Rocking My Boat With Marciano: 50 Years Ago: 1956-2006

[RonPrice]

ROUND AFTER ROUND

On September 23rd 1952 Rocky Marciano climbed into the ring to challenge the heavyweight boxing champion, Jersey Joe Walcott. What followed was what many have called the greatest heavyweight championship fight of all time. In the first round, Walcott caught Marciano with a perfect left hook that dropped him for the first time in 43 fights! But The Rock was up at the count of 3. From then on it was a brutal fight, with Walcott using all his ring skills, hitting Marciano with shot after shot. Walcott’s punches would have knocked out most other fighters. But Rocky was relentless, taking tremendous punishment as he bulled his way into close range to land his own hard blows. By the 12th round Walcott was ahead on all scorecards. Rocky's corner told him he needed a knockout to win. In the fateful 13th round Jersey Joe stepped back from Marciano with his back to the ropes and Rocky delivered a right hand punch that would probably have felled any fighter who ever lived. Walcott slumped to the floor, one arm hanging on the lower rope and was counted out. It took several minutes to revive him. Rocky Marciano was the new Heavyweight Champion of the World!

Two weeks later, on October 8th 1952, the Baha’is commemorated the start of a Holy Year. It was the commemoration of the centenary of the rise of the orb of Baha’u’llah’s most sublime Revelation. The launching of a world-embracing spiritual crusade in 1953 was also proclaimed on that same date. I was only eight at the time. I can neither remember this launching nor this famous fight. The fight was not televised, nor was it on radio and so my dad and I were not able to enjoy the fight together. We had to wait until 1953 or 1954. I can’t remember now after all this time what was the first fight we watched together. My father was a boxing enthusiast, although not obsessively so.

That year my mother had just made her first contact with the Baha’i Faith after seeing an ad in the local paper, the Burlington Gazette. I have often felt, looking back to 1953/4 that these Rocky Marciano fights I saw with my father at the start of the Ten Year Crusade were symbolic of the long fight ahead for my father and for me, for my society and the world. Little did I know then, living as we all did on the brink of self-destruction, as a grade four primary school student, as a person who would spend the rest of his life associated with this new world Faith, the nature of the fight, the battle, ahead.

Marciano became a top contender in the heavyweight boxing world following his sixth-round knockout of Rex Layne at Madison Square Garden on 12 July 1951. 1951 was the same year that saw the rise of the Baha’i Administrative Centre in Haifa. This rise, this development, this process, taking place at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa Israel, had been kept in abeyance for thirty years(1921-1951) while the machinery of the national and local Baha’i institutions of this nascent Order was being erected. Boxing experts have considered September 29th 1952 to be Marciano's defining moment. Marciano fought a rematch with Walcott on 15 May 1953 in Chicago Stadium. This time Marciano scored a knockout after just 145 seconds. This was right at the start of the Ten Year Crusade, in the first month of that Crusade.

Marciano had trained extraordinarily hard. The Baha’i community had trained hard and would train hard in the years ahead. Rocky Marciano stood as a symbol right at the start of the first international teaching Plan. On 17 June 1954 Marciano successfully defended his title against the aged former champion Ezzard Charles at Yankee Stadium. Marciano's final defense came on 20 September 1955. He retired in 1956 and was killed in a plane crash in August 1969.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, July 1st 2006.

You were a model in so many ways,
Rocky, little did I know back then
sitting in that little lounge-room at
the start of a Crusade that would take
this Cause to the earth’s far corners.

You were like a rose amongst thorns,
so said Jimmy Cannon in his summary
of your life. I knew so little of your life,
Rocky, until just the other day, occupied
as I have been with a rose in another garden,
a rose-garden of the spirit whose charm
captured my heart these many years while
I carried the fight and walked the walk
in such a different way to you, Rocky.

I tried to plant the rose of love in the garden
of my heart surrounded as I was by a different
set of thorns than the one you battled with.
My battle was so different than yours, Rocky,
spread out over more than 50 years in a ring,
often on the ropes, round after round, waiting
for the bell to toll, in my corner and many other
corners, never taking the title, wanting to retire.

Ron Price
July 1st 2006

[PRIDE OF BOSTON]

WTF?

[bigragu]

WTF?

uhhh....yeah.....right......this makes no sense...trying to compare a created nation to Marciano??.....WTF? exactly......

[JT Rock]

awww!!!! Thats so nostalgic I think LOL!!

[PRIDE OF BOSTON]

Last time i checked this was a boxing forum...  Call me crazy...  The poem was deffinitly a first................  Im not sure what this is.  Is this like the mormons knocking on your door and preaching to u?  again....WTF?     cc ragu anf jtrock Ill catch u in 24 karma wont let me

[bigragu]

Last time i checked this was a boxing forum... Call me crazy... The poem was deffinitly a first................ Im not sure what this is. Is this like the mormons knocking on your door and preaching to u? again....WTF? cc ragu anf jtrock Ill catch u in 24 karma wont let me

yeah...if I want that I'll turn on the 24 religion channel...and become bored to tears like I was reading this drivel...... cc back at cha.....

[PRIDE OF BOSTON]

he said rocky was a "rose among thorns" WTF if he heard that he'd shat himself...  He was a weapon who knocked people the f*ck out....  there was nothing rosey about him...  he was brutal and would take masive punishment to deliver that 1 punch...  he was no rose... 

[means2184]

[quote="PRIDE OF PROVIDENCE" ]
he said rocky was a "rose among thorns" WTF if he heard that he'd shat himself... He was a weapon who knocked people the f*ck out.... there was nothing rosey about him... he was brutal and would take masive punishment to deliver that 1 punch... he was no rose...
[/qcc in quote]
yea he would be more of a terd that wouldnt flush than a flower

[RonPrice]

It's been some five years since I was at this thread. My prose-poem certainly stirred some of the emotions. When one writes, one wins some and loses some. It's a bit like talking. Anyway, thanks for the honest feedback. Wishing you all well from Australia.-Ron

[brocktonblockbust]

Ron:

I have often tried to draw parallels between seemingly-unrelated subjects in order to create a curious type of symbiosis, let's say. Your parallelogram here of Rocky Marciano and Baha'i is certainly the oddest attempt I have ever come across in recent years of an author trying to do so. I suspect this post is a kind of spam in which you are indirectly either advertising your faith or experimenting with a beta-test of sorts. I must say I am utterly without an idea as to what the possible connection between the two subjects is, or even why you chose Marciano's career instead of any other event that took place around the time of the Baha'i new year, to write this essay about. p.s. where is the parallel to Rocky's plane crash then? Did the Baha'i faith crash in Des Moines on a misty night? Had it just won a computer match with something known as The Greatest in religion?

[Master]

If you have brocktonblockbust confused, and he loves all things Rocky, then you have confused everyone! Stop trying to brainwash us.

[brocktonblockbust]

If you have brocktonblockbust confused, and he loves all things Rocky, then you have confused everyone! Stop trying to brainwash us.

Ron: Rocky, whaddaya think o' my essay here?
Rocky: Well, Ron, it sure was nice. I liked the part about me gettin' up at the count of 3 against Walcott. I didn't really get the rest though. Did you get beat up in a church or somethin'?

[roberto duran legend]

How the fuck has Ron got three cool clicks sorry Ron you are a fruit

[RonPrice]

It has been some time since I was at this thread and at SaddoBoxing.com I received an invitation from the organizers of this site to drop in. Given the feedback to my initial post, I'm surprised I got the invitation. Invitations are probably site conventions, part of the organizational format by administrators here.

I won't apologize for my initial post in this thread. Writers write and readers read---and sometimes what is written does not appeal to readers. That is a common enough experience for writers and readers. Anyway, thanks for the honest feedback folks. It was a piece of nostalgia for me.

My dad and I used to watch boxing back in the 1950s. He died in 1965 at the age of 75 after becoming one of the first 1000 or so Baha'is in Canada. One person's nostalgia is another person's poison. What turns one man on does not turn on another. "Such is life," as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the gallows in New South Wales Australia in 1880.-Ron
--------------------
Here is a little piece I wrote about spam for some readers here. I post it knowing the risk I take But there may be some here who might like to get a handle on the word spam.-Ron
-----------------------------

A NEW PRODUCT HITS THE MARKET

I have written the following partly as a form of defence against the accusation that my post is a form of spam. What I write on the internet and post at sites is very far removed from the meaning of spam as it is used on the world-wide-web. I also try here to place the term 'spam' in a personal historical context and a context that relates to spam’s country-cousin, plagiarism. I was a teacher for 35 years and had to deal with plagiarism; now it appears spam has join plagiarism as "a problem zone" for the 5 billion people on the planet out of its 7.4 billion who can read.

The original term spam was coined nearly three-quarters of a century ago in 1937 by the Hormel corporation as a name for its luncheon meat: a canned, precooked, spiced meat product. The transition from meat product to internet term had a stop along the way at the comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970 that BBC comedy show aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu which featured items like: "egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam and bacon, sausage and spam; spam and egg, spam, spam, and more spam. Finally, there was lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam." To make matters sillier in Monty Python style, the cafe was filled with Vikings who periodically broke-out into song praising spam: "spam, spam, spam, spam: lovely spam, wonderful spam."

I would like to add here, somewhat parenthetically, that while the Hormel corporation was holding a competition to find a new name for their product, the North American Bahá’í community was formulating the details of its first teaching Plan in May 1937. I have been associated with the many extensions of this Plan in one way or another for nearly 60 years. The first formulation of this Plan took place just eight weeks before the introduction of Spam onto the market. As of 2012 the Baha’i Faith had spread to over 200 countries and territories with the largest number of adherents in India, Iran and the USA, and several of the islands of the world. Also as of 2012, Spam was sold in over 40 countries worldwide. The largest consumers of Spam were in the United States, the UK and South Korea.(1)

Computer people adopted the term spam from the Python sketch to mean the endless repetition of worthless text, the commercialization of the internet, the unwanted commercial messages that come in the form of electronic junk mail or junk postings as well as posts at internet sites that: (a) nobody really wants to read/asks for and/or (b) are basically some form of plagiarism. These have become the primary meanings, among other meanings, of spam on the internet.

Spam is everywhere in e-mail inboxes, in instant messaging windows, in web site guest-books, in blogs running over internet telephony lines. As internet-based communication technology evolves so do the methods that unscrupulous individuals use to send you advertisements. Worse yet, the numbers of spam-related messages being distributed are increasing every day. When you hear the word spam, your immediate thoughts go to the more well-known and common form of spam: e-mail spam. However, other types of spam are found in a variety of internet communication mediums such as instant messaging, discussion boards, mobile phones with text messaging, newsgroups, internet telephony, blogs--basically any device or client that provides a means for communications. Some internet site administrators and moderators take a very wide-ranging interpretation of the meaning of the term spam and it is here that my posts are deleted or I am banned from a site with or without warning.

According to the famous poet T.S. Eliot, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”(2) As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and weft of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.”(3) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)“A History of the Term Spam,” internet.com, 24 July 2008; (2) T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1999; and (3) Emerson, Letters, p. 178.

[Andre]

They hung Ned here in Melbourne Victoria mate.