Author. Boxer. Veteran. Traditional man.
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Below, featured boxing book review: |
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Ronald K. Fried, Corner Men: Great Boxing Trainers
This collection of essays about nine memorable boxing trainers is both a history of the sport in America from the 1920s to the late 1980s and a digest of the advice these trainers offered their famous boxers. It's a great tutorial in boxing technique. The trainers are Ray Arcel, Jack Blackburn, Charley Goldman, Whitey Bimstein, Mannie Seamon, Freddie Brown, Al Silvani, and Eddie Futch. Lou Stillman's legendary New York City gym, where many of these trainers worked for a time, gets its own chapter, which in itself is a brief history of American boxing up to 1967, when Stillman's closed. Fried's opening essay is a marvelous introduction to boxing, and not just to its history. It's an essay that revolves around the central question of success in the ring: is it the boxer, or is it the trainer? Larry Holmes is quoted as saying that "fighters make trainers, trainers don't make fighters" (p. xiv). Most boxers give much more credit to their trainers. Even Jake La Motta, who told Fried that "a great, great, great majority of trainers, they don't know what they're talking about," came around to admitting that Futch, Dundee, Arcel, and others were exceptions to his rule (p. xv). Continue here |