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chapter 10 The Shot According to legend, back in the 1920s there was a Greek restaurateur who was fed up. Fed up with all these young pugs bouncing over from the boxing gym across the street and eating his food on credit, running up mountains of unpaid bills. The Greek came up with a solution: in exchange for the meals, the boxers must let him become their manager. Whatever his actual reasons for getting involved in boxing, by the late 1950s George Parnassus had become one of the most powerful figures in boxing, helping to twist the sport from its East Coast moorings and speed it towards the Pacific.1 George Parnassus immigrated to Los Angeles from Methone, Greece, in 1915. He had been told by his brother that success was to be had in the States. As it turned out, his brother was not speaking from personal experience. A period of scrambling about for American dollars ensued. Parnassus washed dishes, lifted a pick and shovel for the railroad, checked hats at a club, even hawked watermelons on Venice Pier. Eventually, he and his brother bought a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, and there, in a community heavily influenced by migrants from south of the border, Parnassus found a home. He married a manicurist named Rosalie Montez de Ocas and learned to speak Spanish. With Rosalie’s help, Parnassus made his restaurant into a booming success by catering to the local Latino population. He fine-tuned his Spanish and also refined his English, skills that would serve him well in the years ahead. Across the street from the restaurant was a boxing gym, and Parnassus became a manager of some of the local fighters. Eventually, the migrant Chapter 10. The Shot 151 Mexican laboring community upon which his business depended began to dry up when the local cotton boom fizzled in the mid-1920s, and Parnassus threw in his lot with boxing rather than with feeding people. He pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, putting Spanish ads in La Opinion to recruit the local fight talent. By 1941 he had built up a stable of forty-three fighters. Like his serendipitous move to an eatery facing a boxing gym, his move to Los Angeles turned out to be another smart decision. He came to be known as a specialist in developing Latino talent . In 1957 the Olympic Auditorium’s matchmaker, Babe McCoy, lost his license (for fixing fights), and Parnassus, whose reputation by then had garnered him great local respect, was recruited as his replacement.2 Part of George Parnassus’s success was due to his independence. He saw the International Boxing Club as an insidious force that strangled rather than helped boxing. By the time he was running the Olympic, Parnassus publicly refused to deal with the organization. This would prove to be a remarkably useful move. The Hollywood Legion Stadium, his competition , was connected to the IBC, and it seemed to be going down right along with the Octopus. Just before the 1958 Floyd Patterson–Roy Harris world heavyweight title fight that took place at L.A.’s Wrigley Field, ring announcer Leonard Jacobsen announced to the fans that Los Angeles was the “boxing capital of the world.” Given that he said this three thousand miles from the Center of the Universe, one might think he was just playing to local pride. But this was not the case.3 According to Sports Illustrated, California by then was garnering more fight dollars than any other state, New York included, and Los Angeles was the only remaining city in the country that hosted two major fight clubs which put on weekly shows. Plus, Los Angeles had a major outdoor venue in Wrigley Field that regularly hosted fight events. Placing the shift in context, Sports Illustrated noted that the whole world of sports seemed to be sliding westward. In 1958 the Brooklyn Dodgers became the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Giants became the San Francisco Giants. In 1960 the American Football League opened up its western division. The reason why boxing was so big in Southern California was obvious to every local observer: the Mexicans. Philosophized Hollywood Legion manager Jim Ogilvie, “They enjoy that type of entertainment. It’s cockiness . It’s the nature of the people.” Aileen Eaton, who ran the Olympic with her husband, Cal, broke it down in terms of numbers: “There are no Mexican football players and no Mexican baseball players to speak [3...

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