The Professional/W.C Heinz

I can think of many excellent boxing films – Someone up There loves Me, Rocky and Raging Bull – and some great writers and writings on the Noble Art of Boxing, but it’s fiction is harder to find.

This is why I enjoyed The Professional.  It’s the story of Eddie Brown fighting for the middleweight crown.

Much of the book features the training camp in upstate New York and the title fight comes in the final chapter.

This makes the book uneven.

There are colourful characters but too many of them: the Brown team, the sparring partners, the boxing press, the family of Eddie Brown and the TV presenter who tricks Eddie Brown into defending boxing as violent.

I asked our book critic Melanie Gay to read it for her thoughts. In particular do you have to be a boxing aficionado to enjoy it?

Melanie  thought it was a book clearly written by a journalist who was the narrator but the central character Eddie Brown poorly defined

Heinz was a noted sportswriter.

He understood boxing better than he could write a book was her verdict.

Written in 1958 I also enjoyed it for its reflections on fighters of that era, notably the three titanic Rocky Graziano/Tony Zale contests.