University of Arkansas Press Publishes Book by 'Current Champ in Boxing Literature'

An Unforgiving Sport: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has just published An Unforgiving Sport: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing (paper, $22.50), by veteran boxing chronicler Thomas Hauser, a past winner of the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism.

The book is a collection of the author’s 2008 articles from the popular espn.com and secondsout.com Web sites. In a pre-publication review of this book in the American Library Association’s Booklist, the reviewer praised Hauser: “Many journalists have written fine boxing pieces, but none has written as extensively or as memorably as Hauser … by any standard, an excellent collection; Hauser remains the current champ in boxing literature.”

An Unforgiving Sport revisits historical figures like John L. Sullivan and offers portraits of Don King, Oscar De La Hoya, Manny Pacquiao, Ricky Hatton, Bernard Hopkins, and many others. The Booklist reviewer took especial notice of Hauser’s account of the Roy Jones-Felix Trinidad bout, calling it “one for the ages.”

An Unforgiving Sport is Hauser’s fourth book published by the University of Arkansas Press.

According to press director Larry Malley, Hauser is part of a stable of press authors writing on sports and society. “Great sports writing gets at something in our culture, including issues of race and gender, that means so much more than the outcome of a game,” Malley said. “So many famous writers, from Ernest Hemingway to Joyce Carol Oates, have had a fascination with boxing in particular. We see Tom Hauser as our own worthy inheritor of this tradition and are proud to publish his investigations as to why men hit men for money, and what it all means.”

Thomas Hauser is the author of 37 books on a wide range of subjects. His Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times is considered to be one of the most important accounts of the great fighter’s life. His first book, Missing, was made into an Academy Award-winning movie, and in 1996 he coauthored with Ali the book Healing, for which they won the Haviva Reik Award.

###

Melissa King, assistant marketing manager
University of Arkansas Press
479-575-7715, mak001@uark.edu