This book contains my personal written and photographic account of the last golden era of professional boxing, which began when six Americans who won medals at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal turned pro and ended in 1983 when Marvin Hagler knocked out Thomas Hearns in three thrilling rounds. The real boxing enthusiast will vividly recall that bright shining period in the history of our favorite sport and remember nothing at all about me. That is exactly as it should be because this book is about the fighters and not the writer, who started to memorialize their exploits with a manual typewriter, nondigital camera, and miniature tape recorder over a quarter of a century ago.

**New edition updated with a foreword by Manny Pacquiao.** A celebration and memorial of the greatest era of heavyweight fighters from 1962 to 1997, as witnessed ringside by an International Boxing Hall of Fame sportswriter. Once upon a time, of all the memories made in ballparks and arenas from California to New York, there was nothing to rival that magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd by its collective jugular vein and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown. That’s the way it was when the heavyweight giants danced in the boxing ring during the golden eras of the greats Ali, Frazier, Holmes, and Spinks, to name a few. There will never again be a heavyweight cycle like the one that began when Sonny Liston stopped Floyd Patterson and ended when Mike Tyson bit a slice out of Evander Holyfield’s ear; when no ersatz drama, smoke, mirrors, and noise followed a fighter’s entry into the ring; when the crowds knew that these men were not actors on a stage but rather giants in a ring with a single purpose—to fight other giants. By the ringside, acclaimed sportswriter Jerry Izenberg watched history as it was being made during those legendary days, witnessing fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle and preserving them in punchy yet tremendous prose. Delivering both his eyewitness accounts and revelatory back stories of this greatest era of heavyweight boxing, Izenberg invites readers to a place of recollection. Once There Were Giants is his memorial to this extraordinary time, the likes of which we shall never see again.

THE REAL ROCKYS: A HISTORY OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF ITALIAN AMERICANS IN BOXING 1900-1955 is a collection of sociological essays and detailed appendices, examining the role and achievements of the Italian American prizefighter. During the most intense inter-ethnic rivalry in boxing Italian Americans captured the greatest proportion of world titles and produced the highest number of championship contenders. Yet the outside world was oblivious to this remarkable success with his Italian identity usually hidden under an appropriated Irish moniker. For the first time these heroes and hard men are acknowledged for the contribution they made to American sports.

Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

The true stories of strength, courage and simple savagery related in this book will stretch the credulity of modern boxing fans. It would be difficult, for example, to imagine Floyd Mayweather Jr fighting his fifty closest challengers in a single nine month period, as Corbett did in 1883; or to picture the Klitschko brothers slugging it out until darkness over 106 rounds and then reconvening the following day to conclude the contest. Originally published in 1894, this glorious facsimile documents and depicts the career histories of a group of pugilists of an almost mythical stature. The boxers' profiles are accompanied by charming illustrations from the period, created either from authentic photographs or sketches from real life. As well as forming a valuable historical documentation of a crucial period in boxing's history, when the modern fight game first took shape, this book provides exciting and fascinating accounts of some of the greatest boxers who ever lived.

For more than sixty years—from the 1890s to the 1950s—boxing was an integral part of American popular culture and a major spectator sport rivaling baseball in popularity. More Jewish athletes have competed as boxers than all other professional sports combined; in the period from 1901 to 1939, 29 Jewish boxers were recognized as world champions and more than 160 Jewish boxers ranked among the top contenders in their respective weight divisions. Stars in the Ring,by renowned boxing historian Mike Silver, presents this vibrant social history in the first illustrated encyclopedic compendium of its kind.

Are today's boxers better than their predecessors, or is modern boxing a shadow of its former self? Boxing historians discuss the socioeconomic and demographic changes that have affected the quality, prominence and popularity of the sport over the past century. Among the interviewees are world-renowned scholars, some of the sport's premier trainers, and former amateur and professional world champions. Chapters cover such topics as the ongoing deterioration of boxers' skills, their endurance, the decline in the number of fights and the psychological readiness of championship-caliber boxers. The strengths and weaknesses of today's superstars are analyzed and compared to those of such past greats as Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey and Jake LaMotta.