Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson.

Thanks for joining us for the 10 Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

My name is Matthew Hennessy, and my guest is Paul Beston. You know Paul is the managing

editor of City Journal, and his new book is called The Boxing Kings, when American heavyweights

ruled the ring. Paul, thanks for joining me. Hi, Matt. When you're talking about the heavyweight

champion of the world, as you are in this book, you're talking about an American most of the time in the 20th century, aren't you? Almost all the time, yeah. And in fact, the book starts late in the 19th century, but it basically covers the whole 20th century, and during that time, they were just a couple of foreign champions,

but almost everyone holding the title was an American. Now, you say in the introduction that you spent

so much time in the library as a kid hunting for books about boxing and checking them out,

that you memorized the Dewey Decimal System classification from boxing books. How did you become

that kid?

Well, I think my poor mother is probably still trying to figure the answer to that.

But, you know, boxing just captured me as a kid.

I was growing up in the late 70s, and it was on television a lot, you know, watching all the traditional usual sports.

But boxing was in its last great heyday

in that time, and it was on television an awful lot. Muhammad Ali was still around, so I was catching

the end of his career and a whole bunch of other great fighters, both in heavyweight and at

lower weights, and something about the individual nature of the sport, I think, just really

attracted me, and that interest drove me to the library and started pulling out these books. And I just started reading about all these guys like Jack Dempsey and Joe Lewis and people who were obviously before my time. I don't want to put you on the spot, but what's the Dewey's decimal system number for boxing? 796.83. Okay. As far as I know, that's correct. Did you do any boxing? Yeah, I boxed for some years with my older brothers. We never did it in any formal way. I never went to a gym or entered, you know, any competitions. But you punched each other in the face.

But we punched each other in the face.

That's pretty formal.

So, um, so, um, we had, uh, we had a pretty good basement set up for such things,

and we just, uh, started collecting all the various boxing equipment and the gloves and the

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