KU News Release

Author, KU alum George Kimball to visit Oct. 9 for ‘Four Kings’ boxing book events

George Kimball

LAWRENCE — Veteran sports journalist and University of Kansas alumnus George Kimball, author of “Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing,” will visit KU for lecture, reading and book-signing events.

He will do a reading and book signing from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, at Oread Books in the Kansas Union. Also, as part of KU’s Hispanic Heritage Month activities, Kimball will do a book signing and lecture focusing on Latino boxer Roberto Duran at 7 p.m. at the Sabatini Multicultural Resource Center. All events are free and open to the public.

For more than 20 years, Kimball was a sports columnist for the Boston Herald. He lives in New York City and works for ESPN.com, Boxing Digest, Boxingtalk.com and the Irish Times in Dublin. He was a KU student and activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In “Four Kings,” Kimball details the classic internecine battles between Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran that defined their sport. Among them they held 16 world titles. Kimball tells of their interconnected lives and careers as well as the backstories surrounding the personalities and activities in and out of the gym.

Among Kimball’s numerous writing awards are the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism from the Boxing Writers Association of America. Reviews, including those from Sports Illustrated and other publications in the United States and abroad, have consistently praised “Four Kings” as a classic boxing tale that gives the sport’s last golden era in the 1980s the book it deserves.

Coordinator of Kimball’s visit to Lawrence is Robert Rodriguez, associate director of the McNair Scholars Program in the School of Education and adjunct professor of political science and Latin American studies.

Rodriguez, boxing journalist and scholar, has written “The Regulation of Boxing — A History and Comparative Analysis of Policies Among American States” scheduled for publication later this fall by McFarland & Co. Kimball wrote the foreword for Rodriguez’s book. As a KU student, Kimball lived on the third floor of Joseph R. Pearson Hall when it was a residence hall. JRP now houses the School of Education and Rodriguez’s office, also on the third floor.

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