On the Ropes

Heather referenced ESPN's Degree of Difficulty - a ranking of which sports are the toughest, the most demanding.

Not surprisingly, boxing is at the top of the list. But in a companion article, Ralph Wiley writes about the difficulty of finding boxing talent today. It seems that the money available in football, baseball, and basketball has drawn off a lot of the talent that formerly would've entered the ring. Which is why you can't remember the last heavy weight match really worth watching.

Anyway, it's a damn good article. Along the way Wiley discusses the first Clay-Liston fight, Tyson, Zab Judah, the Klitschkos, and gives a shout out to George Pelecanos (one of my favorite writers):

Staying with Liston for a minute (only because it keeps us from getting to Wladimir Klitschko, also known as "Glass Joe," and the rest of today's lot), one of the more interesting boxing books of recent times was "The Devil and Sonny Liston," by Nick Tosches. Tosches used a hard-bitten, muscled-up prose, sort of like George Pelecanos, although George (the combo Chandler/Papa Hemingway/Himes/Mosley of Washington, D.C.) is in a class all his own.

Ever seen HBO's "The Wire"? That's George. He can bring serious heat.

Styles aside, where Pelecanos achieves true greatness beyond the mandatory Shared Experience of Good Writing is that he sees the truth behind things. Nick Tosches -- and also the palindrome Mark Kram, in a recent book of revisionist history about Muhammad Ali -- see whatever it is in boxing that they want to see, the truth having only an oblique relation to it.