Which biographies would you hold up as examples of best practice in terms of how to research a fighters career? Which biography would you give to an aspiring young writer to show him/her how it should be done?
I mean it depends on what you are after though? There are so many different categories. We all know about the Pollack series. That's the book that most completley meets the criteria in your opening post. At the other end we have Night Train, the Sonny Liston Story. This book is filled with speculation and a paper investigation of a mafia background. It is well researched but approaches Liston obliquely. Somewhere in between you probably have the best books (though I love In The Ring With James Corbett and Night Train as much as anything i've read), maybe Dick Tiger: The Life And Times of a Boxing Immortal by Makinde is the best example of the middle road.
I like the method Hauser uses. It's easy to follow and relatively transparent. I'm no big biography buff, but I haven't seen that method used in a biography anywhere else. Of course it has it limits (would be hard to use in a biography written today on Johnson, Sullivan etc), but in general I like it.
To be honest I was thinking about how to research a historic fighter where written sources are the mainstay.
Charley Burley's 'The Life and Hard Times of an Uncrowned Champion' is the standout example from my own reading experience. Amazing amount of research went into that
Well, as far as having only newspapers and other written sources to use, that was the case with the book I wrote about Joe Gans. http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Gans-Biography-American-Champion/dp/0786439947/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
'Unforgiveable Blackness - The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson' by Geoffrey Ward is a cracking good read and very well written. Not sure if this meets the criteria of your thread but 'Dark trade - Lost in Boxing' by Donald McCrae is an amazing account of a boxing writer's experiences.
