For the celebrated American essayist AJ Liebling, boxing, which he called the sweet science, was of all sports the most starkly revealing of human character. Liebling was fascinated not only by the boxers in the ring but the whole jamboree: the hustlers and dealmakers, the trainers and cutmen, the hangers-on, and especially what Saul Bellow, in a different context, called the “event glamour” of the grandest contests. He loved the human drama and admired the dedication, discipline and exceptional technical ability of the best fighters he observed. What had it cost them to be as good as they were? What risks were they prepared to take?

For Norman Mailer, boxing was a great “twentieth century art”. This was a statement of characteristic bombast – Donald McRae in his new book calls Mailer “the old braggart of American literature” - but one which also captured something of the allure of boxing in an era when it seemed central to the culture rather than being merely peripheral to it as it is today. I used to relish the spectacle of the big fights shown live on the BBC in the 1970s and early 1980s, with Harry Carpenter on commentary duty and Hollywood stars ringside, and when Muhammad Ali claimed to be king of the world long before Donald Trump arrived in the White House.

Mailer wrote a book, The Fight, about the epic 1974 Ali-George Foreman world heavyweight title bout, the so-called rumble in the jungle in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic of Congo), which Ali won after spending much of the contest on the ropes deftly avoiding heavy punches. “Oh my God, oh my God, he’s won the title back at 32!” Carpenter shouted. Thirty-two seemed old for a fighter then.

On his return to New York, Mailer studied a film of the Ali-Foreman fight. “It’s just as if you were to take five pages of Finnegan’s Wake and skim it quickly, that’s analogous to what you get watching a fight once,” he said. “There might be all the excitement of reading it for the first time but you don’t begin to know what the five pages say, you have to study them and study them and study them. And boxers at that standard are working at so many high levels, psychologically, physically, intellectually and also in terms of the emotions, confidence and fear that you really have to study it over and over again…”.

Like Liebling and Mailer before him, McRae has spent a long career as a sports journalist closely studying fights and fighters. He says it was the success of his first, award-winning book on boxing, Dark Trade, that liberated him to become a full-time writer. And now, in his sixties, he has written what he thinks will be his final book about boxing.

The Last Bell is a study in obsession and it is a sad farewell to a sport about which McRae feels increasingly ambivalent because of what he perceives to be its corruption (more fighters are taking performance-enhancing drugs) and criminality (there is a section on the Kinahan Organised Crime Group and its association with various boxers). “Boxing,” Dr Margaret Goodman, founder of an anti-doping unit, says to the author, “is a beautiful sickness”.

The book covers the period from late 2018 to December 2024, when Tyson Fury, the 6ft 9ins self-styled Gypsy King, loses a second undisputed world heavyweight title fight in Saudi Arabia to Alexander Usyk, the supremely skilful Ukrainian, one of “the most accomplished and unconventional boxers in the world”. McRae was ringside in Riyadh. Before returning to boxing on the orders of President Zelensky, Usyk had served in the army after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. He is motivated, as he tells McRae, by more than personal glory and the multi-million-dollar prize funds: he’s a fighting symbol of a beleaguered nation at war. (Zelensky presented Trump with one of Usyk’s championship-winning belts at their disastrous meeting in the Oval Office.)

The book, which is episodic and discursive, begins with the author waking early in the darkness of an English winter morning to watch, via pay-per-view, Fury against Deontay Wilder in Los Angeles, the first of what would be their trilogy of brutal world title fights. Why boxing, why this obsession, McRae keeps asking as if engaged in a continuous process of self-interrogation. One answer is that boxing allows him “to live in the moment”. He has been “unhinged by grief” following the sudden death of his sister, Heather, a few months earlier. The Fury fight, and boxing more generally, “with its primal force and tragic consequences”, offer escape and distraction. The beautiful sickness is taking hold of him again.

McRae knows Fury well and over the years has monitored his rise, his fall, and rise again. In November 2011, he interviewed the boxer before he was famous at home in the “modest bungalow” in Morecambe he shared with his wife and their two children (they now live in a gated mansion and have seven children). Fury talked to McRae about depression and suicide. “One minute I’m over the moon,” he said, “and the next minute I feel like getting in my car and running it into a wall at a hundred miles an hour.” After winning a world title in 2015, Fury withdrew from boxing for three years as he struggled with drugs, alcohol, and grotesque weight gain. But he came back, and seemed unbeatable, until he wasn’t.

For many of McRae’s interviewees boxing offers a “way out of poverty and crime, abandonment and despair”. Fighters speak to him of being prepared to die in the ring. “There’s so much death in boxing,” the American Regis Prograis, a champion fighter and historian of the sport, tells the author. Wilder says, “I risk my life for your entertainment and, as a boxer, you must have the mentality of a killer.”

The Last Bell is shadowed by profound loss: McRae’s aged parents, who live in South Africa, die not long after Heather. And the author is haunted by the fate of a young Haitian American boxer, an articulate doctor’s son called Patrick Day, whom he admires. Day suffered a catastrophic brain injury after being knocked out during a fight at the Wintrust Arena in Chicago in 2019 and died four days later. McRae cannot stop thinking about the futility of Day’s death and seeks out his friends and family as he attempts to understand what motivated the young man to risk his life in the ring when as a graduate other good career prospects were open to him.

Is boxing still the sweet science? There’s nothing sweet about the world portrayed in The Last Bell. The fight game, the author says, is now controlled by Saudi Arabia, and “it is darker than it has ever been”. I seldom watch boxing these days for reasons McRae explores – the corruption, the criminality, the hypocrisy, the fragmentation of the sanctioning bodies, the pay-per-view charges - and yet you finish this powerful and poignant book with renewed admiration for the courage of many of the fighters themselves while being contemptuous of the extravagant circus that surrounds them. When the beauty fades does only the sickness remain?