Marcel Cerdan

Marcel Cerdan enters these pages not through a book, a canvas, or a song of his own, but through the person who loved him. He was born Marcellin Cerdan on 22 July 1916 in Sidi Bel Abbès, French Algeria, to a Spanish-origin pied-noir family, and raised in Casablanca, where his father ran his early career out of the city's boxing halls. The French press would call him the Moroccan Bomber; the Americans, the Casablanca Clouter. By the time his story crossed Édith Piaf's, he was already the most beloved athlete France had — and the two of them together became, briefly, the most famous couple in the world.

The record was extraordinary by any standard: roughly one hundred ten wins in one hundred fourteen professional fights, nearly half of them ending inside the distance, with two of the four losses coming by disqualification rather than defeat. He turned professional at eighteen in North Africa, took the French welterweight title in 1938 and the European title in Milan the following June, lost the war years to service in the French navy, and came back heavier and better — French middleweight champion in 1945, European champion in 1947, and unbeatable enough that America had to be next.

It happened at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on 21 September 1948. Tony Zale, the Man of Steel, had just taken the world middleweight title back from Rocky Graziano in one of boxing's great trilogies; Cerdan wore him down for eleven rounds until Zale could not come out for the twelfth. France had a world champion, and the celebrations ran from the Champs-Élysées to Casablanca. That same year, in New York, his acquaintance with Édith Piaf — both of them touring celebrities of the same postwar French moment — became an affair conducted across two continents, in hotel suites and headlines. Cerdan was married, to Marinette Lopez of Casablanca, with three young sons; the French public, which adored them both, largely decided not to mind. It was during this affair that Piaf wrote the words to Hymne à l'amour, her vow of love against the end of the world, to Marguerite Monnot's rising music.

The title lasted nine months. On 16 June 1949, at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, Cerdan tore up his left shoulder in the opening round against Jake LaMotta and fought on essentially one-armed until his corner stopped it after the tenth. A rematch was signed for December. On 27 October 1949 he boarded an Air France Lockheed Constellation at Orly for New York, where Piaf was singing at the Versailles club — he had exchanged an ocean crossing for the overnight flight to reach her sooner. In the small hours of 28 October the aircraft struck a mountainside on São Miguel in the Azores on its approach to the Santa Maria stopover. All forty-eight aboard were killed, Cerdan and the violinist Ginette Neveu among them.

Piaf was told in New York and sang that night's program anyway — for Marcel Cerdan, she said from the stage. Hymne à l'amour, written as a promise, became permanently an elegy; she recorded it seven months later and carried it, and him, for the rest of her life. Cerdan was buried in Casablanca, and reinterred at Perpignan in 1995. The Ring magazine's Hall of Fame took him in 1962 and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991, and the cinema kept returning to the story — most strangely and movingly in Édith et Marcel (1983), where Marcel Cerdan Jr., a boxer himself, played his own father.