Got Your Number by Mike Greenberg

Author:Mike Greenberg [Greenberg, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

The year was 1943, and a young man from Brockton, Massachusetts, was drafted into the United States Army. In an effort to avoid kitchen duty, and other undesirable tasks, he tried boxing. The young man had no experience as a fighter but quickly showed some natural ability, and after his discharge he began to fight as an amateur. That young man’s name was Rocky Marciano.

“He was the toughest, strongest, most completely dedicated fighter who ever wore gloves,” wrote the famed sports columnist Red Smith. “Fear wasn’t in his vocabulary and pain had no meaning.” All of those traits were necessary in large part because of Marciano’s not-so-large size. Standing five foot ten, weighing between 183 and 189 pounds, Marciano was thought to be too short and too light, and his reach of but sixty-eight inches was the shortest of any heavyweight champ. Marciano made up for his lack of size with great power. As sportswriter John Schulian said: “When you got hit, you stayed hit.”

Utilizing the thundering right hand he nicknamed Suzie Q, Marciano knocked out the first sixteen opponents he faced as a professional, nine of them in the first round. For his career, Marciano knocked out 88 percent of his opponents, the highest percentage of any lineal heavyweight champion dating back to the 1880s. Marciano became the champion in 1952, beating Jersey Joe Walcott, and would never relinquish the title in the ring, remaining the lineal champ from 1952 through 1956, finishing his career 7–0 in title fights. Only one of them, the first of his two meetings with Ezzard Charles, went the distance. Marciano was the smaller fighter in all seven of those title bouts.

One of Marciano’s most famous fights came in 1951, before he became the champion. On October 26, Marciano knocked out the legendary former champ Joe Louis in the eighth round. The aging Louis had been Marciano’s childhood idol, and Marciano famously cried in Louis’s dressing room after the fight. Marciano was named The Ring Fighter of the Year in 1952, 1954, and 1955. In September of ’55, Marciano knocked out Archie Moore at Yankee Stadium. No one knew it was the last time he would grace the squared circle. Seven months later, Marciano announced his retirement from the ring, becoming the first fighter to retire as heavyweight champion since Gene Tunney in 1928. There would not be another until Lennox Lewis, nearly fifty years later.

In 1999, the Associated Press named Marciano the third-greatest heavyweight of the century, behind Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis. But history will remember Marciano for what he had that neither of those great champions did: a perfect record. Marciano remains the only World Heavyweight Champion with a perfect record (49–0), having won every professional boxing fight in his career. That number will forever define Rocky Marciano. As far as I’m concerned, 49 belongs to him.

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