Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Boxing
Cassius Clay Gives a Thrashing to Sonny Liston
The author of America’s best-loved baseball book speaks of his days as a reporter, of his time (unique among sportswriters) owning a team, and of his latest subject, Jack Dempsey, whose violent career he uses to illuminate an era.
In the Navy, we found parts to make a color television in 1946. Anything to watch the heavyweight championship.
In 1946, I was in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
Harry Wills might have been heavyweight champion of the world. But the world wouldn’t let him.
New York was suffering a newspaper strike when the great black former boxer Harry Wills died in December of 1958, and, therefore, not everyone in the city of his residence knew he was gone.
Some people think that the history of boxing as a glamorous business, as promotion rather than as sport, begins with Muhammad Ali and Don King. Before Ali, they say, boxing was I just a bunch of palookas punching each other.
Americans have always admired size. We like big statues, big buildings, big burgers. And when it comes to boxing, it is the heavyweights we follow most avidly, fascinated by their sheer volume and by the terrible damage they can do.
Taking on all comers, he had always dropped his man—but his supreme moment came in bare-knuckle boxing’s last great fight
On Highway 11 on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a roadside historical plaque bears this inscription:
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