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

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Inevitably, however, there were splits from the very start. In 1921, the rest of fighting America set up the National Boxing Association. Anarchy was up and running.

This served only to encourage the mobsters to move in on boxing with saliva dripping through their grins. They did not like regulation, but they did not mind the appearance of regulation—nor its confusing and chaotic replication. This was turf they could exploit, and the vultures were quick to land. Arnold Rothstein, the man rumored to have fixed the 1919 World Series with the help of the former world featherweight champion Abe Attell, would go to the fights then hold court at Lindy's, at Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street, a place where you could get bagels, booze, and the skinny on the next big fight. He would sit ringside at the Garden, handing out threats and favors to whoever he chose. In Chicago, Al Capone, a fight fan but bigger enthusiast of making money, bullied his way into the affections of promoters and managers.

Whatever arms were twisted for whatever result, there were still great fights at the Garden—such as the contest in 1922 between Harry Greb, who trained on sex and illegal liquor, and the upright Catholic intellectual Gene Tunney. Tunney, who liked to think of himself as a man of letters and who numbered George Bernard Shaw among his friends, was handed his only defeat by Greb, a man for whom reading and writing were not so much chores as irrelevant, except when filling out betting slips. It was a victory for the bad guys. There would be many more.