Tag Archives: college-football

New York Should Fight for a Boxing Arena

Damon Runyon

Washington Herald/June 10, 1930

NEW YORK, June 9.—Mr. Bill Carey, president of Madison Square Garden Corporation, has been convinced of one thing by the Sharkey-Schmeling fight, which is that New York city must either have an arena specially constructed for expositions of the manly art or big outdoor spectacles must be abandoned in these parts.

I am inclined to think that as a result of Mr. Carey’s observations, the Garden Corporation will have a new open-air arena. The Milk Fund Show of 1930 is the first big outdoor show even closely approximating a sellout that Mr. Carey has encountered since taking over the presidency of the corporation, and it has taught him the disadvantages of baseball yards for these affairs.

Would Draw Million

In an arena built for boxing and of sufficient capacity, Sharkey and Schmeling would have drawn well over $1,000,000. I mean such an arena as would insure every client a fair sort of view of the proceedings regardless of location. Such an arena as the old timber saucer that the late George Tex Rickard built on Boyle’s justly celebrated Thirty Acres in Jersey City.

In such an arena, the Sharkey-Schmeling thing would have sold out before you could say John R. Robinson. And it would be a pleasure to sell the tickets to the clients. Mr. Carey can see that the future loss to the Garden Corporation on big fights held in ball yards, just through the absence of clients who would be there if they knew they could get decent seats, may be very large, indeed.

Of course, there can be no loss to the Garden on the Schmeling-Sharkey thing, as it is for the benefit of the Milk Fund, but the fights that come after this are bound to suffer because of lack of proper housing. It is an injustice that cannot be avoided under the circumstances, that one fellow who pays $25 for a ticket can sit in the first row and another who pays exactly the same amount must peer at the proceedings from the thirtieth row, or worse.

But what are you going to do about it?

As a matter of simple justice to the remote client, the expedient has been tried of pricing the rear ringside rows at a figure below the front rows, and the clients promptly disdained the cheaper seats, though they will buy them if they are the same price as the front rows. Your client is peculiar in that he thinks the price difference is not so much a matter of justice to him as it is a class distinction of some kind.

Baseball yards were not built for boxing. The manly art went into them on a large scale when it became apparent that the specially constructed arenas introduced by the late George Tex Rickard were too expensive and too risky to life and limb. But in New York, at least, the owners of the baseball yards have made the rental so high that it would now be economy to build a fistic bowl, especially counting the difference in attendance that the bowl would make.

In New York, the baseball owners demand 10 per cent of the gross receipts for their yards for a single fight and do nothing whatever—not one little thing—to promote interest in the fight or assist in the handling thereof. They just snatch their 10 per cent. I am told that in other towns, especially where there is but one baseball yard, the rental is even higher.

In New York, the owners of the Giants and the Yankees pool their interests on fights, and other events held in their yards. That is to say, if the fight or football game is held in the Yankee Stadium, the Giants ownership gets half the rental price and vice versa. The system has driven at least one big football game that meant millions of dollars to the city outside of New York and it is bound to produce a big fight arena.

Not Wanted for Fights

But regardless of the rental, the ball yards are not suited to fights. You cannot arrange the Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds for a pugilistic exhibition so that all the clients get a proper view. The vast stadia erected in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are even worse than the baseball yards, as the clients of the Dempsey-Tunney fights well know.

The only football stadium in the country that would be ideal for a big fight is Yale’s Bowl. And you can imagine what Yale would say if an ambitious promoter tried to secure the Bowl for a big fight. Yale merely wishes to enjoy prize fighters as lecturers, not as exponents of their real art.

When the Schmeling-Sharkey match was in the making, representatives of the Milk Fund discussed with Mr. Carey the feasibility of constructing a special arena for the fight, because it was believed that in such an arena it would draw well beyond $1,000,000 a theory borne out by the present sale even against the disadvantages of the Yankee Stadium.

One obstacle to the arena was lack of a suitable location, though several were considered, including one on the Long Island city of the Fifty-ninth Street. Another very decided obstacle was the fact that a timber arena would not be permitted on any location that the clients could reach. And it was obviously out of the question for the Milk Fund to build a steel arena for this one fight. So it was back to the ball yards, and the vexing ticket tangles inevitable to the location.

Germ is Planted

But the germ of the open-air arena has been planted in the mind and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it broke out in a rash of building before the end of the year. The rental at 10 per cent of the gross that Madison Square Garden Corporation has paid the ball yards the past couple of years would have paid for a big start on a fine outdoor structure.

I say the potential loss to the Garden in not having an arena isn’t on fights the size and strength of a Sharkey-Schmeling battle. It is on lesser drawing cards. For example, a bout between Jimmy McLarnin and Young Jack Thompson might draw $200,000 in a ball yard, but it would surely pull $250,000 in an arena.

The same thing goes for bouts such as the proposed Mandell-Singer affair, and a score of others that might be named. The only drawback to a regular fight arena is perhaps the fact that it can be used for few other events. However, bicycle racing isn’t a bad dodge in these parts, if I may judge from the ever-prosperous appearance of the king of the saucer game, Mr. John Chapman.

Standard

Expert Wants Old Methods Brought Back

Damon Runyon

Lancaster New Era/October 16, 1930

NEW YORK, Oct. 19.—I note in the public prints that today, Saturday, is to be given over to deception, and fraud, and cunning by many of our college footballers. For example, there’s Harvard and the Army.

It is related from Cambridge that the Harvard team, somewhat crippled in the vicinity of the backfield and the line, too, will depend upon divers and sundry forms of football legerdemain to lick the soldiers from up the Hudson.

From West Point comes stories that gridiron black magic, designed to keep the football hidden as much as possible, is to be employed against fair Harvard. And from other points of the compass we have tales to the same general effect that this and that team is going in strong today for mystery and sleight-o’-hand.

What I say is we ought to have more of that old fashioned public football, in which the pill is on view at all times except perhaps when the boys are piled on top of it. It seems to me that this skullduggery that is being planned for today on all sides is a bad example to the college youth. It may sow the seed of larceny in other forms. The first thing you know some of these footballers may turn out to be judges.

Ball in Full View

Personally, I like the old time football they used to have at Harvard, when no attempt was made to be surreptitious with the old leather pumpkin. In fact, they made a great public display of it in those times. They would bring it out on the field in full view of all hands, and lay it right down on the ground, where, in the haze of a pleasant fall afternoon, it would stand out like a tombstone in a wheatfield.

It was as if Harvard was saying to the enemy:

“Well, here she is, boys! Here’s the football!”

 And then all Harvard would do would be to wheel up some fellow like Charley Brickley, and scare the stuffin’ out of the boys the other side. But they didn’t hide the football–no, siree Bob! They wanted everybody to see when Charley was approaching, football in hand.

Indian Strategy

I imagine that Harvard got sick and tired of that hidden football business ‘way back yonder in the early football, football times when under his Carlisle Injun poked a football under his sweater and ran from here to Cape Cod for a touchdown in the cool o’ the evening when running was good.

In fact, as I recall hearing of the circumstances, Harvard let out an awful yip about the redskin biting the dust behind their goal posts with the football sight unseen. The Harvardian squawk became so loathsome to the football authorities that they hauled off and changed the rules, so that never again could an Injun, or anyone else, hide a football under his sweater, back of his bridgework, or in the slack of his trouserloons.

Possibly it was the Injun artfulness that nauseated Harvard with concealed football, and made open-board dealing more fashionable at Cambridge for a long spell. I am really surprised to hear that Harvard is going back to taking ’em off the bottom, and using a gimmick in its football play.

I hear talk of fake laterals, and other forms of the old phonus-ballonus around Cambridge that gives me quite a turn. ‘Tis sad to think that the shell game has reached the campus where once Eddie Mahan used to take the football, hold it aloft like Liberty’s upthrust torch, and scoodle about to touchdowns.

Mahan Was Supreme

Now, there’s a chap that always appealed to me—Eddie Mahan. I loved the publicity of his method. You didn’t have to beat about the bush with the football when Eddie was around, or sneak through the back way, or tiptoe up the alley. You just handed the football to Eddie, like a sheriff serving a subpoena, and away he went, advertising the fact that he had the football every jump. And what good did it do the opposition to know that Edward had the football, my little rah-ra’s? What good did it do ’em, I repeat?

Not a lick?

In fact, so far from doing them any good, it was more apt to do them harm. It was calculated to increase blood pressure.

Sometimes the quarterback wouldn’t even bother to call the numbers when he wanted Eddie to have the ball. He would merely announce, in the languid Harvard accent common to Harvard quarterbacks:

“Let Mr. Mahan have it.”

Football was public property in those days. You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know what the Harvard lads are going to do with the football. To tell you the truth, it was generally known in the Summer that Mahan would be in charge of the football for the Harvards most of the Autumn.

Game Very Mysterious

Now they’ve got fake laterals, bogus formations, undercover passes and one thing and another, all tending to make the game very mysterious, indeed. I wish we could get another Mahan at Harvard (chorus from Harvard “so do we!”) that we might try a little experiment to show up the foolishness of concealed football. We would put a red lantern on the football and a siren, too, and let Eddie run with it with the horn going full blast. The clients would see that markers wouldn’t make any difference.

It ought to be a mighty mysterious pastime one way and another at Cambridge this Saturday with both Harvard and the Army going in for the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t stuff. There is grave danger that they will both be hiding the football so much that they will lose it entirely. You can’t play a football. you know.

Still, come to think of it, I have seen some Harvard football teams do that, too. Of course they were not teams that included Eddie Mahan. They were teams before and after his time. I have seen these  Harvard teams play entire football games without a football.

The reason they did not have a football during these games was because the other team had it all the time.

Standard