Bert Sugar on Boxing

A colorful tour of the excitement, agony, and thrills of the fight game, from its greatest raconteur.

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A sampling: "If 'Peanuts' cartoon character Charlie Brown had been a boxer, he would have been Floyd Patterson. Patterson's ring career was a tightrope walk across the chasm of his own introspective personality." "You sensed that when Sonny Liston spat out his mouthpiece he was spitting out the rotten, bitter fruits of a success that was really just one more disguised failure in the life of this unlucky man." "Frazier, who could have retired earlier without any criticism, kept pleading. But Futch cut his gloves off. This evening, there was a sore winner and a sore loser, but there were also two self-satisfied men who undeniably had given it there best." "A big right crashed into Larry's face like a bag of bricks dropped from a second-story window." "After a fusillade of rights, the lanky Hearns, in his best imitation of an accordion, gently folded through the ropes." "It had lasted exactly 3 minutes and 57 seconds, 237 seconds of mayhem, in which 11 knockdowns were scored in the shortest and wildest "great fight" in the history of boxing. It could hardly be called "the Sweet Science," but it was one hellvua sweet quarrel." "With one deep-dish beauty of a right at 43 seconds into the thirteenth round, Rocky Marciano almost tore the head off defending champion Jersey Joe Walcott, knocking off his crown in the process, a crown he had worn securely for the previous 12 rounds."