An inside look at the world of professional boxing, "From Fightin' to Writin'" focuses on the stories few have heard. Whether it's the young prospect on his way up, the champion looking to hold on to his title, or the grizzled veteran hoping for that one big break, award-winning boxing writer Thomas Gerbasi brings their stories to you with a hard-hitting immediacy that makes you feel like you're in the locker room with some of boxing's toughest warriors before the big fight. Covering everything from women's boxing and the heavyweight division to Olympians on the rise and the international fight scene, this is not a book about Mike Tyson, Oscar De La Hoya, or Muhammad Ali. Instead, "From Fightin' to Writin'" takes you deeper than ever before into the lives of fighters before and after they hit the big time.

No sport offers more allure and repulsion than the inviting and abrasive world of boxing. Starting on the mean streets of 1950s Chicago, this collection of essays moves into a close reflection of the boxing world up through the glitz of today's boxing circuit.

For Ted Sares, boxing is more than a sparring match between two combatants violently punching each another. It is a visceral experience that reaches in all directions, from his childhood memories of visiting the Chicago rings with his father to today's all-out-fight demeanor of Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao. At the same time tender and brutal, triumphant and tragic, in the end these pieces are about the last man standing and the hope for fair judgment between the victor and the defeated.

"Boxing Is My Sanctuary" is a collection of essays that explores both sides of a sport that is colored with paradox. Between the violent and affectionate, the barbaric and the civilized, Sares finds a ringside refuge in the midst of the sights, sounds, and smells that define boxing.

"Boxing In The Shadows" is the story of many great Black fighters throughout the past century and puts their accomplishments within the context of the era that they fought in. This book is the seventh book that Mr. Donelson has written or co-written. Mr. Donelson has written on a variety of subjects over the past three decades and been published in newspapers and publications, Mr. Donelson is a leading observer of the boxing scene as well as a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, the leading boxing historical society.

About Mr. Donelson, Ringsports.com Rusty Rubin writes, "Tom Donelson is an outstanding scribe in describing the world of boxing. This is why I asked Mr. Donelson to co-authored our book, Billy Soose, "The Champion that Time Forgot.""

The most bizarre world championship fight in boxing history was staged on St. Patrick's Day 1923, in war-torn Dublin. The winner in the ring, Mike McTigue, went on to run with gunmen, gangsters and racketeers in Jazz Age New York. A Bloody Canvas: The Mike McTigue Story tells the story of how Michael Francis McTigue left Kilnamona, Co. Clare, to seek fame and fortune in the United States, only for circumstances to bring him back to Dublin where he would win one of the strangest world title fights in boxing history. Set partly against the background of the Irish Civil War, it also tells of a bitterly divided people who managed to set aside their differences for twenty rounds of boxing before the guns started firing and the mines started exploding once more. But primarily, A Bloody Canvas is a biography. It tells how an ageing journeyman fighter found himself to be the right Irishman, in the right place at the right time. This is the saga of an underdog boxer laced with wrenching danger and a panoramic sense of life from late eighteenth-century rural Ireland to the Civil War, to the heady days of the Jazz Age in New York and the desperation of the Great Depression.

These gentlemen do not hesitate to take a serious look at the major fights of today, weigh the important factors, and make a prediction as to how the contest will proceed and who will win. This does not mean they are always correct. Who is? But in addressing how each combatant will fight his adversary, they are usually on target. In selecting the winner, again they are correct an uncanny number of times. So, it is quite interesting to see what they have to say in advance of a match and also in assessing the outcome. Their study of boxing is not limited to the present either. While they focus primarily on boxers after the year 1930, they are well-read and extremely knowledgeable about the old-timers that preceded these men, even as far back a the bare-knuckle fighters. I have experienced some challenging debates with Tom and Frank regarding several men in boxing history and, in some cases, I am hard-pressed to produce a decent argument in response to some of the points they emphasize. I have followed boxing for over 57 years now, ever since I was a child, eight years of age. subject--magazines, books and newspapers (from as far back as 1820). I have read what sportswriters, coaches, athletes, boxers, and fans have to say. In conclusion, I must say that Tom and Frank write with as much authority and in-depth knowledge as anyone I have read and exhibit in their writing the keen observation and analysis that is often lacking in the work of many others. The book makes for a good reader on the subject of boxing with short and easy to read essays that serve to whet the appetite of a boxing fan. Tracy Callis

Originally published in 1915, this is a memoir of Eugene Corri's career as a boxing referee. He refereed all the top fights of the day and speaks at length of both the fights themselves and the boxers who fought them, all of whom he knew well. Well-illustrated with black and white photographs, this is a fascinating glimpse into a vanished era. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include - The Lucky-Tub of Memory - The Carpentier-Gunboat Smith Fight - Barbardier Wells, with a Word or Two about Carpentier - Robert Fitzsimmons - Willie Ritchie and Freddy Welsh - Matt Wells, Sereant Basham, and Johnny Summers - Wilde The Wizard - Some Boxing Storeys - More Boxing Storeys - Boxing in the War

Easily the most enduring of all sports questions is Who was/is the best . . . ? Perhaps in no sport is the question more asked and argued over than in boxing. And in boxing perhaps none is more qualified to answer the question than Bert Randolph Sugar.
In Boxing's Greatest Fighters, not only does the former publisher of Ring Magazine tell us who the best fighters were, he lists them in order.
Could Sugar Ray Robinson have beaten Muhammad Ali? Could Sugar Ray Leonard have beaten Sonny Liston? The answer, most experts agree, would be no. But what if, as Bert Sugar has done here, one were to take all the boxers and reduce them in the minds eye to the same height, the same weight, and the same ring conditions? The answers would be quite different.
And while some fans may express outrage that Rocky Marciano barely makes the top twenty, and Marvin Hagler staggers into the top seventy-five, others will nod eagerly when they read that Harry Greb and Benny Leonard were better than just about anybody.
So whether you read Boxing's Greatest Fighters cover to cover, pick your
favorites at random, or simply browse through the many rare photographs, at
the bell, come out arguing.

Jock McAvoy was influenced by his poor 1930s background. A ferocious fighter, a special kind of person who fought hard to give his family a better standard of living. Many older boxing journalists believe that the romance of the ring and its hungry exponents rest, almost entirely, in the years gone by. The 1930s were, without doubt, the greatest period in British boxing history. On the social side, this period was hard and desolate: there was no welfare state, conditions of employment for this generation were oppressive, everyone worked for wages that allowed no margin for illness. If a man didn't work, he and his family went hungry. Man was at his best when up against it and thousands fought to put food on the table for their families. "McAvoy: Portrait of a Fighting Legend" lays not only a man but an era to rest.

Iron Mike collects the best writing on the tumultuous fifteen-year career of the most reviled and idolized athlete in the world, Michael Gerard Tyson. Since becoming, at age nineteen, the youngest heavyweight champion in history, Tyson's dramatic rise, fall, and continuing struggle has provoked more passionate writing, both in and out of the sports pages, than that of any other boxer since Muhammad Ali. Iron Mike is about more than boxing. Like no other athlete, Mike Tyson is at the nexus of America's cultural anxieties about race, class, masculinity, violence, and celebrity; like no other athlete his story of high drama and low comedy inspires writers to wrestle with these themes, with Tyson often no more than the occasion for the writer's own preoccupations. And Tyson has provided many such occasions: his rise to the Undisputed World Heavyweight Championship at age twenty-one; his rocky marriage to Robin Givens; his controversial conviction for the rape of Desiree Washington; his return to boxing and reclamation of the WBC and WBA belts; his biting of Evander Holyfield. Iron Mike is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a man who, for better and worse, is one of the most recognizable, popular, and defining icons of our time. The book includes selections from Joyce Carol Oates, Pete Hamill, Jose Torres, Pete Dexter, Phil Berger, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson, Jonathan Yardley, Richard Rodriguez, Katherine Dunn, Budd Schulberg, William Plummer, David Remnick, Keith Botsworth, and others.

Big city boy grabs scholarship to escape L.A. insanity to small-town America. Meets, wins, loses ?

"Personally, I've got a lot invested in reaching my stunning current age, and I'm damned if I'm going to hang on to that youthful crap. (I liked the idea of being a sixty-year-old so much I started claiming that age before I turned fifty-nine.) Parts of it, I don't like--the loss of energy that seems its inevitable accompaniment, for example--but when I consider how I used to boil that energy away as a younger man, and the things I boiled it away on, I am happy to accept a shorter tether and a more reflective way of going at things."


John Jerome, author of such beloved books as Truck and Stone Work, entered his sixty-fifth year with a number of goals in mind: to battle the debilities of age, to master them through understanding when he could not physically defeat them, and to keep a journal of these efforts. As he puts it, "It was time to start planning an endgame."

The result is a warm, compassionate, and honest look at the twelve months that led him to the gateway of old age--a survey of this time of life which ranges from strict physiology to expansive philosophy, from delicate neurosurgery to rough weather on a Canadian canoeing trip, from the despair and isolation of illness to the love and comfort of a sound marriage. The writing, in its clarity, grace, and humor, matches its author's spirit. "The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our time," Jerome reminds us. Reading this wise and funny chronicle of one man's--and everyman's--journey toward citizenship, senior division, will be time well spent, for young and old alike. It is that rare kind of book which comes to life as a companion, and even a friend.


From the Hardcover edition.

From 1919 to 1927, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion of the world. With his fierce good looks and matchless dedication to the kill, he was a fighter perfectly suited to the Roaring '20s. In A Flame of Pure Fire, award-winning and renowned sports writer Roger Kahn, a personal friend of Dempsey's, tells the extraordinary story of a man and a country growing to maturity in a blaze of strength and exuberance. With passion and precision, Kahn not only chronicles the thrilling, brutal bouts of the "Manassa Mauler" but also illustrates how the wild and raucous 1920s shaped Dempsey, and how the champ, in turn, left an indelible mark on sports and American history. An accomplished and insightful observation on how sports can measure a society's evolution, Roger Kahn finds the heart of America in the story of the most famous athlete of his time, the man John Lardner once called "a flame of pure fire, at last a hero."

"This is a surprising book, a terrific book. It's not about boxing, but about an odd, demanding world in which boxing is the thread, the key to existence. Wiley deftly broadens the delineation of this world and its people. Perceptive reporting is the foundation and perceptive reporting is rare enough. Wiley enhances it with clear, quick writing laced with humor and with a sensitivity that lends brilliance to this impressive work."-Robert W. Creamer, author of Baseball and Other Matters in 1941. "Ralph Wiley, with Serenity, has produced an original book about the ring. . . . He can dig beneath the surface and show us what really happened in a bout: why Thomas Hearns, with too much faith in his powerful right hand, lost to Sugar Ray Leonard in their first match. . . . Or why Roberto Durn was acting out of prudence, not cowardice, when he quit in his second fight against Leonard. . . . Yet the book is not really about boxing. Boxing in Serenity is what T. S. Eliot, speaking of plot, called the meat a burglar brings to distract the watchdog. The book is really about growing up in a world where you had to defend yourself physically to survive."-New York Times. "Wiley's rapport with boxers is profound."-Publisher's Weekly. "Wiley is one writer who really knows his way around a boxing ring. . . . He writes] with passion and understanding about complex, violent men and their oddly redemptive sport."-Booklist. Ralph Wiley is the author or coauthor of several works, most recently Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story.

From the daughter of Muhammad Ali comes an intimate portrait of the heavyweight boxing champion and a final love letter from a daughter to her father.

Through audio journals, love letters and cherished memories, Ali's daughter Hana tells the story of a very typical and yet fully-unique family, the rise and fall of her parent’s marriage and the struggles they faced as a family surrounding Ali’s loss to Larry Holmes in 1981.

With the decline of Ali’s voice, his recordings are important to history as they are to his personal legacy. At Home with Muhammad Ali offers a candid look at a man who was trying to find his purpose in the world as he realized he was coming to the end of his lucrative sporting career, all the while trying to balance fatherhood and his worldly and political obligations. Additionally, Hana tells of the everyday adventures that the family experienced around the house—with visitors like Michael Jackson and Clint Eastwood dropping by. And for the first time, Hana’s mother Veronica will share her memories of the 12-year relationship with Muhammad.

At Home with Muhammad Ali is a candid and revealing portrait of a legend, a man admired and respected as the greatest sporting icon of our age.

When Carl Froch defeated George Groves in their Wembley Stadium re-match in front of 80,000 fans, it went down as the biggest fight in British boxing history, cementing Carl's place as our greatest boxer - a pure warrior who has never accepted the easy way. Carl grew up a tough kid on a Nottingham estate, where boxing helped to keep him out of trouble. His incredible natural ability soon led to a world amateur medal before he turned pro and embarked on a long journey with his mentor and corner man Rob McCracken. Carl's career has always been defined by taking on the odds with blisteringly tough fights. He was never scared to fight in someone else's backyard and always faced the hardest opponents to prove himself - Jean Pascal, Arthur Abraham, Andre Ward, Lucien Bute and his incredible last round knock-out of Jermain Taylor. But of course he will always be remembered for his showdowns with the great Dane Mikkel Kessler and then George Groves, avenging his initial points defeat by Kessler and finishing Groves for a second time with one of the greatest punches in British boxing history. Froch was first a local and now a national hero and here he tells the story of how he fought his way through sheer guts and determination to the summit of the boxing world. PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS THE COBRA - NOW FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED

Fifteen previously unpublished boxing pieces written between 1952 and 1963.
Demonstrating A.J. Liebling’s abiding passion for the “sweet science” of boxing, "A Neutral Corner" brings together fifteen previously unpublished pieces written between 1952 and 1963. Antic, clear-eyed, and wildly entertaining, these essays showcase a" The New Yorker" journalist at the top of his form. Here one relives the high drama of the classic Patterson-Johansson championship bout of 1959, and Liebling’s early prescient portrayal of Cassius Clay’s style as a boxer and a poet is not to be missed.
Liebling always finds the human story that makes these essays appealing to aficionados of boxing and prose alike. Alive with a true fan’s reverence for the sport, yet balanced by a true skeptic’s disdain for sentiment, "A Neutral Corner "is an American treasure.

Here is Jake LaMotta discussing his career as a hoodlum; Floyd Patterson on growing up in the ghetto; Gunboat Smith on the Jack Johnson era; Jack Dempsey on the Willard fight and the Tunney "long count"; Rocky Graziano on showbiz; and dozens of others--including Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pastrano, Jose Torres, Carmen Basilio, Joe Louis, Willie Pep, and Archie Moore--on boxers, racketeers, drugs, payoffs, managers. Including two never-before-published interviews with Roberto Duran and Alexis Arguello, this newly expanded and updated edition of "In This Corner. . . !" is undoubtedly the best one-volume history of boxing ever written.