The fight was worthy of the surroundings. The ghosts of the Garden would not be disappointed, by either the class of the winner or the bloody-minded courage of the loser. This dirty, glorious space had always celebrated heroics and, when required, drowned perceived tankers and bums in a hail of derision. Now, as worn out and used and useless as a washed-up fighter, the ring was being laid to rest for good.
To fighters, the ring was a place of work; to admirers of architecture and engineering, it was a work of art. It was a minor marvel from a time when detail and artisanship mattered. The brass was polished so assiduously, it is claimed, that, when TV cameras fell on it in the fifties, executives complained there was too much glare for the cameras—much as they had pointed out to the advisers of Dwight D. Eisenhower that his shiny dome was a distraction to both the cameraman and the electorate when he ran for the presidency in 1952.
The ring wasn't always on TV, though, and it wasn't always fixed in place in the Garden. It was moved about like a shrine, from the Garden to Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, even a gym in Little Italy. But its home was on Broadway.
It measured 342 square feet, eighteen feet, six inches on each side inside the ropes—smaller than today's twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot rings—weighed more than a ton, and was held together through a complex set of 132 interlocking joints. A lot of heads hit the canvas (some more willingly than others), which was replaced periodically, as were the padding and the ropes, up against which wily veterans would scrape the backs of bright-eyed novices.
It was the fighters’ stage, where no man could lie to himself for very long (unless paid to do so). The canvas, ropes, and posts are as blessed in boxing as the altar is in religion—a place of worship, and, more often than some people would like to admit, a place of sacrifice.
Why a ring, why square not circular? The ring is the accidental invention of the Georgian bare-knucklers who stepped on to whatever patch of grass was available and far enough from the unwelcome attentions of the law to accommodate the bloodlust of the Fancy. There they'd face off, in deepest Surrey or Hampshire, maybe Kent or Bristol or Yorkshire, surrounded by four wooden posts and some rope, erected not for any legislated purpose of keeping order between the pugilists but to hold at bay the intoxicated mob. It was square only because the prizefighters’ seconds stood opposite each other and those entrusted with policing the occasion would put a stake beside them, upon which they'd place their coats and hats; to run the rope around the fighters, it made sense to have two more supporting stakes, on the other diagonal, and on these were placed the bets, or stakes, in the care of some hopefully reputable third party. Thus the square ring simultaneously became geometrically incongruous and indestructible in the imagination.
And so they gathered in the Garden one last time to pay homage to an inanimate object, with the very animated Don at the center, the fighters, as ever, all around the man who sometimes made them rich and celebrated, sometimes poor and discarded.
Something more subtle than a King monologue was at work that autumn of 2007. There was a case for tearing down the old ring, certainly; it was starting to creak dangerously. But so was boxing. This was more than the transfer of some metal, wood, and canvas from New York to a museum in a small upstate town. The reality was that the sport was in trouble—and now another piece of the fragile edifice holding it together had been stripped and consigned to a museum. Represented as regeneration by interested parties, taking down the ring also symbolized the dismantling of the fight game. It would not end there. Even as the carpenters were packing the ring into crates, architects, engineers, and lawyers at nearby city hall were talking seriously about the demise of an even more obvious boxing institution: Madison Square Garden itself.
The one still standing, the one from which the ring had been plucked, is the fourth Garden. It had been built over Pennsylvania Station, on Eighth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Street, forty years before and had operated since 1968. Now, it seemed, as part of the endless odyssey, there might be a fifth Garden. On Tuesday, October 23, 2007—five weeks after the ring had been dismantled—the Empire State Development Corporation unveiled a $14 billion plan to level the old building and put up a new one nearby on Ninth Avenue. Will it happen? Nobody knows. As ever in boxing, we will have to wait until fight night.
The ring is dead. Long live the ring.
Chapter 3
Never Far from Broadway
There never was a fight promoter more suited to his trade than Mike Jacobs. He started life in gaslit New York City in 1880, one of eleven kids in a family of Jewish immigrants from Dublin, and never took a backward step as long as he lived. Jacobs was born to hustle. His mother and father had stopped off in Ireland when fleeing religious persecution in Eastern Europe, and, after they had joined the Irish rush to the New World, Mike grew up as a cultural oddity in the Hibernian ghettos of the Lower West Side. He was resourceful, unsentimental, and hungry. He sold candy on the boats that went to Coney Island and, from the age of twelve, he scalped tickets outside the second Madison Square Garden. Fans looking for admission to a fight at the last minute any time in the 1890s would find the skinny kid with the loud mouth striking the hardest bargain. He was ruthless in his negotiations. Young Mike could turn a $2 ticket into a $10 profit in the twinkling of his Irish-Jewish eye. There wasn't a better Fagin on the streets of the city. “After sixteen, I was never broke again,” he said once.
Jacobs was so good a salesman that, in a lifetime of aggravation and conflict, he was always confident of a result. Win or lose, his demeanor did not change much. He rose to the top of boxing's dung heap as if by divine edict, and those who looked to outsmart him could not penetrate an exterior born of adversity and forged in greed. Jacobs died a rich if unsmiling man. While it was a love of money rather than the sport that drove him, nobody questioned his right to be there. He was one of the army of foot soldiers who made boxing tick, if not always after the fashion of a tea party.
In an evocative piece written in 1950, Budd Schulberg described him as the “Machiavelli on Eighth Avenue.” Other sportswriters called him “Monopoly Mike.” Dan Parker, the most perceptive and hard-hitting of fifties fight writers, named him “Uncle Wolf.” Jimmy Cannon said Jacobs was “the stingiest man in the world.” Real enemies, of which there were a few, called him far worse than any of this. He didn't give a damn.
Schulberg saw some good in him. “He staged 61 championship bouts, promoted 3,000 boxing shows, signed 5,000 boxers, grossed over $10 million with Joe Louis alone, staged approximately 70 percent of all the bouts below the heavyweight division that grossed over $100,000 (totaling $3 million, with a mass attendance of half a million), attracted in a single year (to 34 Garden shows) nearly half a million people, grossed in that same year $5.5 million, and sold tickets over a 15-year period to more than five million people who pushed at least $20 million through Mike's ticket windows.”
In boxing, it's all about the numbers. Mike Jacobs, who had the heart of an accountant, was the number-one Numbers Man, and the Garden was his bank.
The New York that fashioned Jacobs was different from the skyscraper island of glamour we know today. The stench of poverty and sickness haunted Manhattan's poorest, as it had done since the birth of the colony. But every New Yorker, rich and poor, was mesmerized by the bright lights of Broadway.
The thread that links all life in Manhattan was known in the early days of Dutch settlement as Heere Straat, or High Street. Before that it was an established Indian trail called Wickquasgeck Road, running along a prominent ridge of the hilly island. The name Broadway, according to most educated guesses, comes from Broad Wagon Way, and that sounds right.
Boxing and Broadway started their love affair at its lower reaches.
P. T. Barnum, a man who advertised his wares with all the subtlety and charm of a hooker, knew how to “get them in.” He was the original American con man of sports, and he set the tone for the chaos that followed him. From the moment P. T. opened the doors to “Barnum's Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome” on the site of an abandoned passenger depot of the New York and Harlem Railroad, at 26th and Madison, on April 27, 1874, he embraced the philosophy that became not only his mantra but the guiding principle of the fight game: