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Chapter 3. The Friday Night Fighters
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chapter 3 The Friday Night Fighters For Friday Night Fighters, the new age of television meant grand opportunity . As broadcasts expanded in the postwar years, fighters discovered that a main event fight in Madison Square Garden equaled instant national celebrity and a big pile of cash. In 1944 Willie Pep and Chalky Wright each received $400 for their premier TV fight. By the early 1950s, boxers pulled in $4,000 per fight, plus a percentage of the gate. For big fights, they received $15,000 plus gate. At the time, this was a good deal of money. The standard $4,000 TV payout was nearly $500 more than the median annual salary for a white adult male in 1955 and over double the yearly income of a male person of color. Regular TV boxers might net from $40,000 to $60,000 a year, or over ten times the American average annual wage. Champions could make a good deal more than that. Sugar Ray Robinson, who earned $4 million over the course of his career, cleared $50,000 alone for his TV match against Gene Fullmer at the Garden in January 1957. (This title fight, shown on ABC, was blacked out in New York and Philadelphia to ensure a big gate.)1 To make it on TV, a boxer first needed to be in New York. Some migrated internally, arriving from the red dirt roads of the Deep South, the rangy farmlands of the Midwest, or the urban outposts of the West. For others, home was the cane fields and ghettos of the Caribbean or the desert metropolises of Mexamerica. Still others crossed the Atlantic, originating in Europe, Asia, even Africa. In a way, the Friday Night Fighters symbolized New York immigration. The first Friday Night Fight, after all, was between the son of poor Sicilian immigrants (Willie Pep was born Guglielmo Chapter 3. The Friday Night Fighters 35 Papaleo) and an African American who had been born in Durango, Mexico . To use another illustration, a list of the top ten welterweight contenders from February 1, 1959, includes two Mexicans (Gaspar Ortega being one); a Cuban; a West Indian; an Italian American; a Latino; three African Americans; and Ralph Dupas, a dark-complexioned white man previously claimed by the Mafia to be “colored” in order to prevent him from fighting for a mob-owned belt under Louisiana’s segregated boxing rules. While New York had it all, all was not peaceful, nor even particularly welcoming, for the Friday Night Fighters. The country was still sharply segregated in the fifties; and while Jim Crow rule still governed Dixie, the South did not corner the market on racial discrimination. Housing covenants prevented nonwhites from purchasing houses in middle-class suburbs across the nation. Within the major metropolises, segregation existed by fact if not by law. As Malcolm X would later say, “ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi.”2 Indeed, within this remarkably heterogeneous space existed remarkably homogeneous neighborhoods. On Gaspar’s densely peopled block, most residents were Puerto Ricans. But the Friday Night Fighters made an impact beyond their neighborhoods , and one worth noting. In the 1950s, boxing shows, among the most popular programs on television, marked the arrival of people of color into countless white, middle-American households. Television collapsed comfortable racial distances, bringing brown and black people into white living rooms. TV not only inaugurated a shift in spending patterns and entertainment choices (in 1955 alone, fifty-five movie theaters went out of business in New York City; radio and book sales plummeted; libraries emptied), it also compromised racial divides. True, most of the fare was indeed white: Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver presented a polished-beyond-recognition ideal of racial homogeneity, and programs like The Amos and Andy Show, which featured African American actors, reinforced ugly stereotypes. But sports shows were different, and they were widely watched. Baseball, America’s most popular sport, started to look more like America in the 1950s. Back in 1947, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in modern Major League Baseball. As the 1950s wore on, team after team began to integrate (though on a very small scale numerically). Boxing, America’s second favorite sport, presented a different, much-accelerated version of this process. Perhaps because of its shoved-aside yet undeniably entrenched place in society, [3.86.235.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:02 GMT) 36 Part...