June 26, 2007

What to Watch: Coming Up on Cable

MSG's Mecca of Boxing doc is a tribute to the sweet science — and to the network's namesake, Madison Square Garden.

Tube Stake: Programming Reviews by Seth Arenstein

FIGHT NIGHT: MSG recalls Ali-Frazier's 1971 bout and other mythic matches at the Garden.

• Tuesday, June 26

Mecca of Boxing, 8 & 11pm ET, MSG.

I’m afraid I don’t count as everyone when Joe Frazier says, “Everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing, when I fought [Muhammad] Ali at the Garden.” Perhaps he means everyone older than 50.

Regardless, there’s almost nothing two people can do, besides sex, that attracts a bigger crowd than boxing. That’s one of the reasons it was America’s top sport for decades, beginning in the 1920s and lasting some 30 years. During that time, this admittedly biased (but truthful) documentary tells us, Madison Square Garden was the sport’s Roman Coliseum. 

While this one-hour special hypes the Ali-Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, the so-called Fight of the Century, the reason to watch this well-made homage to boxing and the Garden is its vintage footage and recollections of Joe Louis.

Besides the second Louis-Schmeling fight (1938), which took place at Yankee Stadium, the filmmakers decide to highlight two fights at the Garden where the Brown Bomber didn’t fare well.

First was a 1947 bout against a 10-1 underdog by the name of Joe Walcott. Jersey Joe dropped the heavyweight champ twice—an unimaginable occurrence—and by nearly all accounts was robbed by the judges.

The next fight covered by the doc was the last for Louis, as a young puncher from Brockton, Mass., Rocky Marciano, destroyed the aged Louis in 1951.  

Speaking of destruction, the filmmakers almost ruin a good piece with relatively useless interstitials of boxing gloves, gyms, nameless, faceless boxers and silly music. It’s fortunate that, for the most part, they wisely step aside, allowing real boxing footage to be the storyteller. That’s especially true when it comes to the Louis-Maricano fight.

There’s also stellar commentary on the bout from Teddy Atlas of ESPN and eyewitnesses, including marvelous old-timers like Bert Sugar, the writer and historian, and Jerry Izenberg of The Newark Star-Ledger.

Atlas contrasts the two pugilists, saying Louis was a skilled boxer, Marciano “was a wrecking ball…one was Michelangelo, the other was a graffiti artist.” Sugar recalls that Louis was asked if he felt the punches Marciano hit him with were from the style book. Louis’s only response, Sugar says: “‘I don’t know if there was a book—I felt like I was hit with a library.’”

Sugar, again, recalling that evening when Marciano knocked Louis through the ropes: “It was the saddest night for boxing fans…there was no more Santa Claus, there was no more anything.” And Izenberg on the same scene: “Joe Louis draped through the ropes, half in [the ring], half out, in the building that he helped solidify…stretched out, helpless, gone…if that wasn’t the end of innocence…boy, it’s sure flirts with it.”

When raconteurs of this skill have the floor, the best thing to do is step aside and listen.   

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