Watch: Sportswriter’s classic portrayal of Muhammad Ali, “the maddest of existentialists,” lives again in new video

Connoisseurs of the sweet science who enjoyed The Library of America’s 2011 collection At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing will want to know that one of the contributors to that volume, sportswriter Mark Kram (1933–2002), is now the subject of his own best-of compilation. Just out from St. Martin’s Griffin, Great Men Die Twice: The Selected Works of Mark Kram is edited by Kram’s son, Mark Kram, Jr., and arrives with advance praise from John Schulian, who co-edited At the Fights with George Kimball and also edited The Library of America’s Football: Great Writing About The National Sport.

Kram’s contribution to At the Fights is “Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great,” his report for Sports Illustrated on the third and final contest between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975—the famous “Thrilla in Manila.” Great Men Die Twice reprints that piece—and also makes it the basis of a new promotional video in which actor James Fouhey reads Kram’s text against the backdrop of an empty boxing gym. Fouhey’s resonant tones bring to life Kram’s description of the world heavyweight champion:

The maddest of existentialists, one of the great surrealists of our time, the king of all he sees, Ali had never before appeared so vulnerable and fragile, so pitiably unmajestic, so far from the universe he claims as his alone. He could barely hold his fork, and he lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, which had been scraped pink.

Enjoy the full video below—and check out the links beneath the video for additional boxing-related Reader’s Almanac posts.



Related posts:

• Rodney Welch on the many contradictory lessons in At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing
• Robert Lipsyte describes how Cassius Clay met The Beatles
• Forty years ago, the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, touted as “The Fight of the Century,” linked their legends forever
• George Kimball and John Schulian share their favorite boxing stories about Ali-Frazier, Stanley Ketchel, Bummy Davis

Photos: W. C. Heinz, Ring Lardner, Red Smith join “Mount Rushmore of sportswriters” at Fenway Park

The ceremony for the PEN New England Sports Writing Hall of Fame
at Fenway Park in Boston on Monday, June 15, 2015.
© 2015 Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox

Three Library of America authors were honored on the field at Boston’s Fenway Park on Monday night, June 15, as part of a pre-game public ceremony for the new Sports Writing Hall of Fame sponsored by PEN New England. W. C. Heinz, Ring Lardner, and Red Smith were inducted along with Grantland Rice—forming an inaugural group of honorees that Karen Wulf, executive director of PEN New England, aptly characterized as “the Mount Rushmore of sportswriters.”

W. C. Heinz’s daughter Gayl Heinz was on hand for the ceremony, representing both her late father and Red Smith, the latter at the request of members of Smith’s family. Gayl Heinz later told The Library of America, “I know how hard Dad worked to get it right, and it is so gratifying to know that his work has not only passed the test of time but has risen to the top. I am deeply honored and proud to represent him and his writings.”

The Library of America published The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz earlier this spring, and released American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith in 2013. Lardner is represented by the volume Stories and Other Writings, which includes “Tyrus,” about Ty Cobb, and You Know Me Al, his celebrated baseball novel from 1916. (Vintage editions of You Know Me Al are on display at the Sports Writing Hall of Fame—see photo, below.) All three writers also appear in the LOA collection Baseball: A Literary Anthology.

Now established in the Press Room at Fenway Park, the Sports Writing Hall of Fame honors writers who have made lasting contributions to sports literature. The Hall is a collaboration among PEN New England (the local chapter of PEN American Center), the Boston Red Sox, and Kurt Cerulli, the founder and chief executive of the financial services firm Cerulli Associates who is also a noted collector of sports memorabilia. With his wife Mary, Cerulli also founded PEN New England’s Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Writing in 2012.

Meanwhile, for those keeping score, after the Sports Writing Hall of Fame ceremony the Boston Red Sox fell to the Atlanta Braves, 4-2, for their seventh loss in a row, on a damp, chilly night at Fenway. Readers can speculate as to whether any Boston fans consoled themselves that night by imagining how Heinz, Lardner, or Smith would have captured the scene in print.

Inductees Red Smith and W. C. Heinz, shown here
on a monitor at the reception for the PEN New England
Sports Writing Hall of Fame at Fenway Park on June 15, 2015.
© PEN New England

Library of America volumes at the reception for the
PEN New England Sports Writing Hall of Fame.
© 2015 Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox

Gayl Heinz with the Library of America collection
of her father's sportswriting.
© PEN New England

A Sports Writing Hall of Fame display case with books, photos,
and memorabilia related to the four inductees.
© PEN New England

Related Reader’s Almanac posts:

• Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to and respected athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting
• Daniel Okrent on Red Smith’s “mastery of anecdote and vividness of expression”

Audio and text selections:

• Read the W. C. Heinz classic “Death of a Race Horse” at The Library of America’s Story of the Week website and listen to Bill Littlefield reading the selection in streaming audio.
• Ring Lardner’s 1915 piece “Where Do You Get That Noise?” at Story of the Week

Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to and respected athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting

The Library of America’s recent title The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz collects thirty-eight pieces by sports journalist W. C. Heinz (1915–2008), whose work is distinguished by its timeless human interest and vivid colloquial style.

Bill Littlefield, the book’s editor, met Heinz in 2001, and has attested to being “grateful ever since” for the friendship that developed between them. In the following interview, he discusses why Heinz’s writing has endured and how Heinz was able to create such compelling portraits of iconic athletes like Sugar Ray Robinson and Gordie Howe alongside others who were markedly less successful. Littlefield has been the host of National Public Radio’s weekly sports magazine Only A Game since 1993 and has written commentaries for NPR and Boston’s WBUR-FM for over thirty years. His seven books include two novels, Prospect and The Circus in the Woods, and the 2014 collection of sports verse Take Me Out.

In the earliest pieces in The Top of His Game, from 1947, Heinz seems already fully formed as a writer. Was his literary apprenticeship the reporting he did in World War II, or was there a period even before that in which he learned his craft?

The work Bill did as a war correspondent was certainly important to his development as a writer. I imagine he learned from the men and boys of those days the importance of getting their stories right. And he learned to work very hard at doing that. I’m sure that carried over into his work when he got home and had the opportunity to write about sports.

Heinz profiled many successful, even legendary sports figures, but much of his best work shows an affinity for what today we might call “beautiful losers”—strivers who don’t quite make it. Can you speculate a little as to where this special empathy or attraction of his might have come from?

Bill knew that everybody loses. Undefeated fighters lose. They grow old. They suffer the consequences of the profession. The glorious moments athletes provide us are glorious in part because they are fleeting. But Bill was especially drawn to the athletes he recognized as true professionals—those who brought not only talent but intelligence, determination, and integrity to what they were doing, whether or not they became champions. He respected boxers who listened and learned. The professionals.

I think his affinity for Pete Reiser, for example, came in part from the recognition that Reiser couldn’t have played baseball any other way. He didn’t run into outfield walls because he wanted to. That was the only way he could play the game, and it was brave and sad at the same time. The loss was built into the glory.

Heinz can make choices that initially might seem counterintuitive, such as his decision, in the long boxing piece “The Day of the Fight,” not to get to the match itself until the startling final paragraph. Did he have certain characteristic strategies in his writing?

I don’t know about characteristic “strategies.” It feels to me as if Bill’s constant strategy was to listen carefully and to see what there was to see. Sometimes he heard and saw things others missed until he pointed them out.

Along those lines: what trait do you most admire about Heinz as a writer?

Bill had great respect for the people about whom he wrote. So much writing about sports is full of smart-alecky asides and sarcasm or derision. Bill didn’t work that way. He cared about getting each story right, and when you read his work, you feel as if he cared not only about that responsibility, but about the people. He liked some of them more than others, certainly, and he didn’t entirely trust some of them, but he always honored them with his attention.

You were already familiar with Heinz’s work and career well before beginning to work on this book. As you sifted through the scrapbooks of his writing that Gayl Heinz, his daughter, lent you, were there any particular surprises—facets of Heinz’s talent you hadn’t come across before, for instance?

Jeff MacGregor said it best. He went through the same scrapbooks for his wonderful Sports Illustrated profile of Bill, and Jeff said, “There aren’t any bad ones.” I agree.

Is there a piece here that readers may find surprising?

The column Bill wrote about “Toughie” Brasuhn, Queen of the Roller Derby. I don’t think most of Bill’s readers will recall that one, but I was delighted to see it. Bill was curious. And he wasn’t reluctant to step away from the gym or the race track or the ball field when something like the roller derby came to town. I really like that column.

The period covered in The Top of His Game, 1947 to 1979, arguably coincides with the zenith of print journalism in this country. Given your own background, what’s the difference between a great print piece and a great TV or radio piece?

I don’t know how to talk about TV pieces in that context, because to such a great extent TV is obviously about pictures. That’s not to say that some of the people writing for television aren’t excellent writers . . . only that they know they can depend on images for a lot of the impact they’re trying to create. But radio is about words, just as obviously, and a good story told well on the radio is not so different from a good story told well in print, except that often radio gives you less time to get the job done. It’s been great to see some of the websites bring back what’s being called “long-form” journalism, the form in which Heinz was the master, because most of the magazines in which that work used to appear are long gone.

Your introduction recounts an episode in which, without having taken any notes, Heinz was able to report “word for word” on a meeting with boxing manager Jack Hurley at Stillman’s Gym. Is it possible today’s reliance on tape recorders and video cameras might make it harder for new writers like W. C. Heinz to emerge?

Several people who have read the introduction have commented on that story. Bill told me that of course he couldn’t reproduce “word for word” what Jack Hurley had said during that afternoon. What he could do was give his readers the cadence of Hurley’s voice, and a sense of his wit, by using some of the words and expressions Hurley favored. Bill could recreate what he’d heard in a smaller space—the space afforded him in a newspaper column.

Some people today wouldn’t be comfortable with that process. I think what makes the work harder for journalists today is that the athletes and the people around them are so careful about their images. A lot of them don’t have much to say, at least while the digital recorders are running or the cameras are rolling or the notebooks are out. And probably most writers now—like most writers in any time—are less patient than Bill was, and less trustworthy, too.

A lot of readers today may be fascinated to learn that in 1968 Heinz co-wrote, under a pseudonym, the novel that inspired the film and TV show M*A*S*H, after his two well-received novels The Professional and The Surgeon. Are there connections to be drawn between his fiction and his sportswriting?

The only novel about which Bill and I spoke at any length was The Professional. Bill put the qualities he’d learned to respect in fighters and in at least one trainer into the characters in The Professional. He was proud of what a good book it is, and proud of the integrity with which he’d written it. I won’t say any more about it, in case some of the people reading this haven’t yet read the novel. I don’t want to spoil it for them.

Audio and text selection: Read the W. C. Heinz classic “Death of a Race Horse” at The Library of America’s Story of the Week website and listen to Bill Littlefield reading the selection in streaming audio.

Daniel Okrent on Red Smith’s “mastery of anecdote and vividness of expression”

Daniel Okrent, author of several books (most recently, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition), spoke with us about American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith, published in May by The Library of America.

What do you admire most about Red Smith as a journalist? as a writer?

His absolute lack of pretension. Smith wrote cleanly, plainly, and directly, in natural language that never relied on flashy effects or inflated syntax. He had the same affect in his reporting: he asked direct questions, which just happened to produce direct answers. And his eye for detail was as acute as a painter’s.

Hemingway paid famous tribute to Red Smith’s writing in “Across the River and Into the Trees,” and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dubbed Smith “the Shakespeare of the press box.” What is it about Smith’s writing that has spoken to other writers and readers through and across so many decades?

More than anything, that it looked so easy. He managed to sound as relaxed and comfortable as an old friend—an old friend whose mastery of anecdote and vividness of expression just happened to be unmatched. I suppose what’s most remarkable is that writing was exceedingly difficult for him, and that what looked so easy was often as not the product of hours of false starts and other discarded efforts.

By taking sports as his subject, did Smith limit his possibilities as a writer?

As a writer, no; I’ll put the quality of his prose up against anybody’s. But as an enduring cultural presence, perhaps—not because he wrote about sports, but because he never wrote a book.

Why do you think the 750-word column was such a congenial form for Smith?

I’ll go out on a limb here and say it worked for him because of fear, two kinds. First, fear of the ever-approaching deadline, which is made even more terrifying by the old dictum, “I don’t have enough time to write short.” Getting everything he had to say into the limited space of a column before running into an unmovable deadline concentrated his mind the way that, oh, a date with a firing squad might. The second form of fear was, I believe, a fear of longer forms. Specifically, the book. He said he never wanted to write one, but I have to believe that, at least in part, he was afraid to venture into new territory.

Why do you think Smith was such a great obituary writer?

Simple: he knew everybody, and he liked most of them.

Smith balked at the prospect of writing an autobiography, and yet his writing imparts such a strong sense of his personality—warm, wry, humane. What were your encounters/interactions like? What do you remember about him?

I knew him slightly, and briefly, late in his life, when I commissioned him to write an essay for a book I edited, The Ultimate Baseball Book. The eight other writers I commissioned were literary figures—Mordecai Richler, John Leonard, George V. Higgins, Wilfrid Sheed, etc. Red was a joy to work with, and he was absolutely giddy about being the only pure sportswriter in a volume of literary heavyweights. Needless to say, they were all thrilled to be associated with him.

One difference: Smith was the only one of the bunch to deliver on time.

Smith wrote about boxing, horse racing, and fishing, among other American sports and pastimes, but he’s most closely associated with baseball. How would you describe Smith’s special connection to baseball? What players and managers were most important to him?

Both baseball and boxing (his two favorites) had that most treasured of attributes for any writer: a clear, unfolding story line. But remember, as well, that when Smith was rising in the sportswriting world, those were the nation’s two biggest games. He seemed to grow attached to football in his late years, but it never approached baseball, especially, in the richness of its milieu, its susceptibility to detailed examination, and its sheer dailiness, that long, slow, everyday-another-game march toward the off-season.

Your most surprising discovery in the course of working on the book?

Just how good he was so early in his career. I started reading Smith in the mid-60s, when he had already been the nation’s number one sportswriter for nearly two decades. What I had never realized is that the rhythms of his prose, the sharpness of his eye, the uncanny ability to come up with an unlikely image to capture a moment or a person—all that was already in place when he was not yet thirty.

Do you have a favorite column/piece in the collection?

Don’t ask me to choose among my hero’s children.

Rodney Welch on the many contradictory lessons in At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Which is more important in boxing: muscle or skill? Do the most successful fighters crave violence—or transcend it? In his incisive review for The Millions of At the Fights: American Writings on Boxing, Rodney Welch tears into the many opposing forces on display in the book’s fifty pieces—but he begins with a scene from Faulkner:

In William Faulkner’s masterpiece Absalom, Absalom!, landowner Thomas Sutpen’s idea of a rousing good time is to stage fights between his slaves. It’s his way of reminding himself of his own station in life, his triumph over his white trash past, to watch the lower orders go after each other tooth and nail, “fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad.” Occasionally, he even likes to participate, “as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself.” 

Money, power, race, and violence – they’ve all been a part of boxing from the beginning and they’re on full display in At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing from The Library of America.

Welch then uncorks a barrage of combinations about good versus evil, muscle versus skill, white power, exploitation, money, and how boxing “turns writers into pugilists of prose”—and “makes them reach for odd literary references,” as in the following:

His fighting style is as formless as the prose of Gertrude Stein.
– Heywood Broun

So he perished there in that Homeric stewpan, a brave man but an unwise one.
– H. L. Mencken 

Since the rise of [Rocky] Marciano, [Archie] Moore, a cerebral and hyper-experienced and light-colored pugilist who has been active since 1936, has suffered the pangs of a supreme example of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout.
– A. J. Liebling

Or as John Schulian, one of the book’s co-editors, described the sport in an interview with The Library of America (PDF): “Primitive. Savage. And yet beautiful and ennobling and capable of inspiring a kind of sweat-stained poetry.”

Also of interest:

• Forty years ago, the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• A memorial to George Kimball (1943–2011), co-editor of At the Fights, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato” by Pete Hamill, a previous Story of the Week
• “Cobb Fights It Over Again” by Irvin S. Cobb on the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, a previous Story of the Week

Related LOA works: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing; William Faulkner: Complete Novels

Ah, spring! when sporting minds turn to baseball—and books about baseball

Every April prompts high hopes for the home team, high expectations for the new roster of baseball books, and hearty harrumphs for pundits calling critical balls and strikes.

David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times kicks off the season by revising his list of “The Nine Best Baseball Books”—notoriously excluding Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four—but happily including Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, Jimmy Breslin’s Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, and Roger Angell’s Five Seasons. On Open Page Chauncey Mabe is baffled that Ulin’s list fails to include any of Mark Harris’s four baseball novels, which he asserts “together constitute a neglected classic of literary Americana.”

Leonard Cassuto, co-editor of the recently published Cambridge Companion to Baseball, sounds off in The Chronicle that “no one should doubt that baseball is America’s most literary sport.”

The game has a natural affinity to narrative: Each contest unfolds like a measured story, and the gaps in the action leave room for embroidery of all kinds. And embroidery there has been, with the romance of baseball proclaimed—against evidence that baseball is a big business, and often a venal one.

Likewise, in “Baseball in literature, baseball as literature,” their chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Baseball, Stephen Partridge and Timothy Morris note, “It’s hard to read an American classic without finding some mention of baseball.” Even Jay Gatsby, the ultimate American dreamer, may have had ties to the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Partridge and Morris uncover many little-known gems, including Lucy Kennedy’s 1950 novel The Sunlit Field, which recreates pre–Civil War baseball in Brooklyn and features a cameo appearance by Walt Whitman.

The connection between baseball and American culture gets its most sustained celebration every June at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, hosted by the Baseball Hall of Fame and the State University of New York at Oneonta. In February McFarland & Company published a collection of the best presentations from 2009 and 2010 including the intriguingly entitled “Plié Ball! Baseball in American Dance,” “On the Brink: Babe Ruth in Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day,” and “The Golem, the Rabbi, and ‘That Long-Sought Hebrew Star’: Jews in 1920s Baseball.”

And what’s spring without a controversy? Baseball statistician extraordinaire Bill James stirred up an opening-day fracas when he excerpted a piece from his new book, Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom, on Slate. “Shakespeare and Verlander” asked “why are we so good at developing athletes and so lousy at developing writers?” “The population of Topeka, Kansas,” James observes “is roughly the same” size as London’s population in Shakespeare’s time. So where, James asks, are the distinguished writers of Topeka? Dean Robinson, Alan Jacobs, and Ross Douthat were among the legion quick to challenge the wisdom of James’s assumptions (including the question of which player belongs in the title with Shakespeare—certainly not Verlander).

Also of Interest

• Moe Berg's "Pitchers and Catchers" was a recent Story of the Week.

Related LOA Title: Baseball: A Literary Anthology (includes pieces by Roger Angell, Jim Bouton, Jimmy Breslin, Jim Brosnan, Mark Harris, Roger Kahn, Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud, Buster Olney, and many more)

Pete Hamill discusses tabloids, boxing, and Cus D’Amato

In the video below, Broadway Boxing interviews LOA editor and author Pete Hamill.

(Courtesy Alex Belth's Bronx Banter and sny.tv)

“Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato”, the selection Hamill discusses in the video, was a recent Story of the Week.

Related LOA works: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Robert Lipsyte describes how Cassius Clay met The Beatles

Last night six voluble contributors (left to right: Colum McCann, George Kimball, Pete Hamill, Leonard Gardner, Robert Lipsyte, and Mike Lupica) to The Library of America’s new anthology, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, gathered at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble in Manhattan to celebrate the book’s publication. Of the many colorful boxing-related yarns spun, Robert Lipsyte’s account of covering the first Liston–Clay fight in Miami delivered the knockout punch:

In 1964 my time was not very valuable. I was a utility night rewrite writer and speechwriter at the Times when Sonny Liston fought Cassius Clay for the first time. The Times, in its wisdom, did not feel it was worth the time to send the real boxing writer. So they sent me down to Miami Beach and my instructions were, as soon as I got there, to rent a car and drive back and forth a couple of times between the arena, where the fight was going to be held in a week, and the nearest hospital. They did not want me wasting any deadline time following Cassius Clay into intensive care. I did that—if any of you ever get into trouble in South Beach, call me, I can tell you how to get there. I did it and drove to the Fifth Street Gym where Cassius was training. He was not there yet. 

As I walked up the stairs to the gym there was a kind of hubbub behind me. There were these four little guys in terrycloth cabana suits who were being pushed up the stairs by two big security guards. As I found out later, it was a British rock group in America. They had been taken to Sonny Liston for a photo op. He had taken one look at them and said “I’m not posing with those sissies.” Desperately, they brought the group over to Cassius Clay—to at least get a shot with him. They’re being pushed up the stairs, I’m a little ahead of them. When we get to the top of the stairs, Clay’s not there. The leader of the group says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. “ He turned around, but the cops pushed all five of us into a dressing room and locked the door. That’s how I became the fifth Beatle. [laughter]

They were cursing. They were angry. They were absolutely furious. I introduced myself. John said, “Hi, I’m Ringo.” Ringo said, “Hi, I’m George.” I asked how they thought the fight was going to go. “Oh, he’s going to kill the little wanker,” they said. Then they were cursing, stamping their feet, banging on the door. Suddenly the door bursts open and there is the most beautiful creature any of us had ever seen. Muhammad Ali. Cassius Clay. He glowed. And of course he was much larger than he seemed in photographs—because he was perfect. He leaned in, looked at them and said, “C’mon, let’s go make some money.” 

And then—if I hadn’t known better I would have sworn it was choreographed—he turned and the Beatles followed him out to the ring. You can see this now on YouTube [see below]. They followed him out to the ring and they began capering around the room. They lined up. He tapped Ringo. They all went down like dominoes. It was a marvelous, antic set piece. And then it was over and they left. Cassius Clay works out. At the end he’s back in the dressing room being rubbed down after the workout. He and I had yet to meet. He beckoned me over because he had seen me in the dressing room, and he said, “So, who were those little sissies?” [laughter] And then the best thing in the world happened. He won and I became the boxing writer.

Watch the video of Cassius Clay cavorting with the Beatles in the ring in Miami in 1964:


Also of interest:

• Read Robert Lipsyte's report on the Clay–Liston fight in The New York Times (February 26, 1964)
• Robert Lipsyte’s memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter Unabridged, will be published in May and will no doubt include a more extensive version of this story
• John Schulian, co-editor of At the Fights, remembers the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight in a previous Reader's Almanac post
• George Kimball, co-editor of At the Fights, will be reading from the book at Le Poisson Rouge on April 7 
• Read the exclusive LOA interview with Kimball and John Schulian about At the Fights (PDF)

Related LOA works: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (includes Robert Lipsyte’s piece, “Pride of the Tiger” and accounts of Clay–Liston I by Murray Kempton and George Plimpton)

Forty years ago, the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, touted as “The Fight of the Century,” linked their legends forever

Guest blog post by John Schulian, co-editor of At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

It seems like only a heartbeat ago that Frank Sinatra was ringside at Madison Square Garden, camera in hand, straining to get just the right shot of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier as they went to war for the first time. The calendar tells us, however, that forty years have passed. Sinatra is gone. So is Life magazine, which made him part of the working press for the night that launched boxing’s greatest trilogy. Ali and Frazier dwell in retirement like battleships that were too long at sea, but in our memories, they are forever young. That’s the curious thing about what they did for a living: they destroyed each other and gained immortality.

The two of them had been friends before their violent Garden party. When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship in 1967 for refusing induction into the military and found himself wandering the college lecture circuit, Frazier loaned him money. It was a fitting gesture, for Frazier now wore the crown that had been Ali’s. But he vowed he would give the deposed champ a chance to win it back, and when Ali was allowed to return to the ring in 1970, Frazier did something that isn’t standard practice in the cutthroat world of boxing. He kept his word.

They would each make $2.5 million and fight in front of a Garden crowd that overflowed with celebrities. Burt Lancaster, Sinatra’s co-star in From Here to Eternity, did the radio commentary. But the only thing that really mattered was the hatred that had erupted when Ali called Frazier an Uncle Tom and a tool of good-old-boy sheriffs and Ku Klux Klansmen. In a lifetime filled with kindness as well as greatness, it was a low moment for Ali. He knew full well that Frazier, the thirteenth child born to a one-armed North Carolina sharecropper, had traveled a far harder road than he had. By comparison, Ali was a child of privilege, raised in relative comfort in Louisville, his boxing career bankrolled by local white businessmen. But he got away with it because he was handsome, charming, funny, all the things Frazier was not.

What Frazier was, was mad enough to kill. Even in the early rounds of the fight, when Ali’s punches were turning his face into a Halloween mask, Frazier kept coming, relentlessly hammering away at Ali’s body. Here was a man bent on destruction, and in the eleventh round he delivered the blow that should have achieved his goal, a left hook that would have dropped a horse or maybe even a brick wall. But Ali didn’t fall. He wobbled and survived to fight on into the fifteenth and final round. Then Frazier clouted him with another, even more brutal left hook. This time Ali fell like a cartoon character, landing flat on his back while his feet flew high in the air. But he got up. The right side of his face had begun to swell and he was guaranteed to lose, but damned if he was going to let himself be knocked out.

By somehow getting back to his feet in the waning moments of a fight that sent both men to the hospital, Ali underscored his greatness for the nation, the world, and, most of all, Frazier. He would go on to win both their forgettable second fight and the epochal “Thrilla in Manila,” and he would leave pieces of himself along the way, as would Frazier. And when the last punch was thrown, it could rightfully be asked where the physical had ended and the metaphysical had begun. Only Ali knows for sure, but these days he doesn’t talk much.

Also of interest:

• View a Life magazine slideshow of images from Ali–Frazier I
• Richard Hoffer speculates in Sports Illustrated on what an Ali-Frazier match might look like today
• George Kimball, co-editor of At the Fights, has just published a collection of his pieces on boxing, Manly Art (They can run—but they can’t hide)
• Read the exclusive LOA interview with Kimball and Schulian about At the Fights (PDF)

Watch a video of highlights of Ali–Frazier I:


Related LOA works: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (includes seven articles on Ali, including Mark Kram’s classic account of the “Thrilla in Manila,” the final Ali–Frazier match); A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings (includes Liebling's account of a 1963 Cassius Clay fight at the Garden)

George Kimball and John Schulian share their favorite boxing stories about Ali-Frazier, Stanley Ketchel, Bummy Davis

In a just-posted exclusive interview (PDF) with The Library of America, veteran sports journalists George Kimball and John Schulian describe what moved them to put together the new collection At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing. “There’s an almost electrical charge to boxing that separates it from every other sport,” Schulian explained. “Boxing is elemental, visceral. It’s the closest thing to combat that most writers ever see.”

The editors spent a year culling through hundreds of pieces spanning a century in a process Kimball compares to “a jigsaw puzzle, because sometimes the decision to include a particular piece would, due to subject matter or tone or approach, displace others.” Pressed to pick a favorite piece, Kimball retorted, “Come on, man. Which of your children is your favorite?” Schulian came up with three winners:

Schulian: I’ll give you three favorites: Mark Kram’s piece on the Thrilla in Manila is, to my thinking, perfect. I’ve long considered Kram was one of the great stylists in Sports Illustrated’s history, and this is his masterpiece. His language and imagery are rich and vibrant, and there’s a full-blooded quality to the emotion he obviously felt as he watched Ali and Frazier wreak havoc on each other. They had all come of age together, and now the writer was watching the fighters turn each other into old men who never should have fought again after this. There’s never been a story about a fight that was as powerful or moved me as profoundly. 

My other favorites are character studies of the kind of rogues who could find only one sport that would have anything to do with them—boxing. John Lardner’s “Down Great Purple Valleys” begins with the single greatest lede in journalism history: “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.” Red Smith called it “the single greatest novel ever written in one sentence.” And the amazing thing is, the story just keeps getting better and better as Lardner unspools the short, crazy life of this go-to-hell middleweight. Fueled by booze and opium, wild about the ladies, and armed with a punch that once flattened Jack Johnson, Ketchel dwelled on the outer edge of boxing’s margins, and he paid for it. But, oh, what an unforgettable character. 

Bummy Davis, the “Brownsville Bum” immortalized by W. C. Heinz, was a different breed of cat, but just as wild and fearless and self-destructive and utterly mesmerizing. What separates the two of them is the circumstances of Davis’s death. Where the womanizing Ketchel gets played for a sap, Davis, who was a thumb-in-the-eye fighter, stands tall when armed robbers stick up the joint where he’s tending bar. One of the robbers calls Davis a “punch-drunk bum” and Davis starts swinging and the robbers start shooting. They’re still shooting when he chases them out the door with a bullet in him, and he stays after them until he falls on the sidewalk and dies in the rain. When Heinz paints the picture for us, it’s not mere sportswriting. It’s writing.

Read the full interview (PDF) with George Kimball and John Schulian.

Also of interest:

• Read Irvin S. Cobb’s classic account of the 1921 Jack Dempsey–Georges Carpentier fight, a recent Story of the Week
• John G. Rodwan Jr.’s blog has had some interesting recent posts on boxing and black history and on an upcoming Fighters & Writers night at the Book Nookery in Denver on March 1
• Kimball and Schulian have also edited the anthology The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song from Zevon to Ali

Related LOA books: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing; A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Pete Hamill receives A. J. Liebling Award

Journalist and author Pete Hamill has been selected by the Boxing Writers Association of America as the winner of this year’s A. J. Liebling Award. A masterful sportswriter, Hamill also has a special connection to Liebling: he was the editor of both Library of America volumes of his work, one of which was The Sweet Science and Other Writings. In an exclusive interview conducted shortly after the publication of that volume, Hamill spoke of Liebling’s appeal as a boxing writer:

LOA: In January 2003 Sports Illustrated ranked The Sweet Science as #1 of the 100 best sports books ever, hailing Liebling as “pound for pound the top boxing writer of all time. . . . Liebling’s writing is efficient yet stylish, acerbic yet soft and sympathetic.” What makes Liebling’s writing on boxing so great?

Hamill: Above all, he had sympathy for the fighters, and those rogues and craftsmen who helped shape them. As a young man, Liebling had taken his own lessons as a boxer. He learned the hard way how difficult an apprenticeship each fighter must serve, how much skill was involved, how much discipline and will. He knew that the toughest prizefighters could be the gentlest of men. He knew that the toughness they exemplified was not the same as meanness, nor still another version of the loudmouth with a pea-sized heart. The prizefighter was a living example of the stoic virtues Liebling saw growing up in New York, then during the Depression, and most of all, among those who fought World War II. He expressed that sympathy without ever lapsing into sentimentality.

Read the rest of the interview here (PDF).

Hamill has long been advisor to and supporter of The Library of America and has worked on several LOA projects. In addition to the two volumes of Liebling’s work, Hamill edited James T. Farrell: Studs Lonigan and wrote a foreword for Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. One of his own pieces on boxing, “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato,” appears in the forthcoming LOA boxing anthology At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.

The author of eighteen books, Hamill recent completed his latest novel, Tabloid City, which will be published on May 5—the day before he receives the Liebling Award at the BWAA’s annual dinner in Las Vegas. He was chosen for the award by a committee of veteran boxing writers that included George Kimball and John Schulian (both co-editors of At the Fights), as well as Pulitzer Prize–winner Dave Anderson, Bernard Fernandez, Richard Hoffer, and Ed Schuyler. Click here for the complete list of past winners.

“The Fastest Count Jack Ever Got”: Jack Dempsey Meets His Match

The current Story of the Week, Irvin S. Cobb’s “Cobb Fights It Over Again,” is a ringside report of the fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921, one of the most famous boxing matches of the last century. Our research for the introduction to the story turned up some interesting tidbits about the fight: it was the first million-dollar gate in boxing, the arena (which held nearly 100,000 spectators) was built especially for the event, and among the crowd were a gaggle of the rich and the famous, from Henry Ford to Al Jolson.

We also found the marvelous clip below, of Jack Dempsey when he appeared on the TV quiz show What’s My Line? in 1965, just after he turned 70. The blindfolded contestants identify Dempsey in no time (“The fastest count Jack ever got,” the always quick-witted Arlene Francis quips). During the rest of the segment Dempsey and the panelists talk briefly about his testimony before the ongoing Congressional hearings into the corruption and mob influence that had long plagued boxing; the recent rematch between Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) and Sonny Liston, which ended in a controversial knockout; and Dempsey's longtime friendship with Gene Tunney—the boxer to whom he lost his title in 1926.



The Irvin Cobb selection is one of dozens of literary essays and classics of journalism included in the forthcoming At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, which has just arrived from the printer and will be in bookstores on March 3. You can see the complete table of contents here.

New on the LOA website: Boxing in literature, James Fenimore Cooper

• Recently listed by the popular blog The Millions as one of the most anticipated titles for 2011, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing has just arrived from the printer. The contents of the 500-page volume have been posted and can be found here. This new anthology is available now for immediate shipment from the LOA Web Store and will be available in bookstores on March 3.
• We’ve just posted a PDF version of Winter 2010-2011 Library of America Newsletter. The issue recaps the LOA’s fall list and recent reviews of last year’s titles and notes some major donations recently granted to The Library of America to support its mission.
• For reasons known only to the mysterious overlords of publishing, recent sales of The Library of America's two-volume edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales (The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, and three other novels) have spiked dramatically, and we've had to go back to press for a rush reprint. Although the first volume is currently out of stock at most retailers until next month, you can still get the set at the LOA Web Store for 25% off.