In the early hours of Monday 13 May last year, Donald McRae left his hotel room in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for an insomniac stroll. The veteran boxing writer stood in the already broiling, half-deserted streets, allowing himself to be moved by the dawn call to prayer. Its beauty and insistence brought to mind his sister Heather, who had died nearly six years before. As the sonorous voice echoed across the city with increasing yearning, McRae also thought of his late parents, who had been steadfast churchgoers in their native South Africa. In the teeth of that sleepless morning, it was as if he could feel their presence.
Such tender reflections were out of keeping with the mania of the coming fight week. McRae had travelled to Saudi Arabia to sit along with several hundred other journalists, dead-eyed YouTubers, ageing sporting and entertainment royalty – as well as actual royalty – for the feverishly anticipated match-up between the world’s two best heavyweight boxers, Britain’s enduringly controversial Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk, his Ukrainian opponent. With both men undefeated, something would have to give. The preceding months had seen them trade insults: the theatrically bellicose Fury labelled his “gappy-toothed” opponent both a “sausage” and a “dosser”, among other barbs straight out of a 1970s English sitcom. For Usyk, Fury – the much larger man, well known for his improbably doughy build and wild fluctuations in weight – was simply “greedy belly”.
The fight was several years in the making. Bouts at heavyweight boxing’s highest echelons are rarely made with ease. Contractual wrangles, sparring injuries, murky industry politics: the delays and false dawns were piled high. But Turki al-Sheikh, chairman of the Saudi’s General Entertainment Authority and close personal friend of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is a man used to getting his way. Money was simply no object. If queasy at this ostentatious display of Saudi sportswashing, McRae could not deny his excitement. He felt a “sudden longing for Fury and Usyk to produce a gripping contest which rekindled the lost majesty of boxing”. A longing, he knew, which was equally a prayer for justification of his increasingly conflicted but lifelong relationship with the sport. For all of his reservations, it was impossible for him to escape “the shadowy world of courage and deceit, glory and grime”.
Few have covered professional boxing’s ugliness and exhilaration with McRae’s deftness of touch. He has spent the best part of four decades documenting its excesses with unflagging commitment. His back catalogue contains several acknowledged classics: Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing, first published in 1996, remains his best-known work. Granted access to the British and American superstars of the day – Mike Tyson, Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Oscar De La Hoya – McRae teased out revealing stories from them, hoping to understand what drove them into committing their lives to a singularly brutal, ruthless pursuit. Tyson’s darkness, Eubank’s calculated eccentricity, De La Hoya’s scrupulously stage-managed persona: McRae skewered them all with unusual elegance. Where a lesser writer and reporter might only have drawn out the violence and grotesquery of elite boxing, McRae offered plenty of humour and even fleeting moments of transcendence.
In the intervening years, McRae has published further books on pioneering cardiac surgeons, South African rugby and football, as well as countless searching profiles in his capacity as sports interviewer for the Guardian. But it is boxing, always boxing, that he has returned to with the most insistence. His new effort, The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing, has an almost valedictory quality, having been written after a decade marked by a series of family bereavements. Growing up as a middle-class white kid in apartheid South Africa, McRae had fallen in love with Muhammad Ali. After a brief stint working as a teacher in a Johannesburg township, McRae moved to London aged 23, in part to avoid conscription into the South African National Defence Force. There really was a time, he reassures his wife Alison after watching Mike Tyson bite a meaty chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear during their demented 1997 title fight, when boxing “once held a political and cultural resonance which made it endlessly fascinating”. A long gone, mid-century era when fighters like Ali stood for civil rights and social justice, for something other than their own mythology.
The book is dedicated to the late Patrick Day, a promising Haitian-American super-welterweight who died in October 2019 after sustaining a traumatic head injury during a title fight with fellow American, Charles Cornwell. Day – a straight-A student who hailed from a solidly middle-class family in New York – was a figure of unusual gentleness. “Everybody here looks great,” he told the assembled press pack before his last fight. “I’m excited for this card… so thank God we’re all here, healthy.” Day’s tragic death is by no means unique. The book is populated with the dead. Dwight Ritchie, another 27-year-old super-welterweight, had died from brain injuries after a sparring session in his native Australia, just a month after Patrick Day. Both men, McRae writes, were so consumed with boxing it took their lives.
These are just two of the stories McRae traces with artistry and compassion. In 2011, he interviewed an exciting 23-year-old British heavyweight prospect called Tyson Fury at his home in Morecambe. From the beginning, it was clear this was not a man prone to manicured PR speak. Over an afternoon, Fury revealed a deep-set existential angst to McRae. As the heavyweight brooded, McRae probed for interesting or amusing anecdotes. The boxer was young, perhaps his outlook would change. No, Fury told him, that would not be the case. He could see his life exploding. One loss, that was all it would take. The following 15 years have seen Fury become one of the most infamous athletes in the world: a brilliant champion with a spectacular penchant for self-destruction. Suicidal depression, addiction, fairy-tale comebacks, great rivalries: Fury’s many contradictions mirror those of the sport itself.
From the high watermark of the Italian American mafia onwards, boxing has been tainted by its associations with organised crime. Today, it is the globally notorious Kinahan cartel that have attracted the most column inches, with the Irish drug syndicate – net worth likely in the billions – embedding themselves ever deeper across the sport via Daniel Kinahan, its alleged leader and close personal friend to Tyson Fury. McRae is perceptive on these sinister connections, though it’s the Saudi question that receives the most attention. The last half-decade has seen the Kingdom spend evermore absurd sums in sport as part of the Vision 2030 programme to diversify the country’s oil-dominated economy. Football, golf, and tennis have all received significant, mind-altering injections of Saudi wealth. If uneasy about the ethics of this investment, McRae still joins the press pack at the first or second Fury-Usyk bouts. Is their brilliance of these fighters really justification enough for attending events laid on by a regime which murders journalists and dissidents, or imprisons them on the flimsiest of charges? The book is charged with McRae’s anxiety on this and a tangle of other ethical questions. Why, he and the reader wonders, does such a sensible, level-headed man keep returning to such a degraded and degrading circus, again and again?
The book’s grimness is offset, as always in McRae’s work, by the quality of access and his admiration for the skill and bravery of the men and women who have devoted their lives to it. McRae is unsentimental, and never leaves the standard cliches uninterrogated. One of the book’s strongest strands involves the jagged ascent of Isaac Chamberlain, an up-and-coming cruiserweight from Brixton, South London. After a difficult upbringing, marked by gang violence and preteen drug running, boxing offered Chamberlain discipline and escape, as with so many others before him. If ‘inspirational’, his obsession with attaining sporting greatness carries its own darkness. Sitting in Chamberlain’s cluttered car, McRae is worried by his almost manic intensity. “Bro, this will sound crazy”, he tells the older writer. “But I am willing to sacrifice a little bit of my mind to be successful”.
After all this, the more personal sections concerning McRae’s own family life are a dip into cooler waters, even as he narrates a string of griefs and their aftermath. After his sister’s death in 2018, McRae sits up until the early hours in anticipation of Tyson Fury’s first fight with the destructive American power puncher Deontay Wilder. Boxing is a refuge. It is also a trap. But few other things have the power to make you feel “so exuberant and so f***ing alive”.
Great sports writing, much like sport itself, is often a question of the finest margins. The line between success and diabolical failure is perilously thin. The author is presented with a dilemma. How can words on the page compete with the immediacy and drama of the spectacle itself? Some, like the late Gordon Burn, swerve this problem entirely. In Best and Edwards, a portrait of the strangely mirrored lives of George Best and Duncan Edwards, two differently tragic Manchester United prodigies, on-pitch action is sacrificed for Burn’s clear-sighted dissection of celebrity and the dangerous seductive power of sporting myth. Edwards, the unfulfilled genius par excellence, died aged 21 from his injuries sustained in the 1958 Munich air crash, his legacy one of unassailable wholesomeness. Best, the great untameable maverick of the permissive 1960s, died a rather slower death after his unworldly talent curdled into chronic alcoholism.
McRae, however, takes us inside the ring, be it Madison Square Garden or the resolute anti-glamour of a Crystal Palace leisure centre alike. Boxing, we are reminded, is really a live sport. Television might give us a glimpse, it cannot adequately capture the sport’s ferocity. Jabs “snap” into faces. Combinations “club”. Overhand rights “scythe and crash” against horribly exposed temples.
When it comes to the literature of sport, the hierarchy is clear. No sane or uncorrupted judge would seriously deny boxing’s supremacy over football, tennis or any other lesser contender. The list of literary heavyweights who have focused their talents on the sport is daunting: Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, even Joyce Carol Oates . Its contrasting extremes – of excess and Spartan discipline, violence and sentimentality – have called to all manner of ambitious writers, who have produced work of the first order and at least as much overwrought nonsense. In the runup to the first Fury-Usyk fight in Saudi Arabia, McRae recalls Mailer’s famous musings on the eve of the 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier world title bout. “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little more insane… for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there’s a real possibility that he is. It is like being the big toe of God”.
After 35 years immersed in the sport’s murk and corruption, such absurd grandiosity no longer appeals to McRae. Such “romantic bullshit” is a young man’s game. But lifelong habits are not so easy to break, however insalubrious. Though still an addict, McRae is no longer consumed by boxing’s terrible glamour in the same way. “You like the boxing?” asks an exuberant Saudi Uber driver in the early hours aftermath of the second Fury-Usyk fight. Sometimes, comes the honest response.
The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing
Donald McRae
Simon & Schuster, 464pp, £25
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[See also: The Europeans who built Britain]
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