Quote of the Day (A.J. Liebling, on Unsolicited Fan Advice at Boxing Matches)

“Watching a fight on television has always seemed to me a poor substitute for being there. For one thing, you can't tell the fighters what to do. When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally. On occasion my advice is disregarded, as when I tell a man to stay away from the other fellow's left and he doesn't, but in such cases I assume that he hasn't heard my counsel, or that his opponent has, and has acted on it. Some fighters hear better and are more suggestible than others--for example, the pre-television Joe Louis. ‘Let him have it, Joe!’ I would yell whenever I saw him fight, and sooner or later he would let the other fellow have it. Another fighter like that was the late Marcel Cerdan, whom I would coach in his own language, to prevent opposition seconds from picking up our signals. ‘Vas-y, Marcel!’ I used to shout, and Marcel always y allait. I get a feeling of participation that way that I don't in front of a television screen. I could yell, of course, but I would know that if my suggestion was adopted, it would be by the merest coincidence.”—American journalist A.J. Liebling (1904-1963), “Boxing with the Naked Eye,” in The Sweet Science (1956)

Quote of the Day (Gov. Earl Long, on a Crazy Man vs. a ‘Kept’ One)

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, but you will never get to know the truth by reading the Alexandria Town Talk. You all read in that paper that I am crazy. Ohyeah. Do I look any crazier than I ever did? I been accused of saying the fella that owns that paper is a kept man. Maybe he ain't, but I'd like to be kep' as good as he is. He married a rich woman. That's about the best way I know to save yourself about ninety-eight years' hard work.”—Louisiana Governor Earl Long (1895-1960), quoted in A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (1961)

For the current state of elections, I blame mostly the ad men and political consultants for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. These professionals didn’t have much to work with—a corrupt paranoid with an avid interest in policy, and a likable former matinee idol with no interest in policy—and sold them to the American people like bars of soap. Their advice, followed eagerly by their clients, was simple: Stick to the script. Stay on message.

Hearing this, Earl Long (1895-1960), as I think you can tell from the above quote, would have snorted in astonishment. Script? What script?  Message—isn’t that something from Western Union?

Several years ago, in Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, Time Magazine writer Joe Klein recalled Bobby Kennedy’s extraordinary impromptu address, amid the frenetic 1968 primary season, on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, to a group of anguished and angry African-American voters in Indiana. Kennedy spoke of his own brother’s murder, then mentioned his “favorite poet,” Aeschylus, quoting powerful lines about how “pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until ... in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'" 

It was an electrifying moment in American political theater, a pause amid searing tragedy—created at least partly because a candidate was blissfully ignorant of his listeners’ psychographics: “The audience hasn't been sliced and diced by his pollsters, their prejudices and policy priorities cross-tabbed, their favorite words discovered by carefully targeted focus groups,” writes Klein.

“Uncle Earl” Long embodied a long-past moment of political theater, too, but in a comic vein: Aristophanes to Kennedy’s Aeschylus. What he shared with the fated Presidential candidate was an improvised performance. It was spoken, and then some.

“It is difficult to report a speech by Uncle Earl chronologically, listing the thoughts in order of appearance,” wrote The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling. “They chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties.”

Liebling’s politics were distinctly liberal, and certainly Long’s comparatively moderate civil-rights policies (no attempt to break Jim Crow laws, but an expansion of employment and suffrage opportunities for African-Americans) appealed to him. But even if that were not the case, one suspects that his overriding affection for those on the raffish side of life would have led him to hold a grudging affection for this politician.

This was, after all, not only the brother of “The Kingfish,” Huey Long, but a man whose outrageous fling with stripper Blaze Starr inspired the 1989 movie Blaze.

(Incidentally, if you really want an idea of what Earl Long’s life and last campaign were like, you’ll stick with Liebling rather than this movie. Liebling’s profile makes you feel what it was like in that last campaign—one so hot that at one memorable moment, Long holds a bottle of Coca-Cola up to his head to cool off. Director Ron Shelton seems far less interested in telling Long’s story than Blaze’s, and he was certainly besotted in the making of the film with female star Lolita Davidovich, whom he eventually married.)

The chapter from which the “Quote of the Day” was taken appeared in a book edited by Mordecai Richler, The Best of Modern Humor. It’s easy to see why Liebling’s account made it into this 1983 anthology. To be sure, Liebling wrote some clever asides about the politician.

But most of the chapter rolls along on the rhythms of Long’s voice, a style virtually nonexistent among today’s blow-dried, soundbite-hounded, risk-averse politicos. It’s at once colorful, earthy, raw, and even in your face, as when Long confronts a Democratic heckler and gives it to him with both barrels: “I knew your daddy, Camille Gravel, and he was a fine man. But you trying to make yourself a big man, and you nothing but a little puissant."
 

In my home Congressional district, we just went through a primary in which the two candidates bombarded each other for weeks with screaming mail order ads, high-decibel, sneering TV commercials, and nonstop robocalls—all the way to 15 minutes before the polls closed, and all to highlight virtually nonexistent differences between two veteran Democratic liberal congressmen. By the time it was over, I was thoroughly disgusted by the shameful spectacle.

I’m not saying I would have wanted to live in Long’s time, mind you, but the political combat would have been less disembodied, more hand to hand—and infinitely more entertaining.

Oh, one more thing about Long: After an incoherent speech against a bitter enemy, an unremitting racist, in the state legislature, Earl Long's wife, perhaps out of retaliation for his affair with Blaze Starr, committed her husband to a mental institution.  In turn, he managed to check himself out and run in his last political campaign. 

After all this time, it's hard to know the psychological disorder to which Earl Long was indebted. Whatever it was, however, he was still more sane than virtually the entire slate of GOP Presidential candidates this past year.

(Photo of Earl Long, undated, in his office at the state capitol.)

Quotes of the Day (Liebling and Wright, on Yesterday’s Contests and Today’s)

“You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”—Oldtime gym proprietor Harry Wiley on boxing, quoted in A.J. Liebling, “Poet and Pedagogue,” in Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (2004)

“[Middleweight Dave] Menne executes a sneaky jujisu move and traps [Gil] Castillo in a choke hold called a ‘guillotine.’ Castillo struggles helplessly, blood from eye wounds streaming down his face. With each gasp Castillo’s eyeballs roll farther back in bloody eye sockets. His arms flop helplessly. He looks like a rat being strangled by a snake.”—Evan Wright, describing a typical example of “The Ultimate Fighting Championship,” in “Fight Night,” Men’s Journal, March 2002

We’ve come a long way from the “Sweet Science” of boxing hailed by Liebling—peopled by the likes of Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Robinson, the young Muhammad Ali, and others who survived on guile and courage—to a monstrosity called the UFC, or "Ultimate Fighting Championship."

Fans call the UFC a “mixed martial-arts” sports. I call it all organized mayhem. We have no business looking down our noses at gladiatorial contests as examples of the ancient Roman penchant for “bread and circuses” to distract the masses when matches in 21st century America are scarcely less bloodthirsty.

Five years ago, though it seems blessedly longer, I encountered on 48th Street in New York a line of nearly two dozen men in black tie and masks, walking away from the Fox studios. They were contestants on a thankfully short-lived Fox reality dating show called “Mr. Personality,” hosted by Monica Lewinsky.

Well, I guess that if I were on a show hosted by Ms. Lewinsky, I’d want to wear a mask, too, lest my friends and even lots of people I didn’t know discover my infamy. As I watched the long line of these men walk by, I thought I would never again behold a scene so bizarre or so exceeding the boundaries of bad taste. I mean, it was presented by Fox, right? But that was before I read Wright’s account of the UFC.

I had never even heard of the UFC before coming across it in the article by Wright—who, incidentally, in his freelance work for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, LA Weekly, and other publications, has become a vivid chronicler of America’s underbelly. This time, he shows that the UFC is a sport where anything goes—not just the boxing championed by Liebling (perhaps more than deserved, given the rash of pugilists who’ve sustained significant brain damage in recent years and made old before their time), but also kicking and gouging. The whole spectacle only ends when one fighter is knocked unconscious or gives up.

While Republicans and conservatives flail around in confused nihilism today in Obama’s Washington, let’s give them credit for one thing they got right, if only for a short while, on Capitol Hill while they were in control: In the 1990s, Sen. John McCain and columnist George F. Will shamed cable TV from televising the UFC bloodmatches. It looked as if what McCain aptly called a modern form of “human cockfighting” was on the ropes.

But it was not to be. After a few years of peril, new owners of the UFC turned around and mandated “safety rules” and new equipment, such as lighter gloves, making it easier for cable to put on these slugfests all over again.

I’m sorry to say that these “safety regulations” are a myth. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Dr. Steven Brown, a supervising physician for these matches from the Nevada State Athletic Commission. In Atlantic Monthly’s recent profile of former UFC champ Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Brown does his best to make the “sport” sound within the bounds of civilization—it’s not especially brutal, he says—but inevitably what he says spins out of control. He says that he’ll have to leave his ringside seat and enter the ring, because the skill of the fighters is such that an injury is almost guaranteed. Moreover, head injuries are more frequent in mixed-martial-arts fights than in boxing, and there is more bleeding, with eight of 10 cuts that we see coming from the scalp.

Shame worked at least for awhile, so what do you say we try it again—only this time, let’s start on the celebrities who, for reasons because left to their psychoanalysts, have come to the UFC Las Vegas events to cheer on the contenders. Among those who’ve attended these bash-a-thons: Justin Timberlake, David Spade, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jenna Jameson ( just the type of tacky exhibition the porn superstar would attend) and Mandy Moore (just the type of show you’d never expect the sweet girl-next-door singer to watch).