Here is something for you literature fans. It's A.J. Liebling's New Yorker piece on 20-year-old boxer-poet Cassius Clay preparing to smite Sonny Banks at Madison Square Garden, February 1962. I believe this piece later appeared in "The Neutral Corner", a collection of Liebling boxing stories. We can argue who among boxing writers was the best. But about being the funniest, Liebling wins by unanimous decision. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/03/03/poet-and-pedagogue
Paraphrasing he said solid instruction will carry a young man a long way but there's much to be said for innate ability and Clay (Ali) is the type of hero who would be around for a while.
Fantastic writer, very astute man and deep thinker with a tongue in cheek humour. The Sweet Science, it's a must read for any boxing fan, just a masterpiece.
Liebling's fellow writers at The New Yorker later remembered hearing the sound of his laughter as he typed.
There were certainly fellow writers in his day, but at least as it relates to boxing, AJ Liebling had no peers. He looked at boxing as if he were covering the circus. Everyone else focused on just the fighters — and AJ certainly didn’t neglect them in his writing — but he saw a rich milieu of characters making boxing so much more interesting: managers, trainers, promoters, fans, the press, the ex-fighters, bar patrons and even cab drivers … he captured not just the fight, but the experience of going to it and how all of these factors mixed together to make the tapestry that is the Sweet Science.
