60 Books Like The Professional

The mantra for this novel could be that the effort matters more than anything—the attempt, the trying. Winning is something, but it’s not everything. Brooks, a high-school dropout, has to find his way in a world where his closest friend is dying from drug addiction, his household is broken, and street thugs are after him. Against all odds, if you love something and want it, the pursuit of that dream can help those who chase it with enough intensity to possibly overcome the hardship. When so many boxing stories are written with utter bleakness, there is light here.

I was immediately drawn into this slim book about small-time boxers in Stockton, California, trying to find some measure of respect. The sentences are terse and beautiful and contain all the desperation and struggle of small lives lived in obscure places.

Billy Tully, an older boxer, tries to restart his flailing boxing career as the novice boxer Ernie Munger is just beginning. Doubt, alcoholism, failure, rejection, hopelessness, and disintegration beset the path of both main characters, and they may share parallel fates.

There should be more books with characters like this because, as Thoreau noted, most men do “lead quiet lives of desperation,” and no book captures and expresses how this feels—in both style and substance—as precisely as Fat City. It is a beautifully written book, and the reality of the characters’ lives broke my heart. 

This is the most beautiful, touching, and emotional book about boxing, penned by a cut man who didn’t stumble into writing until he was in his sixties. Toole’s prose is sharp, lean, commanding, and coming from the mouth of truth. His gritty characters tell it and show it like it is, and it’s Toole’s ability to demonstrate the love trainers have for their boxers and passion for the pursuit of boxing, along with all the big hearts and often unseen vulnerability in the sport, that makes this story collection so open and heavy and heartfelt and breathing and alive.

The importance of these stories lies within the relatable concept of how people choose to medicate—through pills, alcohol, sex, distance, lies, boxing. Jones’s characters are full of grit and sharp tongues, broken bones, each pursuing a way out of the mediocre feeling of their existences. Some want to chase greatness, while most just dream of coming up out of the hole for a moment in hopes of seeing the light. What Jones teaches is that there’s always redemption in the beauty of the attempt. 

"Who was/is the best...?" Perhaps in no sport is the question more asked and argued over than in boxing. And in boxing perhaps none is more qualified to answer the question than Bert Randolph Sugar. And while some fans may express outrage that Rocky Marciano barely makes the top twenty, and Marvin Hagler staggers into the top seventy-five, others will nod eagerly when they read that Harry Greb and Benny Leonard were better than just about anybody. Every fight fan on the planet, and maybe other planets as well, is familiar with the work of this prolific pugilistic pundit whose publications not only inform but entertain as well. Yep, it was Bert who put the Sugar in the sweet science!

Full disclosure: This was a book I edited back in 1999 when I was working as an editor at HarperCollins. I'm not sure if it was ever published outside Australia, but it should have been.

Wells, a sports journalist, tells the amazing story of the heavyweight world title boxing fight between African-American Jack Johnson and Canadian Tommy Burns at Rushcutters Bay in Sydney in 1908. It features a cast of incredible characters, including Jack London.

“A ghost story, a haunting unto itself”—thus, music journalist Nick Tosches opens his tough tale of the boxer Sonny Liston, two-time heavyweight champion of the world. Born in 1932 into a family of tenant farmers that lived on the border of Arkansas and Mississippi, Liston grew up with violence, reinforced by an early stint in prison. Deftly, Tosches conjures the grim, ruthless culture of professional boxing during the 1950s and 60s. Most poignantly, he shows that Liston never possessed his own life—not in the fields from which he fled as a youth and not as a winner in the ring. He was always owned by white men who operated a fundamentally racist business. For readers interested in Black cultural history, this is a timely book. 

Muhammad Ali’s story is told in lyrical free verse, which is very appropriate for the G.O.A.T., who is also famous for his rhyming poetry, such as “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eye can’t see.”

Beginning with an overview of the great Black boxers before Ali, this picture book engagingly tells his story as the greatest boxer of all time.

Among the legendary athletes of the 1920s, the unquestioned halcyon days of sports, stands Gene Tunney, the boxer who upset Jack Dempsey in spectacular fashion, notched a 77—1 record as a prizefighter, and later avenged his sole setback (to a fearless and highly unorthodox fighter named Harry Greb). Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring, Tunney willingly receded into the background. To this day, Gene Tunney’s name is most often recognized only in conjunction with his epic “long count” second bout with Dempsey. Living nearly half his life in the state of Connecticut, Mr. Tunney was the first boxer I ever corresponded with. Author Jack Cavanaugh, also from Connecticut, crafts this priceless book.

Joe Louis was one the greatest boxers of all time and a symbol of hope for Black Americans.

Joe famously fought Nazi Germany’s representative Max Schmeling, but what isn’t widely known is that Joe Lewis fought him twice, the first time losing to him. His rematch, in 1938, united Americans against Adolf Hitler. After his victory, he enlisted in the Army, fighting twice more. By the time he retired, Joe Lewis was described as perhaps the best heavyweight fighter of all time.”