James Lawton – författare

Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year 2015Sometimes you love a football team not only for their strengths, the splendour of their play and the appealing thrust of their character, but also the haunting possibility that their best hopes may never be fulfilled. This has rarely been demonstrated so vividly as by the Manchester City team who briefly, but unforgettably, illuminated the late sixties. And no one was more caught up in their struggles and their triumphs than James Lawton, a young sportswriter starting out on a career that would take him to all the great events of world sport. Yet still, 50 years after Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison began to shape the brilliant team, he counts watching their rise to glory as one of the most exciting times of his professional life.Francis Lee, Colin Bell, Mike Summerbee - these players loomed large over the game as they charged at the peaks of English football, and today evoke a period of the sport''s history that seems distant and unknowable, hard to see except through the rose-tinted gloss of nostalgia.Lawton goes back to those heroes, interviewing all the main players and characters who are still alive, and vividly brings to life the story of that City team which with such wonderful panache, and freedom, won the first division title, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the European Cup Winners Cup between 1967 and 1970.This, though, is not just the story of one team, but a broader one of how sport can sometimes so perfectly mirror the exaltation and the despair of the real world, how it carries those who do it, and sometimes even those who merely see it, to moments that will claim a permanent place in their hearts.

A luminous account of the most compelling and climactic phase of boxing''s long history.For three decades at the end of the twentieth century – throughout boxing''s most engrossing era – James Lawton was ringside, covering every significant bout, spending time with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hitman Hearns, Roberto Duran, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and many other great fighters.Lawton found himself captivated by the sport as he followed it around the world. From a big fight''s initial announcement, through the fighters'' punishing training regimes, the overblown press conferences and dramatic weigh-ins, up to the bout itself and its savage fall-out – Lawton observed and absorbed it all, grateful for the remarkable access he was afforded. He witnessed Ali screaming in pain for his dressing-room lights to be turned out after a fight; he was there to meet Tyson at the prison gates on his release in 1992; he listened as former champions wept while struggling to find their new place in the world.As part of a small, tight-knit group of sportswriters with the privilege of covering each fight in such intimate detail, Lawton formed lifelong friendships and found himself forever altered by being caught up in the whirlwind of a sport at its most spellbinding.A Ringside Affair brings that brilliant epoch back to life – and puts it in the perspective it deserves. It salutes the epic quality of boxing''s last years of glory, retraces arguably the richest inheritance bequeathed to any sport, and speculates on the possibility that we will never see such fighting again. It is part celebration, part lament, but perhaps most of all it is a personal record of some of the most enthralling and challenging days produced by the world''s oldest sport.