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11/29/2005 Archived Entry: ""SHADOW BOXERS: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive In American Boxing Gyms""
"SHADOW BOXERS: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive In American Boxing Gyms"
(PRESS RELEASE)
The Boxing Book Gift For Every Fight Fan You Know……
Photographs by Jim Lommasson
Forward by Joe Frazier
Essays by Katherine Dunn, Lucius Shepard, Tom Smario, Carlo Rotello, Kate Sekules, F.X. Toole, Robert Anasi, Rene Denfeld, Loic Wacquant, Joe Rein, Ralph Wiley and Bert Sugar.
Published by Stone Creek, 2005
Available from AMAZON.com
Review
"Reveals not just the grit and toil of a disappearing world, but also an unexpected sense of community and...sanctuary." —Sports Illustrated
"Balanced writing, brilliant photographs--unignorable!," June 6, 2005Amazon Reader Reviewer: The Swimmer (New York, NY) - Shadow Boxers is a miracle of a Father's Day gift. Not without a fight, however, will Pop hold onto the book--not while his wife and children are around to read it and, of course, look at it.
The universal appeal of Shadow Boxers owes much to its balanced tone, primal subject, and powerful contributors. Here are writers contending in their own prize rings--Esquire, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Time Magazine, Harper's--for trophies as big as the National Book Award and The Best American Sports Writing. Katherine Dunn, especially, packs a mean punch; again and again she finds your solar plexus before you've finished her first paragraph. (A sample: "One day many years ago, I rode my press credential into a busy boxing gym and was shocked to see a hard-punching monster known as Frankie `The Preacher Man' doing push-ups in the ring with his year-old son sprawled on his back. Amid the din of ringing bells, drumming speed bags, and smacking leather, the baby slept, his long lashes fanned across the chubby cheeks, rocking in the smooth rise and fall of his father's powerful shoulders.")
The photographs alone are worth the cost of admission. Jim Lommasson approaches his subject with the hard-hitting nostalgia of Annie Leibovitz, alongside whose photos of bluesmen, rockers, and gospel singers these fighter shots necessarily belong. Indeed, Pottery Barn has yet to make the coffee table worthy of holding Lommasson and Liebovitz's rock-solid studies of two deep-dyed national passions: Shadow Boxers and American Music (Random House, 2003).
Shadow Boxers opens with a foreword by heavyweight champ Joe Frazier (sole inspiration of the beef-punching scene in Rocky) and features a brief but vivid history of boxing gyms.
The ensuing essays abound with keenly observed ironies about the noble science (e.g., "The game is brutal, but its core is strangely gentle"; "It's dawned on me over the years that there is less macho posturing in boxing gyms than in the average corporate boardroom"), and with crisp details (e.g., the memorable description of Larry Holmes' "jump jab," and the sketch of a city gym in Portland, Oregon, where "a speed bag hung several feet above a wooden pallet, which was used to help children reach the leather punching bag"). So, too, do the essays abound with sharp personal accounts (e.g., a Golden Glove champ who "never weighed more than 140 pounds" and who first entered the gym owing to his girlfriend's parting shot: "you're not man enough"), and with touching accounts of young hoods meeting the coaches who might not only change their lives but save them.
To read Shadow Boxers is to feel the strange warmth, the beckoning glow of boxing gyms, those shabby sanctuaries where individuals can still find a devoted mentor, a group of brothers and sisters, a path toward redemption.
AMAZON Book Description
Boxing gyms are uncovered in all of their glorious grunge in these photographs and essays that reveal both the stark reality of success and the possibility of promise in the sport of boxing. This intimate look at the fighters, trainers, and hangers-on who inhabit these gyms brings to life the tough—and surprisingly tender—world of American boxing. Evocative images reveal the pain, sacrifice, and discipline of the "sweet science" as well as the triumphs, tragedies, and big dreams of the men and women who practice it. A dozen essays by veteran boxing writers such as Katherine Dunn, Carlo Rotella, Kate Sekules, F. X. Toole, Lucius Shepard, Robert Anasi, Loic Wacquant, Joe Rein, and Ralph Wiley explore the community and culture of boxing gyms, an endangered American institution that serves not only as the training ground for the next generation of great fighters, but as a sanctuary in tough neighborhoods, a lifeline for troubled kids, and a repository of a centuries-old tradition of pugilistic knowledge.
