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Philippines, 17 Dec 2025 |
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JERRY IZENBERG'S BEST-SELLING ONCE THERE WERE GIANTS: THE GOLDEN AGE OF HEAVYWEIGHT BOXING NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK PhilBoxing.com Mon, 17 May 2021  "I was there. So was Jerry Izenberg. This is the way it was." - Larry Holmes, former heavyweight champion NEW YORK (May 17, 2021) -- In his newspaper career spanning more than 70 years, Jerry Izenberg wasn't only there for the Golden Age of heavyweight boxing. He actually defined it for an army of readers whom he took on wild and woolly rides around the world for the greatest fights in history. Izenberg, 90, began his heavyweight travels at Yankee Stadium in 1959 when he covered the first battle of the Floyd Patterson - Ingemar Johansson trilogy. Throughout his career as a reporter and a columnist, Izenberg sat readers next to him ringside to see and hear countless epic championship fights in boxing's most glamorous division while forging close and trusted relationships with the fighters giving his readers unvarnished and revelatory back stories of this greatest era of heavyweight boxing. Izenberg trekked to Rome in 1960, Tokyo in 1964, and Mexico City in 1968 to see Olympic gold medal-winning performances launch the iconic careers of future heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman, respectively. In Ali's three reigns as world champion, Izenberg traveled throughout the U.S. as well as to Toronto, Kinshasa, Zaire, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur, not to mention Caracas, Venezuela for Foreman's title defense against Ken Norton. And as boxing fans continue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the legendary first fight between Ali and Frazier, Skyhorse Publishing has just rereleased Izenberg's best-selling book, Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, in paperback, complete with a foreword by the legendary eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao. Once There Were Giants can be purchased at Amazon (https://amzn.to/3oQ9zkC), where it became an instant #1 New Release, and Barnes & Noble (bit.ly/3cF4DMP). Once There Were Giants regales the reader with memories forged in ballparks, arenas, and exotic locales, where nothing rivaled the magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd by its jugular and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown. Beginning in 1962, when Sonny Liston dethroned and demolished Floyd Patterson in just over two minutes of the opening round, through the infamous and gruesome 1997 rematch between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, forever known as the Bite Fight, the heavyweight division took center stage and enjoyed its golden age. In between, world champions and Hall of Famers like Ali, Frazier, Foreman, and Larry Holmes produced legendary fights. Izenberg was there, in their training camps, throughout the fight week hoopla, ringside for their fights, and days later, after the smoke and the crowds had cleared and the champion, as well as the vanquished, would sit alone with Jerry, for hours, reflecting on what had recently occurred inside the ring and the future they had to confront. It's all meticulously told and preserved in Once There Were Giants. Now living in Henderson, Nevada -- a stone's throw from the boxing mecca of Las Vegas -- with his wife Aileen, Izenberg is still regularly producing insightful sports columns and social commentary as columnist emeritus at the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Milestones are nothing new for this Newark native. He is one of only two daily newspaper columnists to have covered the first 53 Super Bowls, not to mention 54 consecutive Kentucky Derby races and the last five Triple Crown-winning horses. And no one has covered more of Ali's fights than he. The recipient of the Red Smith Award, which is bestowed annually by the Associated Press Sports Editors to a writer or editor who has made major contributions to sports journalism, Izenberg is also a five-time winner of the New Jersey Sportswriter of the Year Award. He is an inductee in 16 Halls of Fame, including the International Boxing Hall of Fame, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Closer to home, Izenberg has been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame, the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame, the Rutgers-Newark Athletic Hall of Fame, and the Rutgers Hall of Fame of Distinguished Alumni. Izenberg returned to the winners circle in February, snagging First Place honors in the 2020 New Jersey Press Association Better Newspaper Contest in the Reporting and Writing - Sports Column category. After writing 15 non-fiction books, including the best-sellers Rozelle: A Biography, and No Medals For Trying, Izenberg had his first novel published in October, After the Fire: Love and Hate in the Ashes of 1967, which received universal praise. Perhaps nearest and dearest to Izenberg's heart was the pet project he founded, Newark Project Pride, which promoted an annual college football game during its 29 years and raised the funds to send 1,100 local kids to college.  |
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