We found this weathered but legible Boxing Illustrated/Wrestling News, a magazine founded by Stanley Weston in 1958, and decided to post it because the cover features Floyd Patterson and Ingo Johansson, two interesting guys we profiled back in December. This issue is from July 1960, and in 1967, Boxing Illustrated/Wrestling News jettisoned its wrestling coverage and went on to become one of the important sports publications of its time.
Boxing had been known as the sweet science for nearly two centuries, but during the 1970s larger than life personalities like Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Norman Mailer, and George Plimpton gave weight to that nickname, imbuing the sport with both emotional impact and intellectual veneer. Ali and Cosell were nothing less than the yin and yang of the sport, two men who seemed to orbit each other like binary stars. Meanwhile, guys like Mailer and Plimpton were the scribes, using their pens to describe unbridled savagery in terms more suited for the Bolshoi ballet.
Boxing Illustrated finally folded in 1995, which is more or less when boxing itself began to lose relevance with the world public as the dynamism inside the ring and the intellectualism outside it both withered. The sport still hasn’t recovered, and with the rise of mixed martial arts, many think it never will. More Boxing Illustrated covers and info here.