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

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And so they gathered in the Garden one last time to pay homage to an inanimate object, with the very animated Don at the center, the fighters, as ever, all around the man who sometimes made them rich and celebrated, sometimes poor and discarded.

Something more subtle than a King monologue was at work that autumn of 2007. There was a case for tearing down the old ring, certainly; it was starting to creak dangerously. But so was boxing. This was more than the transfer of some metal, wood, and canvas from New York to a museum in a small upstate town. The reality was that the sport was in trouble—and now another piece of the fragile edifice holding it together had been stripped and consigned to a museum. Represented as regeneration by interested parties, taking down the ring also symbolized the dismantling of the fight game. It would not end there. Even as the carpenters were packing the ring into crates, architects, engineers, and lawyers at nearby city hall were talking seriously about the demise of an even more obvious boxing institution: Madison Square Garden itself.