June 10, 2019
In this insightful sports history, former boxing publicist Sussman (Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune) exposes professional boxing’s world of gangsters and crooked referees and judges. At age 13 in the 1970s, Sussman realized that many professional fights were fixed; he recalls his father saying, “Gambling is a sucker’s game; betting on a fixed fight is never a gamble.” Sussman goes through a rogues’ gallery of master fixers and their control of the fight game: Abe Attell (mob boss Arnold Rothstein’s enforcer whose presence at fights “indicated something was not on the level”), Owney Madden (rumored to have fixed many of Primo Carnera’s fights), and Frank Carbo (a gunman for Murder Inc. who became a major boxing promoter). Sussman explains that with no union or pension, washed-up boxers fell prey to fast-talking, bullying con men who tainted the careers of the likes of Rocky Graziano and Sonny Liston (it was rumored that Liston’s 1964 loss to Muhammad Ali was a mafia fix). The prose harkens to old-school sportswriters like Red Smith and Jim Murray, with crisp descriptions of colorful characters and acts of criminality (Carbo “had the hard, cold eyes of a killer... the man who would invade, conquer, and corrupt the world of boxing”). Sussman’s bold, probing excursion into boxing has the knockout power of a good punch.