Life stories of the champions and contenders who shaped boxing.
A Kansas cowboy who started boxing in his late twenties, Jess Willard survived a ring death and a criminal charge, won the heavyweight title from Jack...
A steam fitter's son who paid for boxing lessons by sweeping a Pittsburgh gym, Billy Conn became light heavyweight champion at 21, nearly took Joe Lou...
Sam Langford beat champions from lightweight to heavyweight, but the colour line, and Jack Johnson, kept him from ever fighting for the world heavywei...
Pone Kingpetch beat Pascual Pérez in Bangkok in 1960 to become Thailand's first world boxing champion, then lost and regained the flyweight crown agai...
Joe Gans rose from Baltimore's battle royals to become the first American-born Black world champion in 1902, beat Battling Nelson over 42 rounds in Go...
Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo went from selling newspapers in Havana to winning the junior lightweight title at Shibe Park in 1931, making him Cuba's first...
Pascual Pérez, a five-foot flyweight from Mendoza's wine country, won Olympic gold in London in 1948 and then beat Yoshio Shirai in Tokyo in 1954 to b...
Fernando Vargas won a light middleweight world title at 21, then fought Félix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya and Shane Mosley, and tested positive for a s...
Ike 'Bazooka' Quartey went from Accra's Bukom district and the 1988 Seoul Olympics to four years as WBA welterweight champion, and then lost the dispu...
Ricardo Mayorga smoked, drank and trash-talked his way to the unified welterweight title with two upsets of Vernon Forrest in 2003, then won a WBC tit...
The career of David Haye, who unified the cruiserweight titles by beating Jean-Marc Mormeck and Enzo Maccarinelli, outpointed Nikolai Valuev for the W...
The life and career of Amir Khan, the Bolton fighter who won Olympic silver at 17, became a unified light welterweight champion and gambled on fights...
