Rocco MARCHEGIANO is a simple, good-natured fellow who goes around hitting people terribly hard. He bruises their bellies, blasts the breath from their lungs, breaks the skin of their heads and generally bangs them about until, brains addled with agony, they fall unconscious. In his case it is a much-admired, and therefore profitable, habit.

He fights in brightly lit rings for the pleasure of millions who know him by his professional name--Rocky Marciano. Never defeated, Rocky has won 37 of his 42 professional fights by knockouts, and has grossed upwards of $150,000 with his fists. Now the ultimate glory and a succession of far greater purses are within his grasp; next week he will fight aging (officially 38) Jersey Joe Walcott for the heavyweight championship of the world.

Boxers less wily than Walcott have no trouble hitting Rocky; he stumbles straight against their mitts. The poser is to hurt him. Hit hard, he merely frowns and keeps coming, and swinging, and missing. He windmills like an earnest apprentice, until sooner or later he lands one or two and becomes the brutal master. Then he drubs them. New England has not produced such a punisher since (in Vachel Lindsay's drumbeat lines):

John L. Sullivan

The strong boy

Of Boston

Broke every single rib of Jake Kilrain.

Rocky's manager, Al Weill, is a sly guy, in a notoriously dirty business. He has described Rocky rather gloatingly as "A nice boy ... a poor Italian boy from a large, poor family, and he appreciates the buck more than almost anyone else. Them type guys is hard to get out there. You want to look out for them young broke fighters."

Born & raised in the shoe-manufacturing town of Brockton, Mass., Rocky was the eldest of six children. At the age of seven he delivered 100 papers a day. He kept up his education long enough to play football as a sophomore in high school, then quit to begin a scrabble of hard odd jobs--dishwasher, ditchdigger, factory candy-mixer, snow-remover, beer-deliverer's helper. He spent three years in the Army (partly ferrying supplies from England to Normandy), and returned to the old blank round. Rocky had boxed a bit in the Army; after his return he did some amateur boxing for fun--and broke his thumb. That small misfortune made him. "It cost money to fix the thumb," he recalls, "so I thought I might as well earn some fighting." His first professional fights were in Providence, 30 miles away. To get in condition, he used to walk there.

BUT Rocky's early road was not all rocks. He was as brilliant in sports as he was dull in books, and sports mean more to most boys. He could lick anybody near his size, yet he-never suffered the loneliness and frustration of being a bully. Secure in the love of his family and friends, he grew up modest and gentle. "Rocco," his warmly matriarchal mother sighs, "was the best-natured child you ever see. He always want to be friendly. Always want to eat. He was 99% boy!"

When Rocky first decided to take up prizefighting, his father said, "Why not? You're strong enough. Try." But his mother used to spank him for fighting, and still disapproves. She never watches his fights, or hears them on the radio. Instead, she lights a candle to St. Anthony and then talks with a neighbor, "just to get it out of my mind. But once in a while we look at the clock and I pray-like in my mind. I pray neither of them gets hurt. After all, the other boy has a mother, too; he is human. Also," she adds with a smile, "I want my boy to win."

Rocky insists he enjoys "99% of the fight game," and likes the actual fighting best of all. "You work up to the fight," he explains gently, "and make the fight your pitch. Of course when you're in there you want to get it over with as quick as possible . . . anything can happen in the ring. You like beating the other guy. You like the way people treat you afterwards ... A guy gets accepted."

THE 1% that sometimes galls Rocky is in the discipline of training for each fight. It means not seeing his young wife for six to eight weeks of rigidly controlled rest and exercise. "You gotta take orders, you know," Rocky says. "You gotta harden up your body so you can take a punch better. That discourages the other guy." (Discouragingly enough for his opponents, Rocky has never been knocked down in a professional match.) But even the training grind is generally fun for him: "I like to better myself, like an artist would."

Little Charlie Goldman, the topnotch trainer who gives Rocky orders, has spent five years teaching him a very few essentials of boxing. Rocky has succeeded in learning to keep crouched and keep crowding his opponents. That way his long body presents less of a target, his short arms are less of a disadvantage, and his extraordinary strength keeps the other man miserable and off balance.

"I teach him slow," Goldman says, "because I want him to feel natural." The fidgetless calm of Rocky's conversation, the buoyancy of his step and the rippling muscularity of his workouts bespeak an unclouded mind in a body sound as brick.

Rocky appears much younger than his 29 years, and smaller than his 187 Ibs. fighting weight. He does not seem made for gore & glory; he never looms, except in the ring. Apart from his flattened nose (which he broke playing football) and the inevitable scars above his eyes, he looks more like a compactly built college athlete than a fighter. He has the rich tan and softspoken, self-effacing manner (though not the grammar) of a children's swimming instructor at a country club. To strengthen his heavy weapons, Rocky wears out rubber balls with repeated squeezings, yet his handclasp is tentative as a pianist's.

He is a man encouraged by absolute courage, convinced by boyish convictions, and strengthened by huge strength to fight his way from obscurity to the edge of greatness as a fighter. Rocky is not content to leave his mark on his opponents' faces; he badly wants "to make a good mark in the fight game." He has no doubt he will be champion, and he plans to stay on top a long while. "One reason the older-day fighters were champions longer," he figures, "is they took care of themselves real good. I don't drink or smoke--I tried to in the Army but I didn't like it--and I'm always in condition. When it's all over it would be nice to be a man people remember in the Boxing Book. Now, it's Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. I hope some day it's Dempsey, Louis, and Rocky Marchegiano--I mean, Marciano."

HE clearly means no one any harm, but Rocky just as obviously loves to feel the arm-tingling crunch of his fists against another man's head. When his victim crumples and goes down and out, the vast encircling crowd roars approval. Modest though he is, Rocky responds wholeheartedly to those victory cheers; he jumps for joy.

To hero-hungry fans from Brockton and across the nation, Rocky is far more than a winner at such moments; he is Hercules, Ivanhoe, Paul Bunyan. He stands for the comforting notion not that might makes right, but that might and right are somehow synonymous.

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