This is not a story about boxing. It is a story about men who are driven by dreams, some of them inside and some outside the boxing ring. There is a line from one of the key characters in this story that captures its “A man’s got to have a dream to keep him from losing his way in life.” It is from a father speaking to his son, who is driven by his own dream. Thus, above all this is a story about life as seen and told by one of America’s finest fiction writers—although all characters in this tale are real—it is history written with the beating pulse of a novel.