Award-winning writer Rod Serling revolutionized television with The Twilight Zone. His celebrated career, including bruising bouts with executives over censorship, is rooted in the boxing ring. Beginning with Serling's first ever published piece of work, a four-page boxing story featured in the March 1948 edition of the literary magazine The Antiochian, called "The Good Right Hand" and extending far beyond the Peabody Award winning Requiem for a Heavyweight.
Rod Serling's boxing stories found humanity, poignancy, and pathos, even deep within violent spectacle of boxing. Serling's influence on the genre reverberates through modern big budget blockbuster boxing films like Rocky, Raging Bull, and Million Dollar Baby. Serling scholar and boxing expert Christopher Benedict ventures between the ring lights and the shadow of the screenplay to offer a deftly guided tour through Serling's personal and literary history with the controversial sport, including his time as a boxer in the Army.
Through ten incredible rounds you'll meet a salty cast of pugnacious pugilists and discover the unforgettable stories they inspired Rod Serling to create. The result is a knockout exploration of Serling's literary art and "the sweet science" which we call The Twilight Rounds.
Benedict, Christopher: - Christopher Benedict is a boxing writer, an elector for both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame, a member of The Ring magazine's women's boxing ratings panel, and he served as a contributing archive researcher for the 2023 documentary Right To Fight. Benedict is the author of several boxing books, including Mandatory Eight Count, Hooking Off The Jab, You Can't Smash Stereotypes By Staying in the Neutral Corner, and I'm Not In The Business. I Am The Business. An advocate for women's boxing, his writings on the subject are featured and preserved on the WBAN (Women's Boxing Archive Network) Historical Database, founded and maintained by trailblazing prizefighter Sue 'Tiger Lilly' Fox. Benedict is a member of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. His science fiction, horror, and monster genre writing include, Needs Must When the Devil Drives, a book of essays on horror and sci-fi, which begins with a lengthy look inside Rod Serling's involvement in developing the 1968 film adaptation of Planet of the Apes. In September 2024, he was a featured presenter at SerlingFest: A Serling Centennial, delivering a lecture on his research on Rod Serling's boxing related stories at the Forum Theatre in Binghamton, New York.
Serling, Anne: - Anne Serling serves on the Board of Directors for the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. She is author of the memoir As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling and contributed adaptations of two of her father's scripts to The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories anthology. Anne is the founder and an Editorial Board member of Rod Serling Books, an independent publishing house whose mission is to make his otherwise out of print work available and affordable. "The Big, Tall Wish" (More Stories from the Twilight Zone) and both the original teleplay (collected in Patterns) and movie tie-in novelization for Requiem for a Heavyweight are among them. Visit her at www.anneserling.com
Tyger, Lady: - Lady Tyger Trimiar is a former boxer who broke down gender and racial barriers. After four years of legal battles, Tyger was one of the first three women to be granted professional boxing licenses by the New York State Athletic Commission in 1978. She competed in the first ever women's boxing matches held in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, headlined the inaugural all-female fight card in 1979, and won the Women's World Lightweight Championship. A tireless advocate for women's rights, Trimiar went on a 30-day hunger strike in 1987 to publicize the boxing establishment's discriminatory practices. She was inducted into the International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame (Class of 2016) and International Boxing Hall of Fame (Class of 2021).
