“You go to an amateur tournament… You get an inner-city, really rough, hard-core black kid, and you get a white kid from Minnesota. Maybe they never even say ‘hi’ to each other all week. But they fight each other, and after the fight, they hug.”—John Scully “Boxing was on the one hand barbaric, unconscionable, out of place in modern society. But then, so are war, racism, … [Read more...]
The Eighties: Boxing and Materialism
“… Open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”-- President Ronald Reagan “Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.”—Margaret Thatcher “When I'm out of politics I'm going to run a business, it'll be called rent-a-spine”--Thatcher Major U.S. banks … [Read more...]
The BEST fighter NEVER crowned?
(Originally published in FraNoi, Vol. 55, Issue 12, December 2015. Reprinted here with permission of Fra Noi, www.franoi.com, Copyright 2015.) By Steve Corbo There was a time in this country, before the advent of television and the explosion of the NFL and NBA, when three professional sports dominated the American landscape: baseball, horseracing and … [Read more...]
The Seventies: Boxing and Disco Ducks
The radical ideas of the sixties gain acceptance and traction. They are mainstreamed and assimilated into American life and culture. The 70s prove to be a sharply different and far more tranquil decade. The Vietnam War continues to divide. Republican Governor James Rhodes of Ohio sends national guardsmen onto the Kent State University campus resulting in the shooting deaths … [Read more...]
The Sixties: Boxing and Bad Juju
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.—Martin Luther King, Jr. Change Is Only a Good Thing If You Change in a Good Way.—Malcolm X I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose … [Read more...]