A New Book from Tom Hauser

It's a treat whenever Secondsout.com posts a new column about boxing by Tom Hauser. Once every year or so, when those columns are compiled into book, it's a treasure.

The Greatest Sport of All: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing (University of Arkansas Press paperback, $19.95) anthologizes everything Hauser wrote about boxing in 2006, including two pieces that won BWAA Barney awards (“Pay-Per-View Piracy And The Internet,” and “The Opponent.") Most of this stuff is available online, but having it in book form is so much more convenient and far cooler to display on your shelf.

Hauser's pieces are called columns, but that's selling them short. In today's sports media, it often seems like getting to the top requires a journalist to have an opinion first and the facts second. With a few exceptions, Hauser's columns aren't about his opinions. They aren't filled with self-references, cagey prose and hilarious jokes. They're actually features and investigative stories, disguised as columns.

Hauser gets the details. In “Manny Pacquiao: Where's the Money Going?” he meticulously breaks down how the numbers added up (and subtracted down) after a so-called $2 million purse netted Pacquiao $313,446. Hauser's looks at pay-per-view piracy and a night in the life of a professional opponent similarly go deep behind the scenes. His profile of Richard Schaefer gets past the Golden Boy executive's mannered front to show the personality that took him from banking to boxing. “Don King at 75,” a compilation of comments by and about King, could serve as a eulogy.

Yes, Hauser enjoys working conditions that any newspaper reporter would envy. His deadlines are loose compared to the daily grind, and editors don't measure the quality of his stories by how far under 25 inches he can keep them. Still, he makes the most of his medium. This year's book is especially interesting to boxing writers because it contains profiles of boxing media people: Tim Smith, Dan Rafael, Steve Farhood, and Steve Albert. The other pieces just serve as lessons to writers. In some instances, the reporting makes it hard to read them to their completion -- halfway through, you get inspired to go out and try reporting a story of your own so thoroughly.

News links: Joe Maxse in the Cleveland Plain Dealer tees up an advance of the Jermain Taylor - Kelly Pavlik fight. In the San Antonio Express, John Whisler laments the absence of top notch boxing promotion in that city. A story in the Boston Herald explaisn that "Channel 5 sports dude Bob Halloran has signed on as a technical consultant for the Mark Wahlberg-Brad Pitt flick The Fighter, now that his book about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward is just about to hit bookstores."