boxing Page 33 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

My Dinner With Ali
Adapted from the original, which was published in 1989 in the Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine. Footnotes from the author (as told to Tommy Craggs) are included throughout the story, and a postscript from Glenn Stout, editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Sports Writing series, follows. The ...

Bad Ass
From the Bronx Banter archives, check out Pat Jordan's 1989 Playboy story on Rorion Gracie:...

Professional Boxer Wears Jacket That Has His Name Spelled Wrong On It
This is Adonis Stevenson. He's set to fight light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson in Montreal this Saturday. He should probably stop wearing that jacket....

Night For Joe Louis: Red Smith On Rocky Marciano's Knockout
Red Smith is the most respected sports columnist we've ever had. In his prime, Jimmy Cannon, Smith's friendly rival, was certainly as well-known. Cannon, the Voice of New York, was an emotional, colloquial writer whose reputation, unfortunately, has faded. But Smith endures. What is it about his wri...

Lost and Found
Here's "Resurrecting The Champ," J.R. Moehringer's classic 1997 takeout piece for the Los Angeles Times. How about this for a lede?...

Boxer Urges Opponent To Fight, Is Immediately Knocked Out
This junior middleweight bout in Florida provides a nice little entry for the Be Careful What You Wish For file....

Seconds Out
Matt Wilson's "Second Out" series. Found via Museumuseum. ...

Here and Now
Ali. The Greatest. There is an entire body of sports writing devoted to him. For more than a generation it's as if every writer worth his or her salt had to tackle him at one point. ...

People Will Say We're in Love
Here's Frank Deford's classic 1985 Sports Illustrated bonus piece, "The Boxer and the Blonde":...

La Vida Macho
In case you missed it, peep Paul Solotaroff's terrific Men's Journal piece on the late Hector "Macho" Camacho. Solotaroff manages to capture the mishegoss and absurdity that was Camacho's life with empathy and humor. The story plays it straight when it could easily have become a mean, one-note take ...

Sweet Dreams
From Carlo Rotella's collection of essays and stories Playing in Time, check this out:...

Brownsville Bum
Here's W.C. Heinz's classic True magazine story on Bummy Davis (Jimmy Breslin called it the best magazine story ever written):...

The Meaning Of Convicted Rapist Mike Tyson's New Cartoon
Twenty years ago The Ring magazine asked the question, after Mike Tyson's rape conviction, "What If Mike Tyson Had Never Gone To Jail?" The cover story posed a counterfactual in which Tyson did not receive a guilty verdict on his 1991 indictment for rape, confinement and criminal deviant conduct....

Body and Soul
Speaking of Palookaville, here's one of the most famous scenes in movie history. Just so happens that it involves boxing. By the way, Rod Steiger, who was an incorrigible ham, is incredible in this scene. Understated. His performance in the whole movie is beautiful. ...

A One-Way Ticket to Palookaville
Back in 1998, Tom Scocca wrote a good one, "The Mayor of Palookaville," for the Boston Phoenix:...

Floyd Mayweather Is Unbeatable. Goddammit.
Well. It turns out Floyd Mayweather has not lost a step after all. I was under the mistaken impression that Floyd Mayweather had lost a step—a tiny step, at least. After extensive review, however, we can now say that, as of the early morning hours of this past Sunday, Floyd Mayweather has not lost m...

Robert Guerrero's Dad Goes Off Script, Calls Mayweather "Woman Beater"
The firm doing PR for Saturday night's Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Robert Guerrero fight emailed us the quotes from yesterday's pre-fight press conference in Vegas. That helpful little guide said the fighters' fathers had "nearly come to blows," but it left out all the fun stuff....

A Column Is Who You Are, And Other Lessons: A Q&A With Pete Dexter
From Pete Dexter's first novel, God's Pocket (1983):...

Cobb-Holmes '82: A Violent Game Of Tag
Here's the last of four Pete Dexter columns about Randall "Tex" Cobb's heavyweight title fight against Larry Holmes. Originally published Nov. 29, 1982, as "An Advanced Game of Tag" in the Philadelphia Daily News, the column was Dexter's account of the aftermath of the fight, which was so bloody and...

Sympathy For the Devil
Here's a treat—Joe Flaherty's 1981 Inside Sports piece on Jake LaMotta:...