Lonsdale's Belt
Boxing's Most Coveted Prize
Published on 1. September 2016
352 pages
978-1-78531-254-0 (ISBN)
Description
For more than one hundred years the Lonsdale Belt, first awarded in 1909 by the legendary National Sporting Club and since 1936 by the British Boxing Board of Control, has encircled the waists of all the great names in British boxing history: Freddie Welsh and Ted 'Kid' Lewis; Benny Lynch and Jimmy Wilde; Freddie Mills, Randolph Turpin and Terry Downes; Henry Cooper, Barry McGuigan, Lennox Lewis and Joe Calzaghe. Drawing upon a wealth of sources - interviews and reminiscences, boxing-board minutes and programmes, contemporary magazines and newspapers, even archive film, sports historian John Harding tells the absorbing and fascinating story of the belt's origins and development and how the system the belt represents has continued to provide an unambiguous measure of excellence in the chaotic and often murky world of British professional boxing.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Hove
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Illustrations, unspecified
File size
15,16 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-78531-254-0 (9781785312540)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
09/2016
Pitch Publishing Ltd
€43.51
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Person
John Harding is the author of Lonsdale's Belt: The Story of Boxing's Greatest Prize, first published in 1994 and updated more than two decades later. A sports historian and literary biographer of over 30 years' experience, he has chronicled the lives of footballers Billy Meredith and Alex James, boxer Jack 'Kid' Berg and playwright Shelagh Delaney among others. He writes regularly for publications such as Blizzard and When Saturday Comes.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by Mike Costello
- The Origins of the Boxing Belt
- A Belting Good Idea
- The Belts are Established
- Peerless Jim and the East End Kid
- The Digger and the Bombardier
- A Golden Era
- Cochrane's Heavyweight Follies
- Not So Roaring Twenties
- Boxing Politics and the Colour Bar
- Dickson's Yankee Invasion
- The Rise of the Regions
- The End of the NSC
- The Board Takes Over
- Freddie Mills and the Rise of Solomons
- Before the TV Age
- Jewels in Solomons's Crown
- A Communications Revolution
- Legends of the Sixties
- Levene Supreme
- Black is Beautiful
- Heavyweight Odyssey
- Grass Roots Revival
- Warren Butts In
- Simply the Best of Times, Simply the Worst
- The 1990s. A Daunting Decade: Part One
- The 1990s. A Daunting Decade: Part Two
- A Century of Belts: Part One
- A Century of Belts: Part Two
- Old Traditions
- New Horizons
- The Glittering Prize
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- Photographs
