Unbeaten

Rocky Marciano accomplished a feat that eluded legendary champions like Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson: he never lost a professional fight. When he retired in 1956, his record was a perfect 49-0.

Unbeaten is the revelatory biography of one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. Marciano rose from abject poverty and a life of petty crime to become heavyweight champion and one of the most famous faces of his era. He dominated boxing in the decade following the Second World War, dispatching every right cross, which he nicknamed the 'Suzie Q'.

But perfection came at a price.

Unbeaten tells the story of Marciano's pursuit of greatness through the era of guys and dolls, hustlers and gamblers, glamorous celebrities and notorious mobsters. But boxing had its dark side, particularly at a time when Mafia mob bosses like Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo wielded immense power behind the scenes.

Marciano retired while still in his prime, weighed down by the mob's influence on the sport he loved. For the last decade of his life, he wandered America, disillusioned, untrusting, hiding his money, cheating on his wife and consorting with the mobsters he had loathed for corrupting his sport, until his death in a plane crash in 1969, the night before his forty-sixth birthday.

Unbeaten is the story of a remarkable champion, a sport that was rotten at its core and a country that may have expected too much from its heroes.