Boxing Biographies

A gripping, all-access biography of Joe Frazier, whose rivalry with Muhammad Ali riveted boxing fans and whose legacy as a figure in American sports and society endures.

In 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaïre, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing." The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble. Observing them was Norman Mailer, a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity.

Muhammad Ali, in the late 1960s, was young, successful, brash, and hugely admired - but with some reservations. He was bombastic and cocky in a way that captured the imagination of America but also drew its detractors. He was a bold young African American in an era when few people were as outspoken. He renounced his name - Cassius Clay - as being his 'slave name' and joined the Nation of Islam, renaming himself Muhammad Ali. And finally, in 1966, after being drafted, he refused to join the military for religious and conscientious reasons.

Muhammad Ali’s daughter captures the legendary heavyweight boxing champion, Olympic Gold medalist, activist, and philanthropist as never before in this candid and intimate family memoir, based on personal recordings he kept throughout his adult life.

Sonny Bill Williams (SBW) is a once-in-a-hundred-year athlete with immense sporting talent in rugby league, rugby union and boxing. Sonny Bill has built an incredible career and sporting reputation across the globe. His athleticism has taken him from inner-city Auckland, where he grew up, to the highest sporting moments in Twickenham, Eden Park and Sydney's Olympic Stadium. But there is so much more to Sonny Bill Williams' life and journey than his on-field and in-the-ring triumphs.

Guillermo Vicente Vidal's memoir chronicles his journey from Castro's Cuba to the United States - a tapestry of his coming of age, a broken family, and disorientation of political unrest. Vidal was barely 10 years old when he proudly shook the hand of Fidel Castro. Although Vidal's parents were once staunch supporters of La Revolucion, they soon found they could no longer keep their sons safe in the new face of Castro's reign, making the difficult decision to send Vidal and his brothers to the US via Operation Peter Pan in 1961.

In this work of sporting and social history we have a biography of Canadian-born, Boston-raised boxer George Dixon (1870–1908), the first Black world champion of any sport and the first Black world boxing champion in any division. George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, 1870–1908 chronicles the life of the most consequential Black athlete of the nineteenth century. Yet despite his triumphs, Dixon has been lost to history, overshadowed by Black athletes whose activism against white supremacy far exceeded his own.

Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a 16-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the "sport" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers. 

This gripping tale follows the life of Jens Pulver, the current lightweight Ultimate Fighting Champion. Pulver reveals a youth spent in a family in which violence was the only way to deal with conflict, and in which his father's alcoholism made all family relationships contentious. Set against Pulver’s tumultuous upbringing, this account offers insight into his rise to prominence in the ring and his drive to overcome adversity and find inner peace.

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of 11 to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African-American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.

This is the final audiobook in the series of Agony books. For the first time, in his own words, Amazon best-selling author Jamie Boyle tells of the unheard stories he has unearthed during his eight years of researching the anomaly that was Wakefield's Paul Sykes. Final Agony follows Paul's journey from the cradle to the grave.

Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas...what could possibly go wrong? Ricky Hatton's brilliance as a boxer, his down-to-earth demeanour and his live-wire sense of humour have made him a national treasure. Five of Ricky's biggest and most explosive fights took place in the boxing Mecca of Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of British fans followed him there to watch these monumental bouts and to soak up the unique atmosphere in Sin City.

Lost in the annals of boxing is the sport's true Cinderella story. James J. Braddock, dubbed "Cinderella Man" by Damon Runyon, was a once promising light heavyweight for whom a string of losses in the ring and a broken right hand happened to coincide with the Great Crash of 1929.

Belfast's Carl ‘The Jackal' Frampton MBE is no ordinary boxer. One of only three fighters from the British Isles to be named the Ring magazine Fighter of the Year, he has headlined sellout world championship bouts on both sides of the Atlantic, winning multiple world titles in the process. His dedicated army of fans have traversed the globe to be ringside throughout it all. But Frampton's popularity far exceeds the traditional adulation for a sporting icon; he is regarded as a symbol of hope and unity by both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.

There was only one man who fought both Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. There was only one man who recorded 141 professional Knock-Outs. There was only one man who trained both a young Ali and heavyweight champion George Forman. There was only one Archie Moore. With a seven-decade boxing career, including 27 years as a prize fighter, Moore's vast career and exploits are finally chronicled in The Ageless Warrior.

On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. No one has captured Ali—and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated—with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick.

Paul Sykes, from Lupset, near Wakefield, died aged 60 in Pinderfields Hospital from pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver. He was a man whose life might have been changed by success in the boxing ring, but despite contending for the British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Titles, he sank back into old habits. It heralded a return to the self-destructive course of his life. This audiobook is my journey to find out what happened to Paul Sykes between the years after his 1990 cult classic documentary and his eventual tragic demise in 2007. 

Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate, fierce mother; and charts the trajectory of his stepdad’s anger. Hovering over Rex’s story is the talismanic presence of his unborn baby sister.

Picture a man, he’s tall, not excessively so, yet as wide as he is high. This man is a spitting and growling street brawler; a tank full of ready-to-blow, muscle-fuelled aggression. Imagine, if you will, the comic-book style Bulldog of Great British stamp. Well, there you have him! The prototypical face taken from the terraces of an ’80s football fan’s rolled-up newspaper cosh; a poster-boy of malevolence left over from Thatcher’s post-punk Britain.

In the early 1990s, Tommy Morrison, a young roughneck from Jay, Oklahoma, burst onto the boxing scene to become one of the most controversial fighters of his era. Handsome, eloquent, and dynamic, Morrison parlayed destructive knockout power and a homespun personality into celebrity status throughout middle America, where boxing rarely prospered. But it was his starring role in Rocky V alongside Sylvester Stallone that propelled him to stardom—and ultimately led to his tragic downfall.