Thomas Hauser’s Latest Book, ‘A Dangerous Journey,’ is Another Peach

In 2001, the University of Arkansas Press released Thomas Hauser’s “A Beautiful Sickness: Reflections on the Sweet Science” and a tradition was born. Decades from now, if someone wants to know what was happening in the world of professional boxing during the first two decades of the 21^st century – “on and off the field,” so to speak – a complete set of Hauser’s annual anthologies will be a prized resource.

Hauser’s latest book is titled “A Dangerous Journey,” subtitled “Another Year Inside Boxing.”
Like the others, it is a compilation of previously published stories. There are 46 in all, arranged under four headings: Fighters and Fights; Curiosities; Other Sports; and Issues and Answers. Regular readers of The Sweet Science will recognize some of the stories as they appeared first in these pages.

Fighters and Fights opens with Canelo-GGG II, taking the reader from the contentious lead-up to the scene in Canelo’s dressing room as he waits to be summoned into the ring, and then on to the actual fight. In the last entry of this section, Hauser is back in Canelo’s dressing room for his match with Rocky Fielding. Canelo’s “key to victory,” notes Hauser, was that Fielding didn’t belong in the same ring with him.

There are 11 entries in the “Curiosities” component. Two of the more interesting segments deal with the history of mouth guards and the history of ring walks.

I wasn’t aware that mouthpieces did not become standard until the 1930s. Neither Dempsey nor Tunney wore a mouthguard in their historic “long count” fight. A boxer can buy a mouthguard off the shelf for a few dollars or have one custom made for a few hundred dollars. According to Freddie Roach, Marlon Starling was too cheap to go to a dentist and have a mouthpiece customized for him.

In the old days, ring walks were straightforward. The procession normally included only the fighter, his trainer and his two cornermen. The boxer walked behind the trainer with his hands on the trainer’s shoulders, followed by the cornermen. Then music was introduced and nowadays for some big fights the ring walk is a major production with pyrotechnics.

Hauser quotes Teddy Atlas: “The ring walk in boxing is part of a tradition, two fighters taking a short but long journey to a place that’s dangerous and dark. That’s lost now. It’s not about introspection or history or tradition anymore. It’s about self-celebration and how sensational can we make it.”

Atlas, Hauser informs us, was once hired by the New York Rangers hockey team to teach the rudiments of boxing to one of their bigger players who wasn’t “engaging” as often as they would have liked.

Although stiffer penalties have been introduced to reduce the frequency of fights in hockey, the NHL, says Hauser, doesn’t want to eliminate fights altogether. Moreover, although fights are real, they are, needless to say, seldom injurious. (Try getting leverage behind a punch when you’re boxing on a slick surface with ice skates as your boxing shoes). “As far as technique is concerned,” said promoter Lou DiBella, “hockey players who are fighting make Butterbean look like Sugar Ray Robinson.”

In one of his fun pieces, Hauser compares the two Kid Galahad movies, the 1937 original in black and white with Hollywood heavyweights Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart in supporting roles and the 1962 re-make starring Elvis Presley. The former, says Hauser, is unrealistic, hokey, and lots of fun. In the Elvis version, the fight scenes are “as realistic as a theatrical production would be if Adrien Broner played Hamlet.”

Hauser reviews more boxing books than any other boxing writer and all of his anthologies have a “Literary Notes” section: A pictorial history of Muhammad Ali from the archives of the Louisville Courier-Journal comes highly recommended although the “wonderful” compilation is marred by some inaccuracies in the text. The Courier-Journal’s collection of Ali photographs dates back to when he was a 12-year-old boy.

Collectors of boxing memorabilia might be interested in knowing that the “Holy Grail” of collectibles is The Ring magazine championship belt inscribed to Cassius Clay (whereabouts unknown). That’s according to Scott Hamilton who Hauser identifies as America’s leading boxing memorabilia dealer. Hamilton notes that when he started his business, 85 percent of sales were to collectors in the U.S.; now it’s down to 40 percent because of European buyers. Interesting.

Hauser’s writings have earned him numerous awards, including multiple BWAA awards for investigative reporting. He covers issues large (boxing’s PED problem; incompetent boxing commissions and ring officials) and small (the pervasive scent of marijuana at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center). “I appreciate the pleasures of marijuana as a recreational drug and also its benefits as a medicinal aid, “writes Hauser. “But it shouldn’t be forced on those who don’t want it.”

In this vein, Hauser’s examination of CompuBox is food for thought. Do you suspect that the CompuBox punch stats are sometimes way off the mark? If so, those suspicions will be reinforced after digesting Hauser’s book.

Thomas Hauser is a renaissance man. He’s well-versed in the works of Beethoven, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, among others, and to this list we can now add Albert Einstein. One of the longer of the 46 pieces in “A Dangerous Journey” is a mini-bio of Einstein who, despite being dead for more than 60 years, “remains the world’s most powerful symbol of scientific inquiry.”

There is something self-indulgent about this piece. It belongs in a different book. Moreover, not all readers will appreciate his swipe at the Commander in Chief.

Many years ago, Hauser collaborated with golf legend Arnold Palmer on Palmer’s autobiography. Palmer wasn’t outwardly political, but he was a Barry Goldwater conservative who had numbered Dwight D. Eisenhower among his closest friends.

What would Arnold Palmer think of Donald Trump? Palmer died in 2016 shortly before the election, so Hauser could not reach out to him. But he reached out to Palmer’s older daughter, Peg. Her discernment, in a nutshell: My dad would have cringed.

This reporter wishes that it was mandatory for all non-fiction books to have an index. And that goes double for books of this nature as the various chapter headings don’t always point the reader in the right direction if he wishes to re-visit a slice of the book that particularly struck his fancy.

One can appreciate why the publisher eschewed an index as it would have been very long, substantially thickening a work that already clocks in at 316 pages. And index or no interest, “A Dangerous Journey,” aside from its historical value, is bound to provide hours of enjoyment for boxing fans of all ages.

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