SPORTING BLOOD

A history of the cruelest sport, told in brutal, poignant vignettes of boxing greats.

As Thomas Hauser, the author of Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991), notes in this book’s foreword, few newspapers or magazines today employ full-time writers devoted to boxing, and substandard boxing websites have proliferated. But Acevedo, the founder of The Cruelest Sport website, stands out in this landscape; his prizewinning writing has been featured in Boxing Digest, Boxing World, and other publications, and this book may cement his status as one of today’s best boxing journalists. In these 21 tales of boxing legends, he looks at tragic heroes of yore, such as early-1900s sensation Jack Johnson, and adds nuance to the stories of well-known later fighters, such as Mike Tyson. With his expertise in boxing technique and form, Acevedo expertly weaves together fighters’ private lives and dramas inside the ring. He’s particularly adept at placing boxers in historical context, such as the Jim Crow South that produced Johnson, and the Northern, racist judicial system that targeted him because he dated white women and defeated many white men in the ring. Many essays challenge prevailing notions about boxing icons; for example, Acevedo focuses on aspects of boxing great Muhammad Ali’s life that white “middle-class baby boomers” and “activist liberals” may take issue with. Ali, he says, was a conservative Muslim who had a strict moral code against drinking and smoking, adhered to traditional gender roles, and not only rejected civil disobedience as a protest strategy, but also opposed the integrationist ideals of 1960s activists. By the 1980s, Acevedo says, Ali had befriended right-wing authoritarians Idi Amin and Ferdinand Marcos as well as prominent American conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Acevedo’s crisp, efficient essays will be accessible to general audiences who may be unfamiliar with many of the fighters, such as Don Jordan, Johnny Tapia, or Eddie Machen, but his fresh insights will still appeal to hardcore fans, as he looks at the greats in new ways. Ringside photographs and artistically shot portraits of fighters complement each chapter and give the book a powerful visual aesthetic. The author compellingly begins his first chapter on Ali with a touching story of his own father's giving him a comic book featuring Superman and Ali as characters, which launched Acevedo’s lifelong passion for boxing. This passage is so beautifully written that it may well leave readers wanting more of the author’s insights on his own life and career. However, each vignette that follows is provocative in its own way, and the book’s structured framework attempts to tie them into a larger, overarching narrative. That said, introductory and concluding chapters might have helped to better unify the book’s common themes of triumph, tragedy, self-destruction, and brutality and made the book a more cohesive read from start to finish. Despite this deficiency, Acevedo still delivers one of the better books on boxing in recent years.

An often engaging set of boxing profiles that packs a powerful punch and rarely misses its target.