Classic tales of Liebling come to life again

The Sweet Science
A.J. Liebling
North Point Press, 207 pp.

During his 28 years as The New Yorker's resident utilityman extraordinaire, A.J. Liebling assumed many guises. War correspondent. Press critic. Curator of a gallery of misfits and scoundrels who inhabited the fringes of the racetrack and theatrical worlds, among other noble callings. Two-fisted (and -chinned) gourmand. Boxing oracle. But there was one unifying thread in Liebling's crazy-quilt repertoire. Genius.

Neglected genius, unfortunately. Since his death in 1963, Liebling's prominence had gradually receded, his virtuoso work seemingly molding in memory, except among the cognoscenti. Thus, his popular rediscovery is cause for hosannahs. Exhibit A is the renewed visibility of his classic boxing omnibus, ''The Sweet Science."

Liebling's ringside musings from the mid-20th century should send his rivals back to the light bag. The hyperbole and bloodlust that pollute fistic rabble-rousing were as foreign to Liebling as a Big Mac would be.

Don't misunderstand. Hardly a voyeur, he had a lusty appetite for the sport. He indulged it as an informal combatant from the time an uncle introduced the 13-year-old Liebling to oversized gloves until he decided at age 26 to limit his hand-to-hand confrontations to bouts with his Remington as a reporter with the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin. But -- perhaps because of the horrors he had witnessed, and chronicled, during World War II -- Liebling refrained from the overheated accounts many of his peers favored.

He was at once detached observer and enlightened expert, uninterested in the role of insider, but regaling his readers with a perception available only to someone removed from boxing's incestuous core.

This was exemplified in his occasional acts of sports writing high treason. He would decline the press pass that guaranteed a prime seat; purchase a civilian ticket on a whim to see an otherwise nondescript match between two refugees from a butcher shop because it engaged him; and sit among the hoi polloi at, say, Madison Square Garden. Distance, it seemed, bred context.

As a result, Liebling was just as entertaining and illuminating when dissecting a palooka prelim as he was addressing more standard topics such as the feral power that enabled Rocky Marciano to overcome his absence of technique -- and opponents such as Joe Louis, Jersey Joe Walcott, and Archie Moore; the bon vivant style and substance of Sugar Ray Robinson; the sideshows of prefight camps; and the machinations of big-time dreamers in downtrodden gyms.

Subtlety and understatement were the foundation of his impressions, but they formed a 1-2 punch of delights rather than knockout boredom. Each sentence was a serpentine treasure hunt, with a gem of wordplay tucked somewhere in there.

Even Liebling's epicurean tendencies enhanced his luminous sports prose. Only he could incorporate Parisian cuisine, 18th-century art, and the distorting impact of TV into fight recaps -- and make it all relevant.

Now, posthumously, Liebling can reclaim his heavyweight title. The renaissance of this Renaissance Man rates a standing O.