Primitive, dangerous, low-paying, crooked, exploitive--boxing, in all but a few cases, offered its athletes very little while taking everything. Why does boxing exist? What accounted for its decades-long popularity? What does its presence on the sport history landscape say about America? 

Jeffrey T. Sammons looks at how boxing reflected the society that fostered it at different points in history. In the time of John L. Sullivan, the sport provided an arena for testing law, order, and social growth. Jack Johnson's career reflected the racism, nationalism, and xenophobia of the Progressive era. At its popular peak in the 1920s, boxing expressed tensions as disparate as the tug-of-war between modernism and tradition and the women's rights movement. From there, Sammons traces how the sport intertwined with Nazi antisemitism, reflected the hopes of the New Deal, produced the seminal figure Joe Louis, and stood at the nexus of the union of organized crime with business and television. Finally, he shows how Muhammad Ali and reactions to him exposed the shifting tides of racial issues and American involvement in Vietnam.

    Lords of the Ring revives the exciting era—now largely forgotten—when college boxing attracted huge crowds and flashy headlines, outdrawing the professional bouts. On the same night in 1940 when Joe Louis defended his heavyweight crown before 11,000 fans in New York's Madison Square Garden, collegiate boxers battled before 15,000 fans in Madison . . . Wisconsin.
    Under legendary and beloved coach John Walsh, the most successful coach in the history of American collegiate boxing, University of Wisconsin boxers won eight NCAA team championships and thirty-eight individual titles from 1933 to 1960. Badger boxers included heroes like Woody Swancutt, who later helped initiate the Strategic Air Command, and rogues like Sidney Korshak, later the most feared mob attorney in the United States. A young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay also boxed in the Wisconsin Field House during this dazzling era.
    But in April 1960, collegiate boxing was forever changed when Charlie Mohr— Wisconsin’s finest and most popular boxer, an Olympic team prospect—slipped into a coma after an NCAA tournament bout in Madison. Suddenly, not just Mohr’s life but the entire sport of college boxing was in peril. It was to be the last NCAA boxing tournament ever held. Lords of the Ring tells the whole extraordinary story of boxing at the University of Wisconsin, based on dozens of interviews and extensive examination of newspaper microfilm, boxing records and memorabilia.