Thomas Hauser Hits Another Home Run With His Latest Book

The title of Thomas Hauser’s latest compilation, “The Most Honest Sport,” will strike some as an oxymoron. Goodness, we’re talking about professional boxing here, a sport that in every era has been rife with skullduggery.

Of course, the inference is to what happens inside the ropes, not the business aspect of the sport. “Once that bell rings,” said Joe Louis, “you’re on your own. It’s just you and the other guy.”

The library of books by Thomas Hauser is trending toward sixty, but who’s counting? Twenty-two of those books were published by the University of Arkansas Press beginning with a 2000 reprint of Hauser’s acclaimed 1986 book, “The Black Lights,” the book that started it all, so to speak, stamping Hauser as the perfect choice to serve as Muhammad Ali’s official biographer.

The UAP books that followed were compilations of previously published stories, all but two focused almost exclusively on boxing. Save for the most recent releases, which were two-year compilations, the anthologies bore the subtitle “An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing.” (The books are still in print. The UAP sports catalog, available online, includes a table of contents for all of Hauser’s books. An image of the late Ricky Hatton, with whom Hauser was well-acquainted, adorns the 2009 volume with the title “An Unforgiving Sport,” an eerie coupling in light of recent developments.)

“The Most Honest Sport,” the first anthology from Hauser since leaving the University of Arkansas Press, clocks in at a robust 378 pages. It contains 47 stories grouped under three headings: Fighters and Fights; Curiosities; Issues and Answers, the latter of which includes book and movie reviews, a constant in virtually all of Hauser’s compilations. Several of the stories in Hauser’s newest book first appeared in these pages.

The first entry in “The Most Honest Sport” is titled “The Brutal Artistry of Terence Crawford,” a prophetic lid-lifter of a title as the book went to press before Crawford’s performance against Canelo Alvarez. The book concludes on a somber note as Hauser re-visits the ring death of Ardi Ndembo who was allowed to compete in a Team Combat League fight in Florida despite having been knocked out twice in sparring in the month leading up to that event. The story, which ran in the London Guardian, earned Hauser yet another first-place finish in “Investigative Reporting” in the annual BWAA Bernie Awards, a category that he has dominated.

My favorite entry in the book, “Don Elbaum: An Appreciation of Sorts,” celebrates the life of one of the great characters in boxing, a Hall of Fame rascal who worked the high and low (mostly low) corridors of the sport before leaving us with a treasure trove of wonderful anecdotes (some undoubtedly true) before he passed away last year at the age of 94. One of the longest sections of the book, consuming 15 pages, this fun read is a compilation within a compilation. Don Elbaum was a hoot and Hauser’s remembrance would make a great movie.

Many years from now, as I have written before, I suspect that a complete set of Hauser’s anthologies in fine condition will command a hefty price on the collectors’ market, notwithstanding the fact that they are paperbacks. “The Most Honest Sport” is available at https://www.amazon.com/Most-Honest-Sport-Inside-Boxing/dp/1955836329

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