Bouts of Mania: Ali, Frazier and Foreman and an America on the Ropes

'A fine study of context and character.'

‘Rich and loquacious account.’

‘Acclaimed boxing writer Richard Hoffer turns his attentions to the fights between Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.’

'The strengths of Hoffer's writing is that the fight action is told with action and drama.'

‘ Richard Hoffer’ s book is a tale of three men and three fights, each so momentous that there is little risk of tedium in the retelling and no need for new angles. It is revealing detail, fine writing and insight into character that is required, and the author, a writer for Sports Illustrated, delivers on every count.’  

‘ In Bouts of Mania and its three heroes, Hoffer vividly evokes an era in which the spirit of boxing, seen against the febrile backdrop of America’ s psychological crisis over the Vietnam war, achieved a pitch of intensity that it has never attained since.’

‘ Acclaimed boxing writer Richard Hoffer turns his attentions to the fights between Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.’

‘ Rich and loquacious account.’

'A fine study of context and character.'

‘ Bouts of Mania  is gripping and intelligent, perhaps the best book about boxing since  David Remnick’ s  King of the World. It puts Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman in  the context of their bloody, turbulent times, and reveals how  The Rumble in the Jungle  and  The Thrilla in Manila  were backlit by  the conflagrations of Vietnam and Watergate, Harlem and Watts.  At last, the golden age of boxing has the book it has always deserved.'

Tony Parsons

Call it an accident of history: these three men – Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman – converging in a single space, their five fights giving us an irreproducible pandemonium. Some of these fights still resonate in ways that go beyond any appreciation of sport. Each stands for a kind of defiance or maybe foolishness that still make sense today. You still hear it now: It was good, but no Ali-Frazier.

But the serendipity of their riotous occupation, three of the most compelling sports personalities ever, is nothing compared to its luck of timing, and Bouts of Mania is as much about when as about what. Their fights so perfectly bookended a particular disintegration of the American psyche that it seems more a cosmic counterpoint than coincidence. This, after all, was the era of Watergate, Vietnam, Nixon and the humiliation of America.

Just as David Remnick’ s King of the World gave us a portrait of Ali and the hope of 1960’ s America, Richard Hoffer’ s Bouts of Mania shows how these three fighters provided a moral compass during one of America’ s worst patches ever. This golden age of boxing gave reassurance to a shattered country that such fundamental if sometimes elusive qualities of courage and determination still mattered. And when it was all over neither they, nor the rest of the world would ever be the same again.