Paul Bishop's Blog, page 71
June 12, 2013
June 10, 2013
May 29, 2013
May 27, 2013
JOHN KENYON ON FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACK
JOHN KENYON ON FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACKMy appreciation of boxing stems, strangely enough, from basketball, Evander Holyfield's ear and Buster Douglas.
Like every boy who grows up in the U.S., I took part in organized sports. The reasons for this are many. At the time, I played because it was fun. I realized as I grew older there were benefits from learning how to play on a team. As a parent, I now know the value of wearing kids out to make them more manageable at home.
That middle reason, of course, is the one parents and child-development experts will cite. Children need to learn how to work together toward a common goal, how to compensate for their weaknesses with others' strengths, how to subsume their desire for personal achievement in pursuit of shared success.
And what does every kid do instinctively? They shoot if they are open. They swing for the fence despite the coach's plea for a bunt. They head for the end zone instead of the sideline when time is of the essence. They know that their chance to shine is fleeting. If they have the ball, they are going to do something with it.
What does this have to do with boxing? Well, I still play pickup basketball games – have for twenty-five years now. Sometimes I shine, sometimes I dog it and let someone else do the work. But what I like best is when there are just two of us on the court – one on one. In that moment, there is no one to set a screen and free you for a jump shot. No chance your opponent hung back to catch a breath while his teammates were left to pick up their slack. It's just you and what you can do. It's your quickness, your endurance, your ability, and nothing more, stacked up against that of another in the same situation.
These are the most grueling, demanding games I play, and their frequency diminishes with each passing year (much to the relief of my creaky knees). If you're doing it right, there's no way to feel anything but spent when you're done.
Now imagine that your opponent is trying to knock your block off. Sure, one-on-one basketball can get rough, with a shove here and an elbow to the head there. But your opponent isn't trying to hurt you, to cause enough physical damage to stop you.
How do boxers do it? That question popped into my head a lot during my late high school and early college years as I watched Mike Tyson destroy all comers. Tyson is that rare athlete who transcends his sport. Like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods or Wayne Gretzky, his accomplishments drew attention from beyond the core of people who care about his sport. It's why at college I would often find myself gathered in the apartment of some rich kid from the Chicago suburbs who bought the pay-per-view rights to the latest Tyson fight. He'd ice a keg and then sell a seat for ten bucks to cover his costs (and probably make rent for the next month in the process). Red Solo cups in hand, a group of us would gather to watch the bout.
You had to get there early and pay attention since Tyson's fights rarely lasted long. I don't recall all of the specific fights, but I'm guessing we saw him stumble against Frank Bruno and then demolish Carl The Truth Williams.
It was Tyson's fight against Buster Douglas, however, that cemented my status as a fight fan. By that point, Tyson seemed unbeatable. Age, perhaps, would be the only thing to slow him down. It certainly wasn't going to be Buster Douglas, right? But as we watched in someone's apartment, a couple dozen guys – only a couple of years younger than Tyson – all jammed into a living room furnished with pressed-board furniture and sagging couches, the impossible happened. Douglas, a forty-two-to-one underdog, knocked out Tyson in the tenth round to take his titles.
Experts cited Douglas being affected by the recent death of his mother, or the turmoil in Tyson's life thanks to fractured business relationships and a dissolving marriage. Tyson’s camp complained about a long ten count in the eighth round that saved Douglas. Still and all, it was a case of two men entering a ring where anything could happen – experts and bookmakers be damned.
It wasn't just the anything can happen feeling that hooked me on boxing. It was that someone like Douglas could have the confidence to step into the ring with a monster like Tyson. Not only do you need to believe you will survive, you need to believe you will win – that your raw strength and stamina and skill will be enough to counter the same in your opponent. Douglas had no one else to lean on when he stood toe-to-toe against Tyson round after round. There was no one to set a screen and free him for a good shot. No one to pick up the defense while he sucked air in the corner for a moment. That, more than the brutality – perhaps even more than the strategy – is the appeal of boxing for me.
And Evander Holyfield's ear? Well, all high-mindedness aside, boxing is singular in its embrace of the absurd. So it was that I found myself, again with red Solo cup in hand, standing in someone's backyard, watching a big-screen TV back when this was a novelty, before everyone had one bolted to their living room wall. This one perched precariously on some table of some sort in the sloping lawn of a college rental house. A friend had heard about this party to watch the second Tyson-Holyfield fight, and so there we stood amid dozens of people arrayed around the yard as the sun went down on a warm, June evening.
You know the story – first one nip on the ear, then another fierce enough to actually rip part of Holyfield's ear off. After a disappointing first fight marred in controversy, we shouldn't have expected much more. Still, after waiting five years for the first and another year for this, it was a disappointment from a boxing standpoint. Yet, in a way, it was exactly what we expected. Tyson, by this point, had proven himself to be crazy, and clearly lacked the fire and explosiveness that he'd left on the other side of a prison term for a rape conviction.
If I could be entertained solely by the physical exploits of two athletes going head-to-head, I'd probably follow wrestling. But for that little added bit of theater – the kind professional wrestling must manufacture to achieve – boxing has it all.
FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACK!
FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACK!MAY’S FIGHT CARD NOVEL NOW AVAILABLE FOR YOUR KINDLE ... THIS MONTH’S AUTHOR BEHIND THE JACK TUNNEY PSEUDONYM IS JOHN KENYON ...
FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACK
Ottumwa, Iowa, 1954
Griffin McCann's small-town world is rocked when the bank where he works as a guard is robbed. He chases the robbers out of the bank and into a gun battle, leaving one hood dead and one on the lam. Left alone with a dead robber and a bag full of cash, McCann makes a rash decision ...
Knowing he’s made a bad mistake, McCann wants to return the money, but life is never that simple. He needs a plan, so he turns to the one thing he knows best – boxing. Now, his moment of weakness has put him in the ring against a deadly opponent who wants to destroy him.
But McCann remembers the most important thing Father Tim, the battling priest, taught him back at St. Vincent’s Asylum For Boys in Chicago: When you get hit, hit back ...
MEMORIAL DAY!
HUMBLE THANKS TO ALL THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES TO PROTECT MY FREEDOMS ...
May 14, 2013
HARD CASE CRIME: JOYLAND SPECIAL EDITIONS!PRE-ORDER NOW!H...
HARD CASE CRIME: JOYLAND SPECIAL EDITIONS!PRE-ORDER NOW!
HARD CASE CRIME UPDATE ...
Stephen King's new novel JOYLAND, which will be published as a paperback original on June 4, 2013 by the award-winning Hard Case Crime line from Titan Books, will also be released in three extremely limited hardcover editions for collectors. These collectors’ editions are going fast (the rare signed editions may already be sold out), but as of this writing we do still have some hardcover copies left.
All three hardcover editions feature both a new cover painting and nine black-and-white interior illustrations by the legendary Robert McGinnis, the painter responsible for more than 1,000 classic book covers as well as the iconic movie posters for Breakfast at Tiffany's and the original Sean Connery James Bond movies.
In a nod to the look of classic paperback crime novels, these hardcover editions also feature a map on the back cover, drawn by Susan Hunt Yule, of the Joyland amusement park where the story takes place.
JOYLANDSet in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, JOYLAND tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever. JOYLAND is a brand-new book and has never previously been published.
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE SPECIAL EDITIONS CLICK HERE
May 13, 2013
PULP NOW: WEST OF GUAM!THE COMPLETE CASES OF JO GARRAOUL ...
PULP NOW: WEST OF GUAM!THE COMPLETE CASES OF JO GAR
RAOUL WHITFIELD
INTRODUCTIONS BY E.R. HAGEMANN AND R.H. MILLER
ALTUS PRESS
In the February 1930 issue of Black Mask Magazine a new character was introduced to the American detective story. Jo Gar is both a classic “thinking” sleuth and a tough man of action who inhabits the exotic noir world of the Philippines between the two World Wars. Jo Gar faces a rogue’s gallery of colorful villains from mixed-race Chinese to high society American exiles.
In these Jo Gar stories, Whitfield creates a vivid world where typhoons threaten the harbor, criminals escape from the local prison, and the waterfront is home to cutthroats from all countries. Manila’s great international seaport is home to luxury liner travelers of all classes from all around Asia, and the world.
This new, expanded edition of the long out of print, very collectable 2002 anthology, contains every word written about Jo Gar, and presents every story, novella, and novel. It includes two legendary Nagasaki novelettes not seen since 1930 as well as the only Jo Gar novel, The Rainbow Murders, complete and unabridged!
Edited by the Black Mask Library Series General Editor, Keith Alan Deutsch, this new volume includes two important, critical, biographical essays about Whitfield and Jo Gar by Black Mask scholar E.R. Hagemann, and a portrait of Professor Hagemann by his colleague, Dr. R.H. Miller. The new book is richly illustrated with line drawings by the greatest dry brush illustrator of the pulp age, Arthur Rodman Bowker.
580 PAGES
May 12, 2013
FIGHT FICTION: FISTS OF IRON!
FIGHT FICTION: FISTS OF IRON!The long awaited and much anticpated four volume collection of Howard’s huge body of boxing material is finally ready for publication. These volumes, published by the REH Foundation Press, are in such demand the first editions are sure to sell out quicker than the first edition of The Early Adventures of El Borak, which went pretty darn fast.
The first volume of Fists of Iron can be pre-ordered now. Below is the complete list of contents for “Round 1″:
CONTENTS:
Introduction: “The Brute Eternal” by Christopher Gruber
Fists of Iron
“The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux”
“Double Cross”
“The Weeping Willow”
“The Right Hook”
“The Voice of Doom”
“Crowd Horror”
“Iron Men”
“The Mark of a Bloody Hand”
“They Always Come Back”
“The Trail of the Snake”
Poems
“Kid Lavigne is Dead”
“Aw Come on and Fight!”
“The Cooling of Spike McRue”
“Fables for Little Folks”
“The Champ”
“Slugger’s Vow”
“In the Ring”
Untitled (“And Dempsey climbed into the ring”)
Untitled (“They matched me up that night”)
“Down the Ages”
“John L. Sullivan”
“Jack Dempsey”
Untitled (“We are the duckers of crosses”)
Untitled (“All the crowd”)
“When you Were a Set-up and I Was a Ham”
Early Tales, Variants and Fragments
“The Spirit of Brian Boru”
“A Man of Peace”
“The Atavist” (unfinished)
“Cupid vs. Pollux”
“The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux” (alternate version)
Untitled fragment (“I had just hung…”)
“The Ferocious Ape” (fragment)
Untitled fragment (“Spike Morissey…”)
Untitled fragment (“The tale has always been…”)
“The Ghost Behind the Gloves” (fragment)
“Lobo Volante” (fragment)
“Night Encounter” (incomplete)
“The Folly of Concei” (unfinished)
“Iron Men” (first version)
Articles
“Dula Due to be Champion”
“The Punch”
“Men of Iron”
Odds and Ends
Untitled document, incomplete, perhaps from an essay
“Jeffries Versus Dempsey”
“Misto Dempsey”
‘The Funniest Bout”
Boxing material from Howard’s self-published The Right Hook
Appendix
“The Lord of the Ring” (part 1), by Patrice Louinet
You can pre-order the first one or all four to ensure you get the complete set. So don’t just lie there on the canvas waiting for the 10 count to end — be a Champ and order all four today!
FOR THE BLOW-BY-BLOW ORDERING DETAILS ON THE REHF WEBSITE CLICK HERE
