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In his latest collection of boxing writing, “Winks and Daggers” (The University of Arkansas Press; $24.95), Thomas Hauser provides his signature, last-word treatment of nine fights from 2010. Of those nine events, only three happen after June. That absence of coverage, the lack of eventfulness it reports, might just be the best metaphor in Hauser’s new book.

Last year was likely better than this year, but the outsized hope that greeted 2010 made it a disappointment. That is, 2010 began with serious talk of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao making a historic match in Cowboys Stadium; 2011 began in frozen and defunct Pontiac, Mich., with Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander accidentally fouling one another.

Hauser was not in Michigan 10 months ago, wisely enough, but he was in Texas, New Jersey, New York and Nevada in 2010. “Winks and Dagger” opens with a ringside and dressing-room account of the Manny Pacquiao versus Joshua Clottey event that happened in March 2010 at Cowboys Stadium, a happening about which promoter Bob Arum said, “This is going to be one of the biggest events in the history of boxing.”

Well. Today, future prizefighting events in Cowboys Stadium warrant nary a consideration. Hauser does boxing historians a favor by putting promotional statements made by men like Arum and Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer on the public record. It is important that such proclamations be held to account.

Arum’s words about boxing’s debut in Cowboys Stadium were indeed hyperbolic but not nearly far-flung as they appear today. They have not aged well because boxing has not aged well. In February 2010, our sport was generally disappointed that negotiations for a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight had collapsed but still hopeful the fight would be made in the fall, with Cowboys Stadium set to break domestic attendance records.

Reading the opening 100 pages of “Winks and Daggers” brings a feeling near nostalgia. No longer would major prizefighting be seen in casino settings only by moneyed hotel guests but enjoyed instead by the masses in stadiums! Hauser captures this hopefulness well, a hopefulness that endured through May when Floyd Mayweather made his consolation bout with Shane Mosley.

Later in “Winks and Daggers,” Hauser writes of the PED controversy that ruined Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations and also of Mayweather’s bizarre behavior during the lead-up to Pacquiao’s November 2010 match with Antonio Margarito. There’s an urgency even in the title of Hauser’s “Floyd Mayweather Jr: When is Enough?” piece; Hauser writes at Mayweather more than about him, with a ferocity usually reserved for HBO Sports executives.

Much of Hauser’s ferocity toward Mayweather has now been replaced by indifference. Hauser recently led a treatment of Mayweather’s latest match by reporting:

“There came a time about a month ago when I tuned out Mayweather vs. Victor Ortiz. I didn’t read the conference-call transcripts. I didn’t go to Las Vegas for the fight. I didn’t buy the pay-per-view.”

That is Mayweather’s loss, not Hauser’s.

The writing in “Winks and Daggers” is customarily crisp. In what is probably his finest treatment of 2010, Hauser journeys to San Antonio to cover Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. versus John Duddy in what turned out to be Duddy’s final fight. Duddy is one of Hauser’s favorite subjects, and there’s something delightful and unexpected about the way Duddy as a subject brings Hauser’s prose alive. All the other Hauser marks – unique anecdotes, exhaustive sourcing, experimentally placed semicolons – can be found in Hauser’s other eight fight treatments, of course, from Yankee Stadium to Madison Square Garden to Boardwalk Hall, but some of his wittiest writing concerns Alamodome, and Judge Jurgen Langos’ scoring of Chavez Jr.-Duddy in June 2010:

“The most charitable explanation for Langos’s scorecard is that Jurgen was tired after his long trip from Germany and might have had trouble concentrating on the fight. State athletic commissions in the United States should make a point of sparing him the burden of similar trips in the future.”

Finally, there is Hauser’s sharp criticism of what can now be called the former regime at HBO Sports. Along with Steve Kim, Hauser has written insightful and important analyses of HBO Sports for years. Hauser’s 2010 contribution, “HBO and the State of Boxing,” is no exception.

Hauser’s methods of prying open the inner workings of HBO have been criticized occasionally by other writers but none so persuasive as Tim Starks, whose writing about Hauser’s use of anonymous sources has offered an ongoing, good-faith critique. In its way, such criticism is an honor; Starks chooses Hauser because of his stature.

In an excellent book about reporters on the campaign trail of 1972, “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse offers two ideas about covering President Nixon that might be instructive here:

“Conjecture was a necessary tool in cracking the secretiveness of the Nixon Administration” . . . “the press needed some new form of journalism to deal with the obscurantism and dissimulation of the White House.”

“Secretiveness”, “obscurantism” and “dissimulation” are prevalent enough in boxing that they’d make a good title for Hauser’s 2011 collection. Very few honorable persons in our beloved sport speak uncomfortable truths on the record. Internet writing about boxing, for all its flaws, has likely flourished because, in its comfort with anonymity and conjecture, it is possibly the very “new form of journalism” Crouse called for.

Hauser’s writing, in other words, consistently beats the hell out of traditional media sources that disseminate publicists’ inflated claims as fact.

As for internet writing about boxing today, disinterested funding is gone. Most independent sites’ dwindling revenue comes from promotional companies’ advertisements. One promotional company owns a prominent site. Hauser himself has published pieces on a different promoter’s site in 2011.

Boxing may not be a dying sport, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine how it would look different if it were.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

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