Good Son

From the bestselling author of Pistol and Namath, a vivid, revealing, and fast-paced biography of the great boxer Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini. 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. But it all came apart on 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 fourteenth 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. With the vivid style and deep reporting that have earned him renown as a biographer, Mark Kriegel has written a fast-paced epic. The Good Son is an intimate history, a saga of fathers and fighters, loss and redemption.

"An absorbing blend of psychological drama and fearless reportage, Kriegel deconstructs the sprawling consequences of that fateful day at Caesars Palace, driving at the heart of where the heady romanticism and stark reality of the cruelest sport converge."--Sports Illustrated, Best Books of the Year, "The Good Son is muscular, literary sportswriting at its best, which is what we've come to expect from Mark Kriegel. But it's also much, much more. Here is the story not just of the rise and fall of a great prizefighter from a hard-luck industrial town--rendered, throughout, with tremendous heart--but of fathers and sons, (and brothers), of America's hunger for mythic heroes, of the tragic collision of two lives. It's a slender, yet epic book, as graceful, layered and achingly intimate as the finest novel." --Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning , "A timeless mythic tale of fathers and sons . . . Kriegel's reporting is impeccable, his passion muted but no less heartfelt for that. It takes one hell of a writer--period--to handle so rich a mix of manhood, legacy, and blood sport with such grace."--Scott Raab, Esquire, Best Books of the Year, "As told by Mark Kriegel, the true tale of Boom Boom Mancini is one of blood and spirit, of the ghosts bequeathed from fathers to sons, from pugilists to their progeny. If The Good Son is a sports book, it's the best I've ever read. Either way, in any genre, it is masterful storytelling." --David Milch, "Goes so deep into the history and entanglement of the dysfunctional and violence-based immigrant Mancini family and the men who strived to make their mark within it, that it reads like something Dostoyevsky might have served up, had he been a modern-day sportswriter."-- "Chicago Sun Times"

Mark Kriegel is the author of two critically acclaimed bestsellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich. He is a veteran columnist and a commentator for the NFL Network. He lives with his daughter, Holiday, in Santa Monica, California.