Mee, Bob

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MEE, Bob

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Telegraph Group, Ltd., 1 Canada Sq., Canary Wharf, London E14 5DT, England.

CAREER:

Journalist. Daily Telegraph, London, England, boxing correspondent; Boxing News, assistant editor; Independent on Sunday, London, England, writer; ITV, London, England, production; Sky Sports, Isleworth, England, production.

WRITINGS:

(With Steve Bunce) Boxing Greats: An Illustrated History of the Ring, Courage Books (Philadephia, PA), 1998.

(With Mickey Duff) Twenty and Out: A Life in Boxing, HarperCollins Willow (London, England), 1999.

Bare Fists: The History of Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting, HarperCollins Willow (London, England), 2000, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2001.

Also coauthor of Lords of the Ring with Peter Arnold.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bob Mee has been covering the British and international boxing scene for over twenty years, as an assistant editor for Boxing News, a writer for the Independent on Sunday, and most recently the boxing correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Along the way he has written and cowritten several boxing books, including histories and biographies.

Several of Mee's book projects are survey histories, such as Boxing Greats: An Illustrated History of the Ring with Steve Bunce and Lords of the Ring with Peter Arnold. Mee also helped colorful fight promoter Mickey Duff pen his autobiography, Twenty and Out: A Life in Boxing. The New Statesman's Tony van den Bergh praised Mee for pulling off "a minor miracle in somehow corralling Mickey Duff's avalanche of words into a disciplined order" and "captur[ing] the atmosphere of this miscalled noble art, with its tang of cigar smoke, wintergreen and cheap cigarettes."

Mee set out on his own in 2001 with Bare Fists: The History of Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting, a meticulously researched history of the sport from the early 1700s until the arrival of the Marquis of Queensberry rules in the late 1800s. Mee also briefly examines bare-knuckle fighting in the twentieth century, as the brutal sport went underground in the age of gloves. Wes Lukowsky, writing for Booklist, delighted in Bare Fists's tales of the ring's colorful figures and marathon bouts, calling the book "a vivid chronicle of the freewheeling bare-knuckle era." A contributor for Kirkus Reviews appreciated the book's "wildly inclusive" historical detail, but found fault with Mee's prose, noting that the "300-year history is too lackluster," and "too often … reads like a telephone directory." A Publishers Weekly critic also found the "well-researched, blocky accounts" of the fights and fighters compelling, but noted that Mee's "enthusiasm and devotion" to his subject probably will not win over those uninterested in the sweet science.