The one magazine boxing enthusiasts need to get
Bought this for my husband as a birthday gift. The cover photos alone make it worth the price. He reads it cover to cover and loves it!

Great Magazines for True Boxing Fan
The Ring magazine is a treasure of information. Most of the articles are well written and very detailed.

Great, but not undisputed champion
It is hard to be critical of the Ring Magazine, as they have often been the only consistent driving force behind delivering objective boxing news and advocating reform of the sport. Other boxing publications and personalities have come and gone, but the Ring has stayed around & stayed true to its informative, straight-from-the-hip format. Ring Magazine wades through the sea of alphabet organizations, corrupt promoters & under qualified refs to celebrate the sport when it excels and expose it when it fails.

Accolades aside, Ring Magazine is open to critique. First and foremost the Ring and its sister Kappa publications (KO & World Boxing) seem to duplicate their services. With the brevity of issues and content, wouldn't it be easier to condense the three magazines into one? In addition, the "flashback" segments in Ring magazine often seem like filler. Sure, the articles are interesting glimpses at the history of the sport, but simply republishing past articles verbatim seems like a cheap way to fatten the magazine up. Lastly, the price of Ring Magazine is expensive - coupled with the fact that you essentially need to get an additional subscription to receive the "special issues" - you feel as though you are being had. The Ring is a good magazine but it needs to work harder if it wants to be the champ.

WELTERWEIGHTS
Everybody and their Mama seem to jump on the Vernon Forrest Ban Wagon till ( Mr. Noboby ) Ricardo Mayorga woke him up, brought him down to earth, then put him to sleep. The first Mosley fight Forrest flat out won, the second well!!! it really could have gone either way. Forrest signs to fight Mayorga and starts reading the clippings thinking I am a bad ass, then POW he gets his lights put out. I think Mayorga will do it again only around the 10 or 11 round, Forrest will take a little beatin ouch!, like Forrest he came from no where only alot NO WHERE and did just what Forrest did win a belt, a WBC 147 lb Welterweight Championship Belt. Above all it was to add to his WBA Belt that he already owned before even signing to the fight....ok,ok enough anyway when is the Ring going to give him the "Ring Belt" and make him fighter of the year or are they going to make him prove himself over again. To think what Mosley couldn't do in 3 fights Mister Mayorga did in a 1/2 fight.

Expensive and repetitive
First thing to note is that "The Ring" doesn't get you 12 issues anymore. Without much fanfare the "Bible of Boxing" went bi-monthly instead of monthly, adding "The Ring EXTRA" in the other months. Of course, it also *costs* extra; a lot extra even with Amazon's great prices. Yeah, the pages are glossy now, but that's a steep increase over the price from just a couple of years ago that included 12 issues. (They apparently refuse to try to sell ad space other than to a few boxing-specific companies.)

Further, the photographs and anecdotes repeat all the time (expect a Camacho or Duran joke, or both, every issue, and they've been using the same Tyson photos for over three years), and you can count on at least one if not two stories on old, historically irrelevant boxers. (A nod to boxing's graying fanbase no doubt, but that doesn't make 43-17 boxers from the 1940s any more exciting.) Still, credit "The Ring" for explaining its fighter rankings and *usually* remembering that even if it can't be timely because of its format it can be analytical.