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

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Those characters and those joints are memories now. LaMotta and his contemporaries have nearly all gone down for the count, replaced by facsimiles. Don King, who started his boxing journey in the 1970s, carries on the fine tradition of hucksterism that began with P. T. Barnum in the first Garden and was refined by the likes of Rickard, Kearns, and Jacobs in the others.

What the Mob did between 1950 and 1960 at the Garden provides a snapshot of a sport and business many people said, even then, was out on its feet. They've been saying that since the days of Jack Broughton, Jem Mace, John L. Sullivan, Primo Carnera. . . . They're saying it now. Somehow, against the odds, boxing keeps getting off the floor.

There was a party in the Garden in September of 2007, but, for once, Muhammad Ali couldn't make it. He was a palsied shadow of himself, sitting quietly at home in Louisville, sixty-five years old, tended by his wife and nurse, Lonnie, and informed of the story secondhand by the friends who invariably descended upon him whenever boxing hit the news. How he would have loved to make the trip to New York. It was there, thirty-six years earlier, that he and Joe Frazier had given the Garden and the world one of their sport's most enthralling contests, the Fight of the Century. But that was just an entry in his scrapbook now for the man who saved boxing, as the news filtered through about the end of an era.