Book description
Gangsters have been around boxing for ever. When boxing took hold in
Madison Square Garden just after the First World War, a new wave of
criminals moved in: the Mob. It was then that Prohibition gave street
legitimacy to organised crime right across America; and by the time
Joe Louis arrived to breathe excitement through a country ravaged by
the Great Depression, the wise guys were firmly entrenched at
ringside. Mike Jacobs, the grizzled boss of boxing at the Garden for
nearly twenty years, made the Brown Bomber the biggest sports star in
the world, and a string of romantic writers ensured this would be
remembered as the fight game's golden age. They mingled with
underworld heavies along a strip of New York pavement near the Garden
known only as Jacobs Beach.
Kevin Mitchell's gripping book is the unsanitised story of those
times and that place, of Rat Pack cool and the fading of the Mob's
peculiar glamour, brilliantly told through the eyes of the men who
were there.
Kevin Mitchell is the boxing and tennis correspondent for the
Observer
and
Guardian
. He is the author of
War, Baby
, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year,
and the co-author of Frank Bruno's autobiography
Frank
, which won the Best Autobiography category of the British Sports Book
Awards.
