sla book review: the greatest sport of all

the greatest sport of all

Reviewed by Brett Conway, Namseoul University, Korea

OCTOBER 27, 2007 archive

The Greatest Sport of All

Of all major sports, one has fallen in popular esteem faster than a boxer belted by former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier's left hook. That sport is boxing. Once on par with the major sports in America in the 1940s and 1950s - college football, baseball, and horse racing - it has become a niche sport. Its major events are hidden away from network television and sequestered on pay-per-view; its iconic stars like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson have been reduced to shells of their boxer selves; its full-page coverage in major newspapers are now slashed to little blurbs relating boxing sins and controversies: one-time heavyweight Tommy Morrison determined to continue his boxing career despite an HIV infection or an Australian world champion, Anthony Mundine, insisting blindness in one eye will not end his ring career. Boxing, as it appears in the mainstream media, hardly offers inspiring stories.

Instead of going to newspapers or to Sports Center on ESPN, boxing fans have to go to HBO or Showtime or the many boxing web sites devoted to the sweet science to follow the sport. These forums give a picture of the sport that many who watched boxing in its heyday would recognize - men with little hope of climbing the economic ladder in the traditional way choose instead to lace on a pair of gloves and fight for their economic worth. But boxing is still different from the major sports. While other sports like the NFL, NBA, and NHL set up their participants financially for life with lucrative contracts, boxing, as it was then and as it always will be, is a lottery, with only the select few moving into mansions in Los Angeles or Puerto Rico, boxers like Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya. One writer who captures this current boxing scene perhaps better than any other is Thomas Hauser, a boxing writer for thesweetscience.com. His boxing reporting from 2006 is anthologized in The Greatest Sport of All.

Thomas Hauser is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee who wrote a classic boxing book in 1985 about lightweight champion Billy Costello. He followed with an oral biography of Muhammad Ali (1990), considered the definitive Ali biography. For the last five years or so, his boxing pieces have been anthologized annually. These books have consistently been organized into sections on fighters, non-fighters, and boxing issues, neatly capturing the year that was in boxing. And with their attention to detail, to the machinations of boxers, managers, and promoters, the reader sees how maddening, how frustrating but, ultimately, how rewarding boxing is for the sports fan willing to endure a lot of confusion, sleaze, and showbiz, cartoon-world hype. Hauser has become the Boswell of contemporary boxing. Or, for those with a little boxing knowledge, the Pierce Egan, the writer of "Boxiana," of our times.

In The Greatest Sport of All, Hauser chronicles the major boxing events of 2006, such as the inconsistency of then middleweight champion from Arkansas, Jermain Taylor; the surprising comeback of Bernard Hopkins who lost his title to Taylor and then lost the rematch but who shut down Antonio Tarver (who played Rocky's opponent in the latest Rocky flick) for the light heavyweight title; and the sad comeback of Roy Jones. Having lost to Tarver twice - once by one-punch knockout - Jones, one-time pound-for-pound King and winner of a heavyweight belt in 2001 (the first former 160 pound titlist to win a 200 pound belt since Bob Fitzsimmons in 1896), is forced to fight in out of the way Boise, Idaho, on an out of the way pay-per-view card. How the mighty have fallen.

But for Hauser, the real decline of boxing is found in the features of the heavyweight division. The heavyweight championship, once the solitary garden of Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Larry Holmes was, in 2006, being trampled upon and occupied by four-fifths of a starting lineup for a basketball team: Oleg Maskaev, Nikolai Valuev, Wladimir Klitschko, and Shannon Briggs. (Since then, some names have changed but, in late 2007, the heavyweight picture was just as confusing as it was in 2006.) The most interesting part of boxing for me is the fighters. And the most interesting group of fighters should be the heavyweights. The organization of Hauser's books mirror such a sentiment as he bookends it with articles on the heavyweights. After a short piece entitled "the Opponent" (more on that later), he begins with an interview of Lennox Lewis, the boxer who gave up his undisputed heavyweight title back in 2005 after knocking out Vitali Klitschko (brother of Wladimir). His retirement brought about the current era of heavyweight confusion.

Lewis, like Larry Holmes who got lost in the shadow of Muhammad Ali, will have a greater boxing legacy as time moves on. Alongside Rocky Marciano and Gene Tunney, Lewis is the only fighter to retire holding the heavyweight title and having defeated every fighter he faced. He won Olympic gold in 1988 for Canada and defeated both Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, the two other fighters in the running for best heavyweight fighter of the era. When he retired, he announced "let the new era begin." But as Hauser opines:

So far, however, it hasn't been much of an era. The situation is best summed up by former heavyweight great Joe Frazier, who said recently, "I really couldn't tell you who the champ is right now. It puzzles me." And Lewis himself acknowledges, "There is a certain satisfaction when I look at the heavyweight division today. It feels good, knowing that people have come to understand that I was the last true heavyweight champion." But in the next sentence, Lennox adds. "I feel bad for the sport." And he declines to critique today's heavyweights on an individual basis. (14)

The general consensus is until a heavyweight replaces Lennox Lewis as the dominant champion, boxing will fall further away from the mainstream, leaving hard-core boxing fans to ask, "Where have you gone, Lennox Lewis?"

The complement to the above essay recounts a time when boxing was, as Hauser's title says, "the Greatest Sport of All": it's a review of two recent books about Joe Louis - David Margolick's Beyond Glory and Donald McRae's Heroes without a Country. These books hinge on Joe Louis, heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1948, the longest reign ever, fighting Max Schmeling in 1938. Schmelling, a German fighting in a time of rising German power fueled by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, became a symbol of Hitler and his regime in the American psyche. Louis, for his part, was fitted with the apparel of America's hope to defeat the Nazis.

Abstractions aside, Louis was also trying to avenge a defeat at the hands of Schmeling back in 1936, a loss that called Louis's legitimacy as heavyweight champion into question. After all, he may have beaten James Braddock, boxing's "Cinderella Man," for the title, but he hadn't beaten Schmeling. In their first fight, Schmeling had taken advantage of a flaw in Louis's technique. (The American dropped his left hand, leaving himself open for a right hand counter.) Schmeling knocked him out in the thirteenth round.

This rematch being just another fight was belied by a meeting Louis had with President Roosevelt in the months leading up to it: Roosevelt grabbed Louis's arm and said, "We need muscles like yours to beat Germany." Joe Louis did his part, knocking Schmeling out in the first round. Hauser writes on the effect this fight had on American morale: Louis-Schmeling II was the most important building block in the Joe Louis legend. The impact of his victory was extraordinary. Within days, films of the contest were showing in theaters across the nation. The fight had almost a spiritual effect on the nation (136).

While Louis sated America with his win over Schmeling in 1938 and his consistency - he had 25 straight title defenses - boxing fans living in 2007 are waiting for a fighter to come and save the heavyweight division and thus boxing itself. They are dying of thirst.

But Hauser suggests there is hope. Hauser may frame his book with the heavyweights, starting with the retirement of Lennox Lewis and ending with a reflection on Joe Louis in his super fight with Schmeling. But Hauser begins the book with a short piece called "the Opponent." An opponent in boxing lingo is a safe fighter for the home promoter's fighter to face. The "opponent," ninety-percent of the time, is supposed to and does lose. That's why, when we watch HBO, we see so many fighters with records of 30 wins and no losses. These records are built on the backs of the less skilled, the less able.

In this chapter, the opponent, Anthony Ottah, takes on the name fighter and holds him to a draw. Hauser writes:

Anthony Ottah took the blows of a younger stronger man and kept coming. He matched his heart and will against his foe in the same way, if not the same skill, that Muahmmad Ali did against Joe Frazier and Evander Holyfield did against Riddick Bowe. Mr. Ottah is entitled to the respect that is due to a professional fighter. (9)

Are the trials of Ottah a reflection of modern boxing -- a sport up against the big-time, big-name sports, like the NFL, MLB, NBA, and the nascent UFC? Is boxing now merely an opponent when facing these sports in the battle for fans, sponsorships, television ratings and cash? And is Hauser's tale of Anthony Ottah, gritting his teeth, fighting back and holding on for a draw and earning little money, the current tale of boxing itself, especially given its heavyweight confusion? And if boxing can get a draw in such a state, maybe if a true heavyweight champion arrives, boxing will transcend its current status and be "the Greatest Sport of All" once again. Hauser's book shows why his optimistic title may soon be justified.

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