Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter
- ISBN-10
- 0374250472
- ISBN-13
- 9780374250478
- Series
- Rings
- Pages
- 421
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1992
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Author
- Randolph Bates
Description
"In this momentous debut, Randolph Bates finds in the daily lives of one American family the pathos and drama we usually associate with the finest fiction. Rings takes its protagonist Collis Phillips, a Black man who, one generation away from slavery, managed to turn a youth of caddying, shoeshining, and running bootlegged whiskey into a career as a successful boxer in New Orleans during the days of Jim Crow. But by the time Randolph Bates first met him in 1979 Collis Phillips was facing more difficult obstacles. Shot and seriously injured by his own daughter while at the top of his game as a trainer, Phillips had endured the suicide of one son and the long-term incarceration of two others in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the most dangerous maximum-security prisons in the country. Over the next ten years, Bates followed Collis Phillips and his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, not only as a biographer but as a friend. After his firsthand experience of boxing in the gym, Bates watched the Phillipses triumph in the ring; later, he sat at the trials of two generations of Phillips men, and attended the funerals of others, He saw at close range the acute rigors of poverty, racism, and neglect; and he witnessed, too, the strength and resilience of a family that has suffered and survived."--Jacket.
