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Author: Paul Beston Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1442272902 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
For much of the twentieth century, boxing was one of America’s most popular sports, and the heavyweight champions were figures known to all. Their exploits were reported regularly in the newspapers—often outside the sports pages—and their fame and wealth dwarfed those of other athletes. Long after their heyday, these icons continue to be synonymous with the “sweet science.” In The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the Ring, Paul Beston profiles these larger-than-life men who held a central place in American culture. Among the figures covered are John L. Sullivan, who made the heavyweight championship a commercial property; Jack Johnson, who became the first black man to claim the title; Jack Dempsey, a sporting symbol of the Roaring Twenties; Joe Louis, whose contributions to racial tolerance and social progress transcended even his greatness in the ring; Rocky Marciano, who became an embodiment of the American Dream; Muhammad Ali, who took on the U.S. government and revolutionized professional sports with his showmanship; and Mike Tyson, a hard-punching dynamo who typified the modern celebrity. This gallery of flawed but sympathetic men also includes comics, dandies, bookworms, divas, ex-cons, workingmen, and even a tough-guy-turned-preacher. As the heavyweight title passed from one claimant to another, their stories opened a window into the larger history of the United States. Boxing fans, sports historians, and those interested in U.S. race relations as it intersects with sports will find this book a fascinating exploration into how engrained boxing once was in America’s social and cultural fabric.
Author: Paul Beston Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1442272902 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
For much of the twentieth century, boxing was one of America’s most popular sports, and the heavyweight champions were figures known to all. Their exploits were reported regularly in the newspapers—often outside the sports pages—and their fame and wealth dwarfed those of other athletes. Long after their heyday, these icons continue to be synonymous with the “sweet science.” In The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the Ring, Paul Beston profiles these larger-than-life men who held a central place in American culture. Among the figures covered are John L. Sullivan, who made the heavyweight championship a commercial property; Jack Johnson, who became the first black man to claim the title; Jack Dempsey, a sporting symbol of the Roaring Twenties; Joe Louis, whose contributions to racial tolerance and social progress transcended even his greatness in the ring; Rocky Marciano, who became an embodiment of the American Dream; Muhammad Ali, who took on the U.S. government and revolutionized professional sports with his showmanship; and Mike Tyson, a hard-punching dynamo who typified the modern celebrity. This gallery of flawed but sympathetic men also includes comics, dandies, bookworms, divas, ex-cons, workingmen, and even a tough-guy-turned-preacher. As the heavyweight title passed from one claimant to another, their stories opened a window into the larger history of the United States. Boxing fans, sports historians, and those interested in U.S. race relations as it intersects with sports will find this book a fascinating exploration into how engrained boxing once was in America’s social and cultural fabric.
Author: Joe Ryan Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 078649249X Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This work covers the individuals and events of what most consider to be the greatest era in boxing history. The first chapter compares the 1970s to all other eras, from the early 1900s and Jack Johnson to the present day and the Klitschko brothers, proving through an established set of criteria that the '70s stand above all other eras. The second chapter focuses on the tumultuous 1960s and the circumstances that led to the blossoming of unprecedented competition. The remaining ten chapters cover the years 1970 through 1979, revisiting the people and the rivalries of an era that produced Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Norton and Holmes, boxers known to people who didn't even follow the sport.
Author: Ken Brooks Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476620237 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Ingemar Johansson's right hand--dubbed "The Hammer of Thor"--was the most fearsome in boxing, and Johansson's three fights with Floyd Patterson rank among the sport's classic rivalries. Yet most fans know little about the Swedish playboy who won the world heavyweight championship with a shocking third round knockout of Patterson and held it for six days short of a year (1959-1960). During his reign, the raffish "Ingo" hit fashionable nightspots on two continents, romanced Elizabeth Taylor, and refused to kowtow to the mobsters who controlled boxing. This first-ever biography of Johansson chronicles his fistic triumphs as a Goteborg teen prodigy, his humiliating disqualification for "cowardice" at the 1952 Olympics, his storybook romances with Birgit Lundgren and Edna Alsterlund and his post-career life and tragic early dementia.
Author: Jerry Izenberg Publisher: Skyhorse ISBN: 9781510759985 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
**New edition updated with a foreword by Manny Pacquiao.** A celebration and memorial of the greatest era of heavyweight fighters from 1962 to 1997, as witnessed ringside by an International Boxing Hall of Fame sportswriter. 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 purpose—to 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.
Author: Arly Allen Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476626375 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
Jess Willard, the "Pottawatomie Giant," won the heavyweight title in 1915 with his defeat of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. At 6 feet, 6 inches and 240 pounds, Willard was considered unbeatable in his day. He nonetheless lost to Jack Dempsey in 1919 in one of the most brutally one-sided contests in fistic history. Willard later made an initially successful comeback but was defeated by Luis Firpo in 1923 and retired from the ring. He died in 1968, largely forgotten by the boxing public. Featuring photographs from the Willard family archives, this first full-length biography provides a detailed portrait of one of America's boxing greats.
Author: John Dennis McCallum Publisher: ISBN: 9780801959516 Category : African American athletes Languages : en Pages : 393
Book Description
Paints an unvarnished picture of the 24 greats who have ruled the sport's most glamorous division - the Heavyweight Champions of the World. Tells all the inside stories of the great ring bouts, the men who fought those grueling rounds, and the men who made and managed the champs.
Author: Armond Fields Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786450223 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
When he died in 1933, James J. "Gentleman Jim" Corbett was honored by two distinguished groups of people: the professional boxing public, who celebrated him as America's greatest boxing champion, and the world of popular theater admirers, who revered him as one of Broadway's top vaudeville headliners. Corbett was uniquely instrumental in making boxing and popular theater both justifiable commercial enterprises, to be enjoyed by all classes of people. He became America's first national sports hero and went on to formulate the theater world's star system. This is the first definitive biography of the man who knocked out heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, and who also knocked out audiences who flocked to see him in vaudeville and silent pictures. The focus herein is on the real man, the influences on his life, and the social and commercial environment within which he functioned. The author reveals that Corbett was a complex, driven, enigmatic man whose dedicated participation in popular entertainment changed American social values and mores, and at the same time reinvented the notion of a national hero.
Author: James B. Roberts Publisher: ISBN: 9781590131213 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 782
Book Description
A fully illustrated and researched update to a classic reference guide includes entries for all of the inductees in the Boxing Hall of Fame through 2006, in an official record book that lists key facts and figures while providing numerous action photographs. Original.
Author: David E. Finger Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc. ISBN: 1612343090 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 494
Book Description
Boxing fans love the upset, seeing the underdog surprise the heavy favorite and take the fight to him, winning over the fans and--perhaps even more important--the judges. Sylvester Stallone mined that emotion through his long series of Rocky films. Rocky is fiction, however. The men in Rocky Lives! are real. David E. Finger, a writer for top boxing website FightNews.com, presents chronologically seventy-five heavyweight boxing upsets of the 1990s. Some involve boxers still fighting today; others contain a cautionary tale of once-great boxers chasing one last payday. There are also the early-round disasters of wannabes and athletes who switched to boxing in midstream. From the Tyson-Douglas, Foreman-Moorer, and Lewis-McCall top-dollar fights to low-level curiosities like former New York Jet Mark Gastineau getting embarrassed or Eric "Butterbean" Esch taking to the ring, David Finger presents the best heavyweight upsets the 1990s have to offer. You'll read about crooked promoters drugging opponents, a convicted felon hoping victory in the ring will win him leniency, and a forty-five-year-old preacher looking to exorcise a two-decade-old demon. Rocky Lives! brings all the knockouts and slugfests right into your home.
Author: Paul Beston
Author: Paul Beston
Author: Gavin Evans
Author: Joe Ryan
Author: Ken Brooks
Author: Jerry Izenberg
Author: Arly Allen
Author: John Dennis McCallum
Author: Armond Fields
Author: James B. Roberts
Author: David E. Finger