Favourite Boxing Magazines in the old days

Knowing what I know now 59 years after I bought my first boxing magazine at a bus station in Seattle (Boxing Illustrated, August '61 -- a special section on heavyweights from Dempsey to Patterson), if I wanted to start over and learn a lot about boxing history and to be well entertained, I would first collect the Boxing and Wrestling magazines from the 1950s, then Boxing Illustrated from its inception in 1959 through the sixties, and then Ring Magazine from the beginning until Nat Loubet sold the magazine. Boxing International was good. Hank Kaplan's magazine was good. And quite a few of the later magazines up until about 1990 were good. After that, keeping track of all the champions became too much for me and I lost interest.

 

That's the great "time capsule" thing about magazines. You open up an old one and are stunned reading about what they thought would happen. They're a very useful way to discover why certain decisions were made.

 

I started early 70's my dad actually had a 12 month Ring Magazine subscription. So I'm gonna say late 60's , all through the 70's were the best mags, it definetly was the best era, (of the heavyweights for sure). loved The Ring's monthly ratings. Nat Fleischer did a great job there.

World and international Boxing had the best pictures, and Fighter stories/fighter biographies, Boxing Illustrated a lil late in the tooth for their monthly ratings, However did have a top 50 that no one used all the same, and had very good stories in their own right. Also WBA & WBC top ten ratings.

I STILL HAVE ALL 70'S AND ALMOST ALL 60'S Ring Magazine
1965-75 BOXING ILUSTRATED
I started doing boxing stats and writing stuff down about the fighter' s 1972. I really would say when I really knew what was going on RING OCTOBER 1972.

THERE WAS ALSO TOMMY KAYS BOXING DIGEST, KO HAD NOT COME OUT YET.

World & International boxing carried a Top Ffteen of their World Ratings, And Commissioner Randy Gordon did a great job.

 

COULD YOU IMAGINE HAD WE HAD INTERNET, AND CELLS BACK IN THE DAY??

 

To me was never the same after 1973 when they changed the format and got rid of Lee Kerr. Problem with some fight reports was that they didn't give a proper account of the fight.

 

I had a boxing news letter sent to my house every month. I can't remember the name of it. Maybe Boxing Digest?

 

I started accumulating boxing magazines around 1963-4. Soon after, I started going to used book stores and collecting past issues of Boxing Illustrated dating from its first issue at the end of 1958 and Boxing and Wrestling dating from 1951. Those were and still are my favorites. I cheris anything that Stanley Weston, Eddie Borden, and Robert Thornton were involved in producing and editing. The Ring, of course, was very useful for its monthly worldwide coverage, but for history I preferred the others hands down.

 

Bert when in charge of Ring magazine had great writing great covers and was very thorough and extensive and even when he left Randy Gordon took over, he kind of kept that up for a while.
KO was almost as good and was a must buy monthly as well.
Great young writers, nice posters in each issue.
I still have my issues of both in my closet, can't bear to dispose of them.

 

Yes Bert did a good job that that magazine then I recall he was an editor of a Spanish boxing magazine, and that was awful.

 

Hah! I used to buy my boxing magazines at the Read All About It news stand in Pike Place Market. They had all the major rags, foreign and domestic. But my FAVORITE through much of the 90's was the Flash! newsletter, so up to date and thorough for the pre-internet days.

 

I had a nearly 100 years of the Ring and Boxing News magazines combined, issues from 1937 - 2000s, near FULL Issues from the late 30s to the mid 50s... Textbooks & bio's over 70 and other miscellaneous gems.

I sold most of my collection off, but kept the 1930s - 1950s years and about a half dozen Boxing News from the early 19teens...

my next Project, in which I hope to do soon is to digitize my Boxing News issues.

BN's in truth can be painful in it's Nationalistic cry & flavour and sometimes reading through the Ring you find similar reading... just the other day I read Eddie Borden using a bit of 'appetizing' hyperbole in setting the interest for what would end up the matching of Woodcock with Oma, where the outcome of that fight ended up completely the opposite to what Borden previously sarcastically suggested, which I believe was a Media attempt at rousing an eventual showdown.

Nothing that happens at the Top is left neutral, but rather intervened on in one way shape or form often, too often.

 

Repoing the UK a bit here, Boxing News was a remarkable achievement being a weekly fight magazine that covered everything going on domestically and around the world. I was grateful for it existing and lasting so long… but Boxing Monthly was my ****. I never missed a copy, looked forward to it coming out and it had the best coverage and analysis of the upcoming big fights, plus it was nicely produced with good photography. In the 1990s and 2000s when I buying it, it honestly put The Ring and other American boxing mags of that time in the shade.

It’s great that both Boxing News and Boxing Monthly live on today as a single entity online, but it’s not the same as holding a copy in your hands and flicking through in the newsagents to get to the stories you want to read about.

 

KO and the sister publication, Boxing 89...90...91...