Murderers' Row: in search of boxing's greatest outcasts - Hardcover

Toledo, Springs

4.83 out of 5 stars

23 ratings by Goodreads

9780954392499: Murderers' Row: in search of boxing's greatest outcasts

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0954392493 ISBN 13: 9780954392499

Publisher: Tora Book Publishing, 2017

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There used to be a particularly dangerous and crime-ridden alley located in what is now the SoHo district of New York City; it ran between ramshackle tenements in a black neighborhood known as Darktown in the early 19th century. "Murderers' Row" was no place for the decent or the delicate. By the 1870s, the term was used in direct reference to the second tier of the Tombs prison, which loomed a half mile from the alley. In 1918, New York was cheering six sluggers in the Yankees batting order who were bringing fans to their feet; "murderers' row" they called them.
Boxing is to baseball what a film noir is to a musical. It's the bad neighborhood of sports. It's no place for the decent or the delicate. It too has a murderers' row: eight elite and notorious fighters from the 1940s who evoke the shadowy origins of the name. One of them was mobbed-up to his eyebrows, another was an unsolved mystery until Springs Toledo exhumed and escorted him into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. The oldest, an ex-con, ended his prime in a San Francisco jail after shooting a rival in an all-night restaurant; that rival stood five feet five and fought light heavyweights--while drunk. Two of them were killers. They were the best of boxing's underclass, barred from title shots because of the danger surrounding them and the color of their skin. No less than Sugar Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong steered clear of them. Their remarkable stories before, during, and after their bloody ring careers are quintessential Americana--after hours.

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About the Author

SPRINGS TOLEDO is an award-winning essayist who has contributed to City Journal, Salon, Boxing News, THE RING, HBO, Sports on Earth, and The Sweet Science. He is a native of Boston, Massachusetts.

Review

"Springs Toledo's writing pulses with the questing passion of the P.I. and the gritty ambience of noirish fiction . . . It would be hard to imagine a more eloquent or loving tribute to forgotten masters, whatever their craft, than Murderers' Row." -Paul Beston, author of The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the Ring

"Any fight fan who has enthusiastically consumed either or both of Springs' first two books, The Gods of War and In the Cheap Seats . . . is well aware of the Boston native's penchant for exhaustive research as well as for finding just the right words to evoke imagery as elegantly as did a John Keats sonnet.Springs' paeans to pugilism are what my favorite mystery writer, James Lee Burke, are to his preferred genre, which is high praise indeed to both artistes of the English language. . . Murderers Row is destined to become a classic." -Bernard Fernandez, The Sweet Science

"Like his two other books -The Gods of War and In the Cheap Seats- Springs Toledo masterfully merges extraordinary research with muscular prose and excellent storytelling . . . Murderers' Row is entertaining, educational, riveting and, for those who love boxing history, a must-buy . . . One gets the sense that Toledo, while definitively a modern man, would have thrived in the age of AJ Liebling." -Lee Groves, THE RING

"Masterly crafted....To say that this book is just about the lives of eight of the greatest boxers to never win a world title is like saying John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is just about a poor family in Depression era America." - Mike Silver, Boxing over Broadway