It’s Tony Day, not just because Joe’s book has garnered some good reviews — “the only excuse for the continued existence of boxing is that its battles have occasioned some of the best writing any sport has ever inspired” — or because he likes telling the story. It’s Tony Day because “Galento [is] a champion of everyone who’s ever gotten in over his head, shrugged, and said ‘What the hell? I’ll give it a shot.’”

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Tony Day is June 28th, but today is the day I received my copy of Joe Monninger’s latest work, Two Ton: One Night, One Fight — Tony Galento v. Joe Louis.

I learned a lot about the characters and times during the two years of research Joe invested in the book, but other than sneaking peaks at the manuscript, I’ve not had a chance to learn the whole story of how Tony Galento ended up in the ring against Joe Louis — and knocked him down.

Beetle-browed, nearly bald, a head that rode his collarbones like a bowling ball returning on rails, his waist size more than half his five-foot-eight height, Two Ton Tony Galento appeared nearly square, his legs two broomsticks jammed into a vertical hay bale. By all measures he stood no chance when he stepped into the ring against the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, the finest heavyweight of his generation, in Yankee Stadium on a June night in 1939. “I’ll moida da bum,” Galento predicted, and though Louis was no bum, Tony, the Falstaff of boxing, lifted him from the canvas with a single left hook and entered the record books as one of the few men to put the great Louis down. A palooka, a thug, a vibrant appetite of a man, he scrapped his way out of the streets and into the brightest light in American life. For two splendid seconds he stood on the canvas at Yankee Stadium, the great Joe Louis stretched out before him, champ of the world, the toughest man alive, the mythical hero of the waterfront, of Orange, New Jersey, of an American nation little more than a year away from war. Joe Monninger’s spellbinding portrait of a man, a moment, and an era reminds us that sometimes it is through effort, and not the end result, that people most enduringly define themselves.

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Will pressed Joe, asking him to name his top ten favorite books. Joe pressed back, saying such lists were ridiculous, but still, sometime later he emailed with the following:

Okay, here are the books that got to me at certain points in my life. Not sure I would view them all the same now, but this is a list of sorts.

I found this an interesting challenge, and of course impossible…I have more lists but I stuck to novels…

Top ten novels by female authors

• The Golden Notebook
• Cross Creek
• We Took to the Woods
• Pride and Prejudice
• Member of the Wedding
• Secret History
• Middlemarch
• Song of the Lark
• The Fountainhead
• The Good Earth

Top ten novels by male authors

• War and Peace
• A River Runs Through It
• Crime and Punishment
• As I Lay Dying
• Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
• The Magus
• The Deptford Triology
• Lonesome Dove
• A Fan’s Notes
• Light Years

Joe Monninger, Joseph Monninger, best, books, top ten

In the two years Joe spent researching and writing Two Ton: One Night, One Fight — Tony Galento v. Joe Louis I’ve heard a lot about this guy. Tony Galento was a most improbable opponent for Louis, who by then had regained the world heavyweight title from Max Schmeling, but Joe’s description tells it best:

Beetle-browed, nearly bald, a head that rode his collarbones like a bowling ball returning on rails, his waist size more than half his five-foot-eight height, Two Ton Tony Galento appeared nearly square, his legs two broomsticks jammed into a vertical hay bale. By all measures he stood no chance when he stepped into the ring against the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, the finest heavyweight of his generation, in Yankee Stadium on a June night in 1939. “I’ll moida da bum,” Galento predicted, and though Louis was no bum, Tony, the Falstaff of boxing, lifted him from the canvas with a single left hook and entered the record books as one of the few men to put the great Louis down. A palooka, a thug, a vibrant appetite of a man, he scrapped his way out of the streets and into the brightest light in American life. For two splendid seconds he stood on the canvas at Yankee Stadium, the great Joe Louis stretched out before him, champ of the world, the toughest man alive, the mythical hero of the waterfront, of Orange, New Jersey, of an American nation little more than a year away from war. Joe Monninger’s spellbinding portrait of a man, a moment, and an era reminds us that sometimes it is through effort, and not the end result, that people most enduringly define themselves.

On this night — June 28, 1939 — Two-Ton Tony became the second man to knock down Joe Louis. The book comes out in November.

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My friend Joe loved his chickens, though a fox did them in this last fall. He’d planned to leave the coop empty for the winter and start fresh in the spring, but his surfing lead him to mail order chickens (adoption card pictured above).

So…what better a gift for a friend than a chicken by mail? And what better a gift to the world than trade justice?

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