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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

Eddie Shore was the Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb of hockey, a brilliant player with an unmatched temper. Emerging from the Canadian prairie to become a member of the Boston Bruins in 1926, the man from Saskatchewan invaded every circuit in the NHL like a runaway locomotive on a downgrade. Hostile fans turned out in droves with a wish to see him killed, but in Boston he could do no wrong.During his twenty-year professional career, the controversial Shore personified "that old time hockey" ...

Fifty-nine in '84 is award–winning journalist Edward Achorn's riveting history of late nineteenth century baseball and the era's most legendary pitcher.In 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won an astounding fifty-nine games—more than anyone in major-league history ever had before, or has since. He then went on to win all three games of baseball's first World Series.Fifty-nine in '84 tells the dramatic story not only ...

To celebrate the National Hockey League’s centennial anniversary, three of the most hilariously irreverent writers in sports media present their own selections for the "100 Greatest Players in NHL History."Read along as Dave Lozo, Sean “Down Goes Brown” McIndoe and Greg Wyshynski of Puck Daddy rank the NHL's best through a unique scoring system that's sure to spark debates – especially when it comes to where modern stars like Sidney Crosby rank. Then check out their other lists and...