The Hardest Game : McIlvanney on Boxing

Thirty years of ringside reporting from one of the world's most honored sportswriters

A living legend on both sides of the Atlantic, British sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney is best known for his incisive ringside boxing commentaries. Employing a writing style as muscular as it is graceful, McIlvanney never fails to infect the reader with his enthusiasm and sense of awe for the sport, while at the same time revealing the deeper truths at work in all such extreme expressions of human will and physical prowess. As one critic put it, "The genius of McIlvanney is his ability to magnify and precisely delineate those elements of sport that contain fundamental truths about the human condition."

First published in 1983 to great acclaim, this sport classic is reprinted with the addition of recent dispatches to span 30 years of ringside reporting. The Hardest Game includes McIlvanney's commentaries on such immortal bouts as "The Rumble in the Jungle" (Foreman vs. Ali, Zaire, 1974) and "The Thriller in Manila" (Ali vs. Frazier, Philippines, 1975), and the most memorable fights in the careers of Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, and others.

"Anyone who admires writing as muscular as it is graceful should buy this book." -- The Daily Telegraph