James Lawton - A Ringside Affair: Boxings Last Golden Age

Rich, authentic and with an understanding of a sport that only intimacy at the closest quarters can bring ... essential reading for anyone interested in boxings last golden age.

Mail on Sunday

This is a book high up in the pantheon of sporting literature and is thoroughly recommended.

Sunday Express

As a fine a collection of boxing tales as youre likely to read. Lawtons known them all and here he reveals their importance with craft and caring respect.

Sunday Sport

A good read.

Thomas Hauser

Zesty tales of the fights that electrified venues from Las Vegas to Tokyo.

METRO

Lawtons tale is a reminder of how great the sport of boxing is when the best fight the best.

By The Minute

Part celebration, part lament, but perhaps most of all it is a personal record of some of the most enthralling and challenging days produced by the worlds oldest sport.

The Gentleman Magazine

Chronicles the sports vanguard from Mr Alis demise to Mr Lennox Lewis fight with Mr Mike Tyson in 2002. Lawtons ringside account is a timely reminder of what makes the sport so appealing.

Mr Porter

Boxing has an uncanny knack of producing the best in sports writing. Lawton brings his own distinctive touch, revelling in some of the best moments.

The Blackpool Gazette

His stories are vivid, and leave the reader with a profound sense of how brutal the fight game can be The fights that Lawton covers are gripping.

Irish Examiner

Each fight is recounted in poetic detail ... Lawton provides athletic and personal context regarding the boxers lives, before and after their fights.

Bookline

For my daughters Jacinta, Victoria and Hannah

Contents

I first met Muhammad Ali soon after he had reinvaded the imagination of the world with his astonishing victory over George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974. I last saw him in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, 34 years later when, from the wheelchair in which he had been so long imprisoned, he welcomed the Ryder Cup teams of America and Europe. The great, multimillionaire golfers might as well have been awestruck schoolboys.

They reminded me of how I felt when I went to interview him at the Caf Royal in London and of what he had come to mean to me and, no doubt, his millions of admirers across the world. He was so much more than a fabled sportsman. He was a touchstone for the possibilities of life, for the rewards of courage; and now when I come to recount all the years I would spend at ringside I see more clearly than ever that without him it would be an account lacking not only its first impetus but also an unchanging focus.

This isnt the story of Muhammad Ali, though I came too late to it for that but of the deeds he bequeathed, the bar he set, the demands he made on the performances of the greatest of the fighters who followed him.

At the Caf Royal, I didnt know I would see the last of his fights his most stirring, final triumph and then his last agony in the ring and that was maybe why, when I sat down with him, I rushed somewhat to an ending. I asked him what he would like written on his gravestone.

He told me at some length. He wanted it said that he had never ducked a challenge, in or out of the ring, that he stood for certain principles of truth and fellowship and kindness, and that he had loved all people of good faith, whatever the colour of their skin. He didnt have an argument with the Vietcong, not when his own people were treated so badly back home in Kentucky, and that was why he had refused to serve in Vietnam. It went on like that to the point where he saw that my note-taking had become less diligent. At the end of his eulogy to himself, he leant across the table and demanded, Read that back.

I left him somewhat chastened but, like so many before and after me, convinced that I had felt a uniquely compelling presence.

It was a feeling that would linger down all the years and never more forcibly than when, on a spring morning in a caf in the village in the Veneto to where I had retreated when the sports-writing days were over, I saw flashed on the television screen the news that Muhammad Ali had died. There was a stirring in the caf, even in the corner where the old men played their cards. I wanted to add to it, I wanted to shout that I knew that man, had seen him fight, had felt his force, and that we would all be lucky if such a one ever passed our way again. Instead, I went into the sunlight weighing again the privileges that came to me in the years that had their starting point in a panelled salon of the Caf Royal.

What follows, I hope, is a small measure of the gratitude I will always feel for having time around a great fighter and a great man. And seeing so much of the best of his legacy to the worlds oldest and most embattled sport. Of seeing fights that, from the moment they unfolded, I knew would rank among the greatest of all time. For being able to say, maybe, that I saw the last great age of boxing.

When Muhammad Ali came into the ring everyone agreed there was more than the usual thunder in the air. It was apprehension, so tangible you could almost touch it. I felt it first on the Eighth Avenue sidewalk when I stepped out of the yellow cab. I could see it on the faces and hear it on the lips of the throng pressing into Madison Square Garden. It warned me that maybe I had come to see not my first Ali fight but his last rite of survival.

Either way, I had one certainty as I took my seat at ringside. I had never known before, and might never again, such a heightened sense of being present at a moment so filled with impending drama.

Ali had once defined the fascination of a big fight in the simplest terms. He said that for a little while the world was obsessed with the question, Whos gonna win? Whos gonna win? and then it would move on. In one way, it was like the pursuit of a beautiful girl: a driving imperative one moment, a passing whim the next.

Here though, as Ali faced the menacing power of Earnie Shavers of Ohio, the implications ran deeper and, potentially, with permanence. At 35, Ali had in front of him nothing less than a visceral examination of his will to go on, to take blows that might prove as destructive sooner or later as any he had received down the years, and announce yet again not only his ability to withstand them but to add still more lustre to his name.

Two years earlier he had fought Joe Frazier to a standstill in Manila in a third fight so elemental, so invasive of both mens body and psyche, that some extremely seasoned observers could hardly bear to watch. The Thrilla in Manila was stopped only when, at the end of the 14th round, the superb veteran trainer Eddie Futch concluded that another round might irreparably damage, if not kill, his man Frazier. Frazier was near blind, with one eye closed and the other the merest bloodied slit, when Futch reached a decision that would always be resented by the fighter and much of his family.

Twenty years later, Futch, then in his eighties and recently the winner of a unanimous decision over an abusive racist in a Las Vegas car park, would tell me how a young woman came to him in a shopping mall, embraced him and thanked him for what he did in Manila. I have wanted to say this for a long time, she said. Thank you for the courage you showed, thank you for saving my fathers life. My father may still resent you for what you did, and some of my family may hate you. But down the years Ive come to realise you were right.