By Cliff Rold
Author: Arne K. Lang
274 Pages
$55 Hardcover
McFarland Publishing (www.mcfarlandpub.com)
Order Line: 800-253-2187
It’s never belonged completely to its shores. It wasn’t birthed there. However, from the late nineteenth century to now, the United States has been largely the center of the boxing universe. For those who may have forgotten, sociologist Arne Lang explores the depth of the historical connection in entertaining detail in Prizefighting: An American History, originally released in October 2008 and available in stores and on-line.
Lang is perhaps most familiar to readers as a sports handicapper and former Sports Information Coordinator at the Stardust Hotel.
Boxing, like Baseball, has amassed an impressive library over the years. Like Baseball the sweet science has so many unique ties to the events of the 20th century, along with enough dark corners to fuel any pot boiler, its history always up for dissection. With so many having having attempted the task over the years, it becomes the author’s responsibility to create fresh takes when they put the sport under the scalpel.
Lang, for the most part, accomplishes the task.
What makes Prizefighting unique would depend on the eye of the beholder. For those new to the history of boxing, the book serves as a good primer to acquaint the reader with the bulk of the milestone figures and events in the sports past.
For those with an active interest in the sport, those wondering what a general history will provide which they haven’t read elsewhere, the book will provide just enough a fresh slant to keep their interest.
Rather than focus purely on the fights and fighters, Lang’s work concentrates on the nature of events. The fights and fighters are still unavoidably at the center, but the lights are shined brightest on promotion and publicity, geography and gates.
The book begins with a first and second chapter which act largely as preface on those terms, beginning the tale across the pond in the vibrant 18th century British boxing market. Introducing readers to figures like James Figg and Jem Mace, detailing not only some of their results but also tactics used to garner publicity for bouts which weren’t always legal. The interest of royalty in the sport and the blind eye it could create for its unsavory element has lasting parallels to the present.
Once settled in America, readers are treated to stories told many times (Dempsey, Rickard and the Raid of Shelby) and others less so (the positive effects of Rocky Marciano on hometown gamblers).
Among the most interesting parts of Lang’s work is a focus on the early relationships between the press and the sport. Lang reminds readers how common it was, and still occasionally is, for writers to get involved with the business side of the sport. Journalists acting openly on the side as publicists or getting caught up as hidden parts of the promotion of major events, assisting ballyhoo if you will, gets a hard look. So too do the strong ethnic and racial waves which have dominated the sport.
For fight fans born after the days of Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey there is ample red meat as well. For most of the last one hundred pages, Lang looks at how the sport gravitated towards Las Vegas with special attention paid to the eras of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Mike Tyson.
If the book suffers a lull, it is in the chapter focused directly on Ali. Ali has had so much written about him, so many documentaries made, that it’s hard for any author to make him feel fresh as a subject. While the point for Lang is in looking at how Ali’s career traced through the rise of Las Vegas and specifically the fights he had in that town, it all feels a bit cumbersome, retreaded.
Thankfully, it only lasts for a chapter.
Lang even gives a fair look at the modern evolutions, the rise of Eastern European fighters and markets and the superstar turn of American Floyd Mayweather Jr., providing readers one of the best whole histories on the sport available in the market.
Altogether, it’s a worthy addition to the book shelves of the casually curious or the fistic frenzied.
Recommended
Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com