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

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This was some ring.

Now, in one short sentence devoid of sentiment—as is the detached way of wire services—a collection of nuts and bolts was to be buried, not without ceremony but with little regret outside the fight community.

The following morning in New York, a big man, wearing a smile permanently wreathed in sardonic double meaning, stood in the middle of the pensioned-off ring and boomed: “The ring is dead! Long live the ring! Heh! Heh!” The preeminent salesman of his or anyone else's time, Don King, as ever, had found quotable pith with which to put his stamp on an upcoming promotion in the Garden. There would be one last fight in the old ring, he said, and then we could start spilling blood in a brand-new one!

As it happens, there would not be another fight in the old ring. One of the proposed antagonists, Oleg Maskaev, was injured and the fight was called off. Another boxing mirage.

King loved the Garden, not wholly out of sentiment. He was a student of history, and used it constantly to lend his promotions glamour and legitimacy, capitalizing on the allure of boxing's past. Certainly, King might be sad to see the old ring go. But he was still standing. At the time of writing, the King is not dead. And we would not wish it so, even if there is a fat parish of enemies out there who disagree with that take on the subject. What a life he's led. What lives he's marred and, to be fair, enhanced. In the late forties, while LaMotta and the Mob were getting acquainted in New York, King threw a few punches as a skinny teenage flyweight back in Cleveland. He won a couple, then quit the sport after being knocked out in his fourth bout. Like the guy who stole Cassius Clay's bicycle in Louisville and led him to take up boxing as a bullied adolescent, the long-forgotten schoolboy boxer who put Don King's lights out lives anonymously forever in boxing's hall of myths.