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The Ageless Warrior: The Life of Boxing Legend Archie Moore
Reviewed by Brett Conway (July 7, 2004)
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In the 1990s, readers of boxing books knew what to expect. They knew what the new release (like the one before it and the one to come) would be about. After Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times and David Remnick’s King of the World, the subject of all the newest boxing books seemed to be Muhammad Ali: he was boxing’s bard.
From Davis Miller’s Tao of Muhammad Ali, Gerald Early’s Muhammad Ali Reader, to the re-release of Jose Torres’ Sting Like a Bee, the existence of those books suggested, in the publishing world at least, that boxing meant only Ali. It is appropriate that during the rise of Ali in the book world, there seemed to be only one fighter fighting. By the mid-1990s, this boxer was at his apex. He was the paragon of showbiz fighters, of matinee idol pugilists, of a type that Ali, with his good looks and charisma, may not have invented but certainly perfected: he was the undefeated Oscar De La Hoya. Now as we see De La Hoya’s boxing career in decline, we boxing fans are witnessing a sea change. Boxing readers seem to be questioning not the importance but the primacy of Ali in boxing publications: they seem to ask why should we write about a fighter who held his hands too low and pulled back from punches and conned his way to many decision victories in the 1970s; they ask why not Rocky Marciano, or the generation of Italians fighting in the 1940s and 1950s, or the seemingly forgotten Charley Burley. The writers have answered: Russell Sullivan has written Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times; Stephen Brunt has produced an anthology called The Italian Stallions: Heroes of Boxing’s Glory Days; Allen S. Rosenfeld has written Charley Burley: The Life & Hard Times of an Uncrowned Champion. The newest book to follow this trend is Mike Fitzgerald’s biography of Archie Moore, The Ageless Warrior: The Life of Boxing Legend Archie Moore.
Fitzgerald, co-author of autobiographies by heavyweight contender Earnie Shavers and heavyweight champion Ken Norton, ostensibly attempts to determine once and for all the number of knockouts Moore had and his age. But he does much more than that: he profiles a rich era of boxing from the 1930s to the 1960s, an era usually known for heavyweights like Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, and Floyd Patterson, or for the stars in the lighter weight divisions like Henry Armstrong, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Rocky Graziano. This era is much richer than anyone can ever imagine: the one fighter who may best define that era is the "Ol Mongoose," Archie Moore, light heavyweight champion from 1952 to 1961.
Fitzgerald’s book details Moore’s life from his birth in 1916 in Mississippi to his death in California in 1998. It contains a lot of extras, too: a foreword by Jake La Motta, a preface by Bert Sugar, and an afterword by Pete Ehrmann. It also contains Moore’s boxing record (with annotations), pictures (starting with his 1951 fight against Alberto Lovell in Argentina), and an extensive bibliography (more on that later).
Moore’s boxing career lasted twenty-eight years, beginning in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1935 and ending in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1963. In between, he traveled the world: Missouri to California, Australia to Argentina, New York to Maryland, Uruguay to Canada. Like Winky Wright before his fight with Sugar Shane Mosley this year, Moore traveled and fought around the world not for pleasure but out of necessity: he was so good that few top fighters and -- until Moore was well into his 30s -- no champion wanted to fight him. Despite his rambles over the globe, he concentrated on his career and compiled one of the greatest boxing records ever: 186 wins, 24 losses, 10 draws, and 1 no contest. His 134 career knockouts are still a boxing record, one considered unbreakable. After retiring from fighting, he stayed involved in boxing. He spent time training the likes of George Foreman (young and old), heavyweight contender Earnie Shavers, and the Nigerian Olympic boxing team.
Moore’s travels helped him gain experience in the boxing ring and develop a unique boxing style, physical and psychological. Moore is still considered the consummate ring artist and his fight films are still studied today by fighters like James Toney and Bernard Hopkins. But his style was not created in a vacuum. Fitzgerald gives credit to Monroe Harrison, a St. Louis heavyweight for developing Moore’s technique. Later a trainer of Sonny Liston, Harrison taught Moore the "armadillo" defense. It allowed Moore to fight out of a crouch with his arms crossed before his face, offering his opponent little in the way of a target. But for Moore, boxing was not just a physical activity; it was also a mental one. It was not enough to know the rudiments of boxing, its mere physical trappings; Moore had to know the mental ones, too. Both in and out of the ring, he practiced and understood what he dubbed "breathology," "escapology," and "relaxism". His boxing psychology can be gleaned from his gloss on heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano’s boxing style: "Marciano didn’t know enough boxing to know what a feint was; he never tried to outguess you – he just kept trying to knock your brains out. If he missed with one punch, he just threw another. Physically and mentally he was like an animal once the bell sounded" (151). Unlike the Marciano he describes, Moore brought more than physical violence to the boxing ring; he brought craft and art. In a country beginning to awaken to its racial prejudice against African-Americans, the black Archie Moore, in the ring, "found complete freedom" (117).
Although Moore is often remembered for the Ali-esque schtick he used to sell his later fights with fighters like light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim and heavyweight champion Marciano, his early career was spent in relative anonymity. Fitzgerald recounts the struggling black fighters and the "spoilers" of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s who could not gain a title fight no matter how merited it was. Not just Moore but also Nate Bolden, Charley Burley (Joe Louis called him the "perfect fighter"), Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezzard Charles, Jimmy Bivins, and many others – these fighters either never got their chance for a shot at a title or were well past their prime when they finally got it. These fighters had to fight each other often just to stay in the business. Eventually, they would all lose. Today, a rising young fighter feels he must not lose because a loss will cost him a contract with HBO or Showtime and seal his fate as a club fighter. In Moore’s day, it was different. A loss did little harm to a career, for as Fitzgerald puts it, "the idea was to learn from your mistakes and do better next time" (36).
Moore made mistakes, learned from them, and did better, but he did not get any closer to a title shot in the 1940s. This part of Moore’s career is richly detailed in Fitzgerald’s book. By October 1940, Moore was the third ranked middleweight title contender, and by 1943, California middleweight champion. By June 1945, Moore had been competing at light heavyweight and was the number one contender, but he decided to try the heavyweights and defeated Jimmy Bivins, a perennial top five contender for the heavyweight title held by Joe Louis. In June 1948 -- less than four weeks after Leonard Morrow knocked out Moore in the first round -- Moore challenged Bivins again and won a decision. Through those ten years, he never received a world title shot although he demolished many top-ten fighters in the middleweight and light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions.
Although he did fight in obscurity for the first half of his career, Moore eventually hit the mainstream in the 1950s, receiving both light heavyweight and heavyweight title shots. Moore’s big money fights include battles against Joey Maxim (from whom he won both the light heavyweight title and Doc Kearns, Jack Dempsey’s old manager), Yvon Durelle (a fight in which Moore was decked four times in the first two rounds and came back to win via eleventh round knockout), Rocky Marciano (the heavyweight champion who knocked Moore out in nine rounds), Floyd Patterson (who, as a heavyweight contender, was written of the way a young Tyson was and who knocked Moore out in five rounds), and Cassius Clay (who humiliated Moore in under four rounds but who was 25 years his junior). Moore never lost his light heavyweight crown in the ring but was stripped of it in 1961 after repeated refusals to fight Harold Johnson, a fighter he had already defeated three times. (Imagine Bernard Hopkins having to fight Robert Allen yet again.)
Fitzgerald recounts Moore’s two hundred-some fights well, providing context, background, and enough blow-by-blow description for the reader to understand not just what happened but why it happened. He also does something I wish more boxing historians would do: When recounting Moore’s beginnings on undercards, Fitzgerald also tells us who was in the main event. Learning that Allen Matthews, another contender frozen out of a title shot, was the main event for Moore’s first fight adds an interesting context to his professional debut.
Although a great read for a fight fan, The Ageless Warrior is a frustrating teaser for the boxing scholar. The biography contains hundreds of sources in the bibliography. They include newspapers, books, periodicals, and interviews, and the writer’s use of them gives the book a rich texture of supporting material; however, the book does not offer any footnotes, thus making it nearly impossible not only to check sources but also to follow up on points made in the book. Checking these sources against the biography is akin to reassembling an uncut lawn from its clippings. This is not the only problem with the bibliography, though. Some sources are used without being mentioned in the bibliography: the book Peron which Fitzgerald uses to talk about Moore’s relationship with the Argentinean President Juan Domingo Peron and his wife, Eva, is neither cited in the bibliography, given an author nor locatable on amazon.com. Harry Kessler’s autobiography The Million Dollar Referee from which Fitzgerald gathers information about Moore’s important fights, including his first light heavyweight title victory over Joey Maxim, does not appear in the bibliography. If the bibliography were improved, the book would be more in the style of Remnick’s King of the World and would help direct writers hoping to research the careers of other neglected fighters from Moore’s era.
Fitzgerald has written a timely book that reflects what is happening in the boxing world today. A few years ago, we in the boxing cult moaned about Bernard Hopkins and Winky Wright not getting their deserved chance against Felix Trinidad and Sugar Shane Mosley. Not only did we eventually get to see those fights, but the fallout from each one shook up the boxing world. The bankable commodities, the fighters who sell tickets (Trinidad and Mosley) lost; the risky investments, the fighters who, in the words of one promoter, could not draw flies (Hopkins and Trinidad) won. The upshot is obvious: You can be as remunerative as Muhammad Ali or any of the glitzy fighters that followed in his wake like "Sugar" Ray Leonard, "Iron" Mike Tyson, or "the Golden Boy" Oscar De La Hoya, but you are still not necessarily the best fighter in the world. As Oscar De La Hoya roared through the lightweight, welterweight, and middleweight divisions (and all those in between), fighting fading champions and refusing rematches (unless he lost) – and earning well over $100 million -- the Ali publishing industry was in full bloom. Now with De La Hoya having lost to both Trinidad and Mosley, having struggled against an anonymous German named Felix Sturm, and facing the depressing (and perhaps disfiguring) prospect of a September fight against Hopkins and now with Winky Wright, Bernard Hopkins, and James Toney – our era’s Burley, Moore, and Charles – surpassing De La Hoya on many of pound per pound charts, maybe we can announce the end of the endless parade of Ali-ographies and the beginning of an appreciation for boxers who do not rely on spectacle but on their fists to earn a living, fighters like Walcott and Charles, Burley and Moore. An entertaining, informative, and well-researched place to start is Mike Fitzgerald’s The Ageless Warrior.
The Ageless Warrior: The Life of Boxing Legend Archie Moore
By Mike Fitzgerald
Foreword by Jake La Motta
Preface by Bert Randolph Sugar
Afterword by Pete Ehrmann
Sports Publishing
275 pages, $24.95
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