Joe Louis's handlers saw to it that he avoided Johnson's mistakes. He was required to be modest in victory, and was never allowed to be photographed with a white woman. Johnson was barred from his training camp. (He had his revenge by indicating how Schmeling could beat the young Louis - which he did.) Louis made black champions res-pectable. Like Ali subsequently, he was a hero to white and black America alike.

The sport has never been honest. Fights have always been fixed. Links with the criminal underworld are part of boxing's cultural history. "Before legalization," Boddy writes, "boxing had largely been controlled by local politicians; afterwards Prohibition bootleggers and gangsters took over ... By the Depression the sport's connection with organised crime was an open secret." For 20 years, the Mafioso Frankie Carbo manipulated boxers' careers and fixed the result of fights in Madison Square Garden. More recently, Don King has been a malign influence on the game.

Despite everything, the sport survives. It has had its fallow periods, and today's is one of them, made absurd by the proliferation of weights and different bodies claiming the right to stage world-title fights. For the first time in my life, I couldn't tell you who is the heavyweight champion, though I could name every one of them and most of their opponents up to Lennox Lewis's retirement. Nevertheless, despite the cruelty and criminality, the barbarism and dishonesty, boxing goes on and new heroes emerge. It does so because it answers to our deep elemental need for drama, for triumph and tragedy.