Boxing's Best Short Stories

As this excellent collection of 22 stories makes clear, pugilism has inspired some of the best writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Following a tepidly written history of the sport, the book kicks off with strong pieces by two lesser-known authors, Mel Matison and Octavus Roy Cohen, whose tales of triumph-against-the-odds are inspiring and heartrending. The pace picks up quickly with solidly written entries by Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry and James T. Farrell, about boxers who find themselves trapped by life's ironies and pummeled unmercifully in the ring. Damon Runyon's ""Bred for Battle"" meets its match in ""The Chickasha Bone Crusher,"" a marvelously funny story by the near-forgotten H.C. Witwer, one of America's wittiest idiomatic stylists. Perhaps the best entry is the sensational ""Champion"" by Ring Lardner, which was made into the 1949 film starring Kirk Douglas. Other impressive selections include classic tales by Jack London and P.G. Wodehouse. While they are each beautifully conceived, ""Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine"" by Thom Jones and ""The Legend of Pig-Eye"" by Rick Bass seem pale in comparison to harder-hitting entries by older writers. The fourth in a series of collections devoted to sports (baseball, 1995; golf, 1997; football, 1998), this newest volume is as good as the first and in many ways superior to the rest. An ideal compendium of boxing fiction, it is also valuable as a sampling of the best of popular short stories in this century. It will make some readers nostalgic for a time when ""men were men"" (an expression representative of the tone established here), and when quality magazines published engaging fiction. Six line drawings. (Oct.)