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Goethe Would Have Gone To Town On Greg Haugen

Robert Lashley
8 min readNov 27, 2024

Greg Haugen was a race-baiting hero of the Northwest extreme right until his brutal comeuppance against Julio Cesar Chavez. Hating his story now isn’t healthy. Neither is making him a victim-saint.

Tough Man, Anthony Zute’s hagiography of Greg Haugen, barely made a dent outside of Amazon.com. The author’s dark web cliches about the boxer’s “political incorrectness” made no sports fan forget his homophobic outbursts against Hector Camacho and the racial slurs that got him jumped by Roger Mayweather. Zute does Haugen’s xenophobic reputation no favors when, in the first few pages of the book, lists a dozen very different Mexican fighters to defend his thesis that they all fight alike. Most noticeable in this critic’s eyes is the author’s inability to reference Haugen’s impoverished background in anything save to excuse his outrages toward liberal standards of behavior. In short, Tough Man was a perfect tome for the upper class hard right pacific northwestern sports fan who made Haugen the Northwest’s most bankable prize fighter.

I don’t know if it’s a shame, but it engenders some feeling of sadness in this ex-pug, for buried in this swill of shit that was his public persona was a lot that was laudable. A scrapper from some rough sticks in Auburn, Haugen willed himself to be one of boxing’s greatest self-created stories. With a scant…

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Robert Lashley
Robert Lashley

Written by Robert Lashley

Writer. Author. Former Jack Straw and Artist Trust Fellow. The baddest ghetto nerd on the planet.

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