The Sweet Science

by A.J. Liebling, Robert Anasi (Foreword)

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 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 as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, History, Martial Arts, Journalism, Essays, Audiobook

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Abbott Joseph "A. J." Liebling was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.

Reviews

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A boxer like a writer must stand alone."

So does this book. It is quite simply a love song to boxing, boxers, and the fans. I am one of the last. From youngsters boxing in Manchester, England (their mothers were the wildest thing with their shouts) to underground fights between corporate executives in London (champagne and high heels for that one) and more, I have watched. That's right. And I feared when I blinked, I'd miss a knockout.

Liebling never blinks. He sees and records it all for years which makes this a witness's history of the sport. Personal in every way, the fights that are remembered are all up close. I've sat ringside. This is better. Liebling saw the greatest boxers in his and, arguably, all time.

Frank Capra once said "If the shot isn't good enough, you're not close enough." No problem for Liebling. He gets in close back when fans listened on radios. His pen, then, and here is poised as any camera.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sweet Science ranks number one on the Sports Illustrated best books of all time list. The book collects some of A.J. Liebling's boxing essays from The New Yorker . Liebling writes in a dry and sarcastic style, and even without knowing or caring much about boxing in the pre-Cassius Clay era of the 20th century I could still find the book enjoyable. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace's tennis essays. I don't care about tennis, but the writing brings and enjoyment to a topic that I would normally pay little or no attention to.

This book was going to be the inaugural title in a sports themed series of books I had planned. I was going to peruse the SI list of books and for each sport represented in the list choose one book and read it. That way I'd read some authors and subjects I normally wouldn't be exposed to, and I'd feel like more of a man and know something about sports. Instead (I guess) I wound up feeling emasculated when I couldn't find the basketball book I wanted to read in the library database and then had my baseball and football book requests erased because the books didn't actually exist in the stacks. It didn't take much to be discouraged. I gave up. But I still read this book which is about guys hitting other guys in the face. Sometimes till they fall down and don't get back up for a bit.

Liebling wrote these essays when the sport was going through a dark time. In the early to mid 1950's TV was interested in boxing and fights were being shown for free on the networks. Fight fans no longer had to go outside to enjoy a fight, they could watch high quality action in the comfort of their own home, and not have to pay for a ticket. This was great for people who didn't want to pay for a ticket, but for the fighters and the sport this was apparently awful. Before TV there existed a thriving fighting culture, local sports clubs and small time venues gave fighters a place to hone their skills. Fighters learned through experience, and could eke out a living from the the money they earned fighting in the small fights. Over time they got better. With TV the lower rungs of the fighting food-chain disappeared. New and exciting fighters were needed to keep things fresh, but without places to fight and the time it took to learn the 'sweet science' of connecting fist to face the quality of the new fighters was lacking. Poorer fighters meant poorer fights. Poorer fights sucked to watch and the whole sport began to fester. Liebling doesn't care for this state of affairs, and he sounds like the doomsayers of books versus digital reading machines.

These essays are fun to read. He jabs and mocks with his words but there is a genuine love that he has for the subject, and the reader can tell that he has some experience first hand in having someone put their fist in your face (sadly, something I don't know really anything about and which makes me wonder how erudite say Joyce Carol Oates paeans to fighting can really be (why would this subject be any different that someone needs to have first hand knowledge to really write about something? I don't know but I think that our society has demonized while fetishizing violence that most of us have no real understanding of it, and I think it's a misunderstanding that is easiest to be overcome by being hit in the face by someone in a non-anger / irrational / bullying / exploitive manner (I also think that since John Updike died Joyce Carol Oates is our greatest living gigantic phony))). This is fine good writing, and can be of interest to anyone who appreciates the art of putting words after other words to make effective prose.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never really thought I would read a book about boxing. It's not a subject I'm very interested in or know much about. In fact, right before I started this book, I did a short review of all of the boxers I know by name and realized that I knew most of them from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire". Awesome.

But when I found out that Sports Illustrated named this book as the best American sports book of all time, I figured I had to give it a read. I'm glad I did.

The Sweet Science is a collection of essays about boxing that A.J. Liebling wrote for the New York in the early to mid 1950s. They cover some of the most famous boxers and fights of the day, including Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, and Archie Moore.

I loved Liebling's voice and prose in these essays. Anyone who can reference both Dicken's Mr. Pickwick, Greek tragic heroes, and Euclidean geometry while writing about boxing is okay in my book. Reading his accounts of the fights made me feel like I was accompanying him there while he provided insightful commentary about tactics, society, and where the particular match belonged in boxing history (which, as a side note, I didn't realize went as far back as it does - Liebling would often refer to famous matches from the 1700s!).

This book also did something I wouldn't have thought possible - it made me want to watch a boxing match. Liebling gave me an appreciation of the tactics and intelligence that is required of a good boxer. Prior to this book, I thought of boxing as purely about one guy being able to hit the other guy harder, but now I know that that is but one part of a larger game. Very cool.

[Peter Derk · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can't go too far into books about fighting without running into this one over and over.

Like a lot of older books, you can feel the vintage on this one. For me, it's about three things: Descriptions of people, descriptions of places, and a careful catalouging of what everybody is eating.

The first serves the book well. Getting a description of the different boxers is helpful, especially because it seems like most descriptions of the time are strongly influenced by whether or not the writer is a fan of an individual.

The second is alright, but every bout the guy attended was prefaced by a description of the crowd and the venue. There was some pretty good material about people seat-hopping and the way they would try to pretend like they had no idea what they'd done, but ultimately it got to be just another part of another chapter.

The third, I could care less. Eat an egg hard boiled or soft. Just eat the damn egg already.

Probably the most interesting part of this book, to me, was that Liebling made a pretty good case for television ruining boxing. It would go against logic in a lot of ways. You'd think the increased chance for exposure would be huge. But in fact, television killed amateurism, which killed the sport.

The problem, as he put it, was that time was a young fighter would fight in small clubs, clubs spectators would pay to enter. This meant that a young fighter could get quite a bit of experience before stepping into the ring for a full-length match against a dangerous opponent. Television, however, only featured big fights, which meant that a lot of fighters had to either be pushed into the big time way before they were ready or figure out how to make their money elsewhere.

He probably put it best, saying that television's not concerned with the sport, only the sale of beer and razor blades.

I don't think much has changed, sadly. Most fighting sports are amped up artificially with layers of invented grudges and so on that are supposed to heighten the drama, but to me they just cheapen the whole thing and are meant to sell energy drinks.

Hell, at least when they were selling razors and beers they were selling products I could get behind.

I guess the book also makes a case against television in that it is very descriptive of a world that existed around a sporting event. Through the long descriptions of New York City, the ways Liebling got to the fights and the bars he visited afterward, you got the sense of these fights being big events, a full night out for a lot of people. There's a positive to being able to see every major league game in your living room, but there's also a price, and that price is the loss of a sense of community around sports. At least for me. I could watch 100 games on tv, but I'm way more likely to remember actually going to ONE because of the people I'm there with and what we might have talked about.

This might be why people are always wanting to talk about sports. Maybe if everyone was actually going to stuff, they could talk to the people there and leave me the hell alone about it.

Anyway, I would skip this one unless you're just a huge fan of 1950's boxing. It's a bit of a slog, and to me there's a lot about it that's very dated. It's about a golden era, and it's got some cleverness to it, but it's just not that great a read, start to finish.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I resisted reading this book, just because, as a lover of boxing and literary journalism, my tendency is to love books I don't hear praised much, and to find myself underwhelmed by canonized classics. I never liked Leonard Gardner's "Fat City" or W.C. Heinz's "The Professional," but I loved Ralph Wiley's "Serenity" and Tom Hauser's "The Black Lights" about a now-mostly-forgotten champ named Billy Costello.

I took the plunge into "The Sweet Science," and while I loved some of the writing, especially the very revealing looks at Archie Moore and Rocky Marciano, those bits not about the Old Mongoose or the Brockton Blockbuster left me relatively cold. Some of this has to do with Liebling's style, which is logorrheic (that sounds like a sexually-transmitted malady, but is just another word for "wordy"). He also demonstrates a weird over-reliance on Pierce Egan's old "Boxiana" treatises on fighting. And he's strangely attached to using the word "cove," which in modern lexicons usually means a recessed area by the sea-line or a sheltered nook, but for him (and probably in other archaic lexicons) means an expert. Some people like this maximalist (sic) approach to their boxing journalism, but it just doesn't work for me, as a matter of personal preference. It's like reading Joyce Carol Oates' essays on Tyson; after awhile I don't want to hear anymore about the quotidian limning of the primal urge instantiated in the ring.

Some hyperbole is fine, but I much prefer Mark Kram's eloquence over Liebling's muddled historical metaphors. That said, this is just a personal preference (and I'm in the visible minority with my dissent here), and there are snatches of true poetry in and among the larger whole. Liebling's work is an artifact from a time when men wore cigar-smoke as a kind of cologne, and fights were as apt to happen at the Polo Grounds as at Madison Square Garden. In that sense, the book's a good time capsule, but even if I were searching for something to recommend on pure nostalgic grounds, I'd rather recommend some Budd Schulberg (whose "The Harder they fall" was loosely based on the story of the mafia's connection with heavyweight champ Primo Carnera, later adapted into a great movie starring Humphrey Bogart).

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a science not as sweet as developmental biology and genetics on account of their use of various honeys and syrups in experimentations, but the science of bruising the faces of fellas is pretty sweet indeed.
I liked how one part of the book has a man go into an open box surrounded by ropes and then another man comes in after that and then a man in the center asks them other two men to come to the center and then theys given instructions and then theys set to whomping on one another with their meaty fists encased in colored cow skins. I like that part of the book and then that part is repeated several more times but with different men in that box. This was set at a time when ladies weren't so much invited into that box to do their own whomping on one another (that comes later.) I think what made this book so good was the pieces about the history of whompins intermixed with the present state of whomopin but the book was written at a time that we now look back as the past of whompin. That's the magic of reading. The sweet magic of reading.

[Captnamerca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good and very well-written. Each chapter is an essay about a fight, usually covering a short history, training camp, the fight itself, and some reflection. Liebling is an excellent writer and makes every fight seem like the outcome is still uncertain, even sixty years later. I only wish he would have been around to cover the rise of Muhammad Ali.

[Tung · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sports Illustrated once called this book the “best American sports book of all time.” If one were to rate books based completely on prose and intelligence, you might be able to make that argument. I prefer to make book recommendations based on prose and intelligence certainly, but also on depth and meaning, and on entertainment value and personal appeal (hence my high opinion of The Stolen Child). And on both of those last two points, this book was a profound disappointment to me. The Sweet Science is a collection of essays on boxing written during the late 1950s/early 1960s by a New Yorker staff writer. The essays are character portraits and period pieces about boxing’s last great era of prominence (excluding later fights by Ali, of course). Liebling’s prose reminded me of Sinclair Lewis: clear and precise, but certainly dated and a bit stuffy. His vocabulary was challenging (I actually learned a few new words like “pyknic” and “succedaneum”). Ultimately, however, the pieces lose the depth and appeal they once probably had due to boxing’s current decline in cultural prominence. His essays assume the readers are boxing fans; for instance, one essay had the sentence “The fight was, as you probably read . . . .” Well, forty years later, no I hadn’t actually read that and didn’t know how the fight was going to end. Liebling doesn’t try to capture the excitement of the fights he describes because he assumes the reader watched the fight, heard the fight on radio, or read about the fight in great detail. Without that context and background, however, his pieces lose any meaning or appeal. Very dry read. Pass on this one, unless you are an old school boxing fan.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a rambling tour of the world of boxing over a number of years before and after WWII. You hear all the stories. This is a fan’s view, but from a fan with access to the boxer and, as important, access to the other people in the “industry”, the boxers, the trainers, the gamblers, the other writers. And, most importantly, the other fans (and frankly anyone who had an opinion). The stories ramble from one topic to the next, often following Liebling through a night of watching boxing, from finding his seat and describing the others in his section to visiting a bar afterwards and maybe finding the bartender was at the same fights, and heading south from the boxing venue to get a train going north, because that's how you get a seat, of course. The boxing is mostly in NYC, with some trips to Chicago and even Ireland to allow for some interesting comparisons. Although this is a collection of essays written over the years, they seem to fit together very well because of that rambling style. I enjoyed the style of the writing. You can tell Liebling was a born storyteller, and his writing comes across like he’s telling you this story about a night watching boxing while he’s sitting next to you in a bar. Favorite image: Liebling describes an undercard fight between far-from-championship-level fighters, one a thin Philadelphian and the other short and barrel-chested, as “it was a contest between a vertical line and a cube.” He describes a fan sitting next to him as calling the “cube” fighter a “griller”. “The griller did not succeed in converting the Philadelphian into a horizontal, but he made him look like two sides of a triangle seeking a third.” A fun read.

[Ta0paipai · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first Sweet Science disappointed me but it heated up towards the end. Liebling paints a colorful picture of boxing's bygone era, a time where TV was still gaining a cultural foothold and written accounts of fights still held high value. Liebling also dawdles around the trivial details of his experiences - his cab rides, his meals, how he obtained his tickets (did he pay or were they free?). You'll learn more about Liebling's preflight habits than you will about most if the actual fighters or fights, but it's still kind of a fun ride.

Marciano v Moore, the last article in the collection really painted an epic picture of two legends in the sport. It was by far my favorite in the book.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colonel Stingo, Mush Sallow, Chickie Ferrara, Whitey Bimstein, Tiny Payne, Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, Jimmy Tomato, Bertie Briscoe . . . This book is worth reading just for the names.

[Corey Erdman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the finest boxing writing ever, which launched a whole era and style of writers trying to sound like Liebling.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of essays by the legendary New Yorker writer. In a storied career (here is a good survey), Liebling wrote about medieval literature, reported on the war from Europe and North Africa, and chronicled what squeamish editor Harold Ross called "low life" (seal trainers, singing fish, a man who fished coins out of subway gratings). But this collection is simply about boxing.

Let me hasten to add that I have little interest in the subject and think it probably immoral (and gridiron not much better)*, but can Liebling make it interesting? Well, somewhat. He is inspired by Pierce Egan, author of Boxiana , who in a running gag he refers to as the:
- Thucydides
- Froissart
- Holinshed
- Philippe de Commines
- Parkman
- Blind Raftery (this one a poet, unless he means someone else?)
- Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory

etc, of the old London prize ring. At times he considers whether boxing, the dolce scienza, is truly scientific - whether the accumulated body of technique can be defeated by a talented amateur. (Unsuprisingly, yes, although I don't know if that is still true nowadays). He describes Archie Moore's fight against Rocky Marciano as one between artist and intellectual.

This is a book suffused in nostalgia, about the world that television ended. Liebling hates television ("a ridiculous gadget utilized in the sale of beer and razor blades"), even more than he hates Chicago (his The Second City coined a put-down the city has never shaken). In the world he describes - maybe the 1920s, bolstered by mass unemployment in the 30s, clearly on the way out by the end of the 40s when this was published - boxing was the form of mass entertainment, given national awareness by radio, but still requiring crowds to come out and see the biggest names in Madison Square Garden and other major urban arenas. The final article involves Liebling traveling to Donnybrook ("universally synonymous with an unofficial, free-for-all fight") to witness a match. After the war the flight to suburbia had already begun ("everyone could only talk about their lawn and their car"). Of course, enthusiasm for sport continues unabated today - I even remember one boxing match being a big deal in my lifetime, Holyfield-Tyson II, although mostly because of the bite - but it's so much more fragmented: everything competes simultaneously with every other form of mass entertainment, and even a single sport event is taken in in myriad forms: TV broadcasts in every language, corporate boxes, live streams, fan podcasts, etc. Not one single mass event but a thousand little ones. Even gladiatorial combat and bull fighting, abhorrent as they are, must have evoked a sense of sublimity and magic and mass consciousness in their spectators, and surely even in ancient Rome there were old poets who lamented the decline of the old ways.

* Liebling dismisses the claim that boxing causes brain damage; he cites Hemingway and Camus as counterexamples. What more proof could you need?

[Dre · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.59 / 5 💫

Published in 1956, this is a wonderful collection of pugilistic essays Liebling wrote for the New Yorker in the 1950s. It was named the Best Sports Book of All Time by Sports Illustrated not only for Liebling’s vivid accounts but how perfectly he captures the theater of the ring and the colorful characters within; but also outside of the corners, in the crowd, in the waiting lines for beer, in the taxi cabs before the fight, in the celebratory dives after wins, in the gyms after losses.

Liebling captures the sport that perhaps - even more than baseball or horse racing - represented the heartbeat of America, at least for a time. His accounts are expertly reported, poignant and often very funny. It is not beneath me to say, this was a knockout.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not really much of a fan of boxing (although I do love boxing movies). If it’s on TV I’ll watch a bit, and if someone invites me over to their house for a pay per view party, I’ll probably go. So, I’m not sure I’m the ideal audience for this book, and yet I enjoyed it. Liebling is a very good writer with a gift for capturing memorable people (and their dialogue) in a few bold strokes. The world he describes has largely vanished, (It was vanishing even as he wrote these essays, a victim of television) and it was interesting to look at it through his enthusiastic eyes.

[Chris Sulima · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars. An interesting time capsule of essays centered around the boxing scene in the 1950s. I didn’t get into it as much as I expected I would, and some of the segments were somewhat repetitive enough that they run together in my recollection, though the writing style kept it entertaining. This was pretty much all new information for me, but I enjoyed learning about the different personalities in the boxing world of this era, as well as the societal observations in general that liebling provided.

[Dominick · Rating 2 out of 5]

what i expected to be extremely interesting collection of insightful comments on boxing ended up being nothing more than a guy's experiences going to madison square garden to watch c-list 1940s boxers fight. he eats hotdogs and drinks a lot of beer and writes in his notepad the different moves and his predictions of whose going to win and then he tells you who won. alright man, thanks. you just wrote this because you couldn't get into the green room and actually meet any of the fighters you speak about.

[Edward · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love A.J Liebling's writing. His personality comes through in a way that can't be faked by those who aren't such interesting characters. However, I just couldn't finish this book. I made it about 80% through before I realized I really have no interest in boxing. So I don't recommend this book unless you're a boxing fan.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joe might have been the best fight writer of all time. His piece on the first Marciano fight against Jersey Joe Walcott alone makes the book worth the read.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happened to be reading this when the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul fight was being aired. A wonderful collection of journalist (and avid boxing fan) Liebling‘s sports articles for the New Yorker, regarding the first-rate pugilists of 1940s and 1950s America, as the advent of television-aired matches began to rob Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium and amateur boxing clubs of paying audiences.

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first essay in the book is excellent and hilarious, the way it so artfully describes the role of the sports fan makes it a classic. A later piece on Marciano vs Walcott is also worth the price of admission alone. Unfortunately, a collection of essays is much like boxing; not all the punches you throw connect.

My enjoyment of each essay was moderated by three features, how well I knew the boxer he was referring to, how good of a boxer they were, and how much the essay connected to a wider social context. Liebling's best pieces are ones that combine all three.


When he's writing of a champion like Joe Louis, who could really box, connecting Louis back to fights 100 years previous, linking him to the social issues of the time and demonstrating Louis' true power in and out of the ring, Liebling's prose sings. You can feel yourself there, or rather you wish you were there.


Liebling's commentary on the demise of boxing as the sweet science is interesting too, I'd love to know what he would say about the current scene, because arguably it's only gotten worse. The trend Liebling identified with the domination of TV has fully reached it's endgame, you're either the champion of the world or you're nothing. To further undermine the plight of the amateur, mothers don't want their children boxing anymore. There's just too much fear of what the lasting damage of getting consistently whacked in the head will do. We all witnessed the terrible price Ali paid to be "The Greatest" and most mothers don't want their child paying that price.


It's interesting because Liebling's lament is essentially that intelligence has been drained out of boxing. Though at the same time many of his best pieces are about Rocky Marciano who was essentially a brick with eyes. Perhaps he's right about intellectual de-powering of the sport, though one could argue that geniuses of bodily talent and incredible craft still emerge, just look at someone like Lomachenko. It seems the sport can still create compelling narratives and pull millions of viewers but it's the critics and aficionados that have really been drained from it, which partly explains why Liebling's work is still considered the best boxing writing of all time.


In Australia people only seem to be interested in celebrities or cross code sportsmen boxing, partly for the story and partly for the amateurism. By dropping the standard of the fight it seems the bar to watch and enjoy is dropped too, people with little to no knowledge can watch without feeling out of their depth. Boxing's popularity is under threat from the no holds barred blood sport of MMA, which pulls the seekers of violence away. It's also in many ways under threat by the WWE and other wrestling comps, which pull the fans of story-telling away. Beset on all sides by competitors and being undermined from within by celebrities and cross-code sports stars, boxing somehow still feels like the most pure and true of all fighting sports. It's history stretches back into time.


Liebling's reverence of Pierce Egan can become tiresome, though it's extremely important. The insights and context given to the pieces from some of these connections to Egan's observations add gravitas and history to the present. Liebling's ability to connect fighters back to their predecessors is symptomatic of boxing's greatest strength as a sport. The concept of the lineal champion. That is to say that the current lineal champion beat the previous champion, who beat the one before him, and on and on until the beginning of time, where single celled amoebas hit each other with their flagella. It's awesome and you can't do that with many other sports.


It's hard to even choose who the best football player in the world is let alone when it changes. Other sports like tennis have a #1 but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the best in the world at that time and they may also lose consistently to a particular opposition. The lineal title is what gives boxing its history and power, Liebling's understanding of that and usage of Egan to connect all "milling coves" together in a line that stretches back through the fog of time is brilliant work and well worth the read. You can see them through the ages, from Pollux and King Amycus, through Ali and Frazer, to Joshua and Ruiz, two men pitched in battle, with nothing but their wits and fists to fight with, what they're fighting for has changed over the years as has the way they go about it but it's still the same primal contest, man vs man.

[Paul O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mentioned to my wife that I was reading a book called The Sweet Science. She initially appeared intrigued. The title does prompt an eye arch from anyone unfamiliar with the book's subject or renown. Upon her further inquiry, however, and the discovery that the "sweet science" actually concerned the "sweet art of bruising", according to Pierce Egan, who Liebling refers back to time and again, she appeared to lose interest; although whatever lost, she gained in puzzlement. She would need seek her literary confections elsewhere. Liebling's classic work, consisting entirely of pieces of boxing journalism, has a romantic feel running throughout it. This likely merited it the honor of being awarded the best sports book of all time; or so Sports Illustrated accused it of being. The early 50s was a pivotal time for boxing; the time of the elder Louis and the younger Marciano. Most notably, however, it was between an age where the boxing match was strictly a community event which made an audience the true third man of the match, not the referee; and an era to come that would completely dominate the sport through the televised event that would effectively take the audience out of it, in more ways then one. Televised events would also turn all events that weren't the main event into non-events. This, Liebling states, crippled the boxing profession immensely, or, at least, thinned it out. This period of flux is the background for Liebling's book. In reading Liebling's great articles, one actually gets the feel for what it must have been like for a fight-goer in New York in the 50s. Liebling was a master at depicting the symbiotic relationship between the pugilists and those who came to watch, admire, instruct, and curse them. He is, also, a true student of the sport and his analysis is informative, fascinating and delightfully humorous. This is a collection that finishes quite strong. Hardly a surprise. As a professional spectator at boxing events, Liebling understood that the last round of a match was usually the most important one to be on top of your game. Books require stamina as much as boxers do. The last article, called "Ahab and Nemesis", describes the 1955 bout between Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore. Liebling recounts this as a match, not just between men, but between concepts: brains(Moore) & beastly power(Marciano). It reminded me much of those past "concepts", Tunney & Dempsey. This chapter showcases Liebling's artful & humorous writing style:

He(Marciano) waddled in, hurling his fists with a sublime disregard for probabilities, content to hit an elbow, a bicep, a shoulder, the top of a head--the last considered to be the least profitable target in the business, since, as every beginner learns, "the head is the hardest part of the human body", and a boxer will only break his hands on it. Many boxers make the systematic presentation of the cranium part of their defensive scheme. The crowd, basically anti-intellectual, screamed encouragement.

Okay, I can't resist, one more snippet from the same chapter and bout:

It was the fourth, though, that I think Sisyphus began to get the idea that he couldn't roll back the rock. Marciano pushed him(Moore) against the ropes and swung at him for what seemed a full minutes without ever landing a punch that a boxer with Moore's background would consider a credit to his workmanship. He kept them coming so fast, though, that Moore tried just getting out of their way.

Sweet, indeed, eh??

[George · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Sports Illustrated considers this to be the best sports book ever written, then I don't think I'll read a book about sports ever again.

Did I finish this book? No. Did I like this book? Sort of. Why am I marking it as read? Because I consider a DNF to be a book that I either a) have read less than half of or b) have the intention to pick it up later.

I read over half of this book, and I typically finish a book when I get past the halfway point out of some rule in my head.

A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science is a book I simply could not finish. I'll admit, the first half was interesting. I liked the discussion of fighters like Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joe Louis. Then, in the last section of the book called "Other Fronts," which takes up the second half, the structure and any form of narrative falls apart. This section feels like the first drafts Liebling did before honing his skills and creating the first half of the book. I say this because the structures of each "story" in "Other Fronts" follows the same structure every time .

It goes as follows: Description of fight written about by Pierce Egan, description of boxer's previous fights, description of manager, description of training, description of boxer, description of opponent, description of opponent's manager, description of opponent's training, description of the day leading up to the fight, description of the fight, and a final quip. It's this way every single time, even in the parts I found interesting. When I lost interest in the fighters and boxing as a whole, which, the book became a constant slog.

The introduction of my edition states that Liebling is an important journalist because he began to write in a "New Journalism" style 15 years before the term was coined by Tom Wolfe. Liebling's style, however, is still trapped in the early 1950s. New Journalism typically placed the reporter as a central character in the story, but Liebling is more of a drifting shadow in these stories.

If Liebling's point about boxing is that, at the end of the day, all of the fighters regardless of race all boil down to the same type of person - a dedicated poor man who sees fighting as his only way of making it in the world - then he has succeeded in spades. I don't think I needed 30 examples of this to get that point. Since I don't believe this is Liebling's point and since he seems to be writing this book as a love letter to the sport, I think the book falls short of its goal.

And, to the editors of Sports Illustrated , I say this: Just because a book was the first to do something doesn't mean it is the best to do it.

If you want to feel like you're in the 1950s reading a newspaper article and chuckling at very very dry and very very mild humor, read a section of this book each day and enjoy your pipe.

[Kid · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a fan of the sports read - check the rest of my titles if you're a doubter. . .this book is somewhat unassailable - even if it is exclusively about boxing in the 40s and 50s. . .

This is a collection of essays about various boxing matches first published in the New Yorker back when pugilists held more of a cultural sway. I think the last boxer who penetrated the popular imagination was Mike Tyson right? Perhaps for all the wrong reasons - but anyway. . .

To call this "the best sports book of all time" as Sports Illustrated did a while back is somewhat of a stretch only because it rarely rises above grand wit. This is no small achievement - there is so much here to recommend - but it also suggests a window into life, into humanity that perhaps this book only occasionally illuminates. It does this sometimes - especially in the last, greatest essay of the collection - a kind of analysis of an aging fighter's final battles. . .I imagine S.I. was thinking of this essay and maybe not trying to read the book over again from the top like I was doing a few weeks ago.

There's no arguing that Liebling crushes all competition in sports journalism. . .he's well-read, thorough, knowledgeable and clever. His pieces are a joy to read and experience.

I did find myself putting this book down though. Liebling is in thrall of Pierce Egan - a British boxing writer from the 1800s who gets referenced ad nauseum throughout the essays. That's OK. Egan is super funny and rich. It's a flaw but not a huge deal.

This book ends up being an extremely nuanced portrait of another time and place - superbly captured and a delicious experience. I do feel as though I would dock it half-a-star just 'cause it did not end up touching me so much. I admire it though.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply enjoyable read, stacked with metaphors and boxing lore. Ever wonder where a 'double cross' got its name? The more you think about it, however, the more paradoxical the book is. For a gregarious sport, where big talk is as much a spectacle as the fight, the author is mostly alone with his thoughts throughout the book, looking in on the action, going for a drink by himself after the fight, walking around in the midtown streets and stopping in at the Neutral Corner to drink with the regulars but avoiding it on fight night. Liebling celebrates the sweet science and the eternal verities of boxing, don't throw the elbow, don't drop the shoulder, and so forth. Truths that had been known since the heyday of Pierce Egan, whom Liebling quotes liberally throughout. But he is writing during the meteoric rise of Marciano, an unorthodox, instinctive fighter to whom the basic thesis of the book does not even apply! Other skilled technical fighters and tacticians go down to the basic physical realities of youthful men taking on older and more experienced, but physically less capable lions, a mythic struggle of old trying to hold off the advance of the young with strategem after strategem a failing body cannot execute. The main theme of the book is, therefore, age and the inexorable decline of the body, a universal complaint which humanizes boxing into a spectacle of human life.

[A.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sweet Science is not really a book about boxing. Yes, it does talk about boxing and various legends in the sport (Rocky Marciano, Jersey Joe Walcott, Sugar Ray Robinson, etc.), but they are not the real focus here.

The real focus is A.J. Liebling's travels through this world, attending fights and getting into the real mechanics of the sport. Liebling's voice is lively and his prose is both funny and sharp. Most importantly, it becomes clear within 10 pages that Liebling truly loves the sport. This is not a passing fancy for him. As a result, it's a book that celebrates boxing for what it really is: the sweetest science.

While I'm a boxing nerd (I've watched fights involving all of the people mentioned above and a lot of the people in the book), this is a book for anyone interested in sports and the people who engage in them. Liebling explains the minutiae of the sport like tactics, strategies, and movements in a way that non-boxing watchers can understand and see the artistry involved (even if it is hideous boxing like that of Marciano).

While he has some questionable viewpoints with regards to boxing on television, Liebling is a smart writer who has really, truly created one of the best sports books of the 20th Century. I would maybe even argue that it's the best sports book of the 20th Century. It's that good.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this thoroughly despite not knowing much about boxing at all. A collection of boxing essays from A.J. Liebling, a writer for the New Yorker from the first half of the 20th century, that are similar but enjoyable. Somewhat cantankerously narrated and dryly observed, Liebling spends time not only watching fights but visiting training camps, sitting at bars with old-timers, chatting about fighters with the man-on-the-street, and periodically referring to the pugilist culture of 19th century Britain as depicted in Boxiana, a British writer of those times whom Liebling admires. (A running joke in his essays is to lob a bombastic line of praise for Boxiana at some point near the beginning.)

While Liebling clearly loves the sport of boxing, he avoids over-reverence, a trap that has snared thousands of mediocre sportswriters. His love is instead communicated through nitty-gritty detail, countless little things that catch his eye and that he then relates to you. This is, for me, the best way to write about sports - don't make it bigger than it is (it's entertainment), don't make mythologies out of the athletes (they're just people), basically don't try too hard. If you love the sport, just write about the sport, and it'll come through.

[Robert S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Sweet Science is often cited as one of the greatest sport books of all time, a tall order among boxing books alone.

Liebling's collection of essays through the 1950s come at an interesting time for the sport of boxing. It is beyond the "glory" days of the sport during the Great Depression but it is before the time where giants like Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier would bring new life to the sport.

Liebling's prose is like few others who decide to pen essays about two men beating each other to a pulp in the ring. His insights are interesting, particularly the idea of television's impact on boxing. It isn't difficult to see his point about how television as a medium negatively impacted it and the point does translate to other sports as well. Baseball immediately comes to mind as something I find far more enjoyable sitting at Fenway Park than at home.

Sometimes I feel that while the prose in The Sweet Science is rich, the material itself on the other hand can leave the reader wanting more from the book. Liebling understands the sport, but its a different story to get to the foundation of what really drives an individual enjoyment in watching it.

If you enjoy boxing, this book is definitely worth reading.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a fascination with the rough and tumble sports of earlier days - the old grit and romance of F1, the days when horse racing was a major draw with celebrities such as Bing Crosby owning horses, the six day races and endurance track cycling events in smoke filled velodromes often accompanied by raucous live music. Add pre-television era boxing to that list. Though Liebling's volume spans the transition to the television age, he looks at the present through an antiquated - or, more accurately, anachronistic - lens. His wit is wry, occasionally barbed, but he also has the capability to turn a beautiful phrase - referring to an old boxer's "hand stitched face" or wondering of a superior boxers approach to his inferior "how will he interpret him." Pick a page at random and joys abound - such as the first, on which he describes personally receiving the punch of Jack O'Brien as "a rapport with the historic past through the laying on of fists", and, furthermore, as a "pedagogical example." Liebling does his noble best to catalogue the lineage of willing fists establishing their temporal relationships with game faces.

[Mark Greenbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't alive to read Ring Lardner or Jimmy Cannon, or to listen to Mel Allen or Red Barber, but I can still read Liebling, a voice from the distant past, and that voice, even in boxing recaps that go back over 60 years, is alive: fully distinct, always cynical, never at a loss for the words of observation. His reports can be repetitive -- the same trips to training camp, the same bull sessions on bar stolls in midtown, the same stooped trainers with miens so grizzled and voices so crusted they hark back before the caricatures were caricaturized, the results all long known, and he seems too to be attempting to emulate his colleague Joseph Mitchell's yearning for connection to the common man without having quite Mitchell's humanity or hope. No matter. Here was a voice, deeply original, with a mastery of the language no reporters alive today can aspire to. His work here is far superior to Earl of Louisiana written closer to the end of his life when Liebling was perhaps tired and felled by his physical addiction to heavy foods and rich wines. Pair this with Up in the Old Hotel for a classic New Yorker feast still satiating in 2017. A lot of fun.

4.5/5