The last few days in boxing have been thrilling, what with Mikey Garcia knocking out my countryman Juan Manuel Lopez in four rounds, Adonis Stevenson clearing out Chad Dawson in one, Marcos Maidana and Josesito Lopez slugging it out with Maidana winning a thriller in six. Marcelo Dominguez making a comeback, being good enough to erase the bad taste left by the "super" pay-per-view event between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Robert Guerrero. I love Floyd, a good man in person and great fighter, but his fights aren't precisely Arturo Gatti - Mickey Ward material. With all those great fights happening so recently, and with me fighting my own fight against a terrible ear infection, bear with me because I've come along reading many of the books I have been sent to review... despite everything I just mentioned and more (my niece and nephew moving to Tucson for the summer, some little boy screaming at this woman in church that I like her, etc).

 

One of those books is The Big Fight, My Life In And Out Of The Ring, (2012, Sugar Ray Leonard, ISBN-10: 0452298040, ISBN-13: 978-0452298040, Plume Publishing, www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/publishers/adult/plume.html, all rights reserved), a very intriguing look at one of boxing's "Big Five" of the 1980's (yes, five, because most people remember Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler but they forget that Wilfred Benitez was in their group as well and the only fight between all those was Hagler-Benitez) and at one of boxing's most exciting times. To me, this was mostly an innocent time,  specifically from 1972, when I was born, to 1987. I used to dream about and talk about, fights such as Bobby Chacon versus Edwin Rosario (which made sense to me since Chacon was the WBC Jr. Lightweight Champion and Rosario the organization's Lightweight one) or Larry Holmes versus Gerrie Coetzee, not understanding, obviously, the machinations and theatrical plays that went on behind the scenes for boxing fights to actually take place. For Leonard, however, these times were chaotic, and he discusses that in detail in this book. 

 

Like in his debut fight as a pro against Luis "The Bull" Vega, Leonard excels in this effort as a debutante. He is not, let's say, an Ernest Hemingway or an Agatha Christie, and he is not a Christian Guidice when it comes to writing a boxing biography, either, but in writing his autobiography, Leonard comes out the same way he always came out in the ring: courageous, articulate,  sincere and with the heart of a lion.

 

The Big Fight is a honest look at himself, and at the things he did that he regrets doing.  Leonard did not have to write this book. He has quadrillions of dollars from his fights, endorsements, appearance fees (if he charges anything at all) and more, so he is not like Joe Louis or like Dominguez, who had to return to the ring after their glory days. He has a public that remembers him well, so he did not have to come out and tell us things that other celebrities might have preferred to keep "in the dark". But he has pride, and he has sorrow, and a desire to apologize for those certain aspects of his past life. This book is redemption. It's his way of telling the world "look, not everything was gold, but I still have my human integrity".

 

In The Big Fight, Leonard, as always, made the necessary corrections and came out triumphant!