WITHIN the pantheon of legendary exponents of the sweet science, no-one eclipses Archie Moore when it comes to understanding the meaning of the word “struggle.”

A ring career that began in 1935 and ended in 1962 says it all. In between lies a story of such hardship and resilience outside the ring it makes anything he experienced inside the ring child’s play by comparison.

Born in 1916 in Mississippi, Moore grew up in St Louis, Missouri, and began fighting professionally at the age of 20. His record of 214 fights represents an astonishing amount of wear and tear, you might think, but Moore was a master of defence to the point where he rarely took a clean shot.

In this respect, he was the forerunner of modern greats such as Bernard Hopkins and Floyd Mayweather Jnr, both also known for their mastery of defence and who also enjoyed long careers.

Of his 214 bouts, Moore won 183 with 131 of those wins by knockout. He holds the distinction of having crossed three eras, confirmed by the fact he faced Rocky Marciano at the end of his career and a young Muhammad Ali at the beginning of his.

Moore actually also briefly trained Ali not long after he turned professional in 1960.

The legend has it that Ali — then still known as Cassius Clay — left Moore’s training camp unable to accept the veteran’s strict disciplinarian methods, with Moore telling Ali’s managers at the time that he needed a good spanking.

When they met in the ring in Los Angeles in 1962 it was a complete mismatch. Moore by then was 48 and well past his best, while Ali was just 20 and at his magnificently fast and lightning finest.

The context lasted four rounds, during which Moore hardly threw never mind landed a punch. Ali, meanwhile, peppered him with punches at will to the point where the grey-haired veteran was reduced to the status of a human heavy bag.

The fight was ended by technical knockout early in the fourth after Ali dropped Moore three times in quick succession.

Watching the fight back today, you’re left wondering what possessed Moore to keep on fighting long past the point at which he should have been.

But then a warrior mentality has no quit in it, and it becomes at a certain point in any fighter’s career his fiercest opponent.

Ten years earlier, in 1952, came the high point of Archie Moore’s boxing life, when he took on and defeated popular light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim over 15 hard rounds to at last win a world title. 

Maxim had done his utmost to avoid facing Moore, but finally was given no choice when the boxing authorities ordered the fight and the promoters acceded to Maxim’s then whopping demand for a $100,000 purse.

Up to this point Moore was one of the most avoided fighters the sport had ever known. The main reason for this was his obdurate refusal to allow the mob to get involved in his career.

The 1940s was the high point of mob control of the sport in the US, especially on the east coast where at the time — in places like Miami, New York, Boston and Philadelphia — boxing predominated.

Moore was a highly intelligent as well as persistent character, who during his years in the boxing wilderness would write in longhand up to 35 letters each night and send them to the country’s leading sports and boxing writers, seeking interviews and exposure with the objective of forcing his way into contention for a shot at the title.

In September 1955, three years after defeating Maxim to claim the light heavyweight title — a title he would retain for 10 years — Moore stepped up to heavyweight to face the legendary Rocky Marciano. 

The fight took place at New York’s famed Yankee Stadium in front of a packed crowd. Sitting ringside was AJ Liebling, one of the most accomplished writers to ever cover the sport whose baroque prose succeeded in adding a dramatist’s touch to the brutality unfolding between the ropes.

The following passage from Liebling’s account of the fight is a case in point: “Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, who hibernates in San Diego, California, and estimates in Toledo, Ogio, is a Bournian rather than an Eganite in his thinking about style, but he naturally has to do more than think about it.”

The actual fight was never destined to be anything other than a war, what with Marciano’s relentless come forward style and Moore a fighter known for standing his ground. This he did for nine hard rounds, before finally succumbing to Marciano’s pressure and superior strength.

Here’s Liebling: “He [Moore] came out proudly for the ninth, and stood and fought back with all he had, but Marciano slugged him down, and he [Moore] was counted out with his left arm hooked over the middle rope as he tried to rise. It was a crushing defeat for the higher faculties and a lesson in intellectual humility, but he had made a hell of a fight.”

Archie Moore’s last appearance in a boxing ring came in 1963 in Phoenix, Arizona, against wrestler Mike DiBiase. Moore won the bout by stoppage in the third round, after which he announced his retirement from a sport he’d graced with the honour and nobility of a man whose personal struggles shaped and forged an inner core that few others have ever come close to matching.

Jimmy Cannon, another legendary boxing scribe, wrote of him: “Someone should write a song about Archie Moore … I don’t mean big composers such as Harold Arlen or Duke Ellington. It should be a song that comes out of the backrooms of sloughed saloons on night-drowned streets in morning-worried parts of bad towns.”

Archie Moore died in 1998 from heart failure to prove that despite everything, in the end he was just as mortal as the rest of us.