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The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
Free Press
September 2012
On Sale: September 18, 2012
336 pages
ISBN: 0743286359
EAN: 9780743286350
Kindle: B0061QATOY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
FRANK SINATRA FAWNED OVER HIM. WARREN ZEVON WROTE A
TRIBUTE SONG. Sylvester Stallone produced his life story
as a movie of the week. In the 1980s, Ray “Boom Boom”
Mancini wasn’t merely the lightweight champ. An adoring
public considered him a national hero, the real
Rocky. From the mobbed-up steel city of Youngstown,
Ohio, Mancini was cast as the savior of a sport: a righteous
kid in a corrupt game, symbolically potent and
demographically perfect, the last white ethnic. He fought
for those left behind in busted-out mill towns across
America. But most of all, he fought for his father. Lenny
Mancini—the original Boom Boom, as he was called—had
been a lightweight contender himself. But the elder
Mancini’s dream ended on a battlefield in November 1944,
when fragments from a German mortar shell nearly killed him.
Almost four decades later, Ray promised to win the title his
father could not. What came of that vow was a feel-good
fable for network television. But it all came apart
November 13, 1982, in a brutal battle at Caesars Palace in
Las Vegas. Mancini’s obscure Korean challenger, Duk Koo Kim,
went down in the 14th round and never regained
consciousness. Three months later, Kim’s despondent mother
took her own life. The deaths would haunt Ray and ruin his
carefully crafted image, suddenly transforming boxing’s
All-American Boy into a pariah. Now, thirty years
after that nationally televised bout, Mark Kriegel finally
uncovers the story’s full dimensions. In tracking the
Mancini and Kim families across generations, Kriegel exacts
confessions and excavates mysteries—from the killing of
Mancini’s brother to the fate of Kim’s son. In scenes both
brutal and tender, the narrative moves from Youngstown to
New York, Vegas to Seoul, Reno to Hollywood, where the
inevitably romantic idea of a fighter comes up
against reality. With the vivid style and deep
reporting that have earned him renown as a biographer,
Kriegel has written a fast-paced epic. The Good Son
is an intimate history, a saga of fathers and fighters,
loss and redemption.
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