With a Straight Face

No one in his right mind really thought that Don Cockell, chubby heavyweight champion of the British Empire, belonged in the same ring with Rocky Marciano. Day after day, before the two fighters tangled for the world championship in San Francisco last week, dutiful British sportswriters beat the drums for the Battersea Butterball. But most of the time it was easier to explain why Don might lose. For one thing, the 16 1/2ft. square ring was too small. For another, the Britons reminded their readers, U.S. boxing is rotten with rackets. In Philadelphia, a light heavyweight named Harold Johnson claimed to have been doped before a fight by a stranger who gave him a bitter-tasting orange, so Cockell's California camp made a big show of not using tea sent by well-wishers.

Beauty and Power. When fight time came. Rocky showed that he needed no help from either ring or rackets. With rough-and-tumble power, as clumsy as any champion since Camera, he took 8 rounds and 54 seconds to batter Cockell senseless. Then the British writers, who once upon a time were renowned for understatement, really turned it on. Their champion, taking a savage beating, had indeed met defeat like a true Briton. "And that is why the high and the mighty, the men with power, the women with beauty and vast possessions are rising in a kind of primeval mass sympathy and acclamation for a man from thousands of miles away," wrote the London Daily Mirror's Peter Wilson. "They rise to him because they know he is exhibiting something which power cannot command, beauty cannot achieve nor money buy.

"The kind of courage which refuses to bandage in front of the firing squad. The driving urge which made men die rather than surrender to Everest, or perish in the white wastes of the Antarctic while trying to bend the very Pole to their driving will ..."

Jackal and Lion. "Killer Marciano was crowding in now, head down like a gorilla, except that a gorilla does not eat meat, and Marciano is the most carnivorous fighter I have ever seen. Truly I do not exaggerate . . . The sun had set on the arena, but it had never set on the heavyweight champion of the Empire."

U.S. sportswriters were a little less primeval. Scornful of The Rock's rule-busting violence in the ring, they still saw the match as a triumph of phony showmanship and unscrupulous exploitation. Said the New York Daily Mirror's Dan Parker: "As shameless as a jackal gorging on the remnants of a lion's breakfast kill, Al Weill, that distinguished promoter of international good will, is already talking of a return bout between Rocky Marciano and his Monday-night abattoir victim, Don Cockell. There having been no reason for the first match, except a grossly commercial one, there is even less cause for a second slaughter. And when Weill says, with a straight face, that he is considering a return bout in London, that is the supreme insult to everyone above the third-grade moron class."

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