At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing [Hardcover]

George Kimball (Editor), John Schulian (Editor), Colum McCann (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: March 3, 2011

American writers have been fascinated by the ring, both the primal contest inside the ropes and the crazy carnival world outside them. From neighborhood gyms and smoke-filled arenas to star-studded casinos and exotic locales, they have chronicled unforgettable stories about determination and dissipation, about great champions and punch-drunk has-beens, about colorful entourages and outrageous promoters, and, inevitably along the way, about race, class, and violence in America. Like baseball, boxing has a vivid culture and language all its own, one that has proven irresistible to career journalists and literary writers alike.
The Library of America presents a gritty and glittering anthology of a century of the very best writing and reportage about the fights. Here are Jack London on the immortal Jack Johnson; H. L. Mencken and Irvin S. Cobb on Jack Dempsey vs. Georges Carpentier, dubbed "The Fight of the Century"; Richard Wright on Joe Louis's historic victory over Max Schmeling; A. J. Liebling's brilliantly comic portrait of a manager who really identifies with his fighter; Jimmy Cannon on the inimitable Archie Moore; James Baldwin and Gay Talese on the haunted Floyd Patterson; George Plimpton on Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X; Norman Mailer on the "Rumble in the Jungle"; Mark Kram on the "Thrilla in Manila"; Pete Hamill on legendary trainer and manager Cus D'Amato; Mark Kriegel on Oscar de la Hoya; and David Remnick and Joyce Carol Oates on Mike Tyson. National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) weighs in with a foreword.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

GEORGE KIMBALL (1943–2011) was a longtime sportswriter (Boston Herald) and the author of Four Kings: Leonrad, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing.

JOHN SCHULIAN was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News before moving to Hollywood, where he was the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess. He is the author of Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists. Both are recipients of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism, awarded by the Boxing Writers Association of America.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (March 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530925
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530926
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #600,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable April 1, 2011

By SUGARRAYSMELEE

Format:Hardcover

Regardless of whether you are a fan of boxing or not, this book contains some of the finest writings I've come across. Not just in sports.Inside are 50 articles, some brief, others rather lengthy, all have been handpicked for their excellency, all are gems. There are many historic authors works throughout the book, Red Smith, Jack London, James Baldwin, W.C. Heinz, Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Jimmy Cannon, and A.J. Liebling just to name a few. The articles are chronologically ordered in such a way that you can almost observe the transformation of the sport and times in America. Each author enshrines their own unique style within the pages amounting to a history of literature that deserves to be celebrated.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Class book September 5, 2011

By Sleeping Piranha

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Classic look at boxing revealed by the classic and classy individuals who honored it with their presence and their words.
A wonderful reminder that the world was different and better mannered.
Writings of numerous, well respected writers and plenty of precious photographs

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fighting Words June 12, 2011

By John Hood

Format:Hardcover

The Black and White of the Black and Blue and Bloody
SunPost Weekly May 12, 2011 John Hood

Boxing may not be the glory sport it once was back in its heyday -- and if last weekend's Manny Pacquiao/Shane Mosley bout was any indication, it's not gonna be either. But at its best, and its brightest, there's something brutally beautiful about the sweet science. No one knows this better than those who throw words around for a living, who find in the fistic not just the stuff of legend, but a veritable parallel to their own craft.

"What you have with a fight is what you have with writing, and they each become metaphors for each other -- the ring, the page; the punch, the word; the choreograhy, the keyboard; the feint, the suggestion; the bucket, the wastebasket; the sweat, the edit; the pretender, the critic; the bell, the deadline. There's the showoff shuffle, the mingled blood on your glove, the spitting your teeth up at the end of the day."

That's what Irish wordslinger Colum McCann claims in his Foreward to At the Fights (The Library of America $35). And it's a cinch that each and every writer featured in this robust collection would wholeheartedly agree. What McCann didn't mention though, was that, like fighters, many of writers featured here would boast their accounts to be the singlemost ass-kicking pieces ever put to print.

Okay, so maybe I exaggerate -- a little. For every Norman Mailer and Jack London, there's a good dozen like the late, great A.J. Liebling, whose prose was so forceful and fluid it stood toe-to-toe with even the most blow-hardiest of braggarts, and in many cases whipped their asses to boot. (It's no wonder The Library of America also collected Liebling's The Sweet Science and Other Writings....) But that didn't stop the top scribblers of their time from trying to best the best, and with the likes of H.L. Mencken and Sherwood Anderson and James Baldwin in the ring, the writings make for one helluva championship season.

Okay, so as renowned columnist Mike Downey pointed out in the LA Times, At the Fights doesn't include anything from Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner or even Bat Masterson, let alone an account of the infamous 1919 bout when the four were among the "484 gentlemen (cough) of the working press [who] sat outdoors in the 100-degree heat of Toledo, Ohio, on the Fourth of July to watch 37-year-old Jess Willard, a 6-foot-6 former cowboy, be flattened in Round 1 seven times by Jack Dempsey, 24, who sat out World War I but was sufficiently fit to break Willard's ribs, cheek and jaw." But that's a very minor quibble in a collection this vast. (For five years Downey wrote "In the Wake of the News," a column which the great Ring Lardner started back in 1913, so he may be taking the exclusions a little personally anyway.) And with apologies to Downey, wouldn't it be wiser to herald what At the Fights does include?

Of course it would. The problem with that is At the Fights includes far too much worthy of both merit and mention for a single column, unless perhaps one wanted to eliminate all the high caliber color, and what would be the fun of that?

Beginning with Jack London's account of the 1910 championship bout between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries (for which the Call of the Wildman called for and coined the term "The Great White Hope"), and ending with Carlo Rotella's 2002 homage to Larry Holmes ("Champion at Twilight"), At the Fights is a near century's worth of rip-roaring reveal. Some of it comes ringside (Mailer et al); some of it comes from the gym (i.e. Pete Hamill's "Up the Stairs with Cus D'Amato"); and some of it comes from so far behind the scenes you feel as if you've been eavesdropping (Thomas Hauser's excerpt from The Black Lights).

Like in London's account, race is a rather rampant factor, including the bout between Joe Louis and Jorge Brescia, though in this case it's not sparked by the writer (Sherwood Anderson), but by a Nazi magazine which claimed Louis's loss to Max Schmeling was a "Cultural Achievement" for the white race. Anderson, like Americans of every color, wanted Louis to get a second stab at Schmeling, and if he lost to this so-called "Bull of the Pampas," that stab wouldn't be coming. Thankfully, two stories later, Bob Considine, "the racehorse of the Hearst syndicate's International News Service," recounts the 1938 bout where our beloved Brown Bomber did just that, and he does so with the kinda befitting "rat-a-tat-tat" that sealed the lid on Schmeling's race-baiting career.

Race also propels Richard Wright's account of the Brown Bomber's first round knockout of the Nazi Kraut (sorry, I couldn't resist), just as it propelled nearly every word Wright ever wrote. Nevertheless, his "High Tide in Harlem" evokes a pride that was far too long in coming for a people who deserved it perhaps more than anyone.

The inimitable Joe Louis is the subject of equally inimitable Red Smith's entry as well. This time it's the Brown Bomber's 1951 bout with Rocky Marciano, and it becomes a fitting, if sad, epitaph to a stellar career.

Of course Joe Louis isn't the only legendary pugilist to be awed upon (though it wouldn't be such a bad thing if he were); nor even the most praised (Ali here claims that title too). In fact, there's nary a 20th century champion who doesn't get his due by at least one of superlative-slingin' scribe or another.

Why, you ask? Well, in the words of John Schulian, who (with George Kimball) co-edited this collection:

"The most quotable, accessible, big-hearted athletes I've ever covered are prizefighters. Doesn't matter whether they're choirboys or ex-cons. They all talk, they all share pieces of their lives that athletes in other sports would never reveal. The important thing to remember, though, is that this is life in microcosm. It's beautiful, messy, profane, funny, sad, cutthroat, brutal -- and yet heroes rise from it even if their hands aren't always raised in victory. When I think of what I've written about boxing, so much of it feels like noir fiction, and yet I was there, I saw it happen. And if I hadn't seen it, when I'd read somebody's account of it, I'd want a taste the next time a big fight came along. Because, as every writer who's been there will tell you, there's nothing in all of sports that compares."

And if that's not enough to get you into this ringside seat, then you're just not into the black and white of the black and blue and bloody sport of boxing. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars at the fights April 21, 2012

By Paul C. Salkaln

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

beast book i ever read. novels, the hell with them. why would you want to make stuff up when you've got such intriguing material in a space twenty foot square.

5.0 out of 5 stars INDISPENSABLE May 9, 2013

By Thomas McIntyre

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

A deep and thorough history, chronicling the Sweet Science, by noted sports journalists, members of the broader literary community, and in a few cases boxers themselves, including profiles of great champions, reporting on epoch-defining fights, observations on the interplay between boxing and politics, social movements, and the culture at large. Absolutely indispensable for any boxing fan, and for anyone curious about the sport.

5.0 out of 5 stars Uniformly great writing, lots of boxing history February 10, 2013

By David K. Porter

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This one's a keeper, even though I got it through my Kindle. Wish I'd bought the hardback so I could loan it and get more use out of it.

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book about the sport of boxing January 9, 2013

By Jeff Lowenthal

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is an excellent anthology of writers on boxing.
In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I bought another copy as a gift for a friend.
Highly recommended!

5.0 out of 5 stars Winner December 30, 2012

By lisa knutstad

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

this was a christmas gift for a boxing fan
they are enjoying it ! and loved it as a gift