Four Kings: The intoxicating and captivating tale of four men who changed the face of boxing from award-winning sports writer George Kimball

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The book's highlights lie in the nuanced insights gleaned from conversations with key figures in the fighters' lives. She has been reporting on celebrity and entertainment news since 2008 and is a former Senior Editor at entertainment site Zap2It. The reality is the fighters he fought who handed him losses via KO/TKO were downright ferocious, powerful punchers. Besides the four key fighters, Kimball dishes out wonderful anecdotes about various other competitors, managers, promoters, trainers, and general interlopers. Despite knowing it will not settle the debate, I don’t think it ever could be, BoxingGuru has decided to put together a scoring system that ranks Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Ray Leonard, and against attributes any boxer needs to become as legendary as them.

Leonard was the WBC champion while Hearns was the WBA, at a time when holding those two titles was all it took to be undisputed. The image of him sitting in his room for hours before fights building up his psyche is intense and harsh.

You see, being a king isn’t about personal glory; it’s about using your influence and power to make a positive impact on the world. Boxing has garnered a certain level of unpopularity in some circles due to the brutality of the sport (after all, some die in the ring) but honestly the lack of men like Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran bring the demise of the sport before anything else. Kimball obviously knows his stuff and if there's any slight criticism from me it's that the book is very (obviously) American-centric: I felt that Duran was made to seem difficult to understand or know simply because he spoke another language or came from somewhere outside the USA.

In addition to this, his knowledge of when to conserve and exert energy is what saw him ‘steal rounds’ and win significant matches.This was of course, the time of “The Four Kings” – Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvellous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns.