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

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The one still standing, the one from which the ring had been plucked, is the fourth Garden. It had been built over Pennsylvania Station, on Eighth Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Street, forty years before and had operated since 1968. Now, it seemed, as part of the endless odyssey, there might be a fifth Garden. On Tuesday, October 23, 2007—five weeks after the ring had been dismantled—the Empire State Development Corporation unveiled a $14 billion plan to level the old building and put up a new one nearby on Ninth Avenue. Will it happen? Nobody knows. As ever in boxing, we will have to wait until fight night.

The ring is dead. Long live the ring.

There never was a fight promoter more suited to his trade than Mike Jacobs. He started life in gaslit New York City in 1880, one of eleven kids in a family of Jewish immigrants from Dublin, and never took a backward step as long as he lived. Jacobs was born to hustle. His mother and father had stopped off in Ireland when fleeing religious persecution in Eastern Europe, and, after they had joined the Irish rush to the New World, Mike grew up as a cultural oddity in the Hibernian ghettos of the Lower West Side. He was resourceful, unsentimental, and hungry. He sold candy on the boats that went to Coney Island and, from the age of twelve, he scalped tickets outside the second Madison Square Garden. Fans looking for admission to a fight at the last minute any time in the 1890s would find the skinny kid with the loud mouth striking the hardest bargain. He was ruthless in his negotiations. Young Mike could turn a $2 ticket into a $10 profit in the twinkling of his Irish-Jewish eye. There wasn't a better Fagin on the streets of the city. “After sixteen, I was never broke again,” he said once.