Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms

Boxing gyms are uncovered in all of their glorious grunge in these photographs and essays that reveal both the stark reality of success and the possibility of promise in the sport of boxing. This... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965633829
• ISBN13: 9780965633826
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Stone Creek Publications
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 12.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent coffee table book

Simply a fine book of short essays and loads of photographs of gyms across the US. The stories have the ability to make you feel the passion of the boxing gyms and the dedication of the fighters. The photgraphs throughout the book are wonderful. They aren't glamour shots whatsoever, they are the down and dirty shots of real life in the gyms. Highly recommended for the boxing fan.

Good Choice for Boxing Fans

This book is filled with inspiring photographs as well as many interesting, educational, and thoughtful texts to go along. I love to watch boxing and admire the heart of the sport. This book encaptures that vulnerable side of the sweet science. I highly reccommend this to all boxing fans.

Balanced writing, brilliant photographs--unignorable!

Shadow Boxers is a miracle of a Father's Day gift. Not without a fight, however, will pop hold onto the book--not while his wife and children are around to read it and, of course, look at it. The universal appeal of Shadow Boxers owes much to its balanced tone, primal subject, and powerful contributors. Here are writers contending in their own prize rings--Esquire, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Time Magazine, Harper's--for trophies as big as the National Book Award and The Best American Sports Writing. Katherine Dunn, especially, packs a mean punch; again and again she finds your solar plexus before you've finished her first paragraph. (A sample: "One day many years ago, I rode my press credential into a busy boxing gym and was shocked to see a hard-punching monster known as Frankie `The Preacher Man' doing push-ups in the ring with his year-old son sprawled on his back. Amid the din of ringing bells, drumming speed bags, and smacking leather, the baby slept, his long lashes fanned across the chubby cheeks, rocking in the smooth rise and fall of his father's powerful shoulders.") The photographs alone are worth the cost of admission. Jim Lommasson approaches his subject with the hard-hitting nostalgia of Annie Leibovitz, alongside whose photos of bluesmen, rockers, and gospel singers these fighter shots necessarily belong. Indeed, Pottery Barn has yet to make the coffee table worthy of holding Lommasson and Liebovitz's rock-solid studies of two deep-dyed national passions: Shadow Boxers and American Music (Random House, 2003). Shadow Boxers opens with a foreword by heavyweight champ Joe Frazier (sole inspiration of the beef-punching scene in Rocky) and features a brief but vivid history of boxing gyms. The ensuing essays abound with keenly observed ironies about the noble science (e.g., "The game is brutal, but its core is strangely gentle"; "It's dawned on me over the years that there is less macho posturing in boxing gyms than in the average corporate boardroom"), and with crisp details (e.g., the memorable description of Larry Holmes' "jump jab," and the sketch of a city gym in Portland, Oregon, where "a speed bag hung several feet above a wooden pallet, which was used to help children reach the leather punching bag"). So, too, do the essays abound with sharp personal accounts (e.g., a Golden Glove champ who "never weighed more than 140 pounds" and who first entered the gym owing to his girlfriend's parting shot: "you're not man enough"), and with touching accounts of young hoods meeting the coaches who might not only change their lives but save them. To read Shadow Boxers is to feel the strange warmth, the beckoning glow of boxing gyms, those shabby sanctuaries where individuals can still find a devoted mentor, a group of brothers and sisters, a path toward redemption.

A unique insight into the world of professional gyms

Enhanced with a foreword by the renowned world heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & The Will To Survive is compiled and edited by photographer Jim Lommasson, who has been documenting boxing gyms from more than a decade. Informed and informative essays are contributed by boxing enthusiasts Katherine Dunn, Carlo Rotella, Kate Sekules, Lucius Shepard, Robert Anasi, Ralph Wiley, F. X. Toole, Loic Wacquant, Joe Rein, Rene Denfeld, Larry Seurynck, Timothy Taylor, and Mark Kram, Jr. With the inclusion of 110 duotone and 65 color photographs, this 176-page, strongly recommended compendium provides a unique pictorial insight into the world of professional gyms and what those men and women who aspire to excel in their chosen sport/profession and is of especial interest to dedicated fans of boxing, as well as students of American popular sports culture.