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By Thomas Hauser There’s a time-honored promotional tactic in the entertainment industry. Create a buzz that an event is where everyone wants to be; and suddenly, because of the buzz, everyone wants to be there. 
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By Thomas Hauser “Every so often,” essayist Arthur Krystal writes, “two men arise with differently cast minds representing different constituencies, who capture the attention of people not normally disposed to view a fight. Perhaps each battler embodies the interested spectator’s own hopes of how the world works.”
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By Thomas Hauser Today’s video-game culture and increasingly violent movies have spawned a demand for entertainment that offers clearly-visible mayhem.
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By Thomas Hauser Some of boxing’s most memorable battles have been contested in the courtroom, not the ring.
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By Thomas Hauser We don’t stop being citizens when we enter the world of sports. With that in mind, once a year I use this space to address issues that are more important than boxing.
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By Thomas Hauser Vinny Maddalone is a club fighter with the heart of a champion. Boxrec.com lists him as the 206th-ranked heavyweight in the world. His records stands at 28 wins and 4 losses with 19 knockouts. There was a fifth loss, but the verdict was changed to “no contest” after his opponent tested positive for marijuana.
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By Thomas Hauser I have a great mother. She got married at nineteen, and I was a wedding night baby. She isn’t young anymore, but she’s still young at heart.
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By Thomas Hauser For most of the world, a prize fight is a sporting event, entertainment, a show. For a fighter, each bout carries the potential to be a crucial turning point in his life.
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By Thomas Hauser September 22nd will mark the eightieth anniversary of the famous “long count” fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. The two men are remembered as adjoining links in history’s chain of heavyweight champions. But Dempsey was more than just another champion. He was one of the most charismatic fighters in ring history and the bridge between boxing’s old and modern eras.
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By Thomas Hauser In the past, I’ve recounted the memories of boxing personalities regarding the first professional fight they ever saw. The recollections of four more individuals who have left their mark on the sweet science follow:
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By Thomas Hauser The recent betting scandal involving NBA referee Tim Donaghy should be a wake-up call for other sports. Donaghy, as virtually everyone in the sports world now knows, pled guilty to two felonies related to allegations that he had passed information to organized crime figures and placed bets on NBA games that he officiated.
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By Thomas Hauser As sports and technology have evolved over the years, training and coaching have evolved with them. From video-tape to computer analysis to sports medicine, the sources of improvement are endless. By way of example, some of the men who won gold medals in swimming at the 1960 Rome Olympics wouldn’t have qualified for the women’s finals at the 2004 Athens games.
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By Thomas Hauser There’s a centuries-old proverb, “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” Howard Cosell used to declaim, “You can buy the writers for a ham sandwich.” “With some writers, it’s in their DNA,” says former Boxing Writers Association of America president Bernard Fernandez. “If it’s free, they have to eat it.”
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By Thomas Hauser Bernard Hopkins is a writer’s fighter. He’s quotable and charismatic with marvellous ring skills to match his persona. He’s also an exceedingly complex man with personal potential that has yet to be fully tapped. He can be smart and foolish, diplomatic and brusque, funny and mean, charming and cruel. At times, he’s wise.
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By Thomas Hauser: Glory came late for Bernard Hopkins. Bernard’s first pro fight was at age 23 for a purse of four hundred dollars. He lost, sat out for sixteen months, returned to the ring in 1990, and was defeated only once over the next fifteen years. In 1995, he captured the IBF middleweight crown with a seventh-round knockout of Segundo Mercado. Ultimately, he made twenty consecutive title defenses.
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By Thomas Hauser In April 2001, I was in Las Vegas for the fight between Naseem Hamed and Marco Antonio Barrera. Meanwhile, in the days before their encounter, the arena at the MGM Grand was taken over by Julia Roberts, George Clooney, and company, who were filming a remake of Ocean’s Eleven.
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By Thomas Hauser The recent contract negotiations between Larry Merchant and HBO offer insight into several facets of the relationship between boxing and the media.
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By Thomas Hauser The first fight that Bob Arum promoted was Muhammad Ali versus George Chuvalo in 1966. Arum is 75 years old now. He and Don King are self-described “dinosaurs of the sport.” But while King has seen his influence fade in recent years, Arum’s remains constant. His current roster of fighters includes Manny Pacquiao, Antonio Margarito, Kelly Pavlik, Erik Morales, Jose Luis Castillo, Humberto Soto, Kid Diamond, Jorge Arce, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Hasim Rahman, and Migue
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By Thomas Hauser Perpendicular to the boardwalk in Atlantic City, a four-story shopping mall called The Pier Shops at Caesars extends across a narrow beach and juts out over the Atlantic Ocean. Standing at the eastern end of the mall, one can gaze at the ocean and see Herman Melville’s “great shroud of the sea” as it rolled on thousands of years ago.
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By Thomas Hauser She’s 79 years old now and lives in a one-bedroom apartment in East Las Vegas, the industrial part of town. Defying age, she has managed to remain both shapely and slender. She’s charming and disarming with an air of refinement and still has long fiery-red hair.
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By Thomas Hauser: Boxing’s historical record, like most forms of history, centers on the exploits of kings, not foot soldiers. But the sweet science is about more than great champions. Journeymen, faceless opponents, and young fighters with optimism are an integral part of the game.
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By Thomas Hauser: At 5:00 PM on Wednesday, May 2nd. Floyd Mayweather Jr. was holding court at the Mayweather Boxing Club, the storefront gym in Las Vegas where he trains.
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By Thomas Hauser For the past two years, in addition to his involvement with boxing, Lou DiBella has been president and managing partner of the Connecticut Defenders (a Double-A minor league baseball team). His goal is to someday be managing partner of the New York Mets. So, what would happen if the people who run boxing took over Major League Baseball? Here’s a sampling of what we could expect:
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By Thomas Hauser In 1973, Elton John advised the world, “Saturday night’s alright for fighting; get a little action in.” Now Saturday is the only night on which mega-fights are held.
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By Thomas Hauser: The New York State Athletic Commission has made enormous progress with Ron Scott Stevens as chairman. It might now be the best commission in the country.
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By Thomas Hauser Fans watch fighters in the ring and see the blows. That’s very different from getting hit. And while fans often identify with fighters, they rarely consider what watching a fight is like for someone who has close personal ties to one of the combatants and loves him.
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By Thomas Hauser Bob Sheridan was first behind the microphone for a fight in 1966. Since then, he has called more than 800 championship bouts and become an integral part of boxing’s historical soundtrack. From radio to broadcast television to closed-circuit to pay-per-view; been there, done that.
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By Thomas Hauser The tagline for the fight (“The World Awaits”) is a bit pretentious. The world hasn’t paid much attention to boxing lately. The days of Louis-Schmeling II and Ali-Frazier I (when the world really awaited a prize fight) are gone. But boxing is waiting for Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd Mayweather Jr like a drowning man who sees a log floating in his direction. The log won’t solve all of his problems but it will keep him afloat for a while.
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By Thomas Hauser It has become accepted sport in the boxing industry for writers to trash today’s heavyweights. With that in mind (and on the theory that turnabout is fair play), I asked some of the more-criticized heavyweights of recent years to evaluate today’s boxing writers. Their thoughts follow.
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By Thomas Hauser Last Saturday (February 17th), boxing returned to New York City in the form of an HBO Boxing After Dark triple-header at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The main event featured Paulie Malignaggi (21-1, 5 KOs), who was in action for the first time since his June 10th loss to Miguel Cotto.
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By Thomas Hauser "The sweet science," A. J. Liebling observed, "is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder."When Liebling penned those words, he was referring to the lineage of boxing’s heavyweight champions. It was a glorious line of succession revered by fight fans with the same emotion that British royalists embrace the monarchy.
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By Thomas Hauser The May 5th fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr might turn out to be the largest-grossing fight in the history of boxing. Over the next few months, thousands of articles will be written about the combatants. Their respective pysches will be thoroughly explored. I don’t claim intimate knowledge of either man, but one experience with Mayweather stands out in my mind.
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By Thomas Hauser: In November 2003, I profiled Don Elbaum for this website and reported on his efforts to promote a series of fight cards in Nevada to be known as " BordelloBoxing". Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and the plan was to promote monthly shows at an upscale brothel called Sherry's Ranch.
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By Thomas Hauser
Boxing is struggling, and 2007 will bring new challenges for the sport. Showtime has publicly announced its intention to televise mixed martial arts. Meanwhile, HBO is committed to televising three UFC shows during the coming year with an option for three more. HBO's current plan is to air the shows at midnight on dates still to be determined. No matter how these telecasts are packaged, ultimately they will compete with boxing.
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By Thomas Hauser
"Life," Mark Twain wrote, " does not consist largely of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head.
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By Thomas Hauser
Some fighters have their hometown behind them. Jermain Taylor has an entire state.
Arkansas isn't known for boxing. Sonny Liston, Tommy Freeman, and Taylor are the only undisputed world champions to have been born there. But unlike the other three, Jermain has lived his entire life in Razorback territory. "Arkansas is my home," he says.
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By Thomas Hauser
"Courage," Irish scholar C. S. Lewis wrote, "is every virtue at the testing point." But courage has special meaning for professional boxers.
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By Thomas Hauser
Each year during the holiday season, I publish a list of what I consider to be the best books on the sweet science. That list, updated with recently published titles, follows. Some of these books are now out of print. But with the proliferation of online services like Abebooks.com, Alibris.com, and Amazon.com, all of them can be found.
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By Thomas Hauser
On June 8, 2002, Lennox Lewis knocked out Mike Tyson in Memphis. Since then, there has been only one real heavyweight championship fight. That was Lewis's stoppage of Vitali Klitschko on June 21, 2003.
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By Thomas Hauser: Sometimes people take good things for granted. Steve Albert is approaching his twentieth year behind the microphone for Showtime Boxing. To some, he'll always be Marv's little brother, part of America's most famous sportscasting family. "People tend to compare me to Marv rather than to all commentators," he acknowledges. "That sets an extraordinarily high standard."
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By Thomas Hauser
I received an email recently from a reader complaining about an article that I wrote twenty-one months ago. The article was entitled " Jack Newfield and George Bush" and recounted my final conversation with Jack Newfield, who died of cancer in December 2004.
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By Thomas Hauser
Boxing is the world's hardest sport and also the world's hardest business. Earlier this month, Nikolai Valuev and Thomas Adamek defended their titles at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. Tucked away on the undercard in an off-television bout was a man who, sixteen months ago, stood at the center of the boxing universe.
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By Thomas Hauser
Let's start with some thoughts from Nikolai Valuev himself. He was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) on August 21, 1973. He's the World Boxing Association heavyweight champion, stands 7-feet-2-inches tall, weighs 328 pounds, and has 45 wins in 45 fights.
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By Thomas Hauser On September 29th, John Duddy fought Yory Boy Campas at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. The fight was made by Team Duddy with the expectation that it would be the next step up the ladder for the popular Irish middleweight. Instead, it became a harrowing journey and a defining fight in ways that were both good and bad.
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By Thomas Hauser
"I was clearly a mistake." Those are Steve Farhood's first words when asked to provide biographical data about himself. "I'm the last of four children," he elaborates. "And my parents were divorced one month before I was born."
Farhood might have been a mistake, but he doesn't make many of them. Over the course of 28 years in boxing, he has fashioned a well-deserved reputation for integrity and competence.
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By Thomas Hauser
The conventional wisdom in publishing circles is that books about boxing don't sell. That might be right; but in the case of David Margolick and Donald McRae, it's a shame.
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By Thomas Hauser
Millions of students will be going back to school this week, and many of them will be asked to write the time-honored essay, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation". Thus, it's worth checking in with one of boxing's finest students -- Bernard Hopkins, who retired from the sweet science this year following a unanimous decision triumph over Antonio Tarver.
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By Thomas Hauser
Sara Lee cakes once had a promotional jingle that went, "Everybody doesn't like something; but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
Similarly, everybody doesn't like someone; but nobody doesn't like Tim Smith.
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By Thomas Hauser
There are times when it's hard to like Don King. And there are times when it's hard to dislike him.
King is unique; a man of foresight, vision, and (some say) foul play. Hard-working, brilliant, charismatic; he's one of the most complex people ever to grace the American scene. His rise in the sweet science is almost as remarkable as Muhammad Ali's. He is an icon and a legend in his own time.
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