It has been 66 years since Jerry Izenberg first sat down ringside to cover a professional boxing bout. The fight was over swiftly, Ingemar Johansson dropping Floyd Patterson seven times in the third round to seize the heavyweight championship of the world at Yankee Stadium, New York in June 1959.
Johansson’s reign did not last long: six days shy of a year until he lost it in a rematch with Patterson in his first defense. Izenberg’s sports writing career, however, has proven to have greater endurance; at 95 years old he doesn’t make it to fights too often, but he remains busy. His most recent book, about Larry Doby – the second African-American to play in Major League Baseball – was published in 2024, and his next, a novel about Josh Gibson, the only man ever to hit a home run clear out of Yankee Stadium, is slated for release early in 2026.
Izenberg, writing primarily for the Newark Star-Ledger, covered the first 53 Super Bowls and 54 consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby. But it is boxing, and particularly heavyweight boxing, that remains nearest and dearest to his heart.
The sweet science, he argues, has historically boasted the single most electrifying moment in sports: when combatants walked to the ring to contest the heavyweight championship of the world.
“For me, it used to be like this,” he recalled during a recent Zoom conversation with BoxingScene. “I’d be sitting at ringside and all of a sudden you would hear a murmur, and it gets a little louder, and then you figure out they’re coming, and then a murmur goes into a roar when the second lifts that bottom rope and the guy puts his foot through. That was a moment that was electric, because in that moment, you could make an excuse for Tony Galento clocking Joe Louis. You could make an excuse for a guy named Johnny Paycheck who had to be helped into the ring to fight. It's that moment when the innocence of ‘This could be a real fight’ is alive.”
In 2017, Izenberg published Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, and the three principal protagonists of the division during that era – Muhammad ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman – all became not just subjects to write about but friends over the course of his long career.
Two of those three participated in what Izenberg considers the greatest fight he ever saw: the third contest between Ali and Frazier in the cauldron of Quezon City, Philippines in 1975. The greatest final round he ever witnessed was also in a heavyweight title fight, when Larry Holmes overcame a torn biceps to defeat Ken Norton and claim the crown that Ali left behind.
The greatest opening round, however, was, of course, the first three minutes of the middleweight classic between Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1985.
Izenberg covered that all-time-great clash as part of a two-person Star-Ledger team, although the second person in the duo was not the writer the newspaper normally assigned for such events but a general sportswriter who was experienced at most things except dissecting the minutiae of a prizefight.
“Our best general assignment sports guy was a guy named Bob Hardy,” he recalls. “He could do anything. So he comes out and he says, ‘I’m nervous’. But I said, ‘Listen, I’ll make a deal with you. Don’t say anything to me during a round. I will tell you what I think before I start to write my running report at the end of the round’.
“So it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and it’s 147 degrees in Vegas, at least,” he continues with mild exaggeration. “And Bob says, ‘I’m going to ringside’. I said, ‘Why? It’ll still be there later. It’s Vegas. You’re going to sit in the sun. You’re going to melt before the main event’. He said, ‘Well, I got to practice my scoring’. So out he went.”
Heading into the fight, Izenberg felt that he had witnessed just two non-heavyweights who could be relied upon to erase their opponents with just one punch. One was light-heavyweight Bob Foster, whose right hand “was a bomb”, and the other was Hearns.
“I thought Hearns could knock over a wall,” he says. And when the first bell rang, Hearns tore into Hagler and even mildly staggered him with a right hand. But Hagler “is not going to quit. He’s coming forward. He’s coming back. He's fighting back. At the end of the round, I turned to Bob Hardy. I said, ‘Who did you give the round to?’. And he breaks a pencil in half and throws the pieces in the air. I said, ‘Bob, I’ll tell you what happened. Hearns won the round. Hagler just won the fight. Because unless he has a gun, Hearns can’t throw anything bigger than that, and Hagler didn’t stop coming.”
Boxing is, he argues, simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult sports to cover.
“It’s still the easiest sport to fake if you’re covering it,” he claims. “If you don’t know what you’re seeing, you can fake it. You get away with it, because a lot of guys do, and a lot of guys did also in the old days. Particularly if a fight ends in a knockout, you don’t even need to know anything about boxing. There’s only three people in the ring, and the referee isn’t hitting anybody. Two guys are punching hell out of each other.
“It’s why I love to write boxing, because you got the two guys, you got the referee with his own style, which may change the outcome in the fight, and you got the cut men and the trainers in a corner. There’s only five or six people, of whom, other than the fighters, only one will make his way into a story on a rare occasion. It’s the easiest thing to concentrate on, but it happens so quickly in real time, which is where the fakery comes.
“But if you know what you’re seeing, the first round to you becomes a preview. What is the one guy trying to do? What is the other guy trying to do? And can I figure out from those three minutes what’s going to happen? That’s a challenge.”
Like many long-term observers of the sport, Izenberg is struck by the fact that it exemplifies beauty and brutality at the same time.
“There’s a lot of raw courage in boxing. In many instances, more courage than in any other sport. But it’s the finer points that make a difference. It really is about the little movements; the little things you can do. You got a sport here that is, at one and the same time, the most brutal and yet closest to a ballet you will ever see.”
The brutality is exemplified by the fate of his friend Ali, who famously slowly succumbed to boxing-induced Parkinson’s. Izenberg was among those who tried to persuade “The Greatest” to retire before it was too late.
“Ali was fighting Earnie Shavers [in September 1977],” he begins. “Shavers never hit anybody below the neck. And I was worried about Ali. They couldn’t pull out of the fight, I knew that. So I went to see him [a few days before the fight]. I bring two tapes. One was a show about Ali I did for the BBC, and I played a clip of him talking about the Black Panthers and how he felt about it. It was politically charged but his voice was clear as a bell.
“And I played this commercial he had done for Raid, the bug-killing company. And I couldn’t make out two separate words in that commercial. And I told him he should be sensational in the fight, be all over Shavers, knocking him out if he could and then get out. And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah’, and I knew then how that was going.”
Ali did defeat Shavers, but he didn’t stop. In his next outing he lost to Leon Spinks before regaining his title in a rematch, retiring, coming back and being battered by Holmes before shuffling to a sad defeat against Trevor Berbick. Ali has, of course, since passed on, as has Frazier and, most recently, Foreman.
Izenberg, however, is still going strong, not just writing and opining but also featuring in a documentary presently in development called “Newspaperman”, which looks back not just at his sports writing but a career that also involved covering the huge social and racial upheavals that have periodically convulsed the United States during his lifetime, and which continue to do so.
He is, he says, a fortunate man.
“I’ve been blessed with a wonderful wife and with a business where I can still fake it and get away with it,” he says modestly. “I’ve been very lucky. Yes, I’ve been blessed.”