Donald’s knockout book on boxing is a sporting classic
Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing, by Donald McRae (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price £24.31)
TO complement our weekly sports book reviews, we plan to periodically revisit some of the very best sports writing in a new series of classic sporting titles. We start with Donald McRae’s memorable Dark Trade, first published in 1995.
The most recent revised and updated version appeared in 2019, enabling McRae to draw a thick final line under the lives of the boxers he so eloquently first presented more than a quarter of a century ago.
McRae exposes the harsh brutality of the professional boxing game, revealing the sport in its rawest state by frequently delivering passages with the intensity of thundering body punches, each one designed to remind the reader of the sport’s ultimate purpose.
His description of the brutal Gerald McClennan versus Nigel Benn clash in February 1995 is a fine example, interlinking his responses while watching the fight on television, with verbatim ITV commentary.
Of course, McRae passes his considered opinion with the benefit of hindsight, something which makes Benn’s behaviour in the ring immediately after the fight had ended appear crass. Yet even now, 27 years after the fight, following which McClennan had a blood clot the size of an average man’s fist removed from his brain, McRae’s account adds something extra. It’s as though he followed McClennan from the ring to the hospital and looked over the surgeon’s shoulder as he made the first incision into the boxer’s skull.
McRae’s admiration for boxers is evident throughout Dark Trade, a factor which helped him get close to pugilists including Evander Holyfield, Oscar de la Hoya, Mike Tyson and his favourite, “the sullied star of my boxing world”, James Toney.
McRae’s unique access may have influenced his opinion about the sport, but he continually steps back to reflect upon the state of boxing and the nature of the esteem in which he holds boxers. This, he suggests,
derives from their intensity and bravery, but also from what he calls “that essential vulnerability beneath those hard layers of machismo”.
Ultimately, even the best boxers end up defeated, although some clever ones, Lennox Lewis among them, get out at the top. McRae followed Holyfield up to his fight with Lewis and wishes afterwards that this giant of a man was “saying farewell to boxing rather than just waving goodbye to the tiny group of us who watched his limo glide away into the darkness.” But McRae knows that boxers always want one more fight, a final chance to prove themselves.
Revisiting the pages which established him as an outstanding writer, McRae admits to a “changed relationship” with boxing, acknowledging that the sport’s hold on him has diminished, although you wouldn’t know that from reading Trade.