Fight Promotion is Big Business Now
Pugilism Was a Simpler Profession When Dan Stuart Arranged the Fitzsimmons-Maher Battle
One of boxing’s most prominent elements is the boxing promoter, perhaps most famously personified by Don King. A 1925 New York Times Magazine article described the boxing promoter as a relatively new development.
The journalist Owen P. White wrote:
Today when two bruisers appear who are rival claimants, let us say, for the heavyweight championship of the world, and begin to vociferate their disdain for each other, what happens? Do they get together and fight? I should say not!
…
This twelve or eighteen months of preliminary argument and squabble makes the present-day system of staging a prizefight possible and causes an admiring and befuddled public to look up to a promoter as a super-individual who is a diplomat, a politician, a publicist, and a businessman, all under one hat.
The article “The Business of Boxing” by Joseph Dobrian, from the October 1991 issue of American Heritage, describes the change. An 1892 match between two boxers named Corbett and Sullivan was the “the first heavily promoted boxing show to take place in the United States.”
By 1921, the first year when a heavyweight championship fight was broadcast over the radio, the sport was surging. That was in no small part thanks to boxing promoters led by Tex Rickard, who Dobrian describes as “the guy who single-handedly changed boxing from a sport to a business.”
Dobrian writes of the circa-1925 era:
Coupled with [Jack] Dempsey’s popularity was the removal of the last serious restrictions on legalized boxing in several states, most notably New York. So, while boxing had been growing steadily in the United States since the 1850s, the real boom took place in the early 1920s. The sport came out of the back rooms for good. Fight clubs were established in every major city. In New York you could see live boxing every night of the week.
Fun fact: the most famous boxing promoter alive, Don King – though most famous for his work in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s – is still alive at 94.
Fight Promotion is Big Business Now: Pugilism Was a Simpler Profession When Dan Stuart Arranged the Fitzsimmons-Maher Battle
Published: Sunday, September 20, 1925