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Books4Guys - Don Stradley · Books4Guys

• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Massachusetts.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Are you in the Boston area?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: North of Boston.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome, man.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Don, man, I've been so excited to talk to you today.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: As I got your book, I got it here, The Immortals of American Boxing.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Man, I was going through and I was thinking of moments of just growing up and watching certain fights.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't get to see Ollie, and I kind of saw the tail end of Mike Tyson.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember the Linux Lewis fight with him in Memphis as a kid when Linux won.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I've grown up with like Pacquiao and uh Money Mayweather.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's pretty cool, man.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: You got a uh you have a system of how you, I guess, nominated your immortals because I was going through some of your honorable mentions and I was like, dang, there's some arguments here.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: But uh no, man, super interested.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Just just to hear your story on on just your interest in boxing and how you put this book together.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I've I've written for the Ring magazine for a long time, maybe 20 years, I think.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I was approached by the publisher of this book from uh Yelving Street Press.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: They're an Australian group, and they had put out some really nice books about Australian sports: rugby surfing, horse racing, uh motor car type sports.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: They had done a lot of nice books and they wanted to branch out into American sports.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: They were approached by Simon and Schuster, which is a big American company, and Simon and Schuster said, do an American sport, we'll put you in American bookstores and we'll distribute.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: So one of the guys in Australia knew about me.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: He'd read one of my other books, and he, I think he may have heard me on a on another podcast, and he thought, well, there's the guy who can write our book for us, you know.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: And he contacted me and he made the proposal that they had they had already done the immortals of soccer, the immortals of rugby.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: He said they wanted to do the immortals of American boxing.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: And he asked me if I was interested.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: And believe it or not, my first instinct was, you know, there are a lot of history books out there already.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I didn't know if I could really do anything different.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: What was I gonna bring to it, you know?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: But after maybe a day of thinking about it, I thought, you know, why not?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I have all those old books, you know, I grew up reading them.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: That was how I learned a lot.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, well, here's here's my opportunity.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'll put my spin on it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: It was the kind of book that I would have liked when I was a kid.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: And that was part of it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought they did a really nice job with it.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a great gift book.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like I'm on the home shopping network.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's a great gift.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's Father's Day, Christmas.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: You've got an older fella in the family who likes the fights.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: This might be great for them.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: Or, like I said, if you're a young fan and and you're curious about the history, you know, things didn't start with Manny Pacquiao and Mike Tyson.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they've got a long lineage going back more than a century, you know.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I think for those who are curious, it's a nice, uh sort of a nice primer to have to name some of the great American fighters.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad I only had to focus on Americans because if I had to include Mexican fighters and British fighters and Russian fighters, the book would have been this big and I I'd still be working on it.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: I would have never finished it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, well, it's certainly it's definitely like you said, it's one of those books like, well, even now, but I was thinking like as a kid where I could go through and kind of like quickly see pictures of icons, you know.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big football fan, so I'm thinking of books like that where I'd see, you know, old quarterbacks, Johnny United, as Dan Marino, and then flipping through and learning about them.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly how this book is structured with uh with the great boxers you go through and you get to you can kind of kick back just for a little bit and just catch catch a glimpse of uh you know a highlight or a memory or something that you've heard someone talk about.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, if uh you know if a younger guy buys this book or a younger woman or whoever, they read one chapter a night.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: By the time they've finished it, they've learned a lot about boxing.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's kind that was kind of how I w w was looking at it.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, talk a little bit about because Don, you said something exactly right.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, guys probably about my age or younger, they know Money Bay weather.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: They they know Mike Tyson, but probably from movies and other things more so than actual fights.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but talk, you know, I know one thing when I watch fights over the last decade, I always hear, you know, boxing's not the same as it used to be.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, you know, you don't have these great heavyweights.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: You got these, you know, you have great fighters and they're and they're doing a good job, but it's not like Diolly and Frasier and all these big time moments.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you even talk about like the people that had impact on culture as a grander stage.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: But kind of just walk me through how you dug into, I guess, your kind of personal research and criteria on how you put this list together.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it it's funny when when you you talk about that.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: Well, when I was a kid, a young man, and I was watching those characters like like Ali and Larry Holmes and and Tyson, there were old guys around saying, Oh, these guys aren't so great.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: They're not as good as Joe Lewis or Rocky Marciano.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: So, in a way, it's kind of like um the fighters you watch when you're young, they really penetrate your your mind.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: They leave an impression.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: And anything that comes after that can't match up with what was originally there when you were a kid.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: Same thing.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like Michael Jordan, LeBron James.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you were if you were a Jordan fan, LeBron can't do anything.
• 6:04
  unknown: Yeah.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the same with music.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: If you like certain bands or performers, when you were young, anybody who comes after that, they're not going to match up.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and it's hard to really maintain your interest and your enthusiasm if you're watching something like boxing.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you're watching it for you know 30 or 40 years, um, it does become difficult to appreciate uh everybody who comes along.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: Now, sometimes I have trouble and I get paid to write about boxing, you know.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes I have trouble keeping up with all these these new countries, you know, fighters coming out of countries that never participated in boxing.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, sometimes that creates not not a problem.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, you're you're seeing guys who, you know, comp maybe they competed at the Olympics in a communist country, you know, and 40 years ago they couldn't turn pro, you know, but now they can.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so you're seeing fighters from different parts of the world coming in, whereas boxing used to be almost primarily American, you know.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: So that has changed a lot just in my lifetime.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: That when I was a kid, you could walk into any barbershop, any bar room, and you had nothing to talk about.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: You would just look at the guy next to you and say, You're gonna watch the fight?
• 7:23
  unknown: Yeah.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he knew what you were talking about.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_03: And back then, a heavyweight fight, I'm not exaggerating, a heavyweight fight was like a Super Bowl.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: It was that big, you know, and they were on the main networks, you know.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: So boxing just used to have a bigger stronghold on America, I think.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: And now it's universal, it's worldwide.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, England, it it it always amazes me.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like when when I talk to British uh boxing fans or boxing writers from England, you know, they're filling up football stadiums with with bear guys.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh I'm always amazed by that, you know, trying to figure out when was the last time two American fighters filled up a football stadium, you know.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's been a long time.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think that is, Don?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because again, I I when I watch certain fights, we've had some big ones over the last few years, but they they kind of still they talk about just the difference it is now compared to those Super Bowl, you know, style fights that everyone was talking about.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: What what's your opinion on on why that's changed a little bit in the popularity here specifically?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: Boy, we we'd have to make this an hour-long uh podcast.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't know if I could capsulize it into just a quick sound bite.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: But part of it really is uh TV sponsors.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: That was a big part of it because around the late 80s, early 90s, uh boxing started moving off of mainstream television and it started going into HBO and Showtime and pay-per-view, and it was that was like the first thing that that created a big shift.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you wanted to watch boxing, you kind of had to search for it.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't just on ABC, Wide World of Sports, on Saturday afternoon, which had been a staple for so many years, you know.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: And suddenly it was almost exclusively on cable.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: And back then not everybody had cable.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it seems the audience started to dwindle.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and the other thing that happened was there was a great influx of Mexican and Puerto Rican fighters.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: And then the networks were hesitant because they thought, well, all of our viewers are, you know, middle class, white-bred America, you know, and these fighters they can't speak English, they can't give interviews, they're not going to relate to the the people at home, you know.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that, whether that's true or not, I I'm not saying, but that was how the networks felt.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: So gradually, sponsors for things like motor oil and you know, and you know, car commercials um and and beer, those were the big three, they started backing off of boxing.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so that was another thing that happened.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: And before you know it, I remember, you know, in the 90s, people would say, Whatever happened to boxing, you know?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: Or I I'd tell them I was writing for for a boxing magazine, and they'd say, Does boxing still exist?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: Who's the champion?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: Is Mike Tyson still the champion?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: What's going on?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was almost like a window had been closed, and you know, just those two things, TV sponsors moving away, and then the fights all gravitating to cable.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh America lost half its audience.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, the rest of the world didn't seem to lose interest.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: It it, you know, because in the 1990s, that's when British boxing really started to uh blossom.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: It had always been big, but suddenly they they had a lot of big names like Lennox Floyds, Frank Bruno, and and Nigel Ben.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: They had a lot of great names.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: That that's kind of how it started.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was a snowball effect.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you certainly boxing has had its moments, though.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm thinking the Manny Pacquiao, Mayweather, just the whole buildup for years.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think most people wish the fight would have happened earlier, but when they were both just a little bit younger and healthier.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because I just remember those years of build-up.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone wanted it so bad.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking recently the Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury fights, but those were some big heavyweight fights, you know, with with among my friend group that we were keeping up with, and a lot of guys that I know that didn't watch a lot of boxing, they looked forward to that fight or those fights.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's how it all was back in the day.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, every heavyweight fight came along.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: Not every fight, but yeah, you know.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I was yeah, I was kind of imagining like that's probably what it was like because I remember leading up to those fights.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, me and all my friends were like, dude, Saturday night, we're watching the Wilder Fury fight, you know.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the Pacquiao Mayweather fight was uh pretty unique.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was really unique.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um that that you had two guys of roughly the same size who were you know both so accomplished.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: That that was kind of unique that uh they I think they were welterweights at that point.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they both started out in lighter weight classes, but you had two welterweights generating that much interest.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: That that was really unique, you know.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the guys being from the Philippines, yeah, that was unique.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he was almost more likable than the hometown Mayweather, you know, just from like a personality standpoint and the way they went about how they carried themselves.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: And his style was was more exciting.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I I think he had a lot of fans written for him.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, like you said, it happened a few years too late.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: But that, but but it kind of shows like how boxing can be when you've got the right people and the right fighters and the right, I guess, marketing behind these matchups.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, it's almost like we're craving more of it.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: We just haven't had a whole lot of it, maybe.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm not in the space, but I know those are those moments where I remember like two specific fights where I was like, man, we gotta watch.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they were big deals.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the the other interesting thing, too, about Pacquio and Mayweather was that they had both been in the business a long time.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: They were they're both kind of past it when they fought.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: And when you think back to the great fights that I mentioned in my book, you know, those these fights didn't have 15 years of build-up.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't need it.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: That that's how different it was back then.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: You didn't need to, you know, talk about something for 15 years to create interest, you know.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: It was just a very different climate, you know.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I I don't want to sound like one of those guys who said, Oh, it was better in the old days, but uh it was just a different setup.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: A different country, the media was different.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_03: A big thing.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't have crossover either, I mean, like the Connor McGregor Mayweather fight, you know, UFC over to boxing, which drew a lot of views, you know, it was different.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: That was that was another weird thing.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: But one thing I noticed while I was working on the book was that New York played such a significant part in how certain fighters became, you know, a mortal because New York was pretty much the center of it all.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: And if you were fighting in New York, you had all of the New York newspapers covering the event, you know, and so your name became really huge, you know.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: And and what I noticed about certain guys for a certain period in the last century, if they were not fighting in New York, they didn't become as well known.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: It was almost like getting to Broadway or something.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: They have a great record in California, you know, but they just considered you, oh, he's he's a California fight.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it really you really had to pull some strings to get to New York.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: So that that was something that is kind of unique to the past.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: That that's something that uh you know you can get from from reading the book.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: You read about guys like Archie Moore, who just on a Greyhound bus down south, going from one crappy arena to another, you know.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and just waiting for the day to get to New York.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: He he didn't get there until he was like 37, I think, you know, he did his first fight in New York.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: So it was it was just a different time, different period, different uh set of circumstances for for those guys.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Did you get to read much of the book yet?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or just read quite a bit, but I was gonna ask you specifically, just as you were putting this together, what was there a a a couple things that you learned yourself where you were like, this is like this is I didn't know this.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta put this in the book, you know, like just stories about somebody in particular, or or any sort of, you know, you kind of mentioned New York being the the place you gotta go, but was there any inside, I guess, information you kind of found out and were like, wow, this is incredible.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there were uh there was one character who was uh a lightweight in the 1930s or 20s, rather, 20s, named Benny Leonard.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: Benny Leonard, and he was a very popular Jewish fighter, really considered a hero to a lot of the the Jewish kids at that point back in the 20s and early 30s.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: And what what I learned about him, and I and I knew he was a great fighter, so there was really nothing new to learn there, but I didn't realize he was so involved with gamblers.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the some of the biggest, most dangerous gamblers of the day were were were friends of his and would sort of go to him.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: They'd say, I'm gonna bet on you tonight by first round knockout.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: Can you pull it off?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: And he would say, Well, I'll try.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I'll give it a shot, you know.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And he would go out and he would try to KO guys in the first round just because he had buddies gambling on it, you know.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and I guess I was gonna ask that too, because you're talking about New York, and in like, I don't know, in my mind, I'm thinking you I see in movies like mob ties and you know, just these tough Italians, you know, into boxing too.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know what was that like?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: I guess you just gave us an insight, you know, gamblers and and maybe some influence and kind of some underground workings, kind of scary, actually.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, a a lot of the uh Italian mobster influence, um, it was prevalent from the 20s through the uh 50s.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um and there was an old saying, if you want to know which guys were involved with the mob, they were the ones who got title shots.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's that was a saying that went around boxing for a while.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: But uh and I I don't know if that's true or if it was just said as kind of a joke.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: But one guy that I knew, he was a welterweight from Boston named Tony DiMarco, he fought in the face, and I I got to know him when when he was uh a much older man.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, I I would talk to him about the gangs, you know, the gangland influence, and he put it that he put it in an interesting way.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: He said sometimes those guys would invest in a fighter instead of investing in a restaurant or or a racehorse.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: It was something like a hobby.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: Put it, put your money into it, see what happens.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: If the guy turns out to be no good, you pull your money out.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: You know.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he said that he said that went on pretty frequently, more so than fixing fights or any of that.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: It was you know, a lot a lot of guys had mob ties, so to speak, but it was really just some you know two-bit, two-bit mobster with a little bit of extra money.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'll invest in a middleweight, see what happens.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if he becomes the champ, I'll be able to make some money off of it, you know.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: But I also I don't know if you remember Lou Duva.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: He might he might be a little before your time.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: He was a trainer, he trained a lot of guys like Abandoned Holyfield for a while, and Hector Camacho, not Camacho, Ronel Whitaker.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: He trained a lot of guys in in the uh 80s and and 90s.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um Vinny Pazienzo.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: But I was talking I was talking to Lou Duva uh about the uh the old gangster days, and and he said, back then if you wore a suit and a tie, people thought you were a gangster.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so a lot of it was exaggerated.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: Here's a guy with a suit and a tie coming to the gym.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, he's gotta be a gangster, you know.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so he he he kind of played it down too.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um but you know, there there's no doubt that uh there there was some gangland influence.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: And there was a big trial in the early 60s before before the uh the Congress where where uh you know a couple of guys were sent to jail.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh illegal shenanigans of fights.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where Jake Lamotta of the Raging Bull testified, saying that yeah, I to I I I took a dive in a fight, you know, against Billy Fox, you know, because they said I would get a title shot if I put this guy over now.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um so so there was definitely uh some some gangland influence.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know that fortunately, you know, the the guys that I wrote about through maybe just a a fluke, they weren't really too touched by any of that.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure they're sure they knew stuff that was going on.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: But there were there were always guys who were untouchable in a way.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: Some fighters so good and so polished and and so respected that that even the criminals would say, I don't don't, you know, don't mess with him.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: He's untouchable.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: We we he shouldn't get involved, you know.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: But uh so it was more likely on the lower end of things.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Those guys were just interesting the the culture of boxing and just how much is involved there.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then you just get into yeah, the style of fight from different boxers and just their personas and just some of them larger than life characters.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I'm kind of like thinking of Mike Tyson and just like, man, that's a bad dude.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like you know, you're saying nobody, nobody wants to cross that guy in an alley, you know, or get on his bad side.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm sure a lot of these guys were like that.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it's just each each fighter had their own, like I said, aura or personality to them and just the way they carried themselves.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: But the whole just the whole culture of boxing in general is just so fascinating.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, one thing I noticed about these guys, the the I picked out 15 for the for the front of the book, the main 15.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's uh an honorable mention list at the back of the book.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking uh as I was writing it, if I had written this book 20 years ago, I don't know if Tyson would have made the cut.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds that sounds interesting you say that, yeah.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I know to younger fans that probably sounds odd, but if you think back to the end of his career, he was not so well regarded.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_03: He was kind of a he became sort of a foolish character.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you and he was losing fights, you know.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: He he lost a bunch yeah, lost a a a a a bunch of guys near the end of his career, and he was not so highly regarded.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I even remember w when he finally retired, uh, 2005 or 2006 or whenever it was, my editor at the Wrang magazine said, Why don't you write a story about uh whether or not he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that's at the time, that was a topic.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: Does he really belong in the Hall of Fame?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, with all of the disgrace that he brought on himself.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: He was at the time, people thought of him as an underachiever.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: He could have been one of the greats, but in that little time frame, people thought of him as an underachiever.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: What could have been, you know?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: And but now, writing this book 20 years later, his image has grown so much.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he's bigger now than he ever was.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm thinking, well, now, yeah, he's he's kind of morphed into one of the immortals, you know.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: But 20 years ago, it was, I don't know if he would have made the cut.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: He might have been an honorable mention, you know.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: And it's funny, that's what happens with a lot of fighters.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: They grow in retrospect, you know.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: You'll only remember the good times, you know.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's done such a good job of yeah, putting his face out there in a positive way.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then you think back on his his peak of his career when he did have the punch and the wins, and it was just, you know, people look up the highlights and they're like, wow, he was deadly.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: But then you also remember the the biting of the ear and all these crazy things.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And now they remember that in a positive light.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, back then he was like the biggest fool you'd ever seen.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: People really didn't like him anymore.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: They just thought he was a coward, you know, and and he wasn't gonna win, so he fouled out.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, now they look at that as like, oh, he was crazy.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he's just crazy, you know.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so yeah, they go, That's awesome.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: You can put a spin on it that way.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's Mike, he's nuts, man.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: He's a bad man.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: But back then, when he when he actually bit Holyfield, it was considered a travesty, you know.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: So time really kind of changes things, you know, and that's how it goes.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's how it's always been, you know.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: And in a way, what what Tyson has done, like you said, is that he's made himself visible.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't let us forget him.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: He he kind of pops up, you know, in different places, you know, like a latamole.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yeah.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: This event.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: He's in he's in Saudi Arabia, he's doing this, he's at a charity event or hosting his own podcast.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: He's uh you know, appearing in a movie once in a while, you know.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: He's been really good at marketing himself, you know.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: Better than a lot of his predecessors.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: Because a lot of, once their careers were over, they kind of faded, you know, and and you didn't, you know, even the really great ones like you know, Joe Lewis and Ray Robinson, you know, who were, you know, there's greatness and then there's greatness, you know.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: And Lewis and Robinson were way up there.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: But in their later lives, they really kind of folded in half almost, you know, and and they were just kind of, you know, almost sad little figures, you know, especially Lewis, you know.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: He ended up in Las Vegas working as a greeter at one of the casinos, you know, uh, and he became very sick.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: And and it's not like he could have fought, you know, Jake Paul for millions of dollars, you know, even so laughs.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: He couldn't have done that.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: He was just, you know, poor health, financially strapped.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: Ray Robinson, too, ended up broke and in bad health.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: And and so, in a way, that's where Tyson has surpassed a lot of his own heroes in that he's kind of stayed relevant, um, kind of kept his kept his head out there.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, kind of interesting.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Do you, Don?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you put this list together kind of looking at a lot of different factors, but do you have, if it's different than the book, do you have a Mount Rushmore of your personal top three or four boxers of all time?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there were guys that I had to cut, and and like I said earlier, I'm glad I didn't have to do Mexican fighters, because I love Mexican fighters.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: I I think they're they're great, they have a long tradition, probably as long as as uh uh any other fucker.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: But uh my Mount Rushmore, it would be some of the guys in this book.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: I couldn't, I don't think I could just pick four Mount Rushmore.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: But uh you know, I would put you know, like this Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion in the 1920s.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um to me he's vital because uh he became such a symbol, such uh an important sports figure.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: He was up there at the time.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: He was up there with Babe Roof.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and in football, I guess it was red range.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: Jack Dempsey was was uh a phenomenon, and he didn't have to fight that often.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: That was the strange thing.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um once he won the championship, he was so popular, so over the top, he only had to fight like once a year, once every 18 months.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result, he kind of got rusty.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, then he took some time off and he went to Hollywood and made made some bad movies.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: And uh he fascinates me.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: One because he had this kind of ruthless style.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: And the other thing is that this was the early days of when they were filming fights and they would show them at movie theaters you know, a couple of weeks after the fact.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: So you had read about the fight in the newspaper, and then you would say, Oh, it's playing at my local cinema.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna go see it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: And that was how the whole country kind of fell in love with Jack Dempsey, you know, what was just seeing him this larger than life character on a big movie screen.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: Because back then, movie theaters were enormous, yeah, and they were even called movie palaces.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: That's how elaborate they were.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so I'm intrigued, sometimes not just by the fighter, but how the media is able to put them over, you know.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: And same thing with another early guy in the book, but I gotta give some some credit to John L.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_03: Sullivan.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: He was the bridge between bare knuckle boxing and glove boxing.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: Really interesting character because at the time they were still fighting under what they used to call the London rules, which were slightly different.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: You could you could basically poke a guy's eyes out.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: You could uh, you know, anything short of stabbing him.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was just a very nasty sport and it was illegal in in most states.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and a lot of your fights would get broken up by the police.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: But Sullivan was smart.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: Once he got into the business, he just thought when you're fighting bare knuckle, you're you hurt your hands.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: That was the main and he wanted to fight a lot, you know, so he could make more money, you know.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so he adopted the idea.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't invent the gloves, but he was one of the first to say, give me the gloves.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'll fight with those little mittens, you know, because they protected his hands and he could fight in different cities, you know, and it was kind of it was almost like a rock star on tour, really.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like he'd get on a train with his posse of sparring partners, and they would hit, you know, they'd hit Boston, they'd hit, you know, Maine, they they they hit New York, they'd hit four or five places in the Midwest, you know, and they would trail the whole country.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: He couldn't do that bare knuckles, but with the gloves, he could do it.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: And fighting under the the newly developed Martins of Queensbury rules, which were a little more humane, which is pretty much what uh what they use now, uh fighting with the gloves, fighting with the better rules, he was able to make a lot more money than anyone ever had before.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the fact that he was traveling, it became uh this bigger than life character, coming to your town.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said, the rock star on tour.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: And what was interesting too is that this was the beginning of the telegraph.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: So rather than you know, going to your phone to see what was going on, you know, trying to get news updates or whatever, uh, or going online to learn stuff, the telegraph was sending reports of his latest fight to the the newspaper offices around the country.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it became kind of a ritual for the boxing fans in that city or town to kind of congregate at the newspaper office.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, waiting for the news.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: Waiting for the news, you know, and and a and a guy in uh they said that they would actually make a production out.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there would be a guy in the newsroom, like a megaphone, shouting out the results.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Sullivan won the first round, you know, and the guys outside, yeah, you know, and uh, you know, they would serve beer on the sidewalk outside the newsroom, and it became an event, you know, before he had paid per view.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: Again, that kind of thing is fascinating.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: Not just that Sullivan was this, you know, strong guy who knocked opponents out, but the way the media was able to enhance his legend, you know.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um I love that.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, this is Don, this has been so interesting because there's so much in here, just again, as a I guess as a I call myself a casual boxing fan, you know, I know things that interest me, but there's so many things like you just shared, the stories of how people even got results and and just the whole reasoning behind putting gloves on, you know, so you can fight more, make more money.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's just all these little details that are just so interesting and fascinating to learn.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And each of these guys having their own, their own sort of piece to the history of boxing and their own influence on it, and and they've left their mark one way or another.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just an incredible, incredible book that I I mean, I I'm gonna be flipping through it for days and weeks.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's one I'll probably go back to and kind of look through because it's just so much fun.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I know a lot of friends of mine too are gonna find this extremely fascinating and interesting.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's very cool.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: I hope so, because you know, you you call yourself a casual fan, and I think that is what boxing misses.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: Just casual fans.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it seems like you're uh it only has hardcore fans now, you know, guys who are just so into it, you know, they they uh that uh the casual fan, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a great point because all these sports, football, you know, basketball, you you have so many casual fans, you know, they go once in a while or they watch when their friends are watching.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: In boxing, you're right.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Boxing's missing that to where there's a bigger audience to consume this.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's had its moments, but you're right.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: There it's there's there's room to improve and to grab us more often.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope they do because I've loved all the fights that I watch and I love the people.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, sure.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: It it see that there was this uh rule of thumb that I had to judge a fighter's popularity when I was writing the book.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: I would think back to when I was a kid.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: And if my mother knew who the fighter was, I was a big deal.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_03: He had crossed over, right?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: He had he had somehow crossed over into the mainstream, you know.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: And there were guys back then, you know, who they fought on television often enough, or they got their name in the newspaper often enough, my mother would kind of know who they were.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that was kind of a little rule I had.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, all right, if like if there was somebody I was thinking about, if there was a fighter I wanted to include, I would think back, would my mother have known him?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: Then I would think, no, she wouldn't have known like Tommy Hearns.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: She would not have known Tommy Hearns, but she would have known Sugar Leonard, you know.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: That was the difference between fighters who really crossed over into the mainstream.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: And and to me, that that counts, you know.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh uh there you'll you'll find fans who just think that that's fluff, you know.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: But to me it counts because it kind of keeps the wheel spinning in boxing.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's the grease that keeps the engine going.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think that's a very fair metric.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Very fair.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Did you have other questions or anything that you wanted?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: No, just again, Don, this is awesome.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to give want you to give too much away because I want people to read your book and look through it because it's it is incredible.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many amazing stories.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I was looking through and I was sitting there thinking, like, yeah, it's so many moments that are captured in there.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: Like that make it uh, you know, it's a good, it's a good book to have.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not that expensive, really.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: It for a book like this, uh slip pages and and and uh uh uh a lot of a lot of photographs.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's only like uh twenty, I think the full price is like$26.95, but yeah uh Amazon knocks a couple of bucks off of that, depending on the week or the month or whatever.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: But uh it's a great gift for a birthday or Father's Day coming up or anything like that.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: But Don, where can people find you if they want to see, if they want to dig deeper into this work or your other work?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, uh I write for the Ring magazine.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: I had a couple of stories in there every month.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and uh here's the latest issue of the ring.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: This is a beautiful, it's got that's Tyson Fury on the cover.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we were talking about him.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and uh the ring is uh it's a beautiful magazine too.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's full full colour, it's got uh a lot a lot of uh interesting articles in there.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: I do about two stories a month for the ring.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: I've been with the ring for about uh 20 years, I maybe 21 years, and I've been fortunate that uh they have occasional changes in management.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: They've they've always kept me on the team, so I'm grateful for that.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: But and I'm on I'm on Twitter, though I don't usually do much lately, or X as it's called now.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: I I'm not a big social media guy.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't love it, you know.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of times I'll try to get on it and I think I'm just kind of wasting my time, you know.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: But uh I also write a lot of uh true crime stuff.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_03: I I have some some true crime books that are coming out in the next six or eight months.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm pretty busy.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: I have a lot of different things going on.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: And they they can go to my Amazon page too.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Look me up on Amazon, John Stradley, or just go to Amazon and put my name in in the search and you'll see a bunch of books that I've written.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um I've I wrote one called The War, which was about the uh Marvin Hagler Tommy Hearn Spike.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh that was uh that's a book that a lot of people like.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're interested in in those guys, I'd recommend that book.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: If you if you like The Immortals and you want to read more from me, um I'd recommend The War about the Hagworth Hearn Spike.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_03: And you can find it on Amazon.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: No, perfect, and we'll make sure that we we've already got this book on the Books for Guys website.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: We'll get we'll get that book and all of yours posted on there as well, obviously with links to Amazon so anyone can find your work and all of that.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: But no, Don, this has been awesome, man.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for doing this.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: My pleasure, Chris.