Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing
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About this ebook
Once upon a time, of all the memories made in ballparks and arenas from California to New York, there was nothing to rival the magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown.
That’s the way it was when the heavyweight giants danced in the boxing ring during the golden eras of greats like Ali, Frazier, Holmes, and Spinks, to name a few. There will never again be a heavyweight cycle like the one that began in 1962 when Sonny Liston stopped Floyd Patterson and ended in 1997 when Mike Tyson bit a slice out of Evander Holyfield’s ear; when no theatrics were needed to bolster a fighter’s entry into the ring; when the crowds knew that these men were not actors, but giants with a single purpose—to fight other giants.
Acclaimed Star-Ledger sportswriter Jerry Izenberg watched history from the ringside, witnessing fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle and preserving them in punchy yet tremendous prose. “A masterful tome from a master of his craft,” There Once Were Giants delivers eyewitness accounts and revelatory back stories from the greatest era of heavyweight boxing (BoxingScene.com).
“Only Jerry Izenberg, with sixty-plus years of no-BS reporting and bristling prose behind him, could have brought back to life the greatest era boxing’s heavyweights ever saw . . . There isn’t another sports writer in America who’s been at ringside so long or tells the stories he found there so memorably.” —John Schulian, editor (with George Kimball) of At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing
Jerry Izenberg
Jerry Izenberg, columnist emeritus at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, is a five-time winner of the New Jersey Sportswriter of the Year Award, and a winner of the coveted Red Smith Award-the highest honor given by the Associated Press Sports Editors. He and his wife Aileen live in Henderson, NV and have four children, nine grandchildren, and one great grandchild. Writing this novel at age 90 was on the top of his bucket list.
Read more from Jerry Izenberg
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Reviews for Once There Were Giants
6 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant detail. Best boxing book I have read. Moving- catches the raw emotion.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I was so happy when I won this book here on GR as I have seen a number of interviews with Mr Izenberg and he seems like a very honest and fair minded sportswriter, I am also a huge fan of Joe Frazier, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston and they were all heavily included in the book.
I highly recommend any boxing fan or a history of boxing fan to read this book - it is not long, but it is very fair and I love his humor too !
Thank you for choosing me as a winner !
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