In the second round of a defense of his IBF super featherweight world championship, Tony "The Tiger" Lopez felt the elbow of challenger John Molina slam into his eye. The impact of the accidental shot shattered his orbital bone and jammed Lopez's eyeball back into its socket. Swelling immediately sealed the eye, a problem made worse when, in the next round, Molina opened a cut over Lopez's other eye. The notoriously gritty champ fought seven more rounds that night in Sacramento before losing his title by TKO -- a story typical of those you'll read in "A Puncher's Chance: Amazing Tales from The Ringside Boxing Show." This is the first of a series of books chronicling the strange-but-true lives of some of the greatest boxers and boxing personalities of all time -- yarns spun in their own words during live interviews on The Ringside Boxing Show, a weekly radio program that originates from Monterey, California and streams worldwide. Prepare to be astonished by more than a dozen of the most remarkable and improbable stories ever told about the brutal and astonishing sport known as "The Sweet Science."

LaVern Roach, a skinny kid from the small town of Plainview, Texas, rose from obscurity to become one of boxing's most popular figures during the 1940s. Roach's rise to prominence occurred during an era when boxing shared the spotlight with baseball as the nation's top two professional sports. As a result of Roach's death- which marked the first nationally televised fight during which a boxer died from injuries received in the ring-the sport of boxing came under closer scrutiny by the general public than ever before. West Texas Middleweight is the story of Roach's all too brief journey from a West Texas amateur, to enlistment in the US Marines, where he captained the nation's most successful military boxing team, to becoming a Madison Square Garden main eventer. He received the distinction of being named The Ring Magazine's "Rookie of the Year" for 1947 and was considered a top ten contender for the middleweight championship of the world. This book chronicles Roach's road to his final fight-and it explains why, as noted by legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, "boxing changed because of LaVern Roach."