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Start giftingStrong Boy
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn more"I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the world."
So boasted John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world, a man who was the gold standard of American sports for more than a decade and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. He had a big ego, a big mouth, and even bigger appetites. His womanizing, drunken escapades, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to a burgeoning newspaper industry. The larger-than-life boxer embodied the American dream for late nineteenth-century immigrants as he rose from Boston's Irish working class to become the most recognizable man in the nation. In the process, the "Boston Strong Boy" transformed boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today.
Strong Boy tells the story of America's first sports superstar, a self-made man who personified the power and excesses of the Gilded Age. Everywhere John L. Sullivan went, his fists backed up his bravado. Sullivan's epic brawls, such as his seventy-five-round bout against Jake Kilrain, and his cross-country barnstorming tour in which he literally challenged all of America to a fight are recounted in vivid detail, as are his battles outside the ring with a troubled marriage, wild weight and fitness fluctuations, and raging alcoholism. Strong Boy gives readers ringside seats to the colorful tale of one of the country's first Irish American heroes and the birth of the American sports media and the country's celebrity obsession with athletes.
Christopher Klein is an author andĀ a history and travel writer. A frequent contributor to the Boston Globe and History.com, he has also written for the New York Times,Ā Harvard magazine, ESPN.com, Smithsonian.com, AmericanHeritage.com, and National Geographic Traveler.
Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Awardāwinning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials.
Reviews
āSullivan was perhaps the first real American sports superstar and especially because he meant so much as a minority championā¦As important a cultural figure as he was a sports idol.ā
āTravel back to the 1880s and sample some nickel beer, free lunch, horse trolleys, and the babble of immigrants. Christopher Klein, in this well-researched book, delivers the sportinā life of the Gilded Age when Americans crowned their first athlete-king, John L. Sullivan, in coast-to-coast banner headlines.ā
āIn this muscular, relentlessly detailed book, Christopher Klein not only tells Sullivanās story but also documents the evolution of boxing from illicit bare-knuckle savagery akin to todayās steel-cage extravaganzas to the āsweet scienceā of legally sanctioned bouts between skillful gloved opponent.ā
āFrom the first page to the last, Kleinās prose retains its powers of enchantment and illumination. It is one of the best boxing books ever penned.ā
"[A] treasure trove of information that covers sports, celebrity, crime, politics, and entertainmentā¦[and] tracks John L. Sullivan, the āBoston Strong Boy,ā across the country and globe as he rises from the tenement to the heavyweight championship and everything that came with it.ā
āAttentive as he is to historical details, Kleinās storytelling gift is most evident in how he depicts āJohn L.ā as a beloved hero who was eventually undone by ego and who had a legendary appetite for food and drinkā¦A lively, consistently entertaining sports biography.ā
āJoe Barrettās narration brings this larger-than-life character to the mindās eye of the listener with a wonderfully gruff, Irish-New England accent. Author Christopher Klein captures much about this manāand thereās a lot not to likeābut itās Barrett who embraces Sullivanās voice in an animated way. That effort makes Strong Boy a great marriage of scholarship and narration.ā
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