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

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The label Jacobs Beach—no apostrophe mostly, although, like a fight contract, these things are not set in stone—was given life by Runyon, according to the newspaper columnist Jimmy Cannon. But the American author David Margolick, who has written excellently about the period and about boxing, is not sure. “More likely,” he says, “the name came from one of two prime sportswriters of the era, Frank Graham of the New York Sun or Sid Mercer of the New York American.”

Whatever its genesis, Jacobs Beach lives on only in grainy, nostalgic images. The cartoonist Ham Fisher, who created the long-loved and improbable boxing ingenue Joe Palooka, would include in his syndicated strips the requisite number of zoot-suited sharpies, chewing on old stogies and shooting the breeze with broken-nosed bums hanging about for a break or abroad. That's how Runyon would love to have “The Beach” remembered, too.

The Beach lasted from 1935, when Jacobs set up his ticket office, until the imagination let it go, at some point in the mid-fifties, a few years after Uncle Mike had been eased from power at the Garden by illness and the International Boxing Club, which was run by his sometime Mob pals. Nostalgia is fine, but sentiment lingers about as long as cigar smoke in boxing. Today, it is just another bit of grubby Gotham pavement. No plaque. No statue.