New Books by Thomas Hauser and Bernard Fernandez are Pearls for Boxing Buffs

Among the regular contributors to this web site are two individuals who have achieved the highest honor accorded a boxing writer; election to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Thomas Hauser and Bernard Fernandez, both of whom entered the Canastota shrine with the class of 2020, aren’t the sort to rest on their laurels. Both have new books in the vault, compilations of previously published stories.

Hauser crashed the pantheon of historically important boxing writers with two acclaimed books, “The Black Lights: “Inside the World of Professional Boxing” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), a penetrating look at the business of boxing at a time when Don King was at his zenith, and “Muhammad Ali: His life and Times” (Simon & Schuster, 1991), an exhaustively researched oral history that is widely considered the definitive Ali biography.

Hauser’s cachet, coupled with a little chutzpah, gave him access to places where few journalists had gone before him, namely into the dressing rooms where certain rituals are performed and boxers and their attendants take care of the final details that gird a boxer for battle as they await the moment of truth when the boxer is summoned to the ring.

A dressing room where Hauser was the proverbial fly on the wall is the common thread in the 35 modules that comprise this anthology. Titled “In The Inner Sanctum” and sub-titled “Behind the Scenes at Big Fights,” the book was released by the University of Arkansas Press where Thomas Hauser has found a home, evolving into a modern-day Pierce Egan.

There’s more to each story than a simple dressing room scene. For example, in the first entry where the mercurial Shannon Briggs is the central character, Hauser delves into the psyche of Briggs, quoting those in his inner circle, and walks us through the fight itself, a controversial win for Briggs over George Foreman.

Consistent with his reputation as boxing’s foremost investigative reporter, Hauser leaves the reader with the distinct impression that something nefarious, not simply myopia, was behind the rotten decision that stripped Foreman of his world heavyweight title in what would prove to be Foreman’s final fight.

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Bernard Fernandez completed the trifecta with volume three of “Championship Rounds,” the final installment of his anthology. This one has a foreword by the esteemed John Schulian, a former colleague of Fernandez during Fernandez’s tenure with the Philadelphia Daily News where he spent the last 28 years of his newspaper career.

This reporter feels a special connection to Volume Three. Among the 70 entrants are 27 stories that appeared in these pages, virtually all of which were edited by yours truly, meaning that I got to read them before anyone else and may have laundered some of them by expunging a wayward comma, not that I recall any.

Volume Three begins with a hauntingly beautiful story about a Mississippi Golden Gloves champion who became a war casualty, dying at age 20 in the rice fields of Viet Nam. It is the oldest entry in the book, dating to 1981 when Fernandez hung his hat at the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, and a sign to the reader that the human-interest stories that follow will profile a wide range of personalities, from the most celebrated boxers of his era to those that toiled in the shadows or on the periphery such as the Runyonesque boxing writer Bert Sugar and Celebrity Boxing huckster Damon Feldman.

Fernandez was the boxing guy for the Philadelphia Daily News but on occasion he would be deployed to a different realm within the sporting cosmos. Volume Three differs from its predecessors in that one of the sections – the last of seven – is devoted to non-boxing personalities, including Pete Rose, Pistol Pete Maravich, Wayne Gretzky, and Nancy Harding.

The first salvo in this section happens to be a story about one of my all-time favorite baseball players, Richie Ashburn, the perfect leadoff hitter who transitioned into the broadcasting booth and became a Philadelphia sports icon.

Written shortly after Ashburn passed away, the story bears the dateline of Tilden, Nebraska, the flyspeck town surrounded by cornfields that was Ashburn’s boyhood home. Metaphorically speaking, Tilden is a million miles away from the glitch of Las Vegas, but Bernard Fernandez — whose assignments frequently took him to Sin City – was comfortable in both environments.

In common with many of the entries in this book, the Ashburn story is caboosed with an epilogue. An epilogue, born of hindsight, puts things in historical perspective and Fernandez is both a good writer and a good historian. “Championship Rounds: Volume Three” can be ordered via Amazon.

Photo: Thomas Hauser and Bernard Fernandez flank BWAA president Joe Santoliquito

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