Creative knockout: Five amazing works inspired by boxers

It wasn't just the camera that was drawn to Muhammad Ali, writers sought him out too.

When Ali and George Foreman travelled to Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974 for a multi-million dollar fight organised by promoter Don King, it wasn't just sports journalists who went to cover the event.

Norman Mailer, the writer best known for World War Two novel The Naked and the Dead, also went with the press pack to see The Rumble in the Jungle at first hand.

Given that Mailer was infamous for possessing the streetwise attitude of a prize fighter and no stranger to violence, it was unsurprising that he was drawn towards the highly-publicised clash between two of the world's best boxers.

His experiences in Zaire were recorded The Fight, a book hailed by the New York Times as "a sensitive portrait of an extraordinary athlete and man, and a pugilistic drama fully as exciting as the reality on which it is based."

The lives of boxers outside of the ring can often attract as much attention as their exploits within it.

Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter was a professional boxer who was charged, along with his friend John Artis, with the murder of three people in New Jersey in 1966. They denied the charges and believed them to be racially motivated – Carter and Artis were black, the victims were white.

While in jail Carter wrote an autobiography and sent copies to a number of celebrities, including Bob Dylan.

Dylan visited Carter in jail and was inspired to write a song about his case, The Hurricane. He said: "I realised that [Carter's] philosophy and my philosophy were running down the same road."

The lyrics for the song are an extremely detailed account of the case – it runs to eight minutes in length. They were so in-depth that the lawyers at his record label, Columbia Records, asked Dylan to make slight changes to avoid possible lawsuits.

Dylan also staged gigs for Carter with his Rolling Thunder Revue, with the Madison Square Garden concert in 1975 raising $100,000 for the boxer's legal fund.

But it wasn't until 1985 that Carter was permanently freed when a federal judge, Judge H Lee Sarokin, overturned his conviction, declaring that it had been "predicated on an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure".

On the surface, Ray LaMotta's life was perfect fodder for a movie.

A former world middleweight boxing champion, he once threw a fight at the behest of the mob and turned to stand-up comedy after he retired.

Yet his 1970 memoir, Raging Bull, in which he described himself as an emotional fighter struggling with life outside the ring, didn't initially appeal to director Martin Scorsese.

In fact, it took significant effort from Scorsese's friend Robert De Niro to persaude him that the book had the potential to be a great film.

It was a period of ill health that changed Scorsese's mind. "I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it, until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own."

In hindsight, of course, it turned out to be one of the best creative decisions of his career. Raging Bull would earn De Niro the Best Actor award at the Oscars in 1981, as well as a best editing prize for the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker.

Raging Bull remains one of the most critically lauded films of all time, ranking as the American Film Institute's number one film about sport. The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, hails it as his favourite film of all time.

He wrote: "The fight sequences themselves, with the camera swirling and swooping around the ring, and the soundtrack sometimes gulping out into silence and sometimes moaning with weird half-heard animal noises, are unforgettable: an inspired reportage recreation in the manner of a Life magazine shoot, which also looks like expressionist newsreel footage of a bad dream."