Any books you’ve found to be a waste of time because they’re full of inaccuracies, uninformative, or just poorly written?
Yes. 'Smokin' Joe" - the autobiography of Joe Frazier by Phil Berger. It's an autobiography, so it's supposed be written (or co-written) by Frazier. Or at least be in Frazier's voice. Yet the "quotes" from Frazier in that book are laughable. Everyone knows what Joe Frazier sounded like when he spoke. Berger should've written a book about Frazier and then populated it with quotes from Frazier. People do that in biographies all the time. But it's almost comical trying to imagine Frazier even reading that book out loud, let alone imagining him saying those things to Berger. This passage, for example, is supposed to be Joe Frazier talking to the reader: "At the time he picked up that copy of Ring, Zyglewicz was finishing up a hitch in the Navy. When he was mustered out, he notified Benbow, who sent him bus fare to Houston. Five years and twenty-nine fights later, as a 10-1 underdog, he now had a shot at the heavyweight title and that bundle of money Benbow had promised - 20 percent of the night's gate proceeds. It was a story that seemed to be out of a movie script. Only this time there was no Hollywood ending. Before a crowd of ten thousand, Zyglewicz came out at the opening bell with bombs-away abandon, but sobered up once I began hitting him." Joe Frazier didn't talk like that. You can imagine Joe Frazier saying "he sobered up once I began hitting him." But I can't imagine Frazier saying, "Before a crowd of 10,000, Zyglewicz came out at the opening bell with bombs-away abandon." Or "When he was mustered out, he notified Benbow, who sent him bus fare to Houston. Five years and twenty-nine fights later, as a 10-1 underdog, he now had a shot at the heavyweight title and that bundle of money Benbow had promised - 20 percent of the night's gate proceeds." It's Phil Berger's voice, not Joe Frazier's voice. I believe "quotes" should be what someone actually said. That's what makes them quotes. You can pull a few words or a few phrases off every page that sound like Joe Frazier, but 99 percent of the page sounds like Phil Berger writing a newspaper column. If you bought that book to get some quotes from Joe Frazier, I don't know if you could honestly trust he said any of them as they are written. But that taken to the opposite extreme is the Tim Witherspoon book, "Terrible Times." My oldest daughter ordered it for me for Christmas a few years ago, and she said she was kind of embarrassed when she gave it to me because she glanced at it and it was awful. It reads like someone interviewed Tim Witherspoon with a tape recorder and just transcribed the notes. He just rambles on page after page. I wouldn't even call it a book. It's a transcript from an interview with the questions removed. And it's nonsensical in parts. It's a mess. Two books I would never recommend to anyone - one because someone tried so hard to clean up what Frazier said - and include facts he didn't say - that the final product doesn't sound like Joe Frazier in the least. And the other because someone didn't put any effort into it at all. It sounds like Tim Witherspoon is talking to you. But it's a conversation with someone who is stoned where you're nodding most of the time and looking for a way out. And someone just transcribed ALL the notes and slapped a cover on it. Poorly written.
'Give him to the angels' about Harry Greb probably fits your criteria. It's full of myths and inaccuracies, but written well.
Pretty sure Blake is a historical fiction writer, not a biographer. He's like the Western book version of Assassins Creed.
Another pile of absolute crap is Tommy Burns Canada's Forgotten Heavyweight Champ by Dan McCaffrey it is total **** ,crammed with inaccuracies and without any discernable indication of even the most rudimentary research having been done.
Not wishing to press upon and old sore, but "Pity the Poor Giant" by Paul Gallico, built myths on an industrial scale!
Great title Klompton who has written his own book on Greb,[ and well received it has been too],is less than enthusiastic about Fair's book, but he might not be being that objective about it.I don't know.
Gypsy Jem Mace by Jeremy Poolman … simply awful. I also didn't like the Jerry Quarry biography, I forget the author's name but it's the one with a close-up of two fists on the cover. Poorly written and used so much slang that I didn't understand which just broke up the flow of the book for me. I would have to stop and look up phrases he used and often wouldn't find the meaning of them. The subject deserved much better than this.
It's a seriously flawed work, especially for the earlier stuff, but not without use. A lot of people are far too prone to just believing what is written in it.
I don't doubt Klompton on it for what it's worth. He's spent way more time researching Greb than I've spent researching boxing.