The Boxing Scene (Sporting)
The prolific Hauser has written 14 boxing books as well as numerous other works of nonfiction and fiction. He also maintains a Web site devoted to boxing, and this is his second collection of essays published originally online. His fascination with boxing began in the late 1970s and produced The Black Lights (1985), a classic portrayal of the boxing milieu through the eyes of a young fighter. What draws him to the fight game is his fascination with the people who populate the business: fighters, trainers, promoters, broadcasters, and even strippers, one of whom, Tempest Storm, a sharecropper’s daughter who counts Elvis and JFK among her lovers, is the subject of one of this volume’s most affecting profiles. Hauser also explores the pay-per-view and mass-media aspects of boxing, as well as soliciting boxers’ opinions of boxing writers. The consensus? The past had better boxers; better writers, too. Maybe so, but Hauser remains one of the best, and if this volume is a little too much of a miscellany to rank as one of his best, it’s still damn good. --Wes Lukowsky