Best Boxing Writers either for publications, columns etc.

[jmc617]

I was just introduced to a few really great writers from around circa 1939 by my buddy Jack who frequents the NYC library microfilm center.

Jimmy Cannon ~ NY Post
Van Every ~ NY SUN

Who are some of the writers you enjoy or enjoyed reading either today or from yesteryear?

I remember the first step I would take when I heard the paper fall at the foot of my steps outside was running out barefoot sometimes and looking to see if Michael Katz ~ (NY Daily News) had written an article in the paper back when I was a kid growing up in the late 80's early 90's. I admired Bill Farrell who wrote the articles about amateur boxing through out that same time period to give the Daily News Golden Gloves the print the kids and people involved with putting the tournament together deserved.

[Mr E]

I was just introduced to a few really great writers from around circa 1939 by my buddy Jack who frequents the NYC library microfilm center.

Jimmy Cannon ~ NY Post
Van Every ~ NY SUN

Who are some of the writers you enjoy or enjoyed reading either today or from yesteryear?

I remember the first step I would take when I heard the paper fall at the foot of my steps outside was running out barefoot sometimes and looking to see if Michael Katz ~ (NY Daily News) had written an article in the paper back when I was a kid growing up in the late 80's early 90's. I admired Bill Farrell who wrote the articles about amateur boxing through out that same time period to give the Daily News Golden Gloves the print the kids and people involved with putting the tournament together deserved.

A.J. ("Joe") Leibling

[harrygreb]

you met joe liebling?

[Mr E]

No, sorry, I did not mean to give that impression.; I just meant to convey that I think Leibling was among the "best boxing rwriters either for publicatins, columns, etc."

[harrygreb]

i am a pretty widely read fellow - not just boxing but across the whole spectrum of literature and i regard "the sweet science" as one of the best books of any ilk i have ever read, so i agree wit ya about joe.
by the way its quite feasable for you to have met him - he was no stranger to these shores and if youre around 65 years old you could have seen him at ringside or close to the winning post at various racecourses over here.

[granberry]

A J Liebling was a good literary man,

but he was a blantantly prejudiced writer when it came to boxing.

He always took the viewpoint of the fighter he favored completely, discounting anything the opponent did.

while saying that everything his fighter managed to do was intentional and proof of his superiority.

He takes Marciano's side 100% in the first fight against Charles, where in reality Charles gave Marciano a hell of a fight.

He discounts Harold Johnson's flattening of Archie Moore in the tenth round of their title fight as an accident,
while he describes Moore's later knockdown of Johnson as happening because Moore intended it so.

I have never seen more one-sided write ups of fights than those by Liebling.

[raylawpc]

From the old timers, I have always enjoyed George Siler of the Chicago Tribune and Sam Austin of the Police Gazette.

[Collins2000]

A J Liebling was a good literary man,

but he was a blantantly prejudiced writer when it came to boxing.

And you are a model of neutrality, gran?

[granberry]

A J Liebling was a good literary man,

but he was a blantantly prejudiced writer when it came to boxing.

And you are a model of neutrality, gran?

Give us your opinion of Kid Azteca, collins.

And when you are finished with that,

tell us all about Juan Zurita.

[harrygreb]

your are absolutely right granberry about joe lieblings jaundiced view of fights. those you mention can be joined by his reading of robinson v turpin 2, in which randy did very well before the KO. this fact does not however detract from joe's eminence as a writer...notice i do not say "boxing writer"...as lieblings standing as a prose stylist elevates him above "mere" sports journalism.

[Slapsie Maxie]

If we want to talk of great writers who wrote about sport, rather than sport writers, then you have to include George Plimpton. His series of participatory books on sports such as football (Paper Lions) Baseball ( Out of My League) and Boxing (Shadowbox) are works of a considerable literary mind. The description of fighting an exhibition against a slightly bored Archie Moore is one fo the finest chapters on boxing ever written

Of more recent writers, the current crop fo UK journalists only make you realise just how good Harry Mullen was.

Slapsie

[harrygreb]

plimpton is excellent. that piece about sparring with arch is magnificent. hey, i wish archie moore had given me a bloody nose.

[DavidPayne]

Pat Putnam was proven to be a bit of a fraud with regard to his heroics in the war, but man that fella could write.

George Plimpton is a great wordsmith. And I loved Liebling's Sweet Science book, Hugh McIlvanney is another British writer worthy of mention.

Of the modern age, Hauser is less stylish but a greater hunter of a story.

I always admire the way Jason Probst puts together a point.

[Adamj1987]

Danny Flexen - Boxing news
Jim bagg - The Ring/Freelance
Graham houston - Boxing monthly

[slakka]

Ask Jack about the Rosenbloom vs Greb write up by Regis Welsch Pittsburgh Post!

[banjo]

Danny Flexen - Boxing news
Jim bagg - The Ring/Freelance
Graham houston - Boxing monthly

Bennie! Have you seen this?

[slakka]

In an interview several years ago, Jimmy Breslin told me that "Brownsville Bum" was "the greatest magazine sports story I've ever read, bar none. It should be required reading in all journalism classes."

Bill Heinz Was a Writer to Relish
By ALLEN BARRA
In 1946, Damon Runyon was dying of throat cancer and could scarcely speak. A magazine editor asked him who, in his opinion, was the best young writer in New York. Runyon scrawled the name W.C. Heinz on a cocktail napkin and passed it to him. He had underlined Heinz's name three times.


Wilfrid Charles Heinz
.Or so the legend goes. Wilfrid Charles Heinz (he preferred "Bill"), who died last Thursday at age 93, was the kind of person around whom great stories collected. I once asked him if all the things said about him were true. "Not all," he told me, "but what's interesting is that they all could be true."

Mr. Heinz was a novelist, war correspondent, and, in the judgment of most of his contemporaries, the best sportswriter of his era. And you can add Bill Heinz's name to the list of people who thought Bill Heinz was the best. "Red [Smith] was the best columnist," he related to me, "and A.J. Liebling was the best essayist. I suppose there's a lot of guys about whom you could say 'he was the best sportswriter,' and I'm one of them. But I think I probably was better more often than any of the others."

In his biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered," David Maraniss said that Mr. Heinz "was a perfectionist with a clean and unencumbered style, always seeking the precise word, phrase, metaphor that would convey his meaning perfectly." Gay Talese wrote that "W.C. Heinz put literary standards in the world of games." Ernest Hemingway, who sent him a fan letter after reading his 1958 boxing novel, "The Professional," thought he had put the world of games into literature.

If the world didn't know Mr. Heinz's name better, it's possibly because he shared the bylines of his best-known books. In 1962 he went to Green Bay, Wis., to collaborate on a book with football coach Lombardi, who was on the verge of becoming a legend. After weeks of prying information out of the reserved coach (and, when Mr. Lombardi was out of the house, from his more voluble wife, Marie), Mr. Heinz wrote "Run to Daylight!" -- one of the first best sellers about professional football and the one that, in the opinion of many, established the sport as a viable literary subject. Published in 1963, today a first edition of "Run to Daylight!" can fetch as much as $15,000 from collectors.

Mr. Heinz's biggest seller, though, grew out of his successful 1963 novel, "The Surgeon," written with the assistance of a noted physician named J. Maxwell Chamberlain. A former pupil of Chamberlain's wrote Mr. Heinz a letter that read, in part, "That clown . . . might be interested that I have a book I put together from my experiences in Korea." The doctor, H. Richard Hornberger, sent Mr. Heinz his manuscript, and after a year of collaboration and rewriting, the result was "M*A*S*H," the genesis of Robert Altman's groundbreaking 1970 film and, later, the hugely successful TV series. "M*A*S*H" was published under the joint pseudonym Richard Hooker (but Mr. Heinz had no connection with the subsequent M*A*S*H novels).

Mr. Heinz paid his dues as the old New York Sun's war correspondent in Europe during World War II, during which he witnessed D-Day, an execution of German spies, the Allied liberation of Paris, and the horrendous slaughter in the Huertgen Forest (where, he wrote, "In a place that had once known a cathedral's quiet...they were dying between the trees and among the ferns").

When the Sun closed in 1950, Mr. Heinz turned to profiling athletes and sports figures for magazines, a practice at which he excelled. David Halberstam, who picked three Heinz pieces for his 1999 anthology, "The Best American Sportswriting of the Century," wrote that Mr. Heinz was "one of the pioneers who helped break down the form." His breakthrough was a 1951 piece for True magazine called "Brownsville Bum," about Bummy Davis, a former middleweight boxer turned thug who redeemed himself in the public's eye when he died taking on two hoodlums with his bare hands. In an interview several years ago, Jimmy Breslin told me that "Brownsville Bum" was "the greatest magazine sports story I've ever read, bar none. It should be required reading in all journalism classes."

Perhaps the lasting legacy of Bill Heinz is something he told me in a phone interview 15 years ago. What, I asked him, was the greatest lesson he had learned in nearly half a century of sportswriting? His answer was surprising. "In the end, all of us -- fans, writers, coaches, athletes -- have something in common: We're all losers. Everybody is a loser, let's face it. None of us wins all the time, in games or in life, not Joe DiMaggio, not Muhammad Ali. And none of us is going to live forever." But the work of one sportswriter just might.

Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal. Write to Allen Barra at [email protected]

[St McComas]

Maybe not the best, but my favorite boxing story was written by Irving S. Cobb, called "Orchid in the Jungle" on July 3, 1921. He was covering the Dempsey-Carpentier fight for the New York Times. With no TV, writers wrote pictures for the reading audience. Here are some snippets from the story:

"The trickling streams [of people] run down the aisles and are absorbed by capillary attraction in the seats."

"He stands toe to toe with Dempsey and trades'em. He shakes Dempsey with a volley of terrific right-handed clouts . . . "

"He [Dempsey] pounds him on the silken skin over his heart. He makes a xylophone of the challenger's short ribs."

"Now the Frenchman is lying on his side. Dempsey knows the contract is finished . . . "

" . . . he [Carpentier] fought himself out. He trusted his strength when his refuge should have been his speed"

One more reason why I dislike television.

[Collins2000]

Graham Houston has been producing consistenly good quality stuff for 30+ years.

http://www.fightwriter.com

[Martin Sosa Cameron]

Of the past, I remember Nat Fleischer, Lew Eskin and others...

In Argentina, too in the past, Simón Bronenberg, Félix Frascara, Rodolfo A. Fernández, José Cardona, Roberto Mezzadra and more...

George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, in their times, wrotes about boxing...

[Brutu]

Barney Nagler was pretty good.