Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн
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The inestimable Budd Schulberg, who wrote The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront, tells Mitchell, “You can see why boxing appeals to so many, many writers: Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw, up to Jack London and Hemingway and Nelson Algren and all the rest. The reason is a very simple one: boxing is the most dramatic, one-on-one of all sports.”
We can be grateful that Kevin Mitchell has joined their ranks.
Mike StantonProvidence, Rhode IslandDecember 2018
Chapter 1
The Beast Within
The story you are about to read has a beginning and a middle, but no end. It is a story about the fight game, and the fight game is an unkillable beast. What it did yesterday, it does today and, unless the sun doesn't rise somewhere, it will do the same tomorrow.
Some periods and places, though, live in the imagination more vividly than others. The fifties were such a time, New York such a place. While no age exists in isolation, there is a backstory to the fifties that makes those years unique in boxing. In that decade in that city, in a venue that has been the spiritual home of the business for more than a century, a coterie of chancers came close to doing the impossible: they nearly killed the fight game.