anything more to it than the numbers.

The original article asserted that in addition to his three losses, Louis almost lost several other fights, but Marciano had only one near-loss. The article also asserted, separately, that just about any knockdown was close to a knockout. This "observation" was a self-serving attempt to pile on points for Marciano; Louis was known for suffering "flash" knockdowns (a flash knockdown is when a fighter loses his feet but is not hurt. He gets up (or has the ability to get up) in a flash. It's a legitimate knockdown, but it doesn't signify that the boxer is genuinely in trouble. In a "typical" (as opposed to flash) knockdown, the boxer has actually been hurt, to some extent, and his opponent has a legitimate opportunity to follow up the knockdown with an attack that can lead to an early victory, by knockout or technical knockout). Louis was susceptible to flash knockdowns, and Marciano wasn't; if you count all of the knockdowns suffered by each fighter as "near-losses," then, you have more evidence to support a "Marciano-was-better" position. People who know boxing, however, know that not all knockdowns are created equal, and some knockdowns (including the vast majority of the ones Louis suffered) are virtually meaningless from the standpoint of providing evidence of a "near-loss".

One also can't help but wonder which fight the obviously biased writer was counting as Marciano's only near loss. It's hard to entertain with a straight face the assertion that there was only one. In a 1950 fight with Roland La Starza, one judge scored the bout for Marciano, 5-4 (1 even round), one judge scored the bout for La Starza by the same margin, and the referee, Jack Watson, scored the bout 5-5 in rounds, but awarded it to Marciano on the supplementary points system in effect at the time in New York. Presumably, THAT has to constitute a near-loss. Against Jersey Joe Walcott, Marciano was hopelessly trailing on all scorecards through 12 rounds (4-7, 5-7, and 4-8), but came up with a one-punch knockout in the 13th. Archie Moore knocked down Marciano for a 2-count (yes, a "flash"knockdown, but remember the writer's assertion... knockdowns are near-knockouts). A fight against Ezzard Charles was almost stopped in Charles's favor due to Marciano's nose being horrible split and bleeding (the stoppage would have been a technical knockout victory for Charles; the referee let the fight continue, and Marciano later won by knockout). Marciano also had close decision victories. The only point I'm making at this point is this - you have to REALLY have an axe to grind to assert that Marciano had only one "near-loss". Now, don't get me wrong; Louis also had his own near-losses. Most notably, he had a very Marciano/Walcott-like performance of his own, trailing Billy Conn on points after 12 rounds, then scoring a knockout in the 13th.

I believe that the greatest credit that can be given Marciano is not that he went through his career undefeated, but rather that he knew when to quit, and had the discipline to stick to his guns. THAT is easier said than done, in any sport. It's hard to walk away at the top of your game, especially when you've spent a couple of decades doing something. Marciano retired just a few weeks after his 32nd birthday. Marciano also died in a plane crash at a relatively young age. Another story I've heard is that it was the plane crash that ended his career, or stopped him from making a comeback and ruining his perfect record. Let's clear that one up right now; that plane crash happened almost FOURTEEN years later, when Marciano was about to turn forty-six years old. So no...he retired, and he stayed retired, completely volitionally.

Louis, in constrast, fought until he was thirty-seven. Don't kid yourself; those five+ years are huge in sports, particularly in boxing (spare me the George Foreman comments; the 1973 Foreman would have destroyed the 1993 version). Marciano had one fight beyond his thirty-second birthday. Louis had fourteen, including two of his three losses, and a couple of his ugliest wins (such as a friendly decision over Jersey Joe Walcott, in a fight in which Louis was knocked down twice). Ironically (in the Alannis Morrisette sense of the word), Louis won the heavyweight title by knocking out "Cinderella Man" Jim Braddock shortly after HIS (Braddock's) thirty-second birthday. Braddock fought once more, then retired.

But it makes little sense to judge a boxer (or any athlete) by how bad he was at the end of his career. Tex Cobb (who impelled Howard Cosell to retire from boxing by getting beaten up so badly by Larry Holmes) won his last nine fights; surely, we don't have to rank him ahead of Muhammad Ali simply because Ali lost three of his final four. No, it makes much more sense to judge boxers by their results during their prime years, with two major criteria -- how good they were during their peak years, and how long their peaks lasted.

In the late 40's, Marciano had a couple of wins over quality opponents (Roland LaStarza and Carmine Vingo), but he was still clearly nowhere near "The Rock" of legend. He was still a 9-5 underdog in mid-1951 against Rex Layne (Marciano was almost twenty-eight at the time; in contrast, Louis was a favorite against the reigning heavyweight champion at age twenty-three). Going into the Layne fight, Marciano had fought four times in 1951. The combined record of his opponents in their six fights before taking on Marciano was 4-20. This is not the stuff of greatness. Marciano knocked out Layne in the sixth round, though, and shortly thereafter, he had a marked increase in general quality of opposition. So let's say Marciano's peak started with the Layne fight. From then on, Marciano was 14-0, 13 by knockout. This included wins against former world heavyweight champions Louis and Ezzard Charles (twice) and reigning champion Walcott (whom he also defeated in a rematch). There was also a win against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore.

Let's look a little more closely at those wins against name opponents. Louis, as noted, was thirty-seven years old. Charles was thirty-two and thirty-three. Walcott was thirty-eight and thirty-nine (and WINNING the first fight through twelve of fifteen rounds, remmeber). Moore, though famous for his longevity, was thirty-nine and had made his reputation as a light-heavyweight (175 pounds or fewer). Marciano also defended against LaStarza (a very good boxer, though not a household name), knocking him out in the 11th after taking a slim lead on points through 10 rounds. So, ok, 14-0...fair enough. But the question is always "Whom did he beat?" (It's usually "Who did he beat?" We like grammar, though.) In Marciano's case, another way to look at it is, 2-0, 1 by knockout, against top-quality heavyweights under the age of 35 (Ezzard Charles, twice), and a peak that lasted about four years.

In 1935, Louis fought some hopeless bums. Four of them, like Marciano's just-before-his-peak opponents. Losers of 21 of their previous 24 fights. He then fought Primo Carnera, however, starting a run in which four of seven opponents were former heavyweight champions. It's fair to start considering Louis's peak with the Carnera fight, and we'll continue through the second Walcott fight (though he was obviously well past his prime), his final successful title defense. Curiously, each of those fights took place on a June 25 -- 1935 and 1948, giving us a thirteen (!!) year peak to consider. Louis's record during this period was 39-1, 34 by knockout. One of the fights that was not a knockout was a disqualification win over Buddy Baer, whose manager entered the ring after Baer had been knocked down three times in the 6th round and refused to leave, prompting the disqualification. Barring this extremely unusual outcome, Baer surely would have been stopped, bringing Louis up to 35 knockouts in 39 wins (in a rematch, Baer was knocked down three times and knocked out in the first round).

Louis's opponents included former heavyweight champion Carnera (28 years old), former heavyweight champion Max Baer (26 years old, and up to that point, the only person besides Louis who had managed to knock Carnera out), former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling (who won the fight, handing Louis his only in-his-prime loss, via 12th round knockout), former heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey (33 years old, a 3rd round career-ending knockout), reigning heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock (32 years old), Schmeling again (32 years old, a devastating first round knockout), and future heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott (twice, when Walcott was 33 and 34 years old). The first of the Walcott fights was a disputed decision that most felt should have gone the other way; the second was an 11th round knockout. So, if you're keeping score, against former, reigning, and future heavyweight champions under the age of 35, Louis was 7-1 with 6 knockouts (two in the first round).

Louis also defeated quality heavyweights who never won the championship (as Marciano had defeated Layne and LaStarza), most notably Paolino Uzcudun (though Uzcudun was 36 at the time) (I'm not making Uzcudun up, by the way; he was 50-16-3 at the time of the Louis fight and had a win over Max Baer and a draw with Schmeling to his credit) and Tommy Farr (23 years old and already with a win over Max Baer; in his next bout, Farr would lose a razor-close split decision to the recently dethroned Jimmy Braddock).

Since Marciano gets to count the Archie Moore win as a quality win, despite the fact that Moore was almost 40 years old and a natural light-heavyweight, let's look at Louis's record against quality light-heavyweights who stepped up in weight class (a periodic phenomenon that usually ends badly for the naturally lighter boxer). Louis had wins over light heavyweight champions (at one time or another) John Henry Lewis (24 years old at the time) and Billy Conn (twice, when Conn was 23 and 28 years old). That's another 3-0 for Louis, all by knockout, against world champions who were in their 20's each time.

Two of Louis's three losses, the losses really being the only thing that superficially make him look worse than Marciano, can be directly attributed to the fact that Marciano knew when to quit, and Louis didn't. To be fair, actually, Louis had financial troubles with the IRS that forced him to keep fighting long after he probably would have retired. Marciano has one undeniable advantage in their primes: He never lost, while Louis did. Once. Louis, after winning the title, defended the title against the only man to beat him, just two years after their first fight, and knocked him out in two minutes, showing that he had improved upon the weakness that Schmeling had noticed -- Louis's tendency to drop his left hand after throwing a jab. With that weakness shorn up, Louis went undefeated for more than a decade (14+ years). Marciano's entire professional career lasted 8 1/2 years. Marciano fought ONE world champion under the age of 35. Louis fought eight, and knocked them all out. Louis was 6'2" tall and weighed around 200-205 pounds. Marciano was 5'10", weighed in the high 180's, and was extremely easy to hit. He made up for it with fierce determination and a huge punch, but it's a lot easier to be fierce against has-beens and never-weres.

I don't mean to sound as if Marciano wasn't a great fighter. He was a great fighter. If you look closely at those 49 wins, though, it's pretty clear that he was helped by being in the right place at the right time (well after Louis's prime, and before Ali's...a time during which there was a dearth of great heavyweights). Sometimes, great competitors come along at the same time and have epic battles with each other (Borg & Connors; Bird & Magic; Ali, Frazier & Foreman). Sometimes, all-time greats don't have other all-time greats against whom to measure themselves (Anatoly Karpov, chess champion for more than a decade, but who happened to come along after Fischer and before Kasparov). Joe Frazier, prior to his first retirement, was 32-4 with 27 knockouts. If you take out the Ali and Foreman fights, he was 31-0 with 27 knockouts. Sounds a bit like Marciano's record, don't it? And Frazier was 5'11 1/2" and 205-210 pounds -- bigger than Marciano, and with a similar style. What's the real difference between Frazier and Marciano? Marciano didn't have to contend with a peak Ali and a peak Foreman.

Rocky Marciano and Joe Louis were two of the all-time great heavyweights. But put them in the same ring ten times in their mid-late 20's, and Louis wins eight of them.