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Forged by Longtime Coach Al Mitchell, Mikaela Mayer Seems Destined for Stardom
Mikaela Mayer makes the first defense of her WBO 130-pound world title on Saturday at the Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas against her toughest opponent yet in Argentine veteran Erica Anabella Farias. A win by Mayer would be another feather in the cap of her 77-year-old trainer Al Mitchell who is one of boxing’s most interesting personalities.
One of the bedrocks of amateur boxing in America, Al Mitchell grew up in Philadelphia in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. “Most of the kids on my block would eventually go to prison,” says Mitchell.
Some of them spent time in prison with Mitchell who got caught up in the street life as a teenager and was remanded to the city’s Holmesburg Prison whose alumni would come to include Bernard Hopkins. When he got out, he went back to the recreation center where he had learned to box but rather than resuming his amateur career, he found coaching more to his liking.
In 1988, Mitchell took a team of boxers to a Junior Olympics tournament at the Olympic Education Center in Marquette, Michigan. Founded in 1985, the center was designed for the purpose of allowing elite athletes to continue their education while providing them with the resources to maximize their athletic potential. Athletes of college age attend classes tuition-free at Northern Michigan University and reside with their younger cohorts in the school’s dorms. For many years, NMU was home to the National Junior Olympics Tournament.
In an oft-told story, when Mitchell was returning with his team to Philadelphia, he came across a 15-year-old boxer from Georgia who was stranded at the airport. Mitchell called the kid’s mother and promised her that he would see that her son got home safely and let his Philadelphia team go on ahead without him.
The 15-year-old boxer was Vernon Forrest who would turn pro under Mitchell’s tutelage and go on to win world titles in two weight classes.
The honchos at the training center were impressed with Mitchell’s compassion and with the tools displayed by the young boxers he brought there. The coaching position was vacant and they induced Mitchell to take the job. He arrived in Marquette in the summer of 1989. He reckoned that he would only be there for a few months.
From a ‘hood in Philadelphia to a sleepy college town in Michigan’s Northern Peninsula is quite a transition. Marquette is white; not predominantly white, just white. And then there’s the weather. Arriving in the summer, Mitchell didn’t appreciate how cold it would get when winter set in. In December, January, and February, the average daily HIGH temperature in Marquette is below freezing.
Mitchell acknowledges that he almost left several times. His boxers, notably Vernon Forrest and Ricky Ray Taylor, a Golden Gloves champion from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who never turned pro and currently trains boxers in New York, talked him out of it. In time, however, Mitchell settled in. When the weather is nice, he says, Marquette is the most beautiful town in the world. And the locals were more than welcoming.
After three years in the NIU dorm where he lived on the same floor as his boxers, Mitchell, who is divorced, purchased a home. It’s four blocks from the shoreline of Lake Superior and one-and-a-half blocks from the college. When he is gone for any length of time, he can count on his neighbors to mow his lawn.
“My neighbors all have the keys to my house,” he says. “In Philadelphia that would never happen. Around here, if I hear bang, bang, bang, I know that it’s just a car backfiring.”
Mitchell was never shot, but he was brutally attacked by robbers during the time that he owned a North Philadelphia bodega, a place where most walk-ins came to turn in their numbers, i.e., their selections in the daily lottery-type game that was once a staple of community life in America’s ghettos.
The assailants got him when he was closing up for the day and left him in such bad shape that he spent five days in a coma during a lengthy hospital stay. He bears a souvenir of the incident, a plate in his head.
Mitchell was named the head coach of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team that included Floyd Mayweather, David Reid, Fernando Vargas, and Antonio Tarver, and was a consultant to the 2004 and 2012 squads, the latter of which was the first to include women.
The greatest U.S. Olympic team was the 1976 edition that won seven medals (five gold) in Montreal. They set the benchmark against which future squads would be unfairly compared.
There were 11 weight divisions in 1976, a number that would grow to 12 and currently sits at eight for boxers with male chromosomes. A boxer faces more hurdles today as there are more boxing federations which has given rise to more international qualification tournaments. Back in the days of Sugar Ray Leonard and the Spinks brothers, notes Mitchell, a U.S. Olympic boxer who made it all the way to the finals wouldn’t have faced more than one Russian. “Today he may face three.”
By that he means that in the old days, fighters from such countries as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan would have been classified as Russians. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, those countries became separate entities. And they have mirrored the Russians and Cubans by investing heavily in their amateur athletes with stipends and other perks that encourage their boxers to delay or forego their entrance into the professional ranks.
Mitchell has proposed moving the Olympic boxing competition from the summer to the winter. With a less cluttered cast of athletes, dispersed over fewer sports, there would theoretically be room for the International Olympic Committee to reinstate the discarded weight divisions. In the United States, this would inevitably translate into more ink for the boxing team, raising the profile of a sport that many no longer consider mainstream.
Mitchell’s proposal fell on deaf ears.
As for the U.S. delegation in Tokyo — five male and four female – Mitchell says it’s a solid team with the women likely to out-perform the men because they have stayed in the program longer. Two of the four women – Ginny Fuchs and Naomi Graham – are in their thirties. On the men’s side, Duke Ragan is the granddaddy at age 24.
The last American to win a gold medal was Andre Ward who accomplished the feat at the 2004 Games in Athens. Ward has morphed into a color commentator for ESPN Boxing where he has impressed knowledgeable fans with his insightfulness.
Al Mitchell, who worked extensively with Ward before he turned pro, isn’t surprised. “Ward and Floyd Mayweather, who was on my 1976 team, had the highest ring IQs of all the boxers that I have coached. When I first worked with Andre, I thought this kid doesn’t punch hard enough to go very far. But he had great anticipation and no one was better at processing what his opponent had and making the right adjustments. I had no doubt that he would perform better against Kovalev in their second meeting than he did in their first.”
Mitchell notes that Andre Ward’s sidekick Tim Bradley is also one of his former students. “He also does a great job and I couldn’t be happier for him.”
Mitchell’s style of coaching has been likened to that of a drill sergeant. He would roust his boxers out of bed at 5 am to go running and it made no difference what the weather was like outside. His gruff demeanor when putting his boxers through their paces may have been inherited from his father, a staff sergeant during the Korean War who returned home with PTSD symptoms and died when Al was 16.
Needless to say, many of the boxers who come to Marquette don’t have the fortitude to stay there very long and who can blame them? It’s no picnic, to put it mildly. When Mikaela Mayer first turned up, Mitchell assumed that she would hang around for a few weeks, at most. She fooled him. Asked to identify her chief asset, Mitchell cited her work ethic. The two have been together now for 11 years.
Mitchell had no interest in teaching women how to be better boxers – “My father would turn over in his grave,” he told ESPN’s Mark Kriegel – but with women now eligible to fight in the Olympics, he felt he had little choice. And Mayer owes her success to more than just a good work ethic. Mitchell and his top assistant Kay Koroma have crafted her into a very formidable fighter who, at age 30, perhaps has yet to reach her peak. (And by the way, she’s a lot more attractive than the photo of her that appears in boxrec, whoever that may be; it certainly doesn’t look like her.)
Back in Philadelphia before boxing became all-consuming, Mitchell concedes that he was a hustler. In addition to having his fingers in the illegal numbers game, he ran a speakeasy. He must have been a hard-boiled guy in those days but one wouldn’t know it if meeting him for the first time today. He comes across as a gentle soul although one suspects it wouldn’t be a smart idea to give him any lip.
For her fight with Erica Farias, Mikaela Mayer spent four weeks at Mitchell’s gym in Marquette (which is no longer formally attached to the university which currently supports athletes in only two Olympic summer sports; Greco-Roman wrestling and weightlifting), then three weeks at the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, finishing up with a week at the Top Rank Gym in Las Vegas.
Her bout with Farias will be the co-feature of a show headlined by the WBA/IBF bantamweight title fight between Japan’s baby-faced assassin Naoya Inoue and Filipino challenger Michael Dasmarinas. The bouts, and a third fight between Adam Lopez and Isaac Dogboe, air free on ESPN with a start time of 7 pm ET. Undercard action commences at 5 pm ET on ESPN+.
Check out more boxing news on video at the Boxing Channel
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Say It Ain’t So: Oliver McCall Returns to the Ring Next Week
Mike Tyson isn’t the only geezer in action this month. As if one grotesquerie wasn’t enough, Oliver McCall is slated to return to the ring on Tuesday, Nov. 19. McCall is matched against Stacy “Bigfoot” Frazier in a 4-rounder. The venue is a dance hall in Nashville where the usual bill of fare is an Elvis impersonator. The fight, airing on TrillerTVplus, will be historic, says a promotional blurb, as McCall will break Mike Tyson’s record as the oldest former heavyweight champion to compete in a licensed professional fight.
McCall was one of Tyson’s most frequent sparring partners during Iron Mike’s days with Don King. Nicknamed “Atomic Bull,” McCall is 59 years old, sports a 59-14 record, and as a pro has answered the bell for 436 rounds. By comparison, Tyson, 58, has 215 rounds under his belt heading in to his date with Jake Paul.
Stacy Frazier, according to some reports, is 54 years old. Per boxrec, he has a 16-22 record and has been stopped 17 times. In common with McCall, this is his first ring exposure in five-and-a-half years.
The Nov. 19 fight card is being promoted by Jimmy Adams, a former Don King surrogate who has had a long relationship with Oliver McCall. Adams promoted five fights for McCall in Nashville in a four-month span in 1997/98. These were comeback fights for the troubled McCall, coming on the heels of his famous meltdown in his rematch with Lennox Lewis.
Back then, Adams promoted most of his Nashville shows at a bar called the Mix Factory. The promoter and the venue factored large in a New York Times story that began on page 1 of the June 1, 1998 issue and spilled over into the sports section. It bore the title “Boxing in the Shadows.”
The gist of the story was that boxing commissions in different regions of the country “had different levels of tolerance for risk” and that Nashville, which had suddenly become a very busy locale for low-budget fights, was an accident waiting to happen. The Tennessee boxing commission, a division of the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance, was a one-man operation with a budget that penciled out to less than $1,000 per show.
In an article that appeared in the (Nashville) Tennessean shortly after the New York Times expose, promoter Adams scoffed at the insinuation that many of the fighters he used were not true professionals – “I’ve worked to make Nashville the boxing capital of the world,” he said – but Tommy Patrick, the head of the Tennessee Boxing Board, allowed that there was a chance that Adams may have recruited some of his fighters from a homeless shelter.
McCall won the WBC version of the world heavyweight title on Sept. 24, 1994, at Wembley Stadium in London. In one of the biggest upsets of the decade, he knocked out previously undefeated Lennox Lewis in the second round. He made one successful defense, out-pointing long-in-the-tooth Larry Holmes, before returning to Wembley and losing the title to Frank Bruno.
The rematch with Lennox Lewis, on Feb. 7, 1997 in Las Vegas, was one of the most bizarre fights in boxing history. McCall was acting odd before the fifth round when he started sobbing and simply quit trying. Referee Mills Lane disqualified him, but it went into the books as a win by TKO for Lewis. That remains the only time that Oliver McCall, renowned for his granite chin, failed to make it to the final bell.
In the months leading up to that fight, McCall had drug, alcohol, and legal problems.
In some of his most recent outings, McCall shared the bill with his son Elijah McCall. They last appeared together in May of 2013 when they appeared on a card in Legionowo, Poland. A heavyweight, now 36 years old, Elijah McCall returned to the ring in June of this year after a 10-year absence and was stopped in the second round by Brandon Moore in Orlando.
Jimmy Adams, the promoter, was also involved in the careers of heavyweight title-holders Tony Tucker and Greg Page. Both fought at the Mix Factory as their careers were winding down. But he wasn’t able to lock in dates for Riddick Bowe.
In 2005, in a rare burst of rectitude, the Tennessee authorities refused to license Bowe who had returned to the ring the previous year after an 8-year absence at an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.
They based their denial on the transcript of a 2000 court hearing related to a 1998 incident where Bowe kidnapped his wife and five children and forced them to go with him as he drove from Virginia to North Carolina. Riddick’s legal team, led by Johnnie Cochran, argued that Riddick’s erratic behavior was the result of brain damage suffered over the course of his 43-fight professional boxing career.
The “brain damage defense” was just a ploy to keep Bowe out of prison, argued Jimmy Adams, who had arranged two fights for Bowe in Memphis, but the authorities were unyielding and Bowe never fought in Tennessee.
Adams has also been involved in the career of Christy Martin who is listed as the matchmaker for the Nov. 19 show. But the cynics would tell you that Ms. Martin is the matchmaker in name only in the same fashion that Jimmy Adams was a strawman for Don King.
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Boxing was a Fertile Arena for Award-Winning Sportswriter Gary Smith
Gary Smith is this generation’s most decorated and distinctive magazine writer after winning an unprecedented four National Magazine Awards for non-fiction and being a finalist for the award a record ten times during his more than three decades at Sports Illustrated.
A longtime resident of Charleston, South Carolina, Smith began his career at the Wilmington [Delaware] News Journal followed by stops at the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York Daily News and the stylish monthly Inside Sports before landing at Sports Illustrated in 1982. His job at “S.I.” was to write four longform features a year. Mike Tyson and James “Buster” Douglas were among the athletes that he profiled and he also penned features on Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
Smith said it’s one thing to see an athlete perform but it’s another to know what’s inside.
“I just felt like to really render the human soul in its most honest way, that getting to understand what human beings had been through and what had landed them with whatever coping mechanism they used would be vital so people could understand a person,” said the La Salle University graduate who stepped away from the magazine in 2014. “Some of these people were doing some extreme things and if you didn’t really lay out the soil they sprung from and what brought them to that place, they would seem like aliens or freaks, but you could very much humanize them which was the only fair thing to do. We all want someone to understand why we are who we are, rather than leaving us dangling on the vine.”
Smith’s wife, Sally, is a psychiatrist, and summed up what her husband tried to lay bare in his features.
“He is not satisfied with putting facts together. He wants to understand what is the core conflict that has driven that person,” she offered many years ago. “He hopes to tell a secret that a person might not be aware of.”
It was rumored Smith would interview no less than fifty people for one feature. Smith said that wasn’t always the case, but he wanted to be thorough, which was merely one key in trying to know and understand his subject.
“You needed patience, asking and re-asking questions because you often wouldn’t get the truest or deepest answer the first go-around. Hopefully being comfortable enough in your own skin would engender trust over time,” he explained. “There would be a lot of follow-up questions, even if I had spent a week with somebody poring over the notes and going back and calling them again and again and really taking it further and further, what their interior monologue with themselves or dialogues in some cases. What was going on and felt in each of these pivotal moments in their lives, so you’d really get a feel of what was going on in the interior.”
“That’s why I did a lot of boxing stories,” said Smith. “There was so much kindling, so much psychological tension which makes for great storytelling. No one carried around tension and opposites like boxers did. It’s fertile terrain for any writer.”
A boxer, said Smith, was figuratively naked in the ring. “These are human beings who are participating in one of the most extreme things that any human being can do,” he acknowledged of the manly sport. “There’s a reason why you end up in such an extreme circumstance. You’re involved in a public mauling. You’re risking being killed or killing. To land there is virtually always a real story. You don’t land there by accident.”
Rick Telander, who worked at Sports Illustrated for 23 years, explained what made Smith’s work stand out. “Gary Smith was a unique writer,” he said. “He immersed himself in his topic, in his subject, like no one else I’ve ever read. He used his words to paint a picture that was one thousand times better than an actual photograph. You could feel the mind and the pain and the joy and the resolve and the defeat and the victory of the person he was writing about.”
Telander, who is the lead sports columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, said Smith was a one-of-a-kind talent.
“He used his skill with words to make you feel exactly what he felt, what you should feel, to understand the story of some other person on a journey to some place we all would recognize, foreign though it may be,” he stated. “No matter how long a Gary Smith magazine piece was, you had to finish it. You had to know. You had to read and feel the resolution. It was a kind of magic. And Gary was the magician. He was the best there was.”
Alexander Wolff, who spent 36 years at Sports Illustrated, shared a similar sentiment. “Gary had the ability to inhabit the head of his subject,” he noted. “He did that by relentlessly asking questions, often leading subjects to address matters and themes they’d never before thought about.”
Smith visited Tyson early in his career and said the one-time heavyweight king had multiple personalities.
“He was a bundle of opposites. At one moment, he’s kind of seething about the world and people and the next moment he’s just a puppy dog with his arm around your neck,” he said. “One moment walking away from my introductory handshake and leaving it hanging in the air when we first met and by the end of it, arm literally around my neck….The friction of opposites was always at play.”
Smith wrote his feature on James “Buster” Douglas after Douglas claimed the heavyweight crown from Tyson in February 1990.
“He was a gentle soul for the most part. Less extreme actually than most boxers. Therefore, it took a more extreme situation being in a ring with Mike Tyson to bring out the natural talents. He was God-gifted and a father-gifted fighter,” he remembered. “He wasn’t the kind who had easy access to all that desperation that’s needed to excel in boxing but after his mother’s death and the proximity to Tyson’s right hand, they brought out that desperation to use these natural gifts as a fighter.”
Like so many who were around Muhammad Ali, Smith was often amused by the three-time heavyweight champ.
“Ali was always a lot of fun to be with. He was mischievous and said things that could be striking,” he said. “Most of them were very interesting in a variety of ways. Ali was the prankster, and you might be the butt of his pranks.”
Among the many honors accorded Smith was the Dan Jenkins Medal For Lifetime Achievement in Sportswriting, awarded in 2019. Some of his finest work can be found in his two anthologies: “Beyond The Game: The Collected Sportswriting Of Gary Smith’’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000) and “Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories by Gary Smith” (Sports Illustrated Books, 2008).
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Remembering Prizefighters Danny Nardico and Billy Murray: A Story for Veterans Day
Remembering Prizefighters Danny Nardico and Billy Murray: A Story for Veterans Day
“There are now over 4000 pro boxers in our armed forces” said a story in the Sept. 19, 1943 issue of the Pittsburgh Press. Some of those boxers returned from the battlefields physically unscathed and were able to extend their career. Others were damaged and never fought again and still others never returned.
Among those 4000-plus boxers who served in World War II were two former world champions who would be decorated for their heroism, Barney Ross and Lew Jenkins. Books have been written about them. Here’s a look at two others who were in the thick of that terrible conflagration, stories worth re-telling today, Nov. 11, Veterans Day in the United States, a day set aside to honor all those that served our nation in the military.
Danny Nardico
Danny Nardico (pictured on the right squaring off against 1952 foe Dan Bucceroni) was born in Ohio near Cleveland, the product of a broken home. He was two years old when his father walked out on little Danny and his six siblings.
At age 17, Nardico enlisted in the Marines. He was wounded in the Battle of Gloucester which began on the day after Christmas in 1943 on an island in New Guinea. The Marines were sent there to destroy two Japanese air bases.
Nardico, despite his tender age, was reportedly a squad leader. The bullet he took in his leg did not stop him from participating in other battles in the Pacific theater. For his valor he received a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
As a professional boxer, Nardico spent 35 months in The Ring Top 10, rising to #3 in the light heavyweight division. He had two signature fights, the first against Jake LaMotta in Miami (actually Coral Gables) on New Year’s Eve, 1952.
Airing on CBS, this was the first nationally televised fight emanating from the state of Florida. Of greater significance, Nardico became the first man to score a knockdown against the rugged LaMotta who was then in the twilight of his career. It happened in round seven, a straight right following a left hook that dropped the Bronx Bull on his pins. Jake survived the round, just barely, and his corner pulled him out before the eighth.
The Ring recognized Nardico’s performance by naming him the Fighter of the Month.
Nardico wasn’t so fortunate in his next memorable fight. On Jan. 20, 1954, he was stopped inside the ninth frame by Charley Norkus, a banger who fought out of Jersey City. Both were in dire straights during this contest, a wild skirmish punctuated by eight knockdowns, six by Norkus. An instant classic, it was named The Ring Fight of the Year. (Danny Nardico, who came in at 181 ½, was out-weighed by 15 ½ pounds. They fought again nine weeks later and Norkus won a unanimous decision in another fierce fight.)
Before his bouts with Charley Norkus, Nardico fought Joey Maxim in a de facto eliminator for Archie Moore’s world title. An outdoor event in Miami, Nardico had Maxim on the canvas in the seventh round but couldn’t sustain the momentum and lost a 10-round decision.
Nardico quit the sport with a record of 50-13-4 (35 KOs) and became a postal worker in Tampa. He later relocated to Sacramento where his second wife, the former Rachel Galindo, had family, and opened an appliance repair shop. When that failed, he accepted a job as the recreation director at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City, Nevada, where he and Rachel lived on the grounds of the minimum security prison. After 13 years in the Silver State, he returned to the Sacramento area with Alzheimer’s to live out his days.
Danny and Rachel were married 48 years when Danny passed away at age 85 in 2010. Speaking about her late father, Nardico’s daughter Danella Plum said, “I remember my father being strong as an ox, but tenderhearted….He had a hard exterior, but inside he was as soft as a marshmallow.”
Billy Murray
Stylistically, Billy Murray and Danny Nardico were complete opposites. Murray, who predated Nardico as a fledgling pro by roughly 10 years, was a cutie. Nardico was a brawler who willingly took two punches to land one of his own. But beyond this, both had a great deal in common.
Both were born in Ohio – Nardico in Painesville and Billy Murray in the blue-collar Ohio River town of Bellaire – and both spent the bulk spent of their professional boxing lives in Tampa. They even had the same trainer, Bill Gore, who would be named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in large part because of his work with Willie Pep. And, akin to Nardico, Murray would also be feted as The Ring Fighter of the Month.
Murray, sometimes billed as Irish Billy Murray, was accorded the honor in the July 1941 issue of the self-styled “Bible of Boxing” which hit the newsstands in June. Murray was recognized for his work in the month of May where he scored six wins, upping his ledger to 29-0.
It was the dream of every young boxer to see his name on the marquee at Madison Square Garden. Billy Murray achieved that goal in August of 1942 when he was matched against the formidable Beau Jack.
Murray entered the contest with a 58-2 record, but took the fight on two days’ notice and was a heavy underdog to the former Georgia bootblack. He wound up losing a unanimous decision, but lasting the distance was a feather in his cap and he could look forward to many more engagements at the famous New York sock palace. With Bill Gore piloting his career, he might yet reach the height of stablemate Willie Pep who was then well on his way to getting a world title shot.
Then came the letter from Uncle Sam that so many young men dreaded receiving. Murray was ordered to report for his induction physical. He had been drafted into the Army.
Murray was assigned to the Air Force. He was remanded to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he was taught how to be an airplane mechanic and then to gunnery school at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada. An Air Force World War II gunner was a crew member on a bomber plane, responsible for protecting the aircraft from machine gun fire by fighting fire with fire.
Billy Murray took his 58-3 record to the grave. On Nov. 24, 1943, the day before Thanksgiving, this terse message appeared in the papers: “Cpl. William F. Murray, better known as Billy Murray was reported missing in action by the War Department.” Murray’s plane had been shot down somewhere over Italy.
Murray learned the rudiments of boxing at a gym in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive from Bellaire. “Sports fans and friends of Billy Murray will always remember him and hope that he will turn up to show his wares again when the conflict is over,” read a story in the Canonsburg paper.
But he never did.
News reports do not list Billy Murray’s age but he was undoubtedly in his early twenties. He looks even younger in the few photos of him that can be found in old papers. One is reminded of the famous anti-war poem by the great sportswriter Grantland Rice.
How very young the faces were
Where all the dead men lay
…wrote Rice in the second stanza of his poem which concludes with his observation that “nearly all the dead were hardly more than boys.”
Danny Nardico, who fought in some of the fiercest boxing contests of his generation, once said, “it was all a cakewalk [compared to the War].” Today, Nov. 11, is a federal holiday, a day set aside to recognize the sacrifices of brave men like Danny Nardico and Billy Murray. And to those of you that served in the military, thank you for your service.
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A recognized authority on the history of prizefighting and the history of American sports gambling, TSS editor-in-chief Arne K. Lang is the author of five books including “Prizefighting: An American History,” released by McFarland in 2008 and re-released in a paperback edition in 2020.
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