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

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Against the odds, Thaw won. He married Evelyn and spent his waking hours in a jealous fit. With good reason, it turned out. Thaw put money into a cheap musical at the Garden called Mamzelle Champagne, which opened on a hot June Monday night in 1906. Five rows from the front sat White and Evelyn, not too cleverly clandestine. Thaw arrived late for the show, drunk, a pistol hanging menacingly from his limp fingers. Without ceremony, he went up to White and shot him dead, through the left eye.

Thaw was sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane. In so many respects, the murder of Stanford White echoed with metaphors for the fight game. Professional boxing could not exist in a moral vacuum and, time and again, the air hovering over it in Madison Square Garden would be filled with the smell of foul play.

The Great War came and went, devastating a generation. Doughboys came home looking for thrills, of which there was no shortage in New York. And there were plenty of fine writers on hand to chronicle the action. The New York boxing scene has always been sustained—some would say invented—by a rich cast list of literary scallywags.