Boxing's Allure.

In many ways boxing in the 1950s had changed little since the era of John L. Sullivan: it was a sport that drew its participants from mostly urban lower-class black, Italian, and Irish neighborhoods—yet was avidly followed by both the poor and the blue bloods. The American public celebrated boxing's champs as the true sports kings, the ultimate athletes competing in the most violent sport. Yet sportswriters and fight fans, who looked to the heavyweight division to determine boxing's king of kings, feared that there was no one fighter among the ranks to assume the lofty place that Joe "The Brown Bomber" Louis had held in the 1940s.

After Joe Louis.

In the immediate post-Louis years Ezzard Charles and Jersey Joe Walcott fought three times for the heavyweight championship, with Walcott taking the crown from Charles in their third fight in...