There Was Something Magical About Matchup

The point of professional boxing is to provide fights of sufficient intensity that ticket buyers will pay top dollar to watch.

In the 125 years boxing matchups have been accurately tracked, no fight has topped the level of ferocity achieved in the three bouts between middleweights Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano.

Like Laurel and Hardy and Rodgers and Hammerstein, these two were made for each other.

Fifty-two years ago today, it was Graziano’s turn. He knocked out Zale in the sixth round in Chicago to win the championship.

Graziano was a dead-end kid from New York’s Lower East Side. Of his misspent youth, he once said: “I never stole nothin’ unless it began with an ‘A.’ A car, a truck, a payroll . . .”

In the Army during World War II, he took a dislike to his sergeant. So he punched him and wound up in the stockade.

Zale was a tough kid from Gary, Ind., a steel mill worker who was a boxing late-bloomer. Nine years older than Graziano, he had a knack for losing his most important fights on the way up. In 1934, for example, he lost three in a row.

But in 1946 and ‘47, he won 12 in a row by knockout, including one over Graziano in their wild first fight, in New York.

After losing the title to Graziano, Zale got it back 11 months later when he flattened Graziano in the third round at Newark, N.J.

Graziano died in 1990, Zale in 1997.

Also on this date: In 1941, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak reached 56 games with a double and two singles at Cleveland. . . . In 1900, Ray Ewry, a childhood polio victim, won the first three of his eight Olympic gold medals with victories in the standing high jump, standing long jump and standing triple jump at the Paris Olympics. He won five more standing jump gold medals at the next two Olympics. Standing jump events were dropped from the Olympics after 1912. . . . In 1920, in his first Yankee season, Babe Ruth hit his 30th home run to break his season record of 29, set with the Red Sox in 1919. . . . In 1950, a record soccer crowd of 199,854 jammed Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro to see a Brazil-Uruguay match.