From the Publisher
The Italian Stallions is a celebration of another time in the history of North American society, and, by extension, of North American sport. It is also a tribute to the classic rags-to-riches tale of the new immigrant, told through the rich stories of a band of Italian-Americans who, for the middle third of the 20th century, held sway over the national sporting psyche in a way perhaps no other single ethnic group ever has. In the 1930s 1940s and 1950s, the nation was obsessed with two major sports, baseball and boxing. It was, as acclaimed author Thomas Hauser proposes in his introduction to The Italian Stallions, a time When Boxing Mattered. Nowhere was this more evident than New York city, the Mecca of the fight game, where Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Madison Square Garden played host to most world title fights, but also where no fewer than 22 neighborhoods gave birth to local fight clubs. Those neighborhoods were cauldrons of desperation, but also of opportunity; one, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, spawned two men, Thomas Rocco Barbella and Giacobe LaMotta, who would not only become middleweight champions of the world but whose stories were so compelling that Hollywood featured them in movies starring Paul Newman and Robert DeNiro.
At roughly the same time Barbella -- better known as Rocky Graziano -- and LaMotta were moving to Brooklyn and the Bronx, the tough streets of Hartford and Brockton, Mass., and the onion fields outside Canastota, N.Y., were shaping three other men who would come to rivet public passion: Guglielmo Papaleo, Rocco Francis Marchegiano and Carmen Basilio. Papaleo -- or Willie Pep, as he became known -- fought a remarkable 242 times over 26 years, while Marchegiano begat Rocky Marciano, whose career record -- 49-0 -- would become boxing's most storied number. Wherever and whenever they stepped into a ring, those five, ably supported by the likes of Roland LaStarza, Joey Maxim and Joey Giardello, inspired passion and excitement. In the 15 years between 1945 and 1959, one or the other among them was a combatant in Ring Magazine's Fight of the Year an incredible 13 times. An end-of-the-century USA Today poll ranked two of their fights -- Pep's second with Sandy Saddler and Graziano's second against Tony Zale -- as among the top four bouts ever.
In The Italian Stallions, noted boxing author Stephen Brunt draws together the threads of these fighters' mutual story in the opening chapter, "From Italy With Love -- And Desperation." Later, the individual character of each boxer is revealed through a series of articles from the pages of the old SPORT magazine. SPORT, from its launch as North America's premiere sports magazine in 1946, emphasized its coverage of boxing. Through the prose of such luminaries as Jack Sher, Frank Graham Sr., Barney Nagler, Rex Lardner, Ed Linn, Ed Fitzgerald and Stanley Frank, and through exquisite photographs from The SPORT Collection, each fighter springs vividly to life again, young, taut and ready to throw a lethal combination at an instant's notice.
Library Journal
This portrait of a fistic age by Ali biographer Hauser and Canadian sportswriter Brunt honors the heyday of the Italian American boxer. Filled with classic photos and profiles culled from the archive of the recently defunct Sport magazine, it ranges from the sadly inept but Mob-backed giant, Primo Carnera, to superb ring craftsman Willie Pep and is understandably clustered around the two iconic Rockies of the postwar era-free-swinging and quotable middleweight champion Rocky Graziano and Rocky Marciano, the powerful shoemaker's son from Brockton, MA, who retired undefeated (56-0) as heavyweight champion. (While Sinatra and DiMaggio are better remembered today, these two were their equal in most Italian American homes of the Fifties.) In the second tier are the thuggish but compelling Jake LaMotta ("Raging Bull") and the anti-LaMotta, Carmen Basilio, the honest Catskills onion farmer's son. This group portrait is also an unintended tribute to a non-Italian, the great Sugar Ray Robinson, who in his prime beat most of these fighters, including LaMotta five of six times. With some filler (good-enough fighters like Roland LaStarza and Willie Pastrano) and leaving the Italian boxing story with its 1980s coda, the throwback champion Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, this book does the paisans and boxing fans proud.-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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