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A.J. Liebling

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The Resume

    (October 18, 1904-December 28, 1963)
    Born in Manhattan, New York
    Birth name was Abbott Joseph Liebling
    Columnist for ‘The New Yorker’ (1935-63)
    Frequent topics included the press, food, boxing, and horse racing

Why he might be annoying:

    He left Dartmouth without graduating, later claiming to have been ‘thrown out for missing compulsory chapel attendance.’
    He claimed to have been fired from an early job in the sports department of the New York Times for using ‘Ignoto’ (Italian for ‘unknown’) as the name of the referee in several basketball game summaries. (He actually was let go for the far more prosaic reason of repeatedly clashing with an established reporter he considered pompous.)
    He was married three times, divorced twice.
    He started several novels that he never finished.
    His friend and fellow New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell inherited Liebling’s library and discovered that he once used a strip of bacon as a bookmark.

Why he might not be annoying:

    As a war correspondent during World War II, he participated in the Normandy landings on D-Day.
    He received the French Legion of Honor for his war reporting.
    Sports Illustrated named ‘The Sweet Science,’ a collection of his essays on boxing, the best sports book of all time (2002).
    The Boxing Writers Association of America established an A.J. Liebling Award for excellence in boxing journalism (1995).
    He wrote, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 90.91% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 5 Votes: 60.0% Annoying