Sports writer George Kimball: My close-up view of boxing's golden age

How many times has a drunk put you in a steely grip and told you that the world wouldn't believe his story, and that, boy, did he have a book to write, and maybe one day he would get round to writing it?

George Kimball, a leading American sports writer for 30 years, who walked out of a bar in Denver nearly two decades ago without realising he'd had his last glass of beer or shot of Scotch, is entirely innocent of such a claim. However, the good news is that in circumstances that would surely have delayed if not dismayed a legion of lesser men with rival claims to a tumultuous life and times, he recently sat down to write his book.

Even more happily for those boxing fans who yearn for great, lost days he settled not on some egocentric ramble back through the years, but detailed recall of what was arguably the sport's age of most concentrated excellence. He has written his book with the authority of a man who followed every step of the Four Kings – Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy "Hitman" Hearns, "Marvellous" Marvin Hagler and Roberto "Hands of Stone" Duran – through the Eighties, when one great fight followed another as seamlessly, it seemed, as did the seasons.

Kimball had plenty of provocation to write another kind of book. He had, after all, rampaged with Hunter S Thompson, who had enlisted him to write for Rolling Stone, partly because he liked his pungent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated style and also because he wanted the editor to know there was someone out there more "fucked up" than himself.

But there was another young Kimball who might have found his way on to the pages of Norman Mailer's classic depiction of a seething, protesting America, The Armies of the Night.

This one almost certainly set back his father's career as a colonel in the US Army when he was frequently jailed for campaigning against the Vietnam war – "he always felt he might have made general without the burden of my FBI file" – and when he fought on the Democratic ticket in a ferociously Republican county against a sheriff, in Kansas, who had a withered arm, he told the electors they needed a "two-fisted lawman". The incumbent won, but many years later conceded, "Kimball wasn't the worst sonofabitch who ran against me."

Kimball once 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 wrote for the fabled Village Voice and for a while gave his postal address as the Lion's Head, a bar frequented by writers and musicians in Greenwich Village and where the young actress-waitress Jessica Lange was one of the more decorative of the creative fauna.

Kimball produced poetry good enough to appear in the Paris Review and when Olympic Press in Paris was publishing English-language editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, it also decided to invest in Kimball's first and only foray into erotic literature, Only Skin Deep, which had as its theme "the adventures of a high school girl in Kansas".

In the prime of his sports-writing Kimball operated in a golden time when you sought out your subjects in bars and on golf courses – on one occasion he separated Leonard from $300 on the Wild Horse Course in Las Vegas – and when men like Muhammad Ali came to your house not for publicity but friendship.

The people George Kimball didn't know on the sports beat were, for his purposes, generally not worth knowing, and those he did would have made it on to anyone's A-list. They included baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, basketball star Larry Bird and record-breaking running back Gale Sayers, an introspective young black man when they shared a dormitory at the University of Kansas.

Kimball, in his mid-sixties, is an apparently psychologically indestructible man who was under no great pressure to write a book, you sensed, because every time you saw him at a big fight or a golf tournament you could see he was still living his way through a boisterous life of undimmed optimism, still chuckling sardonically at the incongruities and pretensions of life and still drawing on a Lucky Strike cigarette.

But then two things happened. First he concluded a retirement deal with the Boston Herald. And then, almost as soon as he had drawn up the strategy for the rest of his life with his third wife Marge, a New York psychiatrist (they were married by his friend George Foreman, the Punchin' Preacher) in their Manhattan brownstone, and with regular travel to the beloved bars of Dublin and golf courses of Ireland and Scotland, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The most recent prognosis promised him six weeks to two years.

He remains, on the surface at least, almost nonchalantly philosophical, and one piece of news is unambiguously cheering. Despite the draining effects of chemotherapy and radiation, despite the need to make sense of what is left to him in a life that was always so unbounded, his book is done and edited and will be published in this country by Mainstream in July.

It is not some self-indulgent account of Thompson's acid blotter or sitting "butt naked" with Di Maggio in a sauna bath or Ali clowning with his children from an earlier marriage. It chronicles the most consistently thrilling decade boxing has ever known. It was one that was utterly self-contained in its brilliance and its hard edge and the certainty that it would always be drawn upon for evidence of what the fight game represented at its competitive best.

Kimball reports: "Over the years I'd saved boxes and boxes of stuff from fights I'd covered, clippings, notebooks etc and I started to write a few lengthy recapitulations of some of those, like 3,000 words, the kind of stuff you couldn't fit into a newspaper. One was Hagler-Hearns, another on Tyson's first fight in Tokyo [against Tony Tubbs], for instance. At some point it occurred to me that I might collect some of these in a book, but when I floated that notion I discovered that boxing in general was considered death in the publishing business and there seemed to be zero interest.

"It then occurred to me that a more specific book, zeroing in on Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and Duran might work better, and the more I thought about it the better I liked the idea. Their nine fights fit neatly into the decade, 1980-89. They'd all fought each other and each of them had beaten at least one of the others. The inception of the pro careers of Hagler, Hearns and Leonard all roughly coincided with the end of the Vietnam War and the era ended with Leonard-Duran III, 10 days before we invaded Panama and burned down Duran's childhood home, and the rest of Chorillo with it."

He had been able to work through most of the effects of his treatment. "There were surprisingly few medical interruptions. When I came through the first round of chemo and radiation it did hit me like a ton of bricks when it was over and it was all I could do to get out of bed. This last February, when I was in the middle of proofing The Four Kings, I wound up in hospital for a couple of weeks and couldn't do much of anything for a month. Fortunately Michael Katz [the distinguished boxing writer and a close friend] and another friend, an editor, Tom Frail, pitched in and covered my ass. If there are any mistakes, I'm blaming them."

You feel bound to ask Kimball if The Four Kings is as much a statement about some of the best of his days as it is a record of great fighters and their achievements and personalities. He says: "It is all of that, and I do feel fortunate to have staked a claim to the subject matter. Pat Putnam could have written a great book about the same subject, so could Katz and a few others including Hugh [McIlvanney]... I'm just glad I got there first"

"I'd love to see Four Kings take its place in the pantheon of sports literature, but as a sports editor once said to Bob [Waters, one of the ringside press table's most colourful characters], after he'd won some award for his boxing coverage: 'Well, that certainly makes you a tall midget.'"

Kimball's reference to Putnam, the late Sports Illustrated writer who became the much-loved doyen of his generation of fight reporters, came just a day or two before shattering news broke across America's fast dwindling population of full-time fight writers. It was the revelation that the stories of service with the US Marines in Korea, and imprisonment in Manchuria, with which Putnam regularly regaled his colleagues, came only from the imagination of a fine writer and a wonderful colleague.

While some turned quite savagely on the memory of Putnam, Kimball immediately wrote a moving defence; not an apology for all the implications of invented heroism, but an argument for the best of a man which still lingered powerfully beyond the meaning of a singular disorder. It was gallantry worthy of the colleague with whom some of the best of the days on the road had been shared.

Kimball has always been a reporter blessed with the precious gifts of clarity of observation and a love of telling detail.

Here he is, in The Four Kings, describing the bedlam that followed Duran's epic first victory over Leonard in Montreal's Olympic Stadium, as ferocious an act of commitment as his "no mas, no mas" surrender in New Orleans later in the year was initially mysterious...

"Both boxers were quickly engulfed in a mass of humanity and cornermen, posses of police and officials poured into the ring. When Duran reached his corner, I saw him suddenly wheel and, pointing to his own genitals, unleash an incomprehensible torrent of Spanish. 'What did Roberto say?' I asked my pal, Jose Torres, the former lightweight champion. 'He was calling Leonard a pussy', said Torres.

"Leonard Gardner (author of Fat City) seemed to think Duran was addressing his remarks to Wilfredo Benitez, while my impression was that he had been looking right at Sugar Ray when he did it. As it turned out, we were both wrong. [The] invective was directed towards Roger Leonard, Ray's brother. 'Right after the bell rang, Roger came charging out of the corner, running straight at Duran', said Ray. Duran responded pretty much the way he had to Pedro Mendoza's wife (when she came into the ring on behalf of her husband). He dropped Roger in his tracks with a single punch."

Kimball spent some time researching another Duran punch, one that, for some, seemed to define his wild, anarchic hauteur.

He writes: "The oft-repeated tale of Duran vs The Horse has so many versions it is difficult to separate fact from legend. In some accounts he was 15, others 16. Ray Arcel would later claim to have witnessed the incident and Arcel, who became his trainer, didn't meet Duran until he was 20. Duran's manager Carlos Eleta later said it had happened in the Panamanian jungle, winning Duran a bet with some workers. What everyone seems to agree on is that Duran scored his equine knockout years before Alex Karras performed the feat in the movie Blazing Saddles... In some versions it was a body shot. In others, Duran dropped the beast with a punch behind the ear."

If Kimball could go back to the best of his sports-writing days it would be no easy choice, though the ringsides of The Four Kings would rank high beside the old Boston Garden, home of the ice-hockey Bruins, and fights, and circuses, and which is still his favourite venue long after they brought in the wrecking balls. He says: "Just wonderful – that smell of old beer and 30-year-old cigars and elephant shit. You could walk in there blindfold and know where you were."

Such odours have permeated the life of Kimball, a big, bearded, relentless man, and the work which will always be a testament to the brilliance of a generation of great fighters – and to someone who had the energy and the courage to get his job done.