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

45 страница из 104

This was the height of the roaring twenties, and Rickard's reign at Garden III, although it would be brief, was about to begin. The bootleggers, criminals, and various investors could hardly wait. Rickard, who'd promoted Jack Dempsey, co-opted the future New York State governor W. Averill Harriman to join his consortium of investors at the new establishment. In the hectic tempo of the decade, it took a mere 249 days to build the place on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street.

By most authoritative accounts, the first fighters to step into the new ring at Garden III were Paul Berlenbach and Jack Delaney, on Friday, December 11, 1925. Rickard was the promoter—alongside one Vince McMahon, the grandfather of the Vince McMahon known to wrestling fans today as the owner of and sometime participant in World Wrestling Entertainment.

Berlenbach and Delaney contested Berlenbach's light heavyweight title over the championship distance of the day, fifteen rounds, and, inevitably, not all was as it seemed. Some of the 17,575 customers who'd filed in from the speakeasies around Broadway that night no doubt imagined Delaney was Irish, a sure ticket-selling bonus in those days. Jack was, in fact, a French Canadian called Ovila Chapdelaine. So, for the purposes of commerce, the chap Delaine morphed into the chap Delaney. We can be reasonably sure Paul did not change his name to Berlenbach; most things German had little cachet after the Great War.