Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The doctor and Crouper entered a space

licking his thin lips

His “sad, lustrous, and doglike eyes,” Lynne Tillman wrote in her 1992 Sight and Sound essay, “Kiss of Death,” describing his performance as “Mikey” Corleone before he transforms into Michael Corleone, when he can still promise Diane Keaton, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Those young Pacino eyes capsize me. His battery of protean gestures is absorbing. Young Al Pacino makes me giddy. I sink into my chair. I experience the full-blown, bodily preoccupation of having a crush. Watching him is like discovering a long-lost audition tape, because his delivery, then, was intimate, kept, mild. I cover my face. I even once, not long ago, ducked under my desk while watching a scene from The Panic in Needle Park, before Bobby and Helen—played with disconsolate, plain beauty by Kitty Winn—spiral downward together and before Helen is using, when they’re just getting to know each other, actually.

I wouldn’t have liked to see Louis beaten by a good young fighter, but it would be awful to see him beaten by a clown. Not that I have anything against Savold; I just think it’s immoral for a fellow without talent to get too far

Part of the pleasure of going to a fight is reading the newspapers next morning to see what the sports writers think happened. This pleasure is prolonged, in the case of a big bout, by the fight films. You can go to them to see what did happen. What you eventually think you remember about the fight will be an amalgam of what you thought you saw there, what you read in the papers you saw, and what you saw in the films.

The division of boxers into weight classes is based on the premise that if two men are equally talented practitioners of the Sweet Science, then the heavier man has a decided advantage. This is true, of course, only if both men are trained down hard, since a pound of beer is of no use in a boxing match. If the difference amounts to no more than a couple of pounds, it can be offset by a number of other factors, including luck, but when it goes up to five or six or seven, it takes a lot of beating.

One of the things that make Marciano a disconcerting opponent for a good boxer like Charles is that even his awkwardness is inconsistent; every now and then he does something highly skilled.

With the money earned from his fifty-two fights, Araujo had moved his family away from South Main Street and into a neighborhood with less character but more sanitation.

Hitting at such short range, the boxer leaves a correspondingly brief opening; the trick is to take the initiative by anticipating the opening or by moving the other fellow off balance. Having done that, one boy sometimes can land a whole series of blows before the other breaks into the rhythm. And there is never the brief surcease a fighter gets at longer range. A smart old fighter can sometimes slide through ten rounds on the equivalent of one round of such fighting.

Now he was in that distressful state when every evasive move brings new disaster, until it seems to the boxer and his public that he is ducking into fists, circling into fists, slipping into fists.