Boxing Fiction

Any of you guy read any boxing fiction? SO novels about boxing, or whatever? I've had some really good luck with this stuff though I haven't read a lot of it.

The Professional by WC Heinz

This is must read for any of you guys that haven't read it. This is the story of middleweight contender Eddie Brown and his quest for the middleweight championship and more pointedly journalist and narrator Frank Hughes who is given unrestricted access to Eddie's camp in the build to the tile fight. Set in the 1950s, it's got everything you'd want from Stillman's to Charley Burley/Holman Williams, under a different name, "The Memphis Kid".

“Too intricate an art,” is how Hughes/Heinz described the sublime brilliance of the Kid in explaining his failure to get across with fight fans of the 1940s and ‘50s. “He was never a crowd pleaser because he knew too much. He never went out to make a show. He went to get a job done…for the people who hang around Stillman’s gym he was a pro. The people who go to fights don’t know a pro from an amateur”

Sound familiar?

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The Dempsey Gambit by Ben Lacey

How more of you guys haven't read this is beyond me. It's literally about Jack Dempsey being cloned in the future and set to work on the big heavyweights of 2050 or whatever it is. It's really not a bad tilt, all the way up to his trying to explain why he never fought "Harry Mills" (not sure if this is accidental or on purpose that mistake). He gets up to all sorts the raj, cutting around modern day Las Vegas.

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The Boxer by Reinhard Kleist

This is a graphic novel and a really good one. It's about Hertzko Haft who survived the SS Camps and came to America before turning professional. It's a true story (ish) and it's ******* brilliantly told. Charley Goldman's in it. "OK, i'll show you a few things, but if Rocky finds out, he'll kill me!"

So it's cool on the boxing and a heartbreak on the SS camps.

"One day I'll tell you everything."

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What you guys got? And read these three books please, hurry up.

 

Yeah, yeah, I remember that too...I got a collection of boxing's greatest short stories somewhere and i'm sure it's in that. It also has a cracking story about a fighter, like a regional top guy, and they just keep slinging this young guy at him until the young guy beats him because they want to move him on. I think it's called "A Piece of Meat", which is a double meaning because it's partly about the fighter's difficulty in getting steak on the tic until he gets the winning end of the purse. Because, he realises, the butcher doesn't think he's going to get the winning end this time.

There's some really good boxing fiction out there.

 

Try not to forget!

 

This is going for 28 bucks on amazon. Out of print, I guess.

 

No no no, he doesn't die at the end of A Piece of Steak (which I was calling A Piece of Meat). He goes home to his family all beat up.