SPORTS
Boxing
9 books
Nine books for the sport that has produced the most literary attention relative to its size — because boxing is the most naked version of athletic competition, a sport where the only equipment is your body and the only strategy is what you've trained and what you can improvise in the moment. The list covers the sport's great champions, its most consequential fights, its cultural significance to the communities that produced its best fighters, and the specific moral question that boxing poses: what exactly are we celebrating when we celebrate a man's ability to hurt another man efficiently? The best boxing writing takes that question seriously without using it as a reason to look away from the thing itself.
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Undisputed Truth
Mike Tyson
Tyson grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was headed for prison or an early death before Cus D'Amato found him and turned him into the most feared heavyweight since Liston, won the championship at twenty, went to prison for rape, bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear in a title fight, went broke, and kept going. This is Tyson in his own voice — no journalist managing the frame, no retrospective wisdom softening the account. The poverty, the violence, the specific relationship with D'Amato that was the closest thing to a father Tyson ever had, and the long chaotic aftermath of a career that peaked before he was old enough to handle it. The primary source entry and the most uncomfortable book on this list. Around 580 pages and not a page is dull.
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Ali: A Life
Jonathan Eig
The most comprehensive Ali available — around 600 pages covering the full arc from Louisville through the Liston fights and the conversion to Islam, through the Vietnam draft refusal and the three-year exile at the height of his powers, through Frazier and Foreman in Zaire, through the long Parkinson's decline and the death in 2016. Eig spent years on this and the authority shows throughout. David Remnick's King of the World covers the early career alone in 326 pages of considerably more literary prose — the right companion for the reader who wants the 1964 Liston fight in full depth after finishing Eig. Cross-seeds with the Boxing reading on this project, where Ali appears again. Start here for the life; go to Remnick for the art.
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Fat City
Leonard Gardner
Two fighters in Stockton, California — one fading, one rising, neither going anywhere that will matter much. Gardner wrote this in 1969 and it has never been out of print, which is the correct outcome for a novel this precisely constructed. Around 183 pages. The boxing is specific and credible throughout; the real subject is the specific texture of a life lived at the margin, the way a man fills his days when the thing he was briefly good at is leaving him. The deep cut on this list — most boxing readers have never heard of it, which is the condition that makes a deep cut worth identifying. John Huston adapted it into a film in 1972 with Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges, which is also excellent. Read the book first. The fiction entry and the shortest entry on this list simultaneously.
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The Fight
Norman Mailer
Mailer traveled to Kinshasa, Zaire in October 1974 for Ali versus Foreman — the Rumble in the Jungle — and wrote about it the way a novelist writes about a battle: the political theater of Mobutu's regime as backdrop, Foreman as a force of nature being systematically dismantled by a man smarter than him, and Ali in the full complexity of what he had become by then. Less sports journalism than a novelist applying his complete toolkit to the most dramatic sporting event of the century. Mailer is present throughout in ways that sometimes illuminate and occasionally irritate, which is the condition of reading Mailer on anything. George Plimpton's Shadow Box covers the same training camp from a funnier and less self-aggrandizing angle — the right companion for the reader who wants more Zaire with less Mailer.
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King of the World
David Remnick
Remnick won the Pulitzer Prize for Resurrection, his account of post-Soviet Russia, and then applied the same literary toolkit to a single subject: the young Cassius Clay, the two Sonny Liston fights, and the conversion to Islam that turned a heavyweight champion into the most controversial athlete in American history. Around 326 pages and the most purely beautiful prose on this list — Remnick writes boxing the way John Updike wrote golf, which is to say he makes you understand something about America while ostensibly describing a sport. Eig's Ali: A Life covers the full biography with more comprehensiveness; this covers one era with more art. The reader who wants to understand what the 1964 Liston fight meant reads Remnick. The reader who wants the full life reads Eig. Read both.
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Only in America
Jack Newfield
Don King promoted Ali-Foreman, Ali-Frazier, and most of the significant heavyweight fights of the 1970s and 1980s while systematically stealing from the fighters he promoted, bribing officials, and operating with the full protection of a boxing establishment that preferred a corrupt partner to no partner at all. Newfield spent years documenting the specific mechanisms — the contract clauses, the fighter accounts that never quite reconciled, the regulatory bodies that looked away — and produced the most infuriating book on this list. Note the political dimension: this is a story about what happens when an industry has no meaningful oversight and its workers have no real recourse. The corruption-of-the-sport entry and the humor entry simultaneously, because King is too audacious to document without laughing.
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On Boxing
Joyce Carol Oates
Oates is one of America's most decorated novelists and this short meditation — under 100 pages — is the best philosophical account of boxing in print, which is the whole point of its presence on this list. A woman writing the definitive treatment of masculine violence is not an accident or an irony; it is the argument. Oates sees the sport from outside the tribal loyalty that distorts most boxing writing, and what she sees is this: boxing is the most primary expression of what men are willing to do to each other and to themselves in the pursuit of supremacy, and the reason it survives every attempt to ban or sanitize it is that it tells the truth about something most sports are designed to conceal. Under 100 pages. Read it in an afternoon.
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The Sweet Science
Shari Lapena
Liebling covered boxing for The New Yorker through the 1950s and collected the best of those pieces here — ringside journalism from an era when the heavyweight championship of the world was the most coveted title in sport and the fighters who held it were the most famous men alive. Around 230 pages and the gold standard of boxing writing: specific, funny, technically knowledgeable without being technical, and built on the conviction that what happens between two men in a ring is worth a novelist's full attention. The canonical entry on this list — the book that established what serious boxing writing looks like and that every subsequent boxing writer has been measured against. Liebling reported from ringside. The prose makes you feel like you're sitting next to him.
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The Devil and Sonny Liston
Nick Tosches
Nobody knows what year Liston was born because nobody recorded it. He was controlled by organized crime from his first professional fight, held the heavyweight championship of the world, lost it twice to Ali under circumstances that remain genuinely suspicious, and died alone in a Las Vegas house in 1970 — officially of a heroin overdose, almost certainly murdered. Tosches is a music and crime journalist who writes like a novelist, and this is the most beautifully written boxing biography in print: Liston's life rendered as noir, the mob connections documented without sentimentality, and the two Ali fights examined with a cold eye that refuses the official mythology. The deep cut on this list and the darkest life in a sport full of dark lives. Around 245 pages.