Book Review - When Boxing Was Boxing

After author Adam Powley's efforts regarding nostalgic, photo-led books on football and cricket comes the third in the series - When Boxing Was Boxing.

If you still need a Christmas present for a fight fan, especially one of a more mature vintage, then this is definitely an option.

Published this September, it professes to be "a photographic celebration of the sport's heyday" and it fits the bill nicely. It does offer some interesting images from as recently as the 90s (Nigel Benn on a rooftop directly in front of Big Ben being a good one) but more interesting are those from earlier eras, some of which remind us how far we've now come from a sport which was once both spartan and incredibly popular with the general public.

There's a cracking picture of a packed White Hart Lane in 1945. Those in attendance - with hardly a breathing space to be had - had come to see Jack London (Brian's dad) fight Bruce Woodcock for the British and Commonwealth heavyweight titles.

What's good about the book is that it doesn't always trot out the pictures we've all seen a thousand times before, even when it focuses on some great champions like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson or even Muhammad Ali. OK, there are a few 'classic shots' in here but much of the book concerns itself with social documentary of the sport too, including the odd picture of bare knuckle or unlicensed fare, though certainly nothing graphic.

There's a cracker of Kevin Finnegan, who had a talent for painting, putting Alan Minter on the canvas with oils more successfully than he managed in their three contests inside the ropes.

And if you want to see a line up of John Conteh, John Stracey and Joe Bugner all holding shotguns in front of an American cop car, this is your book.

Good fun and a good buy too.

Published by JH Haynes and Co Ltd and with a foreword by Barry McGuigan, it's a 208 page hardback with a cover price of £18.99 - though it's available cheaper if you have a little bit of a search.