Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн

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And at the black heart of boxing's empire was Jacobs Beach. It's gone now but for twenty years it was the only place to be for boxing's tsars and their camp followers. Geographically, it covered the stretch of pavement on West 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, with the Garden and Jack Dempsey's Restaurant at either end of the block. Around about the middle was 225 West 49th, the ticket office of Mike Jacobs, the one-time scalper after whom it was named. For nearly two decades he decided who did and who didn't fight in the Garden. From his center of the boxing universe, journalists, gamblers, managers, underworld goons, and hangers-on would walk across the street to the Forrest Hotel—the occasional residence of Damon Runyon, not to mention women of dubious moral distinction and other denizens of the dark—to talk their dirty business. (The owners sued Bob Hope once for joking that the Forrest's maids changed the rats every day.)

The Forrest—which is now the Time Hotel and a place where out-of-towners sometimes stay, ignorant of its past, probably—was the place to which most dealmakers had been gravitating since the twenties, guys such as Runyon and his pals, Tex Rickard and Doc Kearns. The charismatic Runyon, who lived for a long time in the hotel's penthouse, was the catalyst for many great gatherings and stories. He loved all sports, but boxing dominated the hushed conversations of the Forrest. The writer Westbrook Pegler wrote in 1936: “There was always some hungry heavyweight sitting in the big fat chair in the corner, squinting down the street at the clock to see if it was time to eat yet. Sometimes it would be an old, gnarly heavyweight with a dried apple ear and a husky voice from getting punched in the neck. Sometimes it would be a young pink one with the dumb, polite expression that young heavyweights have.”