Boxing Still Matters

Boxing Still Matters is a fact-based history of professional boxing from 1981 to 2021, the years immediately following the time span covered in When Boxing Mattered, the author's first book, which focused on 1880-1980. The book utilizes a decade-by-decade approach and features the big names of the four decades covered. Marquee names, Larry Holmes, the Klitschko brothers, Mike Tyson, Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury, Lennox Lewis, George Foreman, Evander Holyfield, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Alexis Arguello, Aaron Pryor, Julio Cesar Chavez, Bernard Hopkins, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Manny Pacquiao, Canelo Alvarez, and Vasiliy Lomachenko are all covered and accompanied by historical photographs.

Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

A collection of essays on various episodes in American history.

Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring -- the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger - their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Ernie into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the plodding optimism of their manager Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, "There was always someone who wanted to fight."

Professional sports in America offer numerous examples of equal opportunity and broken down racial barriers. These developments call for pride and celebration. Yet skin color continues to have an influence in how Americans experience sport. From Al Campanis' statement about the under-representation of blacks in baseball front offices to the almost exclusively white ownership of professional teams, one sees that sports, though admirably more equitable than other societal institutions, are hardly a colorblind American pursuit. Choosing the racially charged sport of boxing for investigation, the author has compiled dozens of statistics measuring whether or not America's racial majority still yearns for a white champion--a Great White Hope. Drawing upon data from The Ring Magazine and its annual record books, this study endeavors to bolster or refute the popular perception in boxing circles that white fighters of lesser ability are helped along to their sports elite level, as a result of being promotional gold in the eyes of the public.

In this step-by-step guide to getting started in the world's most addictive sport, you'll learn what to look for in your first boxing gym, get a brief history of boxing, its rules, what equipment to buy, what boxing workouts should be, basic defensive techniques, and basic punches.--Adapted from cover.

 Among the great lightweights of the 1940s and 1950s, Boxing Hall of Famer Sidney "Beau Jack" Walker (1921-2000) was virtually orphaned by his parents and eked out a living as a shoeshine boy. He honed his craft fighting battles royale for wealthy white members of the prestigious Augusta National Golf Club, eventually receiving financing for his career from club founders. He went on to win two lightweight titles and set numerous records. He was the draw for the highest admission paid for a ringside seat--$100,000--and was named "Fighter of the Year" in 1944. Like most black pugilists of his day he struggled against discrimination in the sport. Despite this, he sustained an impressive 18-year professional career--117 fights, 83 wins, 40 by KO. Walker retired from the ring penniless and went back to shining shoes, the money set aside for him by his handlers mysteriously depleted.

An 8-volume reference set containing over 4,000 entries written by distinguished scholars, 'The African American National Biography' is the most significant and expansive compilation of black lives in print today.