For a region that thrives on reinvention, it’s striking how many stories still lie hidden in the Catskills. Take the Catskills’ boxing era. If you know it at all, you probably know the shorthand: Cus D’Amato bringing a skinny kid from Brownsville to Catskill and forging the most intimidating heavyweight of the late 20th century. But long before Mike Tyson was doing roadwork overlooking the Hudson River, the mountains of Sullivan County were already humming with the footwork of champions.
Evan Haiman’s new 55-minute documentary, Ringside in the Mountains, digs into that forgotten lineage with the relish of someone who knows he’s stumbled onto a story hiding in plain sight. From the 1930s through the 1990s—the heyday of the Borscht Belt, when the region’s great Jewish resorts were still in their prime—the Catskills doubled as a kind of alpine Fight City USA. Grossinger’s, Kutsher’s, the Pines, the Concord—names that once conjured cream-of-mushroom casseroles, poolside mambo marathons, and tummlers working triple shifts—also hosted the real work of boxing’s golden age.
The film sketches an improbable tableau: world-class prizefighters slipping into hotel gyms between comedians’ sets, heavyweights pounding the bag while vacationers drifted by en route to drinks by the pool, sportswriters hotfooting it up Route 17 for a shot at ringside access without having to file from Vegas. Archie Moore, Emile Griffith, Rocky Marciano—this was their summer office. What baseball had in spring training, boxing found in Liberty, Monticello, and South Fallsburg.
Haiman assembles it lovingly, through archival footage, sun-faded photographs, and interviews with the people who were actually there: fighters who did their miles under the pines, journalists who caught their big stories in between resort buffet lines, historians who’ve been waiting decades for someone to point a camera at the Catskills’ role in the Sweet Science. The film’s argument is gentle but firm: this wasn’t a sideshow. This was the crucible where conditioning got serious, where champions built stamina, where young contenders learned how to carry themselves under pressure—sometimes literally under the watchful eyes of sun-baked tourists in lawn chairs.
There’s a faint glimmer of melancholy in the story, too. The decline of the big hotels is the decline of an ecosystem, sporting and otherwise. Their demolition—some slow, some spectacular—took with it the training grounds that had quietly shaped mid-century boxing. But Ringside in the Mountains threads that loss with something like tenderness. By the time the film reaches the Tyson era, his presence reads not as an anomaly but as the final chapter of a much longer Catskills boxing saga.
Haiman’s documentary doesn’t just revive a lost sports story; it reframes the Borscht Belt itself. Not as kitsch, not as punchline, but as a place where grit and glamour once shared the same hotel parquet. In restoring that history, the film gives the mountains back one of their strangest, most compelling legacies—and reminds us that the Catskills have always been more than what we think they were.
Ringside in the Mountains will screen at the Hurleyville Performing Arts Center on November 29 at 8pm. For more information, email bakerstreetprods@gmail.com.
Had the pleasure of seeing the documentary and I have say it was fantastic.!!! He must see for any boxing enthusiast! Very informative and very entertaining. I would highly recommend!