The sweet science and a whole lot more

Boxing was his passion, but George Kimball's interests embraced all of life. JOHNNY WATTERSONreports

LEGENDARY Irish Timescolumnist and award-wining American sportswriter George Kimball died at home in New York on Wednesday. He was 67.

Kimball, who was also a poet, counter-culture and anti-war activist, provocateur, raconteur, university drop-out, father and husband, wrote for, among many publications over a long career, Playboy, Rolling Stone,the Boston Heraldand the Boston Phoenix.

He began his association with The Irish Timesin 1997. His final column appeared last week.

Kimball died from oesophageal cancer six years after diagnosis.

Consistent to the end in confounding establishment thinking and fighting conventional wisdom, Kimball lived those last six years to the full and left behind a body of work that belied his illness, including two recent books, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxingand Manly Art,a compilation of boxing-related commentary, criticism, reportage and analysis.

Kimball spent a quarter of a century as a sports columnist for the Boston Heraldand in 1985 was warded the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism from the Boxing Writers Association of America. He covered almost 400 world-title fights over four decades, many of those in Ireland. Kimball was in Dublin for Bernard Dunne's world title fight against Ricardo Cordoba in March 2009, and continued to visit many times since then between heavy bouts of chemotherapy.

He often holed up in Buswells or the Rochestown Avenue Hotel in Dún Laoghaire and could be often found at the European Club playing golf, when health permitted, or chin-wagging with Meath boxing promoter Brian Peters about fighters emerging and departing.

He counted the actor Niall Tobin, musician Finbar Furey, and American writers Thomas Hauser and Hunter S Thompson among his friends.

In 2004, he married his fourth wife, New York psychiatrist Marge Marash. George Foreman officiated at the ceremony.

During his final years, which seemed to have been even more productive than those pre-cancer days, he added to his legacy as a writer of quality and authority. Boxing was his canvas.

In the foreword for At the Fights, Irish novelist Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, wrote: "Boxing. You can press the language out of it." Kimball did just that.

He wrote Four Kings, the definitive work on the series of fights between Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran. He also edited another anthology with John Schulian, The Fighter Still Remains, and published his series of Irish Timescolumns, America at Large.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, one of the first casualties might have been the beloved Lucky Strike cigarettes that, particularly in New York, were seen as perversely unhealthy. But after consultation with his doctors he discovered quitting would have little effect on either his deterioration or recovery. He continued to smoke.

Kimball came of age in the 1960s. He was that callow idealist, vehemently anti-right-wing. Though born in California, he went to school all over America as well as in Germany as his father, ironically, was an army man.

The first of his several arrests took place in the late 1960s in Lawrence, Kansas, where he had attended university. The arresting officer was Rex Johnson, an old-fashioned sheriff with a withered arm and a low tolerance for agitators. A few years later in 1970, Johnson was running again for sheriff and Kimball decided to run against him as the Democratic nominee. “Douglas County Needs a Two-Fisted Sheriff” was his campaign slogan. He got 2,000 of the 16,000 votes.

On another occasion he hit a New York policeman who was refusing to help a sick woman. “Words were exchanged and I slugged him. He was in the wrong and they dropped the charges, but only after I spent a night in the cells and was beaten up by the cops,” he recalled.

Kimball wrote for the Village Voiceand for a while gave his postal address as the Lion's Head.

He produced poetry good enough to appear in Paris Review.

His tastes were catholic. He lived life fully and in the end with enduring candour, humour and clarity. He is survived by children Teddy and Darcy and wife Marge.