More on boxing’s literary tradition.
Literary Notes
A word of explanation regarding the process by which I review books.
Each year, I’m sent dozens of books about boxing. I don’t have time to read all of them in their entirety, but I read at least part of each book. Some of them are informative, beautifully written, and demand attention. I read these books from cover to cover. Others don’t rise to that level but are solid research efforts. And some are mediocre.
I write for a living, so I’m sensitive to the time and effort that go into writing a book. I know that a good review can move the needle a bit, particularly for authors who receive little marketing support from their publisher or self-publish. But I also have an obligation to readers who rely on my reviews when they decide which books to buy and read.
In recent years, Pitch Publishing has published more than its share of books about the sweet science. Born to Box by Alex Daley—a sad story of what might have been versus what was—is its latest offering.
Pat Daley removed the “e” from the spelling of his last name and fought as “Nipper Pat Daly.” The story of his life has been written by his grandson. That raises a red flag with regard to objectivity, but it’s a credible book.
Daly was born in Wales on February 17, 1913. He entered the ring for his first pro fight seven weeks before his tenth birthday. By his mid-teens, he was hailed by the British press as a boy wonder, the future of British boxing, and a worthy successor to flyweight great Jimmy Wilde. At age 16, he was ranked among the top-ten bantamweights in the world by The Ring. He was, his grandson writes, “handing out boxing lessons to grown men in 15-round fights, trouncing pros with whom, by any logic, he had no business sharing a ring.”
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In 1927, at age 14, Daly fought four 15-round fights against grown men in the course of 38 days, winning three and battling to a draw in the fourth.
In 1928, he fought 25 fights totaling 280 rounds.
In 1929, when Daly was 16, these numbers increased to 33 fights and 319 rounds. That same year, the British publication, Boxing, proclaimed, “We may hope with increasing confidence to see the day when he is acknowledged as absolutely the best and greatest there has ever been.”
“It was becoming increasingly hard to believe,” Alex Daley writes. “Hard to believe that a boxer could be so good at such a young age, and harder still to believe that he could keep on going fifteen rounds week after week against grown men yet each time emerge unscathed. So far, Pat’s toughness, fitness, speed, and skill had made a mockery of age and strength disadvantages.”
But the seeds of Daly’s destruction were being sown. His handsome young face had been marred a cauliflower ear from age 14. Scars and other visible reminders of his trade began to accumulate.
The worst damage was unseen.
“Pat was aware of the dangers of fighting so often and at the level he was,” Daley notes. “But his immense self-belief, the illusion of invincibility that comes with youth, and a reluctance to let down others would have helped him to purge such thoughts from his mind. What he needed was a wise and compassionate guiding figure who valued his health above short-term financial gain. Sadly, there was no one close to him who fitted this mold.”
Manager-trainer Andrew Newton (who fancied being called “Professor Newton”) cashed in on his prodigy as early and often as possible. He exploited Daly financially and did his best to cut off any avenue that might lead to the fighter’s education or independence.
On June 13, 1929, Daly was knocked unconscious in the first round of a fight in Sunderland, England. Five days later, he fought 15 rounds in Liverpool. He was in the ring again eight days after that. This led the Daily Mirror to warn, “It looks as though Nipper Pat Daly is running the risk of having his career ruined before he has reached his best by being rushed along at too great a pace. His advisers ought to bear in mind the fact that he is not strong enough to oppose boxers who are fully matured and exceptionally strong for the weight.”
On October 9, 1929, Daly suffered another knockout defeat, and Trevor Wignall of the Daily Express wrote, “The whole thing was a tragedy for this child of boxing. He has been worked too hard, his jaw has been made glassy and vulnerable to one accurate smack, and a very promising career has been blighted. He should now be given a long rest and be allowed to grow in a normal way. If this is not done, his life as a fighter will end long before he is twenty.”
Faced with this criticism, Newton responded, “Burned out? Wait for another few years and then see whether any intelligent boy can get burned out so long as I train and manage him. Some boys may get burned out. But if they were, it was only because their trainers did not know their business.”
However, contrary to Newton’s self-justification, Daly was all used up as a fighter at an age when most young men are just starting their ring career.
“He’d seemed destined to rule the boxing world,” Alex Daley writes. “But now, at age 17, he felt like he was on boxing’s scrapheap. Surely, that was absurd. The scrapheap was for washed-up old pugs who had gone on too long, and the old fighter was the only one who didn’t know it. You couldn’t be washed up at 17, could you?”
Daly’s 118th and final fight was contested on January 27, 1931, three weeks before his eighteenth birthday. BoxRec lists his professional ring record as 99 wins, 11 losses, and 8 draws with 26 knockouts and 7 KOs by.
Daly rarely complained about his lot in life. But in 1949, at age 36, he told Ron Oliver of The People newspaper, “I loved to fight. I used to say to myself, ‘If I can do this at sixteen, what shall I be able to do when I’m 26?’ But they never allowed me to grow up naturally.”
Thereafter, the story grew sadder. In his later years, Daley was given to mood swings and erratic behavior and suffered from dementia. His final years were spent in an assisted living facility. He died on September 25, 1988.
In an introduction to Born to Box, Alex Daley writes, “To my regret, I never really knew my grandfather. He died just before my eighth birthday. I have only hazy memories of him.”
But drawing on a manuscript written by his grandfather in the late-1970s and his own independent research, Daley has fashioned a moving cautionary tale. And a 1985 observation from boxing writer O.F. Snelling is used to sum up well:
“The boy was so potentially great, so keen and gifted, that with judicious handling it is no exaggeration to say that he might have boxed his way to a world championship had he been allowed to reach his full growth and potential. But he went up like a rocket, burst into sparks well before he had reached his peak, and sank into darkness. A great memory now, but that is all.”
Given the popularity of boxing in England, we can expect a stream of books about Anthony Joshua from across the pond. Joshua by John Dennen (Yellow Jersey Press) is one of the early arrivals.
Dennen had access to Joshua from Anthony’s early days as an amateur. The book is a thorough recounting of AJ’s life in the ring from his first visit to a boxing gym in 2004 through his April 29, 2017, conquest of Wladimir Klitschko.
Joshua was widely hailed after winning a gold medal in the super-heavyweight division at the 2012 London Olympics. Most people forget how close he came to defeat. In the first round, he squeaked by Cuba’s Erislandy Savon by a 17–16 margin. In the gold-medal bout, he was dead even with Roberto Cammarelle of Italy at 18 points apiece and prevailed on the basis of supplemental points. His other two Olympic bouts (against Ivan Dychko of Kazakhstan and Zhang Zhilei of China) were decided by two and four points respectively.
An Olympic gold medal gives a fighter the economic advantage of being fixed in the public consciousness before he turns pro. Cassius Clay (soon to be Muhammad Ali), Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Lennox Lewis, and Wladimir Klitschko all capitalized on their Olympic fame. Super-heavyweight gold-medalists Audley Harrison and Tyrell Biggs met with far less success in the aftermath of their amateur years.
Combining his natural ability and work ethic with the guidance of promoter Eddie Hearn, Joshua has climbed steadily through the professional ranks as a fighter and as a commercial attraction. Dennen takes us on this journey.
There are some evocatively written passages. One that comes to mind is the description of Dominic Breazeale after his seventh-round knockout loss to Joshua.
“Breazeale,” Dennen writes, “was no longer the enemy. He was just a man cutting a forlorn figure as he picked himself off the canvas. A man who had come up against the limits of his ambition. At a time like that, you remembered that his wife and child were in the crowd. You hoped Breazeale had been well paid for what he suffered. You hoped he’d be the same afterwards.”
Dennen has a nice feel for boxing. Among the thoughts he shares are:
* “The boxing ring is a lonely place. In few other areas are limitations of skill and character so painfully and so publicly exposed. In no other sporting endeavor is a small lapse so brutally punished. Miss your attack, drop your guard, and prepare to eat a fist thrown by a man whose business is knowing how to hurt.”
* “In many ways, boxing is a simple morality tale. Nothing comes for free. If you want something, by all means take it. But you can’t take it without the work.”
* “In professional boxing, pain is constant. Boxers suffer. No other sport compares.”
* “You can’t live a normal life and box.”
Dennen’s insights into the essence of boxing are so on the mark that it’s frustrating when he lapses into what seems like hero-worship of his subject. The cover of Joshua proclaims that it’s “the unauthorized biography.” This suggests a warts-and-all exploration. But at times, the book has the feel of a look through rose-colored glasses.
Also, the portrait of Joshua as a person apart from his identity as a fighter is superficial. His relationships with his parents and the other important non-boxing people in his life are given short shrift. So are the years that Anthony spent in Nigeria during early childhood.
Similarly, Joshua’s experiences with the criminal justice system in 2009 and 2011 for what AJ later called “fighting and other crazy stuff” are treated in a single paragraph. The “other crazy stuff” (not fully discussed by Dennen) includes an arrest after Anthony was stopped for speeding in North London and the police found eight ounces of cannabis in a sports bag in the car he was driving. Joshua was charged with possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute, an offense that carried a maximum 14-year sentence. A guilty plea to a lesser charge followed.
Joshua today gives every indication of being a model citizen. But it’s important to acknowledge the valleys he passed through on the way to his current place in society, not just the mountains he has climbed.
At one point, talking generically about boxing, Dennen quotes Charlotte Leslie, a former member of Parliament who once chaired the All Party Parliamentary Group for Boxing.
“What do human beings need to be happy?” Ms. Leslie asked. “They need a sense of identity. Who am I? A sense of purpose. What am I here for? And a sense of community. Who am I with? If kids are not given that through mainstream society, they’ll find that somewhere else. If a gang says, ‘You are for this and you are with us,’ they go there. But that’s exactly what boxing clubs provide. So for the kids who haven’t got any of those things in their lives, the boxing club is there. Boxing clubs provide them with identity, community, and purpose.”
Dennen then writes, “If you have standing within your peer group, you don’t have to do other things to get standing. You don’t have to do criminal stuff, you don’t have to vandalize things, because you have that standing.” But he never applies these thoughts directly to Joshua’s personal journey.
The best writing in the book is a chapter that recounts Dennen’s own abbreviated experience as an amateur boxer.
“I tried boxing myself,” Dennen reminisces. “It was a joyful as well as a hurtful experience. In training, I could haul myself round the Oxford University track where Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. I got to try to punch people in the head. I took plenty of blows myself. I bled. I felt the pain. I felt fear. I felt free. I heard the sound, briefly, of a crowd shouting my name. Boxing, for the short time I did it at the low level I did it, let me feel like someone bigger, someone better. Made me feel like I was getting something done. It was a strange kind of magic.”
“The sport may be called amateur boxing,” Dennen continues, “but the name is deceptive. The standard gets very high very quickly. After ten bouts, if you’re not good enough, you can start getting hurt. It’s a dangerous sea if you swim too far out of your depth. I had five bouts in total. Then the coaches advised me to pack it in, to give it up before I came up against someone who knew how to handle themselves and I contrived to get myself hurt. My attempt to box had not been successful, but nevertheless it was a great gift to me.”
“Boxing matters,” Dennen concludes. “Its dangers can’t be ignored. There is an ugliness to it, in wrong decisions, in the damage, in the bad deals. But there is a beauty to the sport.” And reflecting on the end of his own in-ring experience, he writes, “I could only imagine what it took to make it in boxing, to keep driving yourself into that place. I could imagine it. I couldn’t do it. And it left me in awe of those who could.”
Never Stop by Simba Sana (Bolden Books) isn’t a boxing book. It’s a coming-of-age memoir written by a man who grew up in inner-city poverty, escaped, and then had to navigate the world outside it. But boxing keeps popping up in his life.
There’s a warning flag in an “author’s note” at the beginning of Never Stop that states, “This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of Simba Sana’s memory. While all the stories in this book are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.”
Changing names to protect privacy is understandable. And memory is what it is. The phrase “creative nonfiction” should leave readers a bit wary.
But Sana writes well and his work demands attention from the start. The opening paragraph reads, “My mother never told me anything about her past—not one thing. This may be hard to believe, but she talked to herself more than she ever actually spoke to me. I grew accustomed to this at home. But as I got older, I became keenly aware that her habit of engaging in intense conversations with herself was not ordinary behavior.”
As Sana (then named Bernard Sutton) moved through adolescence, he trained at several boxing gyms and developed an affinity for the sweet science. Later, he earned master’s degrees from Howard University and St. John’s College and moved into the corporate world.
The most intriguing portion of Never Stop insofar as boxing is concerned deals with the period of time that Sana managed Beethavean Scottland.
During his sojourn through various gyms, Sana established a rapport with Scottland. By 1997, “Bee” had fallen out with his manager and walked away from boxing with an 11–4-2 record. In 1998, Simba began managing him on a handshake agreement. Scottland won his first fight back and, by late-2000, had a 20–6-2 record. Meanwhile, Sana was roughly $5,000 in the hole, not having cut Bee’s purses for most fights and having advanced money for various expenses.
In November 2000, Scottland dumped him. It hurt.
“All the work I’d put in with Bee,” Sana recalls, “and then bam! Just like that. I was no longer Bee’s manager. It was like all my work meant nothing. Bee avoided me, and I didn’t go out of my way to find him either.”
On June 26, 2001, Scottland fought his first fight under new management against unbeaten George Khalid Jones and was knocked out in the tenth round. Sana watched it unfold on ESPN2 and acknowledges, “As Bee lay on the canvas, I felt vindicated. I had been wronged and part of me wanted him to pay for what he did to me.”
That’s impressive honesty given what soon turned Sana’s “sense of satisfaction” to concern. Scottland was carried from the ring on a stretcher and died six days later.
It’s not often that a member of Parliament writes a book about boxing. But Christopher Evans, who represents Islwyn in South Wales, has done just that.
Fearless Freddie (Pitch Publishing) is a biography of Freddie Mills, the Englishman who compiled a 77–18–6 (55 KOs, 7 KOs by) record and reigned briefly as light-heavyweight champion in the aftermath of World War II.
Mills was an aggressive action fighter. He won the crown in London by decision over Gus Lesnevich on July 26, 1948, and was knocked out by Joey Maxim in his first title defense. He was the epitome of a fighter who fought too long, suffering from memory loss, headaches, and blackouts throughout the later stages of his ring career.
After retiring from boxing, Mills parlayed his fame into a brief show business career. He also opened a Chinese restaurant and then a nightclub in which some of the hostesses doubled as prostitutes. He died on July 25, 1965, at age 46. The cause of death was a bullet that entered his head just above the right eye. Evans concurs with the authorities that Mills committed suicide.
At the time of Mills’s death, he was in debt to an organized crime syndicate. There were also rumors, which Evans fails to explore, that Mills had a sexual relationship with a nightclub singer named Michael Holliday and that Mills was a serial killer known as “Jack the Stripper” who murdered eight women in London in 1964 and 1965.
Evans sees Mills as a hero to working-class England. But like its subject, the book is flawed. I’m wary of biographies that recreate long-ago conversations and ascribe thoughts to subjects that can’t possibly be verified. The most obvious example of this in Fearless Freddie is the description of Mills’s suicide: “Closing his eyes, Freddie slowly counted backwards from ten before gently and deliberately pushing his thumb down on the trigger.”
Let’s get real. How could Evans possibly know that?
The image has been fixed in the consciousness of fight fans for more than a half-century: a 12-year-old boy wearing boxing trunks, fight shoes, and socks, standing on a crude wood platform. It’s the first known photograph of Cassius Clay in a boxing pose and was taken for the Louisville Courier Journal by a photographer named Charley Pence.
That photo and many more from the Courier-Journal archives are in a new book entitled Picture: Muhammad Ali. Warren Winter, who oversaw the undertaking on behalf of publisher PSG, notes that the newspaper chronicled Ali’s life for more than six decades and estimates that he reviewed well over ten thousand Ali images in the course of the project.
Louisville was always close to Ali’s heart. In the ring, moments after defeating Joe Frazier in their climactic third fight in Manila, an exhausted Ali proclaimed, “I want everybody to know that I’m the greatest fighter of all times and the greatest city of all times is Louisville, Kentucky.”
Add in the fact that the Courier-Journal was nationally known for excellence in photo-journalism in the second half of the twentieth century (its staff was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1976) and one has a good marriage.
Picture: Muhammad Ali has superb production values. It’s a 296-page hardcover book printed on hard glossy stock, 9.25-by-12.4 inches in size. The photographs are divided into eight sections entitled “Young Ali”, “Miami”, “Home”, “Deer Lake”, “vs. Spinks”, “Retirement”, “Bahamas”, and “The Later Years”.
One might ask why Ali vs. George Foreman in Zaire is missing while Ali-Berbick in the Bahamas gets a whole section. The answer is that staff photographers were given specific assignments (e.g., to photograph Ali while he was training for a particular fight at Deer Lake, to photograph Ali at home with his family, etc.). These are the photos that the Courier Journal has.
The text consists of tagline photo captions, a few short essays, and quotes from Ali. The essays are thin and sometimes factually inaccurate (e.g., Ali fought Joe Frazier three times, not twice). But this book is about the photos. And the photos are wonderful. Each one creates a nice sense of the moment.
As for 12-year-old Cassius Clay . . . Pence’s photo was published for the first time in the November 11, 1954, edition of the Courier Journal with a caption that read, “Flyweight Cassius M. Clay will be making his first fight tomorrow night when he appears on the weekly WAVE-TV amateur boxing program but he is being billed in the feature match. He meets Ronnie O’Keefe, little brother of light-heavyweight James W. O’Keefe.”
Bill Luster (a retired staff photographer) says of Pence, “Charley was a gruff old man. At least, he seemed old to me at the time. And he was a good man. He did a lot of sports photography for the paper, college and high school sports. I liked him.”
Tom Hardin (who retired from the Courier Journal after serving as a staff photographer and director of photography, recalls, “I worked with Charley when I was new at the paper. He was senior at the time. He had a dry sense of humor. He was dedicated to his job. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He was a good guy who knew what he was doing. You could always count on him to get the job done.”
Pence had no way of knowing in 1954 that the 12-year-old boy he was photographing would become the most famous person on the face of the earth. Nor could he have imagined that the photograph he was taking would be reproduced millions of times, giving him his own slice of immortality. But he lived long enough to see both of these improbabilities come to pass.
What did that mean to him?
“I don’t recall Charley talking about that photograph,” Tom Hardin says. “He might have said, ‘I knew him when he was a kid.’ But that was all.”
And what about Ronnie O’Keefe, Clay’s opponent on November 11, 1954?
It was the first and last bout of O’Keefe’s ring sojourn. Decades later, he would recall, “I weighed 89 pounds, and he weighed about the same. The fight was three rounds, a minute a round. And he hit me a whole lot more than I hit him. I had a heck of a headache that night. He won by a split decision. And right after he was announced the winner by the referee, he started shouting that he was going to be the greatest fighter ever. He was heavyweight champion of the world already, at twelve years old and 89 pounds.”
Mark Twain was a fight fan. He attended several boxing matches and characterized them as “absorbingly interesting.”
On January 25, 1894, heavyweight champion James J. Corbett knocked out Charlie Mitchell in three rounds at the Duval Athletic Club in Jacksonville. Corbett then took a train directly to New York and, two days later, boxed a three-round exhibition at Madison Square Garden against Dan Creedon (a sparring partner who had helped him prepare for the Mitchell fight).
Twain was at that exhibition accompanied by Henry H. Rogers (an industrialist and financier who was one of the richest men in America).
The following day, Twain wrote to his wife, Livy, telling her, “We bought a fifteen-dollar box in the Madison Square Garden. Rogers bought it, not I. There was a vast multitude of people in the brilliant place. [World-renowned architect] Stanford White came along presently and invited me to go to the World Champion’s dressing room, which I was very glad to do. Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident besides being the most perfectly and beautifully constructed human animal in the world.”
What did Twain and Corbett talk about?
According to Twain’s letter to his wife, he told the champion, “You have whipped Mitchell, and maybe you will whip {Peter] Jackson. But you are not done then. You will have to tackle me.”
And how did Corbett respond to his slightly-built challenger, a man with no apparent physical gifts?
“He answered so gravely,” Twain recounted, “that one might easily have thought him in earnest. ‘No! I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to require it. You might chance to knock me out by no merit of your own but by a purely accidental blow; and then my reputation would be gone and you would have a double one. You have got fame enough and you ought not to want to take mine away from me.’”
As for the action that unfolded at Madison Square Garden that night, Twain wrote, “There were lots of little boxing matches to entertain the crowd. Then, at last, Corbett appeared in the ring and the 8,000 people present went mad with enthusiasm. My two artists [illustrators who had joined Twain, Rogers, and White in the box] went mad about his form. They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equaling its perfection except Greek statues, and they didn’t surpass it.”
“Corbett boxed three rounds,” Twain concluded. “Oh, beautiful to see.”