The Italian stallions

The Italian Stallions is a celebration of another time in the history of North American society, and, by extension, of North American sport. It is also a tribute to the classic rags-to-riches tale of the new immigrant, told through the rich stories of a band of Italian-Americans who, for the middle third of the 20th century, held sway over the national sporting psyche in a way perhaps no other single ethnic group ever has. In the 1930s 1940s and 1950s, the nation was obsessed with two major sports, baseball and boxing. It was, as acclaimed author Thomas Hauser proposes in his introduction to The Italian Stallions, a time When Boxing Mattered. Nowhere was this more evident than New York city, the Mecca of the fight game, where Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Madison Square Garden played host to most world title fights, but also where no fewer than 22 neighborhoods gave birth to local fight clubs. Those neighborhoods were cauldrons of desperation, but also of opportunity; one, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, spawned two men, Thomas Rocco Barbella and Giacobe LaMotta, who would not only become middleweight champions of the world but whose stories were so compelling that Hollywood featured them in movies starring Paul Newman and Robert DeNiro.