Falling Hard - Softcover

When he was hired as a rookie reporter, Chris Jones looked for a sport to call his own and found boxing: "It was unloved, unclaimed, the abandoned child on the department's stoop". Over the course of the year that followed, the dark trade would creep deeply inside him, set his heart pumping one minute and break it the next, make him stare at violence - in others and inside himself - and dare him not to flinch. In "Falling Hard", Jones shows how he was drawn into boxing's storied, corruption-plagued world. He gets dressed down by Don King; meets the troubled guy who found Evander Holyfield's ear; goes to Muhammad Ali's birthday party; and witnesses Prince Naseem Hamed explode while Mike Tyson implodes. This work is in equal measures victory and defeat - an intoxicating mix that leaves Jones addicted to boxing's special brand of pain.

Chris Jones was born in London's east end in 1973. He has written for the National Post since 1998 and won the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for outstanding young journalists. He lives in Toronto.