THE WAR

IT’S a line in boxing’s record book: April 15, 1985 - Marvelous Marvin Hagler vs. Thomas Hearns at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas - KO 3.

Hagler-Hearns was marketed as “The Fight” and later became known as “The War.” The combatants, United Press reported, fought like men fought “before the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel.”

“The way it turned out,” famed sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, “we’ll all have nightmares for weeks.”

Reminiscing about the first round, Larry Merchant recalled, “It was as though you couldn’t breathe for those three minutes. There’d been an electric buzz around the fight all week, but people were expecting a traditional boxing event. Once it started, there was a new story and the realization that this was something they’d never seen before.”

Don Stradley revisits this epic fight in (Hamilcar Publications). His work comes on the heels stands on its own as an excellent recounting of a landmark fight – “boxing as it appears in our imagination,” Stradley writes, “wild and unbridled.”