With the end of the year coming, I was thinking of George Plimpton again. And of someone who may not have been mentioned here, Albert Payson Terhune. Like Plimpton and Paul Gallico, two later writers, Terhune went into the ring for the sake of writing a good story. Unlike Plimpton and Gallico, who faced Archie Moore and Jack Dempsey respectively, Terhune was a good amateur boxer who faced a "murderers row" of six heavyweight contenders or champions. They were: "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, Kid McCoy, Gus Ruhlin, James J. Jeffries, Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey. Supposedly Terhune's editor secretly arranged for the fighters to go all out in the (three round?) bouts and he suffered at least a broken left hand and two teeth gone. There is no record of what happened to the editor once Terhune found out about the arrangement.
Anthony