the roofless Hippodrome—which Harper's Weekly described at the time as “grimy, drafty, combustible”—the sky was the limit as far as harmless nonsense went. There were waltzing elephants, fire-eaters, the usual sideshow freaks, and all manner of proto-Roman excesses, such as chariot races. And fights, many of which were on the level. Looking over proceedings was an eighteen-foot gilded copper statue of Diana, the goddess of love, who, despite her bulk, swiveled in a light breeze, almost tempting God to knock her down in retribution for the sins committed beneath her ample charms. New Yorkers loved the gaudy excess of P. T.'s Hippodrome, but, even then, the foundations and external trappings were shifting.
Before it became properly notorious, the old place had a couple of different names on its way to becoming known generally as Madison Square Garden, in 1879, just a year before Mike Jacobs was born. And here it was that John L. Sullivan created part of his legend. On July 17, 1882, he took on the British fighter Joe Collins, who was known in some quarters as Joe “Tug” Wilson. Collins/Wilson took up Sullivan's challenge to remain standing for four rounds to collect $1,000. Collins, whose ring history was sketchy and who went down twenty-four times in his efforts to avoid a clean knockout, collected on the dare—but Sullivan's aura was not diminished, at least not among the gullible. They couldn't get enough of this illegal pugilism and the blarney Sullivan brought with it.
The great man's second exhibition, a year later, didn't go so well. Police captain Alexander Williams told reporters he was bringing the entertainment to a halt “just short of murder.” The following year, Sullivan was arrested at the Garden during his bout with Al Greenfield and charged with behaving “in a cruel and inhuman manner and corrupting public morals.” As with P. T. Barnum's credo, this was a statement begging to be added to boxing's unwritten constitution.
John L. was king. And, for much of the time, he was on the run from the authorities, like many of his fans. When prizefights couldn't be snuck into the Garden under the banner of education, they were held in fields and on barges. Sullivan was acknowledged as the world's bare-knuckle champion by beating a part-time punch-thrower from County Tipperary, Paddy Ryan, in front of an audience that included the James boys, Frank and Jesse, in Gulfport, Mississippi, in February 1882. Back in New York, the Garden's interest in boxing spluttered along intermittently . . . for a while.
That first Garden was knocked down, rebuilt and repackaged, opening on the same site in 1890. And the new darling of the fight fraternity was an Irish Californian, James J. Corbett, whose nom de guerre “Gentleman Jim” owed more to alliteration and the vivid imagination of his publicists than any pedigree polished while mixing in high society. When 10,000 sadists flocked through the doors of Garden II on February 16, 1892, Corbett obliged them by fighting three men in a row, knocking two of them out cold. Eight months later, Jim was champ and John L. was chump, washed up and in the grip of the bottle. Corbett “near murdered” the old man and was the new heavyweight king. Gentleman Jim—in the spirit of brotherly love unique to fighters—staged an exhibition in the Garden for the retirement pot of his vanquished foe.
By the time the teenage Jacobs was making a name for himself as a resourceful ticket mover, the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, at Times Square, laid claim to being the center of the universe. It was gloriously lit, flashing its temptations twenty-four hours a day. And not many, rich or poor, resisted the temptation to make Broadway and the Garden their preferred place of pleasure.
Opening night at Garden II was special. The vice president of the United States, Levi P. Morton, was among the 12,000 guests who gaped at the temple of vulgarity the eminent architect Stanford White had designed for J. P. Morgan, one of the richest men in America.
“From the principal entrance on Madison Avenue,” writes White's biographer Paul R. Baker, “the first-nighters moved through a long entrance lobby lined with polished yellow Siena marble, merging into the huge and colorful amphitheater. Gold and white terracotta tiles decorated most interior walls. Two tiers of seats rose along the sides, and three tiers of boxes, trimmed in plush maroon, filled the ends of the vast space. Some 10,000 spectators could be seated comfortably in the amphitheater, and there was standing room or, for some events, floor seating for up to 4,000 more. The high roof was spectacularly supported by twenty-eight large columns. At the center of the roof, an enormous skylight could, as if by magic, be rolled aside by machinery. This was done during the opening performance but it occurred so quietly that most spectators were not even aware of the change until they noticed the cool night air. As in ancient arenas, provision was made for flooding the floor for water spectacles. As at the Roman Colosseum, animal stables to be used for the horse shows and circus performances were placed in the basement below. Here was a bit of ancient Rome, transformed, modernized, and brought to the Gilded Age of New York!”
It was no tent.
By the turn of the century, Jacobs's career had gone from street mischief to seriously influential. Although barely out of his teens, he knew most of boxing's big guys, including Tex Rickard, the Texan who'd spent years making and losing fortunes in his gaming houses in the Klondike. They met in Nevada in 1904, where Rickard promoted his first fight, a world title contest between Joe Gans and Battling Nelson.
When Jacobs got home, he met Bat Masterson, who'd left the Wild West behind him and was going to be a bona fide New York character, like his new friend Damon Runyon. This was a historic coming together of larger-than-life boxing folk.
Garden II, meanwhile, was to entertain them all with the most delicious scandal, one that would set the tone of activities there for a century to come.
Stanford White had a house in fashionable Gramercy Park, a wife, a family, and a reputation kept clean by an obsequious media. In reality, as Runyon and his pals knew, White was also a New York dandy of substance, with an insatiable libido. While Garden II was his baby, the creation he coveted most was one Florence Evelyn Nesbit, known to all as Evelyn. As befits the story that ensued with the predictability of a naughty nineties melodrama, Evelyn arrived in New York at fifteen, penniless and with a body and face that would buy her all the trouble she and her suitors could handle. She “modeled”—and won the heart of every man in the city, most notably White and a rival, the cruel and unstable businessman Harry Kendall Thaw.
Against the odds, Thaw won. He married Evelyn and spent his waking hours in a jealous fit. With good reason, it turned out. Thaw put money into a cheap musical at the Garden called Mamzelle Champagne, which opened on a hot June Monday night in 1906. Five rows from the front sat White and Evelyn, not too cleverly clandestine. Thaw arrived late for the show, drunk, a pistol hanging menacingly from his limp fingers. Without ceremony, he went up to White and shot him dead, through the left eye.
Thaw was sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane. In so many respects, the murder of Stanford White echoed with metaphors for the fight game. Professional boxing could not exist in a moral vacuum and, time and again, the air hovering over it in Madison Square Garden would be filled with the smell of foul play.
The Great War came and went, devastating a generation. Doughboys came home looking for thrills, of which there was no shortage in New York. And there were plenty of fine writers on hand to chronicle the action. The New York boxing scene has always been sustained—some would say invented—by a rich cast list of literary scallywags.
Jacobs, while never one for books, made sure to stay in with the fight writers, especially Runyon, whom he liked for reasons that had little to do with the music of his words. Runyon, as Jacobs was well aware, was every bit as sharp as he was, tutored in the ways of the world by his father and always on the lookout for a good business opportunity. Jacobs and Runyon would become the firmest of friends.
There is a story, relayed by the fine old New Yorker Jimmy Breslin, which explains how Runyon forged his worldview. Breslin had it on authority, via Masterson, that Alfred Lee Runyan (the family name's correct spelling) once told his son Damon: “Son, there will come a time when you are out in this world and you will meet a man who says that he can make a jack of hearts spit cider into your ear. Son, even if this man has a brand-new deck of cards wrapped in cellophane, do not bet that man because, if you do, you will have a mighty wet ear.”
This was Runyon's pedigree. All his life, he moved among