The fighting Frenchman : Minnesota's boxing legend Scott LeDoux
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The fighting Frenchman : Minnesota's boxing legend Scott LeDoux
University of Minnesota Press, c2016
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Scott LeDoux's face read like a roadmap of boxing's last golden era-eye thumbed by Larry Holmes, brow gashed by Mike Tyson, ears stung by none other than Muhammad Ali. "George Foreman hit me so hard," LeDoux said, "my ancestors in France felt it." The only man to step into the ring with eleven heavyweight champions, LeDoux also fought through two of boxing's greatest scandals, recurring illness, and childhood trauma that haunted him for decades. This is his story, the life and times of a Minnesota Rocky making the most of the hard knocks that bruise the American Dream, told in full for the first time by award-winning journalist Paul Levy.
He was never a world champion, but Scott LeDoux was always the people's champ. Doing his best to turn a small-town miner's son into boxing's next great white hope, Don King said of Scott LeDoux: "He eats rusty nails for breakfast, punches holes in concrete with either hand, bobs and weaves like a giant Rocky Marciano." He was a big, good-natured kid, with a ready wit and the will to take all comers along on a ride he himself found hard to believe. From the mining community of Crosby, Minnesota, to the dingy, mildew-scented dressing rooms in minor-league towns like Sioux Falls and Billings, to the stage of Madison Square Garden, Levy gives us a real sense of what it was like to spar with fighters such as Tyson and Ali. The buried secrets of childhood abuse and the harrowing sadness of death and disease in his family make LeDoux's triumphs and defeats all the more poignant and, in Levy's irresistible narrative, unforgettable.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Five Minutes to Go
1. The Great Milford Mining Disaster
2. Doc and Mickey
3. "I Thought I Had Done Something Bad"
4. When Lightning Struck
5. The Last Place on Earth
6. "I've Had Enough"
7. Sandy
8. Papa Joe
9. The Great White Shadow
10. One for the Record Books
11. A Foreman Grilling
12. A Hair-Raising Fix
13. A Suspension, a Missing Mouthpiece, a Rematch
14. "To Be Somebody"
15. The Greatest?
16. Always King
17. Six Months to Live
18. Cold, Hard Cash
19. Luck of the Draw
20. The Monroe Doctrine
21. "What's an Eye When You've Given Your Heart?"
22. Last Rounds
23. Game Seven
24. Down for the Count
25. Crucial Confrontation
26. Something to Prove
27. Funeral for a Friend
Afterword: The Greatest and More
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"