Boxing Junkie staffers have tried to do their part in filling the void left by a barren fight schedule by providing boxing junkies other kinds of fixes.
First, we each provided three our favorite boxing matches. Then we revealed our favorite boxing movies. And today, to complete the series, we give you our favorite boxing books.
We hope you get your hands on some of them. They’re all worthwhile.
MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
David Remnick
1998
Muhammad Ali was a great fighter, maybe the best ever. He would’ve been worthy fodder for a book or two if he had no further significance. The fact he also arrived during the civil rights era and was willing to risk everything he had to change the world made him one of the most important figures of his generation. Pulitzer Prize winner David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, did a wonderful job weaving these elements together to tell a truly incredible story of Cassius Clay the boxer becoming Muhammad Ali the icon. This is my favorite boxing book.
Muhammad Ali: His life and times
Thomas Hauser
1991
There have been many books written about Muhammad Ali. Thomas Hauser’s oral history is arguably the best. Hauser uses the words of Ali himself and those closest to him to paint a complete, intimate portrait of a complicated figure that is difficult to put down. The New York Times described the book as “the first definitive biography of the boxer who transcended sports as no other athlete ever has” and “a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most charismatic and controversial superstars.”
Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
David Margolick
2005
The 1936 and 1938 fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were two of the most scrutinized events in boxing history because of their cultural significance, particularly the latter fight. The American Louis came to represent good, the German Schmeling evil during the rise of the Third Reich. Margolick’s exhaustive research and clear writing give the reader a compelling perspective on two unusual men, their turbulent era and the impact their fights had on the world. As author Joyce Carol Oates put it, “‘Beyond Glory’ is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.”
***
NORM FRAUENHEIM
The Sweet Science
A.J. Liebling
1956
A wonderful collection of essays from a ringside seat by A.J. Liebling, who at his best was the defining example of why boxing is called a writer’s sport. Liebling, a sophisticated man and longtime writer for the New Yorker, wrote about many things. He was a media critic. His was also a war correspondent, who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He saw the good, crazy and funny in men confronted by adversity. He wrote about Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. Archie Moore, he wrote, was “a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection.’’ Word-for-word, the undisputed best.
Only In America: The Life and Crimes of Don King
Jack Newfield
1995
It’s an uncompromising, well-sourced look at King. Newfield, then a columnist at the New York Post, was an investigative journalist who looks beyond hair and malaprops. He begins with King’s days running numbers in Cleveland. There was prison for manslaughter. Then there was a pardon and his emergence into a promoter both remembered and reviled. Newfield then looks at him through the eyes of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson. It’s not pretty. It’s not meant to be.
Four Kings
George Kimball
2008
Kimball, an unforgettable character from a legendary generation of great ringside writers, delivers an insightful piece of history, one that brought boxing out of a dormant era. It was post-Ali. Who was the next big name? Turns out there were four of them: Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler. From welterweight to middleweight, they would fight each other nine times for 16 world titles through the 1980s. What a decade. What a book.
***
SEAN NAM
In the Corner
Dave Anderson
1991
With the exception of the fighter, there may be no figure in boxing more important than the trainer. Also no figure more overlooked. But Dave Anderson, fortunately, knew their importance through and through. In his illuminating collection, Anderson presents first-person anecdotes from some of the most acclaimed teachers in the sport, including Ray Arcel, George Benton, Angelo Dundee, Eddie Futch, Gil Clancy, Emanuel Steward. And, mind you, they don’t talk about fancy “Instagram” mitt work. Collectively, their stories remind the reader that boxing is a serious pursuit that requires serious minds.
The Hardest Game
Hugh McIlvanney
2001
Few can approach a fight from so many angles and at the same give you a visceral sense of what is at stake than McIlvanney. “Hardest Game” collects many of the Scottish journalist’s deadline writings on the sport. An eyewitness to boxing’s greatest heavyweight age to the ascendance of Mike Tyson, McIlvanny was faced with the the challenge of measuring up to his subject. He did so time and time again.
On Boxing
Joyce Carol Oates
1987
Like Susan Sontag on photography, Robert Bresson on the cinema and Philippe Petit on the high wire, Joyce Carol Oates’ “On Boxing” is a lucid, philosophical investigation into the nature of one of the most dangerous and befuddling pursuits on earth. Oates might’ve never thrown a punch in her life, but it doesn’t matter, as evidenced by observations like this: “Some observers — among them men — believe that boxers are angry because they are men; and anger, for men, is a means of asserting dominance over other men — a tool, one might say, of the manly trade. Yet it is reasonable to assume that boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them.”
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Our favorites: Classic films to fill the boxing void
Our favorites: Classic movies to fill the boxing void