On Angelo Dundee, the man who trained Muhammad Ali:

THE BOXING HISTORIAN: Except for a few world champions, the most recognizable face in the history of boxing.

THE BOXING P.R. MAN: More style than substance. Doesn’t really train these fighters. He shows up a few days before a fight, and it’s like an entertainer coming on—it’s show time.

THE FORMER FIGHTER: That’s a lie! He’s the best corner man who ever lived. He was part of me when I fought. We were one. I could see it in his eyes.

In 1809, Tom Molineaux, a freed slave, traveled to London to take on Tom Cribb, the most famous boxer in the world. The fight was, in many ways, the birth of boxing as we know it.

Neil Chamberlain chronicles his three-month tour of Muay Thai boxing camps in Thailand, showing a side of fighting you can’t find on pay-per-view.

But dig deeper and you see something else about Pacquiao that is an unexpected gift. For Asians and Filipinos who were born and live in the West, Pacquiao offers a space where a diasporic people can feel closer to somewhere hardly ever seen. For a few hours they are united with all the other Asians in the world hunkered down in Pacquiao caps, socks and hoodies, trying not to gnaw off the rim of their beer glasses. Pacquiao closes a distance of thousands of miles so that they are at home.

This is the story of Billy Conn, who won the girl he loved but lost the best fight ever.

On Ali’s history in Miami and LeBron’s future:

LeBron James is the same age now that Muhammad Ali was when a jury found him guilty of resisting the draft. That year was the lowest of low points in Ali’s career. He was stripped of his titles and his licenses to box. It would be another seven years before Muhammad Ali would regain the title in Zaire against George Foreman. During those seven years, Ali would grow spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. He left the Nation of Islam, became a Sunni Muslim, apologized for his treatment of Malcolm X, reconciled with fighters he had humiliated (he even called Henry Cooper to compliment him on his left hook), became a philanthropist, and sought out a role as an international advocate of peace. He grew to become one of the most respected and beloved public figures in the world.

Three years before his retirement, boxing had already taken its toll on Arturo Gatti, who died two years ago today:

“Years of pummeling have given Gatti’s features an eerie geometry: His lips are stretched semicircles; his ears, flattened half-ovals; his nose, a mashed isosceles triangle. His eyes are swollen with scar tissue, the skin around them grooved by needles that couldn’t completely mend the ravages of the ring.”

In a ceremony on June 10, Mike Tyson’s Hall of Fame photo and plaque were unveiled. The lead-up to this event—along with a new reality show about Tyson’s intriguing passion for pigeon fancying—has brought him back into the media spotlight. Tyson was the last great popular champion of the twentieth century, the last of what may well have been the age of prominent public boxers, a period that extended from Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali, and saw its denouement with Tyson. Twenty-five years after he roared onto the scene we still speak of Tyson and not James “Buster” Douglas—the man who defeated Tyson—because we are, for some reason, still hungry to understand the particular life that this particular man was fighting for. And we’re still not getting it quite right.

The author chronicles the 2005 Women’s Daily News Golden Gloves.

But a lady fighter is brave. She looks out through her sweaty headgear, stray hairs matted on her cheek, eyes calm and droopy from exhaustion, the black plastic guard bulging in her mouth.