Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society

While this is a quality book to purchase (and worth it), the book is still flawed. Ali is presented pretty much as a pure martyr, and while he had legitimate reasons not to go to war, it wasn't purely done for altruistic purposes (better of mankind). Well researched, but some opinions get mixed in with facts along the way, skewing some parts (such as the Ali draft thing I just mentioned). Worth picking up, though.

Jeffrey Sammons offers any serious student of boxing and its history a marvellous introduction to information that otherwise might takes months -or even years- to find and assemble. From his first question: "Crime or Sport?" to one of his final conclusions that "like a weed shooting up through a crack in the sidewalk, (boxing) is firmly planted in the foundation of our highly advanced society" Sammons examines the implications and underbelly of what is for many of us, the most exciting of all sporting spectacles. That Sammons may be harder on boxing and boxers than some of the rest of us does not detract from the scholarship and effort so evident in this careful history. In five years of my own study I have found almost no inaccuracies in Sammons' text and have used his text and footnotes to follow such fascinating subjects as the career of Joe Louis, his relationship to Mike Jacobs and later the IBC, the hold that Frankie Carbo managed to exert on boxing in the forties and fifties, the rise of television and how it affected the lives of most boxers, and the international role that Muhammad Ali played both in and out of the ring. Boxers are, and deserve to be, the greatest of sports heroes,not just because they risk and offer more than other athletes but because their sport itself has put up so many barriers and hurdles they must overcome to succeed. Sammons examines those obstacles and ends up, like the rest of us, wondering about the world of boxing but at the same time recognizing just how difficult it is for boxers to achieve the greatness of which they, and we, dream. While I may quarrel with some of Sammons' conclusions, I continue to admire his scholarship. No serious fan or student of boxing can consider his ring education complete until he reads and rereads BEYOND THE RING.

Good book for the serious fan or foe of boxing, widely researched. Style is sometimes academically inert, at other times gets on a high horse moralizing about abolition. Barney Nagler's "James Norris and the Decline of Boxing," an older, more limited study to which Sammons is indebted, is livelier. Sammons also needs to be more critical about his sources. A better book on medical, ethical, and social controversy is Robert Cantu's collection, "Boxing and Medicine." But Sammons is still useful for broad historical and social concerns.