The first part of Nat Fleischer's Black Dynamite: The Story of the Negro in the Prize Ring from 1782 to 1938. This volume follows the careers of pioneering Black boxers, covering decades of fights from the late 1700s to the 1880s.Featured in this volume are: Bill Richmond, Tom Molineaux, Henry Sutton, Sam Robinson, James Wharton, Massa Kendrick, Sambo Sutton, Young Richmond, Bob Travers, Bob Smith, John Perry, Jemmy Robinson, John Banks, Harry Woodson, George Godfrey, Peter Jackson...

Part of a series of personal profiles written by Nat Fleischer, the founding editor of The Ring magazine. A legendary figure in the sport of boxing, Fleischer witnessed many of these historic bouts firsthand and presents here a biography of the American "King of the Lightweights," Benny Leonard.Born in 1896 in a Jewish ghetto in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Benny Leonard is often championed as the greatest Lightweight boxer of all time. His thirteen-year reign as an u...

Part of a series of personal profiles written by Nat Fleischer, the founding editor of The Ring magazine. A legendary figure in the sport of boxing, Fleischer witnessed many of these historic bouts firsthand and presents here a biography of the American Middleweight champion, "The Michigan Assassin," Stanley Ketchel.Born in 1886 from a Polish family in Belmont, Michigan, Stanley Ketchel is listed to this day as one of the greatest Middleweight champions of all time. Perhap...

Nat Fleischer's memoir is a ringside chronicle of boxing's drama, romance, and hard-edged business, told by one of the sport's most seasoned witnesses. Drawing on more than fifty years in journalism and promotion, he celebrates the "sour science" as a world of courage, ambition, illusion, and hero worship, where champions are made and unmade by the chase as much as the crown. Along the way he offers vivid portraits of great fighters, memorable conversations with men like Freddy Welsh and G...

A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was.The Sweet Science depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goin...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Like many a Canadian kid, Stephen Smith was up on skates first thing as a boy, out in the weather chasing a puck and the promise of an NHL career. Back indoors after that didn’t quite work out, he turned to the bookshelf. That’s where, without entirely meaning to, he ended up reading all the hockey books. There was Crunch and Boom Boom, Slashing! and High Stick; there was Max Bentley: Hockey’s Dipsy-Doodle Dandy, Blue Line Murder, and

This is the untold story of the secret scandal behind baseball's most legendary moment:The Shot Heard Round the World. A Washington Post Best Book of the Year.At 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The ball sailed over the left field wall and into history. The Giants won the pennant. That moment—the Shot Heard Round the World—reverberated from the West Wing of the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo...

This volume, formatted to current ebook standards and with an active table of contents, contains three complete books that provide an inside view of early baseball. Two of the authors are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.Works included are:“Pitching in a Pinch,” by Christy Mathewson“A Ball Player’s Career,” by Adrian C. (Cap) Anson”Base-Ball: How to Become a Player,” by John Montgomery Ward

The 1972 Washington Redskins were dubbed the Over the Hill Gang by the media, who considered the team of aging veterans too old, too slow, and too ornery to succeed. The day-to-day story of how that team went to the Super Bowl is told in this book, which is the diary of Brig Owens, the team's safety and now a member of the Redskins Ring of Fame. It's all here--the competition, the battles for starting positions, coach George Allen's relentlessly thorough preparations, the humor, the tensio...

National BestsellerFinalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer PrizeJOE MURPHY HAD IT ALL. In 1986, he became the first college-educated hockey player selected first overall in the NHL entry draft. He won a Stanley Cup in Edmonton four years later. But since then, his life has taken a tragic turn, largely due to the untreated brain injuries he suffered as a player.Murphy’s life didn’t begin on a track that would lead to homelessness. He w...

In "a worthy companion to . . . Boys of Summer," a Pulitzer prize winning journalist "exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace" ( New York Times).From award-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry comes the beautifully recounted story of the longest game in baseball history—a tale celebrating not only the robust intensity of baseball, but the aspirational ideal epitomized by the hard-fighting players of the minor l...