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Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times

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Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times

Paperback(Reprint)

$20.95

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Paperback(Reprint)
$20.95

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Overview

In this captivating and complex portrait of an American sports legend, Russell Sullivan confirms Rocky Marciano's place as a symbol and cultural icon of his era. As much as he embodied the wholesome, rags-to-riches patriotism of a true American hero, he also reflected the racial and ethnic tensions festering behind the country's benevolent facade.

Spirited, fast-paced, and rich in detail, Rocky Marciano is the first book to place the boxer in the context of his times. Capturing his athletic accomplishments against the colorful backdrop of the 1950s fight scene, Sullivan examines how Marciano's career reflected the glamour and scandal of boxing as well as tenor of his times.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252072628
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	02/09/2005
Series:	Sport and Society
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Russell Sullivan is senior vice president and general counsel of Linkage, Inc.

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Editorial Reviews

"In the early '90s, Marciano started slipping from our short long-term memory. Enter his poet, Russell Sullivan . . . Sullivan's book is not just a perfect paean to a pugilistic hero but also to a history of mid-century America as glimpsed from the corner window of what was then America's second most popular sport, professional boxing."—Los Angeles Times

"Russell Sullivan's revealing new biography . . . will refresh those of a certain age about a boxing legend and initiate others into the full, entertaining story."—Chicago Tribune

"More than anything else, the book assesses Marciano in the context of his times, the early 1950s, when his career reflected America's serene years before the marches of the civil rights movement, when boxing ranked second to baseball as America's favorite sport."—Dave Anderson, New York Times Book Review

"Reading Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times is like opening an old steamer trunk and being overwhelmed by the aroma of a long-ago era and its fragrant memories. In capturing Marciano and the 1950s as few could, Russell Sullivan has given Rocky his fiftieth win."—Bert Randolph Sugar, author of 100 Years of Boxing

"The greatness of Marciano in the ring was defined by the way he prepared for a fight, his ability to punch and take a punch. Russell Sullivan combines the same elements in this book. It is the best research job ever on Marciano, is written in a straightforward manner, and doesn't pull any punches. This is the story of an athlete who made himself a great fighter and never forgot who he was, or where he came from. It is a book that is needed. Marciano is the most under-publicized great athlete of the last half century."—Will McDonough, Boston Globe sports columnist

"Rocky Marciano has never been awarded his due among the icons of Boston sports. Hopefully this book will help restore him to his proper place."—Roone Arledge, chairman of ABC News and former president of ABC Sports

"Marvelous. . . . Weaves real scholarship into an enthusiastic chronicling of Marciano's string of victories. Sullivan captures the fear of failure that drove Marciano to wade into bigger men, relentlessly dealing punishment from awkward angles until he had won all forty-nine of his professional bouts. This definitive biography accurately places Marciano in the larger context of his times."—Chris Mead, author of Champion: Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America

From the Publisher

Sullivan, a business writer and owner of a corporate education company, offers a solid if unspectacular biography of the only undefeated heavyweight champion in history. He recounts Marciano's career from his first professional fight in 1947 through his death in a plane crash in 1969, looking at the sports hero as a symbol of both the optimism and the darker cultural currents of the 1950s. Sullivan provides a detailed and complete history of Marciano's fights, as well as some rich contextual background on the characters and atmosphere of boxing during the 1950s. Marciano, the child of Italian immigrants, who grew up in working class Brockton, Mass., was presented by the press as the ideal '50s man: a wholesome, patriotic family man with an all-American rags-to-riches story and worshipped by his fans as such. He was another Great White Hope in a sport dominated by black men, and though many 1950s sportswriters strove for a colorblind approach, it was nonetheless clear that they rooted for Rocky. The cultural analysis is the strongest part of the book; Russell's portrait of the private man (sometimes ambivalent about his family and notoriously obsessed with collecting and never spending money) is well researched and complex, but hampered by his often clunky and repetitive writing style. Though Marciano never achieved the popularity of Ali or Louis, his story offers a fascinating glimpse of boxing at midcentury and boxing buffs will be glad to have this overdue biography. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Ask the average boxing fan who were the greatest heavyweight champions, and chances are that names such as Louis, Ali, and Dempsey will quickly pop up. Some who fancy themselves historians might chime in with Jack Johnson or even John L. Sullivan. Only after these choices will most people get around to Rocky Marciano, a plodding, many said clumsy, fighter willing to take ten blows to get in the big knockout punch of his own. But Rocky had one thing over all these guys he fought 49 pro fights and never lost, retiring as champion in 1956. In this biography, Sullivan, a Boston-area business writer, examines Marciano the fighter and Marciano the person, a man who symbolized his era as much as Ali did his. Along the way, Sullivan also offers excellent portraits of Marciano's nemeses Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, Archie Moore, and others and gives a sense of big-time boxing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the sport trailed only baseball in popularity. Essential for all boxing collections. Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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