The History Book Club discussion

This is the thread to discuss the history of Boxing.

I'm not a fan of the fact you hit each other senseless, but it has a great history.

Kasia Boddy

Product info:
Boxing is one of the oldest and most exciting of sports: its bruising and bloody confrontations have permeated Western culture since 3000 BC. During that period, there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or naked fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all.

In her encyclopaedic investigation, Kasia Boddy sheds new light on an elemental sports and struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Boddy examines the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, and shows how from Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boxing explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, from cinema to radio to pay-per-view. The book also offers an intriguing new perspective on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding, Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Philip Roth, James Joyce, Mae West, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Dickens.

An all-encompassing study, Boxing ultimately reveals to us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

Yes, I have never been a fan either but there are a lot of folks who are.

This looks good:

A.J. Liebling

Product info:
A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.

Some Muhammad Ali books:

David Remnick

Amazon review:
You'd think there wouldn't be much left to say about a living icon like Muhammad Ali, yet David Remnick imbues King of the World with all the freshness and vitality this legendary fighter displayed in his prime. Beginning with the pre-Ali days of boxing and its two archetypes, Floyd Patterson (the good black heavyweight) and Sonny Liston (the bad black heavyweight), Remnick deftly sets the stage for the emergence of a heavyweight champion the likes of which the world had never seen: a three-dimensional, Technicolor showman, fighter and minister of Islam, a man who talked almost as well as he fought. But mostly Remnick's portrait is of a man who could not be confined to any existing stereotypes, inside the ring or out.

In extraordinary detail, Remnick depicts Ali as a creation of his own imagination as we follow the willful and mercurial young Cassius Clay from his boyhood and watch him hone and shape himself to a figure who would eventually command center stage in one of the most volatile decades in our history. To Remnick it seems clear that Ali's greatest accomplishment is to prove beyond a doubt that not only is it possible to challenge the implacable forces of the establishment (the noir-ish, gangster-ridden fight game and the ethos of a whole country) but, with the right combination of conviction and talent, to triumph over these forces. --Fred Haefele

Thomas Hauser

Publisher's Weekly:
Hauser compiles opinions from a wide-ranging roster of interviewees to create a portrait of the controversial boxing champ that bristles with insights, jabs and tributes.

Muhammad Ali
Publisher's Weekly:
Few lives have been more zealously recorded in movies, photography and literature than Ali's. So it's fortunate that this book is not so much a memoir as a collection of the supreme athlete's spiritual contemplations. Structured as a series of minichapters on abstract virtues—love, friendship, peace, wisdom, understanding, respect, etc.—it consists of Ali's religious reflections, buttressed by personal anecdotes, Sufi parables, aphorisms, personal letters and poetry. What might be seen as mawkish or cloying from someone less universally beloved has real poignancy coming from boxing's brashest champion ("The Mouth" was one of his many nicknames), who is slowly being driven behind a wall of silence by Parkinson's. The book has the intensity of a deathbed confessional. Ali is settling his accounts, apologizing to Joe Frazier and Malcolm X for hurting them. But primarily he is giving advice to his many children, for whom he obviously feels an overwhelming love. (His daughter Hana addresses her love for her father directly in the book.) Besides Ali's love, readers will be struck by his remarkable faith. With the Black Muslims, he found not only an expression of his own pride in being black but also a personal relationship with Allah, which served as the wellspring for the remarkable courage he displayed both inside ("The Rumble in the Jungle") and outside (refusing the Vietnam draft) the ring. It's hard not to be moved by Ali's spirit. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information,

Mike Marqusee
Product info:
Ali has been a player on the world stage for so long, it's hard to remember that before his metamorphosis into a cultural icon holding the Olympic flame aloft he was a cultural lightening rod. Hero to some, traitor to others, he managed to land powerful punches both in and out of the ring. What changed him from athlete to personality to a heavyweight of global reach? "At the core of the Ali story," Mike Marqusee reminds us, "is a young man who made daunting choices and stuck to them in the face of ghastly threats and glittering inducements." Redemption Song explores those choices in the context of the turbulent times in which they were made.
Ali and the '60s were a naturally synergistic fit. It was a time of great change, and Ali, the seeker, had remarkable access to the fomenters of that change. They, in turn, had a prime influence on his symbolic rebirth and reemergence. As Redemption Song recounts, the night the young Cassius Clay upset Sonny Liston for the title in 1964, he skipped the traditional post-fight party and headed straight for Miami's black ghetto where he met with Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke, and the running back Jim Brown, an early advocate of black rights in sports. The next morning, announcing to the white world that "I'm free to be what I want" and "I don't have to be what you want me to be," he confirmed rumors about his conversion to Islam. Clay was dead; long live Ali.

The conversion to Islam was only one of Ali's "daunting choices." As Marqusee moves through the decade, he carefully traces Ali's choices to confront the establishment and stand as a symbol of civil rights and the anti-war effort; his relationships with Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King; and the importance of his travels to Africa. There's plenty of boxing too--Liston, Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, George Foreman; the ring, after all, was his arena. Marqusee, though, is more interested in how Ali expanded that arena to take in the kinds of fights that go beyond the ropes. It's a tall order, but Redemption Song fulfills it with solid reporting and worthy analysis. --Jeff Silverman

Thanks, abclaret, looks interesting.

Roger Kahn

Amazon:
Jack Dempsey (1895-1983) launched the age of big-money, high-visibility boxing with his 1919 defeat of heavyweight champion Jess Willard. Then when Gene Tunney beat Dempsey in 1927, assisted by a referee's controversial "long count," it foreshadowed the end of an era. With his good looks, free-and-easy ways, and roughneck background--including an ex-wife who was a prostitute before and after their marriage--Dempsey was the perfect hero for the brawling, cynical 1920s. Even his sensational trial in 1920 on charges of draft evasion and "white slavery" (he was acquitted) suited the decade's appetite for lurid tabloid stories. Roger Kahn, who met the fighter in the mid-1950s, takes an idiosyncratic approach to biography. He begins with a 1960 encounter in Dempsey's restaurant, moves back to the fighter's hard-knocks apprenticeship, covers Dempsey's childhood after an account of the 1920 trial, and intersperses snapshots of the American scene with recollections and reflections from the champ throughout. This technique pays off. Readers get a vivid sense of the period and of Dempsey as its hard-living but honorable exemplar, and they come to share Kahn's affection and respect for the thoughtful, generous man he became in later years. Squeamish readers, be warned: along with the cultural history, there's lots of boxing action, graphically described. --Wendy Smith

Geoffrey C. Ward

Product info:
In this vivid biography Geoffrey C. Ward brings back to life the most celebrated — and the most reviled — African American of his age.

Jack Johnson battled his way out of obscurity and poverty in the Jim Crow South to win the title of heavyweight champion of the world. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled simply to exist, he reveled in his riches and his fame, sleeping with whomever he pleased, to the consternation and anger of much of white America. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure prison and seven years of exile. This definitive biography portrays Jack Johnson as he really was--a battler against the bigotry of his era and the embodiment of American individualism.

This looks good, too:

David Margolick

Product info:
Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling — bouts that symbolized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war. Acclaimed journalist David Margolick takes us into the careers of both men — a black American and a Nazi German hero — and depicts the extraordinary buildup to their legendary 1938 rematch. Vividly capturing the outpouring of emotion that the two fighters brought forth, Margolick brilliantly illuminates the cultural and social divisions that they came to represent.

Great adds Bryan.

I am not a boxing fan but the story of Jack Johnson has always fascinated me; therefore I purchased:

by Geoffrey C. Ward.

An interesting and basically tragic tale of the black champion who suffered for his race and his marriage to a white woman in the days when that "just wasn't done" and in most states was against the miscegenation laws. The book is a character study of the man as opposed to a story about boxing but it is one that boxing fans should read.

Thank you very much Jill for the add. Very much appreciated.

You are most welcome......it is also a book that could fit into a category concerning the problems encountered by blacks and other minorities in the 20th century....I couldn't find an appropriate thread.

You did just fine finding the right thread.

A couple of other boxing biography / history books that I though looked interesting: by Wil Haygood and by Donald McRae.

Cool, Steven, thanks for your adds.

The story of a popular boxer. Don't you sort of expect boxers to have this sort of nickname?

by Mark Kriegel
In the early 1980s, Mancini was more than the lightweight champ. He was a national hero. Sinatra fawned over him. Warren Zevon wrote a tribute song. Sylvester Stallone produced his life story as a movie of the week. After all, an adoring public considered Boom Boom the real Rocky. Lenny Mancini—the original Boom Boom, as he was known—had been a lightweight contender himself before fragments of German mortar shell almost killed him in 1944. By winning the championship just as he vowed—for his wounded father—Ray produced his own feel-good fable for network television.
But it all came apart in a brutal 1982 battle against an obscure Korean challenger. Duk Koo Kim lost consciousness in the fourteenth round and died within days. Three months later, his despondent mother took her own life. The deaths would haunt Ray and ruin his image, turning boxing’s All-American Boy into a pariah. Now, thirty years later, Kriegel finally uncovers the story’s full dimensions, tracking the Mancini and Kim families across generations and excavating mysteries—from the killing of Mancini’s brother to the fate of Kim’s son. Even as the scenes move from Youngstown to New York, Las Vegas to Seoul, Reno to Hollywood, The Good Son remains an intimate history, a saga of fathers and fighters, loss and redemption.

Sounds like an interesting book. I knew this author briefly in the 1990s when he was a sportswriter for the New York Post. I guess he is a reporter for Fox Sports now?

Craig I think that is right, if it is the same person I am thinking of.

As a child my father and I used to listen to the Friday Night Fights on the radio....but as an adult, I am no boxing fan; however, there is some interesting information in this book about the champs and those who would be champs.

The Heavyweights: The Definitive History of the Heavyweight Fighters

by Bob Mee

Synopsis
Heavyweight boxers have always had a special appeal. From the last great bare-knuckle champion, John L. Sullivan, to the modern giants such as Tyson and Lewis, this is the definitive history of the heavyweight fighter. Dozens of books have been written about the champions, but this is the first time the doings, and sometimes undoings, of the main men of the heavyweight division—champions, challengers, and pretenders alike—have been placed side by side in one book.

Joe Louis: The Life of a Heavyweight


Lew Freedman

Synopsis
Joe Louis held the heavyweight boxing championship longer than any other fighter and defended it a record 25 times. (In the 1930s and 1940s, the owner of the heavyweight title was the most prominent non-team sports competitor.) In addition, Louis helped bridge the gap of understanding between whites and blacks. During World War II he not only raised money for Army and Navy relief and entertained millions of troops as a morale officer, but became a symbol of American hope and strength. This biography of Louis outlines his rise from poverty in Alabama to become the best-known African American of his time and describes how an uneducated man, simple at his core, became so articulate and ended up on the side of right in the battles he fought, with fist or voice.

Amazing

One Punch from the Promised Land: Leon Spinks, Michael Spinks, and the Myth of the Heavyweight Title

by John Florio

Synopsis:

“Well written and deeply sourced." —Bob Costas

“A vivid and compelling dual biography populated by the giants and demons of boxing’s last golden age.” —Jeremy Schaap, ESPN

It was 1976 when Leon and Michael Spinks first punched their way into America’s living rooms. That year, they became the first brothers to win Olympic gold in the same Games. Shortly thereafter, they became the first brothers to win the heavyweight title: Leon toppled The Greatest, Muhammad Ali; Michael beat the unbeatable Larry Holmes.

With a cast of characters that includes Ali, Holmes, Mike Tyson, Gerry Cooney, Dwight Qawi, Eddie Mustafa Muhammad and dozens of friends, relatives, and boxing figures, ONE PUNCH FROM THE PROMISED LAND tells the unlikely story of the Spinks brothers. Their rise from the Pruitt-Igoe housing disaster. Their divergent paths of success. And their relationship with America.

The book also uncovers stories never before made public: the big paydays, the high living, the backroom deals. It’s not afraid to tackle an issue rarely discussed: Does the heavyweight title deliver on its promise to young men in the inner city? This is the definitive story of Leon and Michael Spinks. And a cross-examination of heavyweight boxing in 20th century America.

Reputed to have one of the hardest punches in boxing history, Rocky Marciano is the subject of this very well done biography.

Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times

by Russell Sullivan (no photo)

Synopsis:

In this captivating and complex portrait of an American sports legend, Russell Sullivan confirms Rocky Marciano's place as a symbol and cultural icon of his era. As much as he embodied the wholesome, rags-to-riches patriotism of a true American hero, he also reflected the racial and ethnic tensions festering behind the country's benevolent facade.The early 1950s were an outwardly simple and optimistic time. America was basking in postwar prosperity. Living rooms across the country glowed with the novelty of television. People were likely to trust politicians, hate commies, lionize athletes, and turn to sports for good, clean fun. Boxing was second in popularity only to baseball, and Marciano was the heavyweight champion of the world.

Marciano emerged from obscurity in the early 1950s and had snagged the heavyweight crown by 1952. When he quit the ring in 1956 he had never lost a bout -- a feat still unmatched by any boxer in heavyweight history. To sportswriters and fans, Marciano's 49-0 record was enough to warrant the prestige and honor they bestowed on him despite widespread discussion of his flaws as a boxer.

Sullivan contends that Marciano's popularity was compounded by the uneasy racial attitudes of the era. He was a white man in a sport increasingly dominated by black men during a time when most Americans were hesitant to accept integration. He was also a second-generation Italian American, and although portrayed in the media through ethnic stereotypes, he was revered by immigrants and others who embraced the idea of the melting pot. Even more looked to Marciano as the embodiment of the American Dream and a way of life that was cherished in the early 1950s.

Spirited,fast-paced, and rich in detail, Rocky Marciano is the first book to place the boxer in the context of his times. Capturing his athletic accomplishments against the colorful backdrop of the 1950s fight scene, Sullivan examines how Marciano's career reflected the glamour and the scandal of boxing as well as the tenor of his times.

Rubin "Hurricane Carter passed away today.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (May 6, 1937 – April 20, 2014) was an American middleweight boxer who was convicted of murder and later freed via a petition of habeas corpus after spending almost 20 years in prison.

In 1966, police arrested Carter for a triple-homicide in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Police stopped Carter's car and brought him and another occupant, John Artis, to the scene of the crime. There was little physical evidence. Police took no fingerprints at the crime scene and lacked the facilities to conduct a paraffin test for gunshot residue. None of the eyewitnesses identified Carter or Artis as the shooters. Carter and Artis were tried and convicted twice (1967 and 1976) for the murders, but after the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time.

Carter's autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round, was published in 1975 by Warner Books. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter).

From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter(no photo)

One of the greatest boxers in history and certainly the most dapper.

Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson

by Herb Boyd

Synopsis:

Hailed by critics as a long overdue portrait of Sugar Ray Robinson, a man who was as elusive out of the ring as he was magisterial in it, Pound for Pound is a lively and nuanced profile of an athlete who is arguably the best boxer the sport has ever known. So great were Robinson's skills, he was eulogized by Woody Allen, compared to Joe Louis, and praised by Muhammad Ali, who called him "the king, the master, my idol." But the same discipline that Robinson brought to the sport eluded him at home, leading him to emotionally and physically abuse his family -- particularly his wife, the gorgeous dancer Edna Mae, whose entrepreneurial skills helped Robinson build an empire to which Harlemites were inexorably drawn. Exposing Robinson's flaws as well as putting his career in the context of his life and times, renowned journalist and bestselling author Herb Boyd, with Ray Robinson II, tells for the first time the full story of a complex man and sport-altering athlete.

A upcoming book:
Release date: October 4, 2015

The Phantom Punch: The Story Behind Boxing's Most Controversial Bout

by Robert Sneddon (no photo)

Synopsis:

The two bouts between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston are widely considered the most anticipated and controversial fights in heavyweight boxing. Cassius Clay won the first bout in Miami Beach in February 1964, when Liston refused to come out for the seventh round. The second fight took place in Lewiston, Maine, fifteen months later in May 1965. Halfway through the first round, Ali countered a left from Liston with a fast right, knocking Liston down. He did not get up. Ali’s right was so fast many spectators never even saw it. It was quickly dubbed the Phantom Punch and rumors began to swirl that Liston had thrown the fight. Many who believed Liston—a brutal fighter who picked up boxing in prison—had also thrown the first fight the year before in Miami were now vindicated.

What were the events leading up to the second fight, which confirmed Ali’s place as Heavyweight Champion, and why did a match worthy of Madison Square Garden between two powerhouse boxers come to take place in Lewiston, Maine? Now, journalist and sports historian Rob Sneddon goes behind the scenes of the fight. He brings new perspective to the world of boxing in the 1960s, to the managers, teamsters, promoters, boxers, and the fight itself—a fight that remains both a key milestone in the history of sports in Maine and the most controversial bout in boxing history.

One of the most popular boxers of the 1950s era.

Kid Gavilan: World Welterweight Boxing Champion

by Robert Grey Reynolds, Jr(no photo)

Synopsis:

Kid Gavilan was a fixture in the boxing world of the early 1950s. He fought on television more than thirty times, in bouts for championships and non-title fights. From Camaguey, Cuba, the Kid was named by his first manager, who had a restaurant called El Gavilan or The Little Hawk. Kid Gavilan fought the majority of his fights in the United States after arriving here in the 1940s. Kid fought Sugar Ray Robinson, Carmen Basilio, Billy Graham, Johnny Bratton, and others contenders, some of them multiple times. He was noted for his bolo punch, his quickness, and ring savvy. Gavilan had trouble making the 147-pound weight limit for welterweights and tried to move up to the middleweight division in 1954.

An upcoming book:
Release date: February 7, 2017

Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing

by Jerry Izenberg (no photo)

Synopsis:

Once upon a time, of all the memories made in ballparks and arenas from California to New York, there was nothing to rival that magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd by its collective jugular vein and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown.

That's the way it was when the heavyweight giants danced in the boxing ring during the golden eras of the greats Ali, Frazier, Holmes, and Spinks, to name a few. There will never again be a heavyweight cycle like the one that began when Sonny Liston stopped Floyd Patterson and ended when Mike Tyson bit a slice out of Evander Holyfield s ear; when no ersatz drama, smoke, mirrors, and noise followed a fighter s entry into the ring; when the crowds knew that these men were not actors on a stage but rather giants in a ring with a single purposeto fight other giants.

By the ringside, acclaimed sportswriter Jerry Izenberg watched history as it was being made during those legendary days, witnessing fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle and preserving them in punchy yet tremendous prose. Delivering both his eyewitness accounts and revelatory back stories of this greatest era of heavyweight boxing, Izenberg invites readers to a place of recollection. Once There Were Giants is his memorial to this extraordinary time, the likes of which we shall never see again.

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee"...........RIP Mohamed Ali, one of, if not the greatest boxers in history. For more information, visit this link.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/mu...

Another:
Release date: January 9, 2018

A Ringside Affair: Boxing's Last Golden Age

by James Lawton (no photo)

Synopsis:

For three decades--throughout boxing's most engrossing era--James Lawton was ringside, covering every significant bout, spending time with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hitman Hearns, Roberto Duran, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, and many other great fighters.

A Ringside Affair brings that brilliant epoch back to life--and puts it in the perspective it deserves. It salutes the epic quality of boxing's last years of glory, retraces arguably the richest inheritance bequeathed to any sport, and speculates on the possibility that we will never see such fighting again.

It is part celebration, part lament, but perhaps most of all it is a personal record of some of most enthralling and challenging days produced by the world's oldest sport.

Thank you Jerome