0 comments by Andrew Ryan on 4/15/2016
A plank of wood is an unexpected start to “I Am The Greatest,” the much-hyped Muhammad Ali exhibition at London’s O2 Arena. It’s the door header from 3302 Grand Avenue in Louisville, Ali’s childhood home and the label suggests that a teenage Ali would surely have reached up and touched it on coming home from […]
0 comments by Mike Ricciardelli on 12/30/2015
Sports columnist Jerry Izenberg has been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. I grew up with Izenberg. Like almost everyone else in New Jersey, where he is as much an institution as corruption and pork roll, he came to my house a couple of days a week in the pages of the Newark […]
0 comments by Andy Ryan on 8/23/2015
Sports Illustrated asked me to cover the post fight activities – how the winner would spend the evening – which I expected would involve following Muhammad Ali around on a hectic evening of celebration. George Plimpton had expected a party. Sports Illustrated had asked him to cover Muhammad Ali’s celebrations after his March 1971 fight […]
0 comments by Kevin Canfield on 6/23/2015
Mark Kram worked for Sports Illustrated for 13 years, and for a good chunk of that time he was the magazine’s ace boxing writer, a coveted perch from which he penned a series of evocative, irreverent and generally superb pieces about the heavyweight wars of the 1970s. To be sure, he had lots of compelling […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 4/30/2015
Depending on whom you ask, this is the biggest fight since Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard or Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier. I’m not quite sure where it ranks on a biggest fights list, but Mayweather vs Pacquiao damn sure the biggest fight of this young century. The two best fighters of their generation are finally facing each […]
0 comments by Sam Sheppard on 4/29/2015
A common aphorism around professional prizefighting states it is nothing more than a means to an end. Boxing as a career, rather than mere spectacle, is a route out of poverty and societal neglect open to those willing to offer up a grizzled part of themselves. In times of great hardship, so the greatest fighters […]
0 comments by Patrick Connor on 11/20/2014
Boxing’s heavyweight division is its own beast. These days, that beast is looking toothless and dreary, but in days past it was ferocious. There are no quick fixes, or simple answers as to how or why things change, we just know that the landscape of the heavyweight division now is mostly barren. American networks have […]
0 comments by Matthew Swain on 6/25/2014
It seems an eternity since the heavyweight division was relevant. As a teenager in the 1990s, I watched awestruck as Evander Holyfield, Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis and a couple of others temporarily loaned each other the title. Back then being the heavyweight champion of the world made you famous, and it was big business. There […]
