This is powerful writing. Enjoy it." —Thomas Hauser, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee “Carlos Acevedo is the most original, perceptive, and best new writer in boxing. Sporting Blood is a vivid and gripping collection.” —Donald McRae, writer for The Guardian and author of Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing Boxing’s literary tradition is perhaps the richest in sports. From A. J. Liebling to Donald McRae, the sweet science has consistently inspired great sportswriting. The work of Carlos Acevedo stands firmly in that honored tradition. The essays that make up Sporting Blood include Acevedo’s moving meditation on Muhammad Ali; his penetrating look at Ali’s fearsome rival, the enigmatic heavyweight Charles “Sonny” Liston; and his profile of Mike Tyson, which brilliantly conjures the Boy King’s late 1980s reign of terror. Acevedo offers many other unforgettable tales from boxing’s dark side, featuring Jack Johnson, Joe Frazier, Roberto Duran, Aaron Pryor, Johnny Tapia, Evander Holyfield, Jake LaMotta, and more. Sporting Blood is ultimately a poetic throwback, an uncanny book that evokes journalism’s golden age and places Acevedo not only among the best sportswriters of this generation, but of any other as well.
Оглавление
Carlos Acevedo. Sporting Blood
Praise for Sporting Blood
Contents
Guide
Pages
Foreword
A Ghost Orbiting Forever. MUHAMMAD ALI, 1942–2016
Fugitive Days. JACK JOHNSON IN EXILE
The Last Goodbye. THE RIVALRY BETWEEN ROBERTO DURÁN AND ESTEBAN DEJESÚS
Right on for the Darkness. ON AARON PRYOR, 1955–2016
The Catastrophist. THE TROUBLED WORLD OF DON JORDAN
Dark Sun. REMEMBERING JOE FRAZIER
Strange Days. The Johnny Saxton Story
The Hurting Kind. WILFREDO GOMEZ VS. LUPE PINTOR
Yesterday Will Make You Cry. THE SHORT, TRAGIC CAREER OF DAVEY MOORE
Under Saturn. JOHNNY TAPIA, 1967–2012
Total Everything Now. MIKE TYSON, 1988
The Windfall Factor. THE NIGHT BERT COOPER ALMOST BEAT EVANDER HOLYFIELD FOR THE HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE
Red Arrow. THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF SONNY LISTON
The Dark Corner. JAKE LAMOTTA, SURVIVOR
A Young Old Man. AD WOLGAST AND THE REJUVENATOR
The Lightning Within. TONY AYALA JR
No Exit. THE STORY OF EDDIE MACHEN
One Long Season in Hell. ON MICHAEL DOKES
Lightning Express. THE QUICK RISE AND EVEN QUICKER FALL OF AL SINGER
Lived Forward, Learned Backward. MIKE QUARRY AND THE “QUARRY CURSE”
Leftover Life to Kill. WHO WILL REMEMBER CARMELO NEGRON?
Sources. Books
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“Stringing seemingly disparate boxing stories together as intimate vignettes that document the sorrow and heartache of the most decorated—and forgotten— fighters of every generation, Acevedo strikes the reader early with a quick jab and refuses to let up.”
—Christian Giudice, author of Hands of Stone: The Life and Legend of Roberto Duran and Macho Time: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of Hector Camacho
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What Ali did in the ring was not revolutionary for the simple fact that not a single distinguished heavyweight in his wake could reproduce his style. In a way, Ali was like Dizzy Gillespie, whose virtuosity—one step beyond—could not be duplicated or surpassed for nearly thirty years, or until Jon Faddis began hitting notes not even Gillespie could reach in his prime. Of course, there were variations on the Ali style among the heavyweights—think of flashy Greg Page and flamboyant Michael Dokes—but, for the most part, smaller fighters adopted its main ingredients. The closest a heavyweight came to successfully incorporating the Ali method may have been jab-and-dance master Larry Holmes, who sparred with Ali in the early-1970s and went on to butcher “The Greatest” in one of the saddest spectacles ever seen in a boxing ring.
But the flashpoint reflexes, the improvisatory moves, the stamina needed to dance gracefully for fifteen rounds, the explosive hand speed, the decking, dodging, and darting (all done seemingly in double-time)—these had never been seen before among the bigger divisions. After all, his aspiration as a fighter was madness: to resurrect Sugar Ray Robinson as a heavyweight. More influential, of course, was his personality, part vaudeville, part rassling routine, part mad preacher, part the Dozens. Egotism, insult, exhibitionism, incivility—Ali changed boxing in more ways than one. Even during the most primitive era of prizefighting in America, when fights to the finish were common, a certain amount of gentility was expected. When John Morrissey defeated John C. Heenan to retain his heavyweight title in a gruesome slugfest in 1858, the occasion, blood-soaked or not, called for a strange ritual etiquette: “All the courtesies of war followed with the utmost grace at the end of the close of the fight. Morrissey was carried over to his fallen foe and, in the French style, kissed his hand in token of his valor.”
