There was the mildly notorious Kit Kat Club, on 55th, “Harlem moved downtown,” as guides of the time described it, and “popular in the early hours of the morning.” There was the Stork Club on 53rd, expensive, packed with New York's aristocracy and the perfect place to mull over wages won and lost at the Garden. There was also, of course, the Cotton Club, on Broadway and 48th, the longtime haunt of boxing's inner sanctum; Mob connections with the Cotton stretched back to the twenties, and the neon signs that flashed outside advertising “50 Tall, Tan, Terrific Gals” said it all.
And, for the hardcore, there was always Toots Shor's, the ultimate post-fight den, parked at 51 West 51st Street, a short stroll from the Garden. It was here that many great stories were born (some of them true) and just as many reputations ruined—or enhanced, depending on your view of life. The actor Jackie Gleason, large in every way, threw his weight around here a lot, brawling and boozing until he collapsed on the floor. On more than one occasion the proprietor stepped over him with practiced nonchalance. That was Bernard “Toots” Shor, a rabble-rousing adventurer from Philadelphia, who was big and ugly enough to earn a living as a speakeasy bouncer in the fading years of Prohibition. He met and liked Damon Runyon, whose clout gained Toots entry to New York's demimonde. Toots had found his natural home and, in 1940, opened his eponymous establishment. Like Jacobs Beach, it would live on past a point of dignified closure, a tatty relic in the end.
In the age before rock and roll, before TV took a grip, before the Pill, as the horns swung from big band to boogie to blues, New Yorkers loved a simpler version of the boxing universe: they loved Toots, the Garden, great fights, as well as the smell and thrill of Manhattan's throbbing ribbons of light. For a while, there was no place else to be for those in search of sanitized depravity.
It was in these clubs and bars and coffee shops that men in their thin-brimmed porkpie fedoras, tugging on their Romeo y Julietas, stinking of Pino Silvestre cologne, talked quietly with men whose flat noses betrayed their calling. These were not innocent men. They were players. They made boxing what it is, for better or worse.
The Mob had been deep in the heart of boxing since the early days of Prohibition. The handing over of power from one set of thugs to the next had not been seamless, but it had been unstoppable. By the late forties, the International Boxing Club, run at one remove by Frankie Carbo, had slipped without ceremony on to the throne. Usually one step ahead of the law, they controlled boxing late into the fifties, by which time complacency would weaken their grip on the business and on reality. When Kefauver went after the Mob one last time in 1960, he came closer to delivering a knockout blow than he and other agencies had in previous efforts. This was partly through the belated confession of LaMotta, but mainly was down to the staggering hubris of the bloated and arrogant warlords who reckoned they could continue to rule the lives of thousands of people in the fight game for as long as they chose to. Even as they sneered at Kefauver's righteousness, the wise guys were compelled to acknowledge Joe Louis's own ring maxim: you can run, but you can't hide.
Those characters and those joints are memories now. LaMotta and his contemporaries have nearly all gone down for the count, replaced by facsimiles. Don King, who started his boxing journey in the 1970s, carries on the fine tradition of hucksterism that began with P. T. Barnum in the first Garden and was refined by the likes of Rickard, Kearns, and Jacobs in the others.
What the Mob did between 1950 and 1960 at the Garden provides a snapshot of a sport and business many people said, even then, was out on its feet. They've been saying that since the days of Jack Broughton, Jem Mace, John L. Sullivan, Primo Carnera. . . . They're saying it now. Somehow, against the odds, boxing keeps getting off the floor.
Chapter 2
The Ring Is Dead
There was a party in the Garden in September of 2007, but, for once, Muhammad Ali couldn't make it. He was a palsied shadow of himself, sitting quietly at home in Louisville, sixty-five years old, tended by his wife and nurse, Lonnie, and informed of the story secondhand by the friends who invariably descended upon him whenever boxing hit the news. How he would have loved to make the trip to New York. It was there, thirty-six years earlier, that he and Joe Frazier had given the Garden and the world one of their sport's most enthralling contests, the Fight of the Century. But that was just an entry in his scrapbook now for the man who saved boxing, as the news filtered through about the end of an era.
What appeared in Ali's newspaper in Kentucky that morning was a bulletin from the Associated Press, issued at 4:35 p.m. (Eastern time) the previous day, the 18th. Datelined Canastota, New York, it read: “After 82 years, Madison Square Garden will retire its storied boxing ring and donate it to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, where it will go on display this fall.”
This was the ring in which LaMotta first fought, and lost to, Sugar Ray Robinson, in 1942.
This was the ring in which Rocky Marciano knocked out Joe Louis in the Brown Bomber's last fight, in 1951.
This was the ring where Randolph Turpin brought the crowd to their feet in losing heroically to Carl “Bobo” Olson in 1953.
This was the ring where Joe Louis was lucky to get the decision against Jersey Joe Walcott in 1947, and where Billy Graham was robbed against Kid Gavilan in 1951—as was Lennox Lewis against Evander Holyfield in 1999.
This was the ring where Lou Ambers, Tony Canzoneri, Beau Jack, Dick Tiger, Ken Buchanan, Roberto Duran, Fritzie Zivic, Ike Williams, Joe Frazier, and Muhammad Ali thrilled, shocked, and amazed us.
This was some ring.
Now, in one short sentence devoid of sentiment—as is the detached way of wire services—a collection of nuts and bolts was to be buried, not without ceremony but with little regret outside the fight community.
The following morning in New York, a big man, wearing a smile permanently wreathed in sardonic double meaning, stood in the middle of the pensioned-off ring and boomed: “The ring is dead! Long live the ring! Heh! Heh!” The preeminent salesman of his or anyone else's time, Don King, as ever, had found quotable pith with which to put his stamp on an upcoming promotion in the Garden. There would be one last fight in the old ring, he said, and then we could start spilling blood in a brand-new one!
As it happens, there would not be another fight in the old ring. One of the proposed antagonists, Oleg Maskaev, was injured and the fight was called off. Another boxing mirage.
King loved the Garden, not wholly out of sentiment. He was a student of history, and used it constantly to lend his promotions glamour and legitimacy, capitalizing on the allure of boxing's past. Certainly, King might be sad to see the old ring go. But he was still standing. At the time of writing, the King is not dead. And we would not wish it so, even if there is a fat parish of enemies out there who disagree with that take on the subject. What a life he's led. What lives he's marred and, to be fair, enhanced. In the late forties, while LaMotta and the Mob were getting acquainted in New York, King threw a few punches as a skinny teenage flyweight back in Cleveland. He won a couple, then quit the sport after being knocked out in his fourth bout. Like the guy who stole Cassius Clay's bicycle in Louisville and led him to take up boxing as a bullied adolescent, the long-forgotten schoolboy boxer who put Don King's lights out lives anonymously forever in boxing's hall of myths.
When King gave breathless birth to his valedictory over the sacred ring in Madison Square Garden—one of hundreds for which he will be remembered when he is eventually laid to rest by gout or universal schadenfreude—the roped square was on its way to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in quiet Canastota. Rebuilt and revered, it resides as a reminder of the skulduggery and high times that took place in what for most of the twentieth century was the most revered arena in sport.
Nobody can be sure how many fighters stepped through the ropes of the most famous Garden ring over the course of eighty-two years. We can be certain, though, that the last title fight there was on Saturday, June 9, 2007, when Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico stopped Zab Judah of Brooklyn in the eleventh of twelve scheduled rounds to retain his World Boxing Association welterweight belt in front of 20,658 fans, most of them New York Puerto Rican supporters of the champion. It was the biggest crowd the venue had seen for