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Title: “Boxing’s Best Short Stories”

Editor: Paul D. Staudohar

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Price: $24

No sport has a richer short story tradition than boxing, and Staudohar has assembled 22 of the best, many holding up splendidly over the span of a century.

Two that stand out are O. Henry’s “The Higher Pragmatism,” written in 1909, and Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak,” also published in 1909, written when London was in Sydney, Australia, covering the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns heavyweight title fight.

Other boxing heavyweight writers included are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Croxley Master”), James T. Farrell (“Twenty-Five Bucks”), Damon Runyon (“Bred for Battle”), Paul Gallico (“Thicker than Water”), Irwin Shaw (“Return to Kansas City”), Ellery Queen (“A Matter of Seconds”), Nelson Algren (“He Swung and He Missed”), and Ring Lardner (“Champion”).

“The Higher Pragmatism,” only 2 1/2 pages, is capped by a patented O. Henry (Real name: William Sidney Porter) surprise ending. It’s about a middleweight, who serves up this line, commenting on his street-fighting prowess: “If I’d only had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best men outside it, I’d be wearing black pearls and heliotrope socks today.”

London’s “A Piece of Steak” is about an over-the-hill heavyweight, Tom King, so poor his wife and two children go to bed hungry so he can have a prefight meal of bread and gravy.

One line: “Ah, the piece of steak would have done it! He had lacked just that for the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of steak.”