‘Its not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’ Mark Twain.
‘A good big one always beats a good small one,’ so the traditional axiom goes. Strength and skill combine to determine success or failure – the implication being that with equality of skill then strength is the key determinant.
There is however, as Twain noted, an unmeasurable third element that impacts on any contest. Everyone has an awareness of it but because it can’t be measured in inches or appreciated in technique it is often assumed to be more or less equal in all contestants. What Twain alluded to is that this isn’t the case and just as with strength or skill the will to win is not equal in all. It’s measure can only be determined in reaction to adversity, the ability to dredge up something when there is apparently nothing left and whilst it can’t surmount the insurmountable, it can on occasion add the missing inches or bridge the skill gap.
A prime example of this was Rocco Francis Marchegiano aka Rocky Marciano. Its true Rocky was no weakling but he was a little guy even amongst the smaller heavyweights that populated the scene back in the 40’s and 50’s. At 5'10" he was the second shortest heavyweight champ ever, his reach of 68” was the shortest of any heavy weight champion. His weight, around 188lbs, would make him a very small cruiserweight by today’s standards. Needless to say he was outweighed by almost all his opponents. To this can be added the ‘advanced’ age, Rocky took up boxing- after a failed attempt to make it in baseball. Firstly a short, undistinguished, amateur career at age 23 and then turned pro at 25 which meant he never acquired the levels of skill many fighters brought with them into the pro ranks.
Much is made of the poor quality of the heavyweight division of the 50’s and compared to the 70’s heavyweight heyday Marciano ploughed his furrow in stony ground however it should also be noted that at the time there were eight weight classes and one champ in each class. He fought everyone that was a contender at the time and no world champion has retired undefeated with as many fights as Rocky Marciano.
Charlie Goldman, the famous trainer, who performed the pugilistic equivalent of alchemy noted on first seeing Rocky that he was short, stoop shouldered, balding and clumsy. The one thing that caught his eye was Marciano’s right, his ‘Suzi Q’. Later in his career it was reported as having been measured by the US Testing Corp at a colossal 925 foot pounds, ie if he punched an almost 1000 lb object as hard as he could it would move one foot. It was enough for Goldman to give Rocky a trial. As well as his heavy right hand Rocky had tremendous punch resistance, apparent imperviousness to pain and he developed supreme conditioning. Goldman honed the raw material at his disposal into a limited but unusual skill set. Rocky fought out of a crouch making him harder to hit and shortened his stance. The end product was still crude, even the more so when the boxing press of the day compared him to the recent champ, the great Joe Louis, but as Goldman noted "a lot of people say Rocky don't look too good in there, but the guy on the ground don't look too good either."
With his unorthodox skill set and tremendous conditioning Rocky could impose himself on the majority of his opponents swarming and outworking them until he could deliver one of his trademark KOs. In 1952, ‘53 and ‘54 Ring magazine had a Marciano fight as Fight Of The Year, his relentless, wrecking- ball performances making him a big box office draw. However as with any fighter who pits themselves against ‘live’ opponents there will be times where despite a fighters best efforts victory seems to be inexorably slipping away.
For most fighters these nights end in defeat and the greats have to demonstrate their greatness in coming back. Though Marciano looked down the barrel of defeat most clearly in two of his contests he was able to answer the call in the fight itself and emerge victorious. The first occasion was in his world title challenge against Jersey Joe Walcott. Going into the 13th he was behind by a landslide on the scorecards and taking a significant beating from the heavier, more skilled Walcott. Rocky backed his opponent on to the ropes. At last he got the timing of his Suzi Q such that it landed just as Walcott was throwing a right of his own. The result was the most iconic KO in heavyweight history. As famous boxing historian Bert Sugar noted the referee could have counted to one hundred, Walcott wouldn’t have answered the count.
The second occasion was in his return bout with Ezzard Charles. Rocky had won a points decision in their first bout but suffered an unusual vertical cut to the nose in round six of the return. The cut worsened (his nose was basically split in half). The corner couldn’t staunch the flow of blood and at the end of the 7th the ref inspected the cut. Though Marciano said it wasn’t bothering him the ref saw the seriousness of the injury. The bout should by rights have been stopped then but in the face of Marciano’s protestations and probably because the heavyweight title actually meant something back then the ref gave Rocky one more round. Marciano had at that point fought 22 rounds with the skilful Charles and hadn’t been able to land a KO blow. He won by KO with 24 seconds of the 8th round remaining.
Though many of his fans will point to the fabled 49 and 0 figures it isn’t those figures themselves that really define Marciano, rather what they represent. It was that when all appeared lost; that with the boxing cognoscenti smiling knowingly that Rocky had at last been found out, that he really was nothing more than a crude throw back, that the other guy just had too much; that the very fight gods themselves had cast their smile upon his opponent , Marciano still didn’t have an ounce of quit in him. Somewhere deep inside he found the means of defying what fate had apparently decreed was his lot that night and maybe if you could actually have seen that spirit as inches Rocky would have been towering over his opponent rather than the smaller of the two fighters.