Marchegiano didn’t look like a professional fighter. He was short for a heavyweight; five feet ten inches tall. His hands were huge, but he had stubby arms that would make it difficult for him to develop an effective jab.
A. J. Liebling later likened what Weill and Goldman saw to “the understander in the nine-man pyramid of a troupe of Arab acrobats. He has big calves,” Liebling wrote. “Forearms, wrists, and a neck so thick that it minimizes the span of his shoulders. He is neither tall nor heavy for a heavyweight, but gives the impression of bigness when you are close to him. His face, like his body, is craggy. Big jaw, big nose askew from punching, high cheekbones; and almost always when he is outside the ring, a pleasant asymetrical grin.”
Marchegiano was also two months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday; old for a novice fighter.
“Al and I often looked over green kids who thought they could become fighters,” Goldman reminisced years later. “I’ll eat my derby hat if I ever saw anyone cruder than Rocky. He was so awkward that we stood there and laughed. He didn’t stand right. He didn’t throw a punch right. He didn’t block right. He didn’t do anything right. Then he hit Chancey with a roundhouse right which nearly put a hole in the guy’s head, and I told Weill that maybe I could do something with him.”
“Charley Goldman,” Michael Silver later wrote, “found a block of marble and sculpted it into The Pieta.”
Marchegiano entered the ring as a professional for the second time on July 12, 1948. The site was Providence, Rhode Island; twenty-five miles from Brockton. The opponent was Harry Belzarian. Marciano won on a first-round knockout. His purse was forty dollars.
Years later, Belzarian recalled, “The first time he knocked me down, he broke my tooth. Then he knocked me down again. Then I don’t remember anything.”
Soon after, at Weill’s suggestion, Marchegiano changed his name to Rocky Marciano. But Weill wasn’t sold yet on his new fighter. He was using him to test other prospects.
On August 23, 1948, in his fifth professional fight, Marciano fought a 15-0-1 heavyweight named Eddie Ross. Rocky was the “opponent” that night. Prior to fighting Ross, Marciano had traveled from Brockton to New York to train occasionally with Goldman, but the trainer hadn’t attended his fights.
Marciano knocked Ross out at 1:03 of the first round. Seven days later, when Marciano fought Jimmy Weeks in Providence, Goldman was in his corner.
Marciano fought eleven times during the last six months of 1948, scoring eight first-round knockouts and two in the second stanza. One opponent made it into the third round.
Rather than work with the fighter at Stillman’s Gym (which was a hub of boxing commerce in New York), Goldman continued to sculpt his creation at the CYO gym on 17th Street.
Marciano had poor balance, minimal defense, and little understanding of how to throw a jab or hook. Goldman taught him how to stand properly for balance and maximum leverage on his punches. Turning Marciano’s lack of height into an advantage, he taught him to fight from a crouch, which made him harder to hit and forced opponents to lower their hands to hit him. He taught him the rudiments of defense and schooled him to go to the body.
“You got to realize,” Goldman said later, “when I took him over, he didn’t know what a body punch was. In the first ten fights I handled him, he didn’t throw a single one. Some of those early fights when he didn’t know how to fight; he won them all, but I was afraid he’d get killed.”
But Marciano had a great equalizer; his right hand. Goldman gave him just enough moves and enough of a jab to get inside and use it.
“I got a guy who’s short, stoop-shouldered, and balding with two left feet,” the trainer said. “They all look better than he does as far as the moves are concerned. But they don’t look so good on the canvas. God, how he can punch.”
(By Thomas Hauser)
