I would rather read about boxing than watch a bout. Boxing has provided some of the best writing in sports, from William Hazlitt to A. J. Leibling and from Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates. The finest among those who have written on the sport day in and day out — without unmooring it from literature — is the South African Donald McRae.
In Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing, he explains his “seemingly illogical but enduring love” of boxing. It began when he saw Muhammad Ali on screen “destroying Cleveland Williams” in 1966, “with a speed that made savagery look lustrous on monochrome film.”
That book, published 10 years ago, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. His latest — and he says, his last — The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing — speaks of a diminishing love for a sport he has been obsessed with for half a century. “Boxing is as crooked and destructive as it is magnificent and transformative,” he says, admitting in another place that “It has always been a bleak and dirty business but, at its best, boxing is like nothing else. It can be as beautiful as it is brutal, as glorious as it is painful.”
Boxing, says the American heavyweight Deontay Wilder, is “the only sport where you can kill a man and get paid for it”. A spate of deaths, boxing’s increasing identification with crime, the entry of Saudi Arabia and more, sees the author strike the elegiac note missing from the more sentimental and glamourised versions of a violent sport. McRae is happy to leave the “romantic bullshit” to younger writers looking to make a mark.
The book is dedicated to Patrick Day, a gifted young fighter from New York who died in 2019 after a knockout caused bleeding in the brain.
Years ago, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “If [the heavyweights] become champions, they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust…” It is this inner life McRae records with eloquence and empathy. On the page, boxing acquires dignity.
The Last Bell is the most personal of McRae’s books, a retrospective of his professional career and a coming-to-terms with personal tragedies through what sport taught him. In the end, he says, even zealots grow weary.
It is easy to write about the big names, the Alis, the Tysons and the Furys (all of whom figure in his books), but one paragraph sums up McRae’s approach best.
Recalling the interviews he has done over the years, McRae says, “My interest in, and concern for, Isaac Chamberlain and Regis Prograis took precedence over their more famous contemporaries. I had shared meaningful moments with Canelo Alvarez, Anthony Joshua, Oleksandr Usykand Tyson Fury, but the fame and wealth of that quartet meant I would never become close to them. It seemed more important than ever that I concentrated on those fighters I knew best and liked most of all.”
McRae watched boxing so I didn’t have to.
Published on Mar 01, 2026
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