Browsing Category Fight City Reviews

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  Fight City Reviews 1

  Facing Ali

  Casualties of a cruel sport. Broken spokes on boxing’s eternal wheel. Archetypes for the noble poor. Or, to cast such reductive generalizing aside, perhaps just men who made a choice. Facing Ali, ...

  On August 24, 2019 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Gentleman Jim Speaks

  The Roar of the Crowd: The True Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Champion Originally published in 1925, The Roar of the Crowd is an entertaining ...

  On August 13, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Ray Mancini: The Good Son

  The 1980s remain perhaps the most successful decade in boxing’s history, a rare time when the sport was highly popular and widely accepted as mainstream entertainment. Champions such ...

  On July 29, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 3

  Sun Kil Moon: “Salvador Sanchez”

  In Salvador Sanchez, singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek walks amongst men who died much too soon. Such deaths are tragic by definition, but in the case of the men depicted ...

  On July 24, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  I Fight For A Living

  One of boxing’s most enduring tropes is that of the prizefighter who punches his way out of the depths of poverty and obscurity and into a life of ...

  On June 30, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Dark Trade

  My earliest memory of boxing is a poster for the Mike Tyson vs Michael Spinks superfight from back in 1988, the big heavyweight superfight that lasted exactly 91 ...

  On June 21, 2019 / By Joshua Isard
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Johnny Tapia: Boxing Saved His Life

  HBO’s Tapia begins with an overhead shot of the New Mexico desert. The camera pans across the yellow landscape and settles on a solitary man, walking with his ...

  On May 30, 2019 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Punching From The Shadows

  In labeling Punching from the Shadows a memoir, Glen Sharp might be selling short his autobiographical work. More than a memoir, Sharp presents in his book a thorough ...

  On April 9, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 1

  McIlvanney On Boxing

  A.J. Liebling will always be boxing’s literary standard bearer, his masterwork The Sweet Science certain to find appreciative fans through the generations. If there’s a top table of ...

  On April 3, 2019 / By Ronnie McCluskey
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Ali: A Life

  The latest biography of Muhammad Ali, surely the most written-about boxer in history, is also the longest, and will be among the best-selling and most-read. Jonathan Eig’s Ali: A ...

  On March 28, 2019 / By Michael Ezra
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  Fight City Reviews 3

  The Nightmares Of Emile Griffith

  Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story explores the ramifications of one of the most infamous moments in the history of professional boxing. On March 24, 1962, at ...

  On March 22, 2019 / By Marko Sijan
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  Fight City Reviews 1

  Off The Ropes: The Ron Lyle Story

  I loved it. I loved it. I loved luring a guy into throwing a punch, then landing my own right hand and hurting him and dropping him. I ...

  On February 27, 2019 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  The Bittersweet Science

  “The more you know about boxing, the more you discover that you never truly know what’s going on,” write editors Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra in their introduction ...

  On January 23, 2019 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Yo, Adrian! Here We Go Again!

  And so I’ve now seen Creed II, the successful sequel to the surprisingly effective and popular 2015 film, Creed. In this second installment, Adonis Creed, son of deceased ...

  On January 10, 2019 / By Sean Crose
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Champion

  Few champions have ever inspired as much public ambivalence, mistrust, and scorn as Sonny Liston. The frequently violent events of a life spent underneath the bright lights of ...

  On December 30, 2018 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Fist of the Reich

  Max Schmeling was the first German-born world heavyweight champion and the only boxer to defeat Joe Louis in “The Brown Bomber’s” prime. A sporting hero to the German people, he risked ...

  On December 27, 2018 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 6

  The Luminous Cube And The Roaring Darkness

  “Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few spectacles as healthy and beautiful as a boxing match.” These are the words of a 26-year-old Vladimir Nabokov, taken from ...

  On December 22, 2018 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  The Sweet Science

  One of the obvious realizations upon re-reading A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science is that while much has changed in the sport over the last 60 years, other things ...

  On November 26, 2018 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  The Gods Of War

  One of the best parts about being a boxing fan is the vitality of the sport’s history and the spirited debates and discussions that arise from it. The ...

  On November 17, 2018 / By Joshua Isard
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  When We Were Kings

  More than two decades ago, one of the finest boxing documentaries ever made was finally released. The Academy Award-winning When We Were Kings details Muhammad Ali’s 1974 fight with ...

  On October 24, 2018 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 1

  The Edge of Fat City

  Like humanity, the world of boxing consists largely of losers. Perhaps the most self-defeating kind of loser is one who fails to take responsibility for his failures, instead ...

  On October 13, 2018 / By Marko Sijan
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  Fight City Reviews 3

  The Blood Feud

  HBO’s 2008 film Thrilla In Manila is a sports documentary with an agenda; not necessarily a bad thing, but when a bias obscures and twists the truth, as happens here, ...

  On October 2, 2018 / By Michael Carbert
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  The Long Count

  Nine decades have passed since the rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey took place on a brisk September evening at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927, and in ...

  On September 22, 2018 / By Patrick Connor
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Shadow Box

  Even if it had nothing else going for it—something very far from the truth— Shadow Box by George Plimpton will forever remain a bastion of boxing literature because of the ...

  On September 18, 2018 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  Reading The Fights

  At first glance, Reading the Fights is a compendium of insightful essays which alternate between examining the responses boxing evokes and bringing to life stories of its past, thus providing ...

  On August 19, 2018 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 2

  The Boxing Kings

  It’s one of life’s most interesting ironies that prizefighting–a brutal, often exploitative, enterprise baptized as “the red light district of sports” by the late Jimmy Cannon–is the most ...

  On August 12, 2018 / By Rafael García
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  The Story Of The Cincinnati Cobra

  Like anyone who identifies as something of a boxing diehard, I’m familiar with the name Ezzard Charles. However, if pressed I could not tell you much more than ...

  On August 8, 2018 / By Ronnie McCluskey
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  Fight City Reviews 3

  A Requiem for Iron Mike

  “The only thing we knew was violence in Brownsville, even with people we love.”  — Mike Tyson We cannot escape Mike Tyson. Never boxing’s patron saint but no ...

  On May 28, 2018 / By Eliott McCormick
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Requiem For A Heavyweight

  In its visual style and heady narrative, Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) resembles few other films of its genre and ranks among the greatest boxing movies of all ...

  On May 12, 2018 / By Marko Sijan
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  Fight City Reviews 0

  Golden Gloves

  In grainy black and white, half-naked boys and young men form a line in a Montreal gymnasium. They’re lean and fit, registration cards tucked into snug white briefs ...

  On April 3, 2018 / By Marko Sijan