The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip

Round 7: Las Vegas Embraces Prizefighting

169 Following the epic 1910 confrontation between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, Nevada lost its ability to attract major prizefights.With legalization occurring in several states, the epicenter of prizefighting moved eastward, leaving Nevada boxing fans with only occasional lackluster fight cards featuring local novices or down-and-out itinerant fighters looking for a small payday. New York City emerged as the center of American boxing during the 1920s and maintained its dominance for the next three decades, but during the 1960s Las Vegas began to attract major fights as part of its rapidly expanding gaming economy. New York developed an integrated boxing subculture. It was home to several training gyms, essential incubators for new pugilistic talent , in particular the famous Stillman’s Gym on Fifty-Seventh Street that opened in 1910. It was there, in a nondescript building, that generations of boxers, from novices to champions, trained in a large room in which the windows were nailed shut and cigar smoke blended with the fragrance of liniment and yesterday’s sweat. Management actually took pride in the fact that the floors were seldom cleaned. Gene Tunney refused to train there because of what he considered “unsanitary conditions.”1 Over the years, spectators paid a modest fee to watch such famous ringmen as Jack Dempsey, Georges Carpentier, Primo Carnera, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano prepare for their big fights alongside This is the biggest thing we’ve ever had. We’ve had some big New Year’s here, but I think this fight will do five-fold of those weekends. —Harry Wald, Caesars Palace executive, on eve of Ali-Holmes fight, October 2, 1980 Las Vegas Embraces Prizefighting Round 7 170   The Main Event rank beginners. New York City was also home to the men who exerted great influence over the sport: promoters, trainers, gamblers, sportswriters , and mobsters. New York was where Tex Rickard relocated after having made Nevada his home for more than a decade. By the time of his death at age fifty-nine in 1929 from complications following an appendectomy, Rickard had become a celebrity in the Big Apple, where he presided over the new iteration of the Madison Square Garden. He promoted all sorts of events to draw a crowd, including circuses, track meets, and bicycle races, but he refused to have anything to do with professional wrestling. Always a boxing man, he was proud of the weekly boxing cards that drew large crowds. The professional hockey team he created to compete in the National Hockey League in 1926 was an instant success , and sportswriters provided the team nickname of Tex’s “Rangers .” He outdid himself as a fight promoter when he put on the second Dempsey-Tunney fight on September 22, 1927, in Chicago’s Soldier Field. An estimated 145,000 jammed the football stadium, producing the first two-million-dollar gate in history. Rickard would have been delighted that boxing remained popular in New York City throughout the 1930s. Championship fights were held with predictable regularity. The enormously popular Joe Louis fought many of his major fights at Madison Square Garden, or outside at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. National radio networks carried live blow-by-blow accounts of his fights that generated enormous listening audiences. The crisp, unique voice of Clem McCarthy became familiar across the United States as he described the ebb and flow of championship matches. On the evening of June 22, 1938, an estimated 100 million Americans, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, hovered by their radios listening to McCarthy describing that magic moment when Joe Louis avenged an earlier loss by knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round at Yankee Stadium. In 1939 NBC began its popular radio broadcasts of Friday-night fights from New York, with Don Dunphy providing rapid-fire descriptions of the main event from ringside at Madison Square Garden or at the converted aging ice rink up on Columbus Avenue, St. Nicholas Arena. During his long career, the popular Dunphy broadcast an estimated two thousand bouts. Those weekly broadcasts were labeled the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports and sponsored by the Gillette Safety Razor Round 7  171 Company, touting its distinct “blue blades.” These popular broadcasts firmly established New York City as boxing’s capital in the minds of American sports fans. The city was the media capital of the nation and at the end of the Second World War seamlessly made the...