Throwback Thursday: Rocky Marciano Hangs Up His Gloves

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

The news trickled out slowly, the reports initially disclosed by Rocky Marciano's wife, Barbara, in their hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts. The next day, April 27, 1956, Marciano and his manager, Al Weill, held a press conference at the Hotel Shelton in New York City and confirmed that it was true: Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, was retiring at the age of 31 to "spend more time with his family."

This was front-page news, as boxing was second only to baseball as America's most popular sport, and the heavyweight championship was one of the most coveted titles in sports. Marciano was a source of pride for the Italian-American community, generally seen as a clean-cut, decent, hard-working champion. The true story, of course, was far more complicated than the myth. Marciano was dealing with an ailing back; his conflicts with Weill, his iron-fisted manager, were well known. Years after his death, a Sports Illustrated profile would reveal Marciano's ties to a loan shark, his legendary tight-fistedness, and his penchant for prodigious womanizing.

But the first reaction to Marciano's retirement was utter disbelief, particularly from Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight who had lost to Marciano seven months earlier and stood to take over his title if Marciano truly was walking away with an unblemished record of 49-0.

"Marciano won't quit, because he loves the jingle of the American dollar too much," Moore said. "He'll soon hoe himself to the North Woods with an axe on his shoulder to get into condition to meet Archie Moore."

But Marciano would never come back to the ring, despite the temptations. A week after his announcement, 20,000 people turned out in Brockton for a parade in his honor. In July, after experiencing pain while playing with his three-year-old daughter, Marciano checked into a hospital and was diagnosed with a ruptured disc in his back. In October, at a press conference in Washington, when asked if he really intended to stay retired, he replied, "Sure."

"I'm going to profit by other people's mistakes," Marciano said, according to longtime boxing writer Thomas Hauser. "If Joe Louis couldn't make a successful comeback, I'm not going to attempt it."

By then, Marciano had already made it, as far as he was concerned. He had achieved the life he'd aspired to. He was the son of a shoe-factory worker who had long been in search of a way out. He grew up playing baseball; after being drafted into the Army in 1943, he took up boxing a way of avoiding more the pedestrian duties of the military. He was almost 25 by the time he turned pro, a powerful puncher but rough around the edges. He had no footwork—he was strong and lumbering, and sometimes he would literally fall through the ropes when he missed his target—but he won all of his first 11 fights by knockout, seven of them in the first round. He began to accumulate a small cheering section from Brockton, and attracted the attention of trainer Charley Goldman, who worked for Al Weill.

Marciano trained hard and limited his diet; sometimes he would walk the 75 blocks from his room to the gym to train, according to Sports Illustrated's William Nack. "There was a merry unpredictability about what would happen next when Marciano was in the ring," Nack wrote, but the common result was a knockout: 43 of them altogether. His 1952 knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott when desperate and trailing in the 13th round cemented his legend. In 1955, Nack wrote, a mobster offered Marciano a considerable amount of money to throw a fight, but he refused. Because of his modest background, he became a hero to the Italian-American community.

In retirement, Marciano was surrounded by mobsters, his friend told Nack. Marciano had a naïve business mind, and at one point invested in the business of a Cleveland loan shark—a loan shark who was killed amid an IRS inquiry. Marciano never recovered his money for fear of being implicated. He lost money in other dubious ventures, too, and reportedly had dalliances with many women. He lived in constant fear of going broke, and almost never picked up a check; this frugality is what reportedly led to his conflict with Weill, his manager, and maybe even to his retirement.

"(Weill) gave them the proposition when he met them," columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote. "They would fight with their bodies, and he would think for them with his mind. They could not argue. He would not tolerate any opinions from them."

"He took 50 percent of Rocky in and out of the ring," one of Marciano's longtime friends told Nack. "That's the reason Rocky retired. That was the conflict. He didn't want to pay Al Weill any more money. Even for a personal appearance, Weill wanted 50 percent of it. He wanted cash because he didn't want Weill to get a dime."

But Marciano also structured his life so that he had to pay for as few things as possible. He didn't trust banks, and hid his money in all sorts of strange places: curtain rods, light fixtures, toilets. On August 31, 1969, one day shy of his 46th birthday, Marciano boarded a small plane for a free flight from Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa, for a speaking engagement. The plane crashed, killing all three men onboard, including the pilot.

His legacy remains the subject of debate among the boxing community: many of the fighters he vanquished in achieving that undefeated record were beyond their prime. But there is something indelibly alluring about Marciano going 49-0 and never coming back, never succumbing to temptations of a paycheck.

"All a fighter can be is the best of his era," Hauser wrote. "And Marciano could beat any fighter of his time."