Not quite enough A.J. Liebling

Then again, Liebling's influence gets harder to pin down with each passing decade, even as the journalists he influenced continue to evoke his name. Not only has the world, mostly the New York, he wrote about vanished, there hasn't been much of interest to replace it. Are there still fast-talking confidence men on Broadway with fake offices? Maybe, but who wants to read a book about cellphone Indians? Boxing is even more marginalized now than in the early 1950s, when Liebling or anyone else could conceivably show up at the arena an hour before fight time to see Archie Moore, Rocky Marciano or Sugar Ray Robinson. Today, even the sporting public doesn't notice boxing more than once or twice a year for so-called superfights. (You can't just show up at a Las Vegas casino to catch Oscar De La Hoya.) Press criticism today is either partisan or viewed as partisan by partisan readers, and more readers than ever are partisan.

If Liebling were alive today, what would he write about and for whom would he write it? It's tempting to say that cable TV news or NASCAR or Thai food might inspire him, but if so, who are the A.J. Lieblings writing about these things now? The truth is that Liebling really didn't leave any disciples, though that doesn't prevent press critics everywhere from making judgments in his name. (In August, Slate press critic Jack Shafer, in a tribute to Liebling, used the occasion to praise and damn several other press critics around the country. Precisely how Shafer knows which writers Liebling would approve and disapprove of was not explained.)

His methods, no matter how many people have claimed them as an influence, were too arbitrary, and his temperament too personal and idiosyncratic, to leave a pattern for greatness that others would follow. In truth, despite the frequent comparisons to his friend Joseph Mitchell, there really wasn't anyone much like Liebling back in the '40s and '50s. Liebling was always much better than those who claimed to be influenced by him, including Wolfe, who finally gave up chasing Liebling's ghost to pursue John O'Hara's -- not exactly a trade up. As Herbert Mitgang pointed out, reading Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" turned out to be better preparation for covering World War II than the apprenticeship served by some of his fellow war correspondents in the press boxes of professional football games.

If Liebling actually had a philosophy as a writer, it could probably be summed up in three brief tenets, which run through all his books. 1) Know your subject really well. 2) Don't ever force the humor; always look for it and you will find it. And 3) Spar with the little guys, but put on the eight-ounce gloves when taking on the big shots. The last one was his main point.

It was as a press critic that Liebling made his greatest impact and left his most important legacy -- his most quoted line is still "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one." Which is why it's so disappointing to find just 50-odd pages given to his press writings in "Just Enough Liebling." It might have been a greater service to simply reprint "The Press."

There's a school of thought that contends that Liebling's best work was not his press criticism. This is not only wrong, but it misses the real significance of Liebling. Everything Liebling wrote is worth reading and rereading, but the modern viewpoint tends to gloss over the shortcomings of most of his books. I have no interest in food writing -- to me, reading about food is like semaphoring about sex, so I'll make examples of three other Liebling books.

"The Sweet Science," for instance, has evolved in 48 years from a cult favorite to, according to a Sports Illustrated end-of-the-millennium poll, the greatest sports book ever written. Liebling, almost by consensus, has become "the greatest boxing writer who ever lived." He was not. W.C. Heinz was the greatest, and Red Smith was second. Liebling was the greatest boxing writer for people who didn't go to fights -- for people who read only one piece about a fighter or a fight. That is a very good thing to be, but it's not the same as being the greatest boxing writer ever.

Next Page: Norman Mailer: "When it came to fighters, he had a New Yorker attitude that was fatal"

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