Mother’s Day is for flowers and a sweet card.

Mother’s Day is for taking Mom out to brunch.

Unless you were in Huancayo, Peru last Sunday, in which case Mother’s Day was for boxing. Sports promoters in Huancayo invited moms to lace up the gloves and whack away at each other. Ten women took up the challenge, which was reportedly inspired by the success of the current world flyweight champion, a Peruvian named Kina Malpartida.

About 200 spectators watched as several of the participating moms, wearing traditional embroidered skirts instead of boxing shorts, got clocked hard enough so that they hit the canvas, which, in this case, was actually grass…so was this really boxing?

To read more about the matronly matches from the Boston Globe click: here.

Ten-Pin Prodigy

Kamron Doyle of Brentwood, TN, first became interested in bowling when he was 7. That was five years ago.

On Sunday, Mr. Doyle earned his first check in a pro bowling tournament, the Canton Regional Open, when he finished 30th and pocketed $400.

Well, not “pocketed,” actually, because Mr. Doyle, now 12, isn’t a professional, so the check was deposited in a scholarship account to be tapped at some later date, which is fine, I guess, except that how’s the kid gonna buy beer and cigarettes?

Because this is bowling, right?

To see photos and video of Doyle and read about one writer’s attempt to challenge him, check out this article from Backporch.fanhouse.com.

Alabama looks to tackle rival Auburn in this weeken's Iron Bowl

Tailgating season is in high gear as fans across the country get ready for one of the biggest weekends in college football.  Bill talks with CBSSports.com’s Gregg Doyel about rivalry weekend, the much maligned BCS, and a certain straight-armed gold statue.

In today’s tough economic climate everyone is cutting back on spending, including athletic directors at Division I schools.  This week, Boston’s Northeastern University joined a number of colleges that have opted to cut their underperforming football programs in an effort to save funds.

Often in sports the team becomes family.  But what happens when family becomes the team?  Kellie Harper, the head women’s basketball coach at N.C. State, and her husband Jon, one of her assistants, work together on the hardwood every day.  Only A Game’s Dave DeWitt reports on the family-style rebuilding project at N.C. State.

One of the most famous athletes of the early 20th century, Sugar Ray Robinson is also one of the most complex.  Bill talks with author Wil Haygood about his new book on the champ, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.

Want to get the news?  Go to WBUR.org.  Want to talk sports? Get caught up on all of the week’s important sports stories with Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce, right here on Only A Game.

Sent some mail? Bill opens up the Only A Game mailbox to check in with listeners from across the country.

A new craze is sweeping football fans from Miami to Seattle.  No, it’s not the spread-option offense or the Wildcat formation.  Only A Game’s Charlie Schroeder reports on the Lingerie Football League—a sport that gives a new meaning to fantasy football.

Sweet Thunder by Wil Haygood

In some respects, Ray Robinson’s story is surprising. At a time when much of the boxing business was controlled by gangsters, Robinson managed to step around a lot of the slime. Even as he impressed his fans with his speed and power as a prize fighter, he yearned to succeed as a song-and-dance man. As Wil Haygood suggests many times in Sweet Thunder, Robinson’s rise to prominence merits consideration in the context of the growing popularity of some of his contemporaries, particularly Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, and Miles Davis, all of whom were Robinson’s friends. (It’s worth mentioning that Davis was a good enough friend to urge the boxer to retire and stay retired long before Robinson actually did quit the ring.)

In other respects, though, Robinson’s story is discouragingly familiar. No matter how many championships he won – and he won five as a middleweight alone – they weren’t enough. In his early forties, Robinson was still  chasing just one more belt, though he was alone in thinking he deserved another title shot. No matter how much money he earned, it wasn’t enough. At the end of his life, he was dependent on “loans” from friends. Finally, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in his early sixties, so he ended up as many boxers do: dazed and confused.

Wil Haygood is an admirer of Ray Robinson, and he makes a convincing case that there is much in the man to admire. When he finally did quit boxing, Robinson devoted a lot of his time and energy to helping disadvantaged children. Though he was, for the most part, an absentee father – Haygood maintains that “fatherhood bewildered him” – Robinson was a cheerful advocate for kids who lacked means and one or both parents, and the one sport he did not allow them to embrace in his facility was boxing. Haygood is also a fine and careful writer, and I agree with his contention that since movies have already been made about Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta, one ought to be made about Robinson. The inclusion of Miles Davis’s music in the soundtrack would be worth a great deal more than the price of a ticket.

The story of this season’s Atlanta Hawks really begins at the end of last season, when they grabbed the final playoff spot in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and then took the eventual champion Boston Celtics to seven games before falling in the first round of the playoffs. This year, Atlanta is off to a strong start, and, as Only A Game’s Ron Schachter reports, the Hawks and their fans are ready to put a decade of basketball futility behind them.

The NFL playoff picture is still a bit cloudy. Can the Cowboys keep it together long enough for a playoff run? Will the Cardinals collapse in the stretch? Can the Patriots overcome the loss of The Brady with the surprising Matt Cassell? Matt Crossman looks into his crystal ball and offers his insights with Bill.

Even in the best ski resorts, there are several months when the powder gives way to mud or the run is completely dry. But, imagine a mountain where you can ski nearly every day of the year, including those 90+ degree days in the middle of summer. Beverly Amsler of member station WVTF in Roanoke, Virginia has the story.

Bill comments on the Ted Williams Auction last week.

Bill Littlefield and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce discuss: the NFL’s Thanksgiving day turkeys, LeBron’s big welcome to the big apple, and Charlie’s greatest disappointment.

In his new book, Four Kings, George Kimball writes of Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran that “they didn’t set out to save boxing from itself in the post-Ali era. But they did.” George Kimball joins Bill to discuss his new book.

Old Holyfield will fight again.

In 2004 he performed so poorly in a lopsided loss to a fighter named Larry Donald that the New York State Athletic Commission suspended Old Holyfield’s license, declaring him medically unfit to compete. This meant he could no longer fight anywhere in this country.

The grounds for that suspension were changed from “medical” to “administrative” a year later. A skeptic might be forgiven for assuming money changed hands.

To argue that Old Holyfield is ready for competition would seem to be a stretch. He has been inactive since losing badly to somebody named Sultan Ibragimov a little over a year ago. He has lost four title fights since 2000. He has won none.

This is not to suggest that Old Holyfield’s life has lacked excitement. Last month he was threatened with jail time for failing to make various child support payments. In fairness to Old Holyfield, he has fathered five children in partnership with four women to whom he wasn’t married. The accounting must be challenging.

Last spring, following reports that he might lose his one hundred nine room mansion to a bank which has since gone under – not, perhaps, solely because one of its clients was Old Holyfield – the ex-champ claimed he was “not broke.” He maintains that he’ll be fighting next month in Switzerland only because he wants to become the heavyweight champion again.

Can you name the man Old Holyfield will have to beat to achieve that distinction?

Until I started reading about Old Holyfield this week, neither could I.

The current WBA Heavyweight Champ is Nikolai Valuev. He is seven feet tall, and he weighs three hundred thirty pounds – about one hundred pounds more than Old Holyfield. Of his defense against Old Holyfield, Mr. Valuev, who, wisely, has already begun a second career in the movies, said this week, “Ten years ago I would not have dreamed of getting into the ring with this champion.”

This suggests that Mr. Valuev is a thoughtful fellow. Or perhaps – unlike Old Holyfield – he is managed by thoughtful fellows.

Bill Littlefield reviews a very different boxing book by Bob Halloran.

Most books about boxers are about champions.

Micky Ward, the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts and the boxer about whom Bob Halloran writes in Irish Thunder, won something called the WBU Light Welterweight Championship, but Halloran acknowledges that the distinction was "fourth on the list" of the five light welterweight titles circulating among Ward and his peers like so much comically inflated currency. According to Halloran, Ward’s achievement had less to do with gaudy championship belts and national acclaim than with the determination and resilience that characterized the boxer’s long career.

Halloran quotes boxing analyst Larry Merchant, who claims "guys like Micky Ward are the heart and soul of the sport." By this he means that Ward delighted fans who valued toughness. He would continue fighting after he’d sustained cuts that would require dozens of stitches to close, or after he’d suffered shots to the head that left him seeing two or three opponents instead of just one.

Whether that sort of behavior is heroic or stupid depends on one’s point of view. Halloran argues that Ward, most of whose family members were at best chronically irresponsible, at worst drunk, stoned, or in jail, could not rise from the chaos of his origins by any means other than boxing. That’s the rationale that has led an awful lot of young men with no money into brain-damaged middle age. Halloran acknowledges that although Ward maintains that a CAT scan toward the end of his career "didn’t show nothing wrong," dementia is still a real possibility. On the positive side, Ward did retire from boxing with enough money to buy himself a house in Lowell and start a business or two. But back on the negative side, the older brother who’d given up crack cocaine to help with Ward’s career went back to drugs when the fighter hung up his gloves.

At one point after he’s described a tough fight Ward won, Halloran characterizes the fighter as "the best thing to happen to Lowell since, well, maybe forever." Fans of the Lowell Folk Festival or the Lowell Spinners and readers of Jack Kerouac may not agree, but writing about boxing has often been inclined toward hyperbole.

All three fights occurred after Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 and prevented from boxing for three years, while the courts tried to figure out whether he had a legitimate claim to the status of conscientious objector.

Frazier had won the first fight in 1971. Ali had come back to beat him in 1974.

When Ali returned to the ring in 1970, even those in charge of promoting him as invincible and pretty acknowledged privately that he’d lost some of the quickness that had enabled him to avoid getting hit. Thirty years ago today, he was hit so hard and so often — at least 440 times according to some accounts – that when the fight was over, Ali described the experience as the closest thing he had ever known to death.

The story of the so-called “Thrilla in Manila,” the third Ali-Frazier fight, receives a lot of attention in a new book by Thomas Hauser, The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali. Hauser’s stated purpose is to provide a full and accurate portrait of a man he admires to the point of worship. He’s dismayed by the extent to which Ali’s image has been subverted and used by people trying to sell everything from computer operating systems to jingoism. He wants to reassert Ali’s power as an image of triumph for people who, according to Hauser, found in him not just a symbol, but a savior; and to demonstrate that even now the damaged former champion’s ability to lead the way to a more tolerant and peaceful world would be undiminished if he hadn’t been co-opted by marketers.

But what seems to me more compelling in Hauser’s book is the indictment of boxing that seeps between the seams of the celebrations of Ali’s grace, power, and potential. Ferdie Pecheco, for many years the doctor in Ali’s corner, said of the fight in Manila that Ali “took a beating like you’d never believe anyone could take,” and he continued fighting for six more years. Before he stepped into the ring against Larry Holmes in 1980, the result of the punches Ali had taken was evident and sad. Barry Frank, who was promoting the former champion’s commercial projects, remembered for Hauser that sometimes when Ali would stand up out of a chair, he’d have to take a step to find his balance. The people handling the boxing end of Ali’s business interests can’t have failed to notice that. And yet he fought, and fought again.

Whatever Thomas Hauser might have intended in “The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali,” the lasting image in the book is less of an icon corrupted by commercialism than of a quick and dazzling man beaten to dizziness and silence by a sport that’s no less damaging now than it was when it reminded Muhammad Ali himself of death 30 years ago today.

Writer Ishmael Reed insists that “writin’ is fightin.’ Well, by Reed’s definition that would make A. J. Liebling not only a great fighter, but the undisputed champion of writing about fighting. The greatness of his stories on boxing isn’t simply rooted in his encyclopedic knowledge and unstinting curiosity. Boxing is a brutal sport, but Leibling is all finesse.

For him, the page was an inky fight ring: in the space of a paragraph Leibling turns from heavyweight to flyweight and back, peppering readers with a variety of socko sentences: sardonic feints, instructional asides, and horse laugh hammer blows. For example, check out a sampling of his nifty moves in piece on Joe Lewis’s 1951 fight against Joe Savold:

“A couple of times it looked like as if Louis was trying for a knockout, but when Savold didn’t come apart, Louis returned to jabbing. A man somewhere behind me kept saying to a companion, ‘I read Savold was a tricky fighter. He’s got to do something!’ But Savold didn’t until late in the fifth round, by which time his head must have felt like a sick music box.”

Images such as these are why “The Sweet Science” is a classic work of journalism that just happens to be about sports. You don’t have to care a whit about boxing to want to sit ringside with Liebling, who was as enamored with the life around the ring as with the boxing matches themselves.

Most of “The Sweet Science” deals with boxing when it was going into decline in the early 1950’s. Once television began to dictate its economics, the once glamorous sport sank into seedy obscurity. For Liebling, boxing cranked out sluggers like Rocky Marciano rather than boxers like Joe Lewis. Liebling’s brilliance is that he filters this decadence through a tongue-in-cheek, yet reverent, memory of the fabled past. Unfortunately, Liebling died in 1963, before Cassius Clay became a champion. Still, he wrote about the young fighter’s talents as a boxer and a wordsmith.

The pages of “The Sweet Science” are crowded with amusing, linguistically challenged characters, from fast talking trainers and managers to deranged fans. A writer for three decades at “The New Yorker,” Liebling excelled at sympathetic but savvy yarns about real life petty con men, the city’s underground of hucksters and hawkers. Perhaps that explains why Liebling’s writing escapes the sins of sports writing today: cynicism, sentimentality, and hyperbole. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science” is one of the finest sports books ever written because it combines the innocent passion of a fan with the hard-boiled scrutiny of a detective.

– commentary by Bill Marx

If there is, Bill Heinz probably smiled at that irony when he was welcomed into the Boxing Hall of Fame earlier this month, though his health prevented him from attending the ceremony in person.

According to the hall’s publicists, Mr. Heinz qualified for enshrinement because he wrote brilliantly about boxing. But the fact is that Bill Heinz wrote brilliantly about what it’s like to be alive on the planet. Boxing was one of many beneficiaries of Bill’s curiosity, his sense of humor, his exceptional ear, and his determination to tell stories worthy of the people who did him the favor of intriguing and delighting him.

Baseball was another beneficiary and so was horse racing. War, too. With a surgeon who’d served in Korea, Bill Heinz co-wrote the novel mash under the pseudonym Richard Hooker.

I had the good fortune to meet bill several years ago when Da Capo Press reissued some of his books, which had been out of print for years. Among the works was a 1958 novel entitled “The Professional,” which is set in boxing. “The Professional” ends in a defeat that seems surprising and unfair. The first time I talked with bill in person, I asked him if he’d been tempted to write a more cheerful ending.

“No,” he told me, “because that’s not the way it happens.”

I don’t watch boxing. I think the fact that this week Mike Tyson, 38, was once again licensed to fight in New Jersey is only the most recent bit of evidence that the alleged sport is foul in its appeal, thoroughly corrupt, and brutal beyond sensible tolerance. But if news of the induction of Bill Heinz into the Boxing Hall of Fame encourages somebody to read something Bill wrote, the result will justify the existence of the place, and it’ll have to serve until somebody puts together a writers’ hall of fame and plunks Bill Heinz into that.

When that happens, the odds are excellent that Mr. Heinz won’t take the honor — or himself — seriously. I suggest this because a couple of months ago, after I’d sent him a postcard featuring a painting by Paul Gauguin, bill wrote in reply: “I like Gauguin, too. He was another guy who knew how to beat the old 9-5.”

Much of the most striking and powerful material in the book relates to Tyson. His descent into lunatic excess and self-parody has been public, of course, but reading Hauser’s summaries of various episodes in Tyson’s decline will remind readers how sad and vulgar it has been. It may also make them wonder why so many people paid so much attention to Tyson for so long, rather than collectively recognizing years ago that he was a dangerous, damaged and pathetic man who needed to be separated from people he would harm (most of them women) and saved from himself and from Don King.

Boxing is a thoroughly discouraging business built on the willingness of fighters to absorb punishment that can lead to brain damage, blindness, and death for the entertainment of paying customers. Even Thomas Hauser, who is a dedicated fan, acknowledges that the people who run the business are callous at best and thoroughly crooked at worst, and that the governing bodies charged with making sure that fighters are protected from promoters are utterly ineffectual. About the only excuse for boxing – and I’m not at all sure that it’s sufficient – is that the “sport” has generated some good writing.