SPORT: Jacobs Beach: The Mob, The Garden, and the Golden Age of BoxingBy Kevin Mitchell, Yellow Jersey Press, London, 288pp. £18.99
THE GUY WHO really should be reviewing this book died just over a month ago. In 1950, a year after Mike Jacobs had severed his connections with boxing, the late Budd Schulberg authored an exhaustively researched piece for Collier'smagazine in which he detailed at length the saga of the son of Dublin-born immigrants who rose from hustling nickels and dimes on the streets of Manhattan to hustling million-dollar gates for a decade in which he was the most powerful figure in boxing.
During the era of his greatest prominence, roughly 1936-1946, Jacobs's influence was such that the one-block stretch of 49th Street that ran between 8th Avenue and Madison Square Garden down to Broadway was familiarly described as "Jacobs Beach", borrowing the name of an actual beach in Connecticut. The epicentre of Jacobs Beach was the ticket agency out of which Mike operated until 1938, when he assumed control of the Garden's boxing department. The use of the term " Jacobs Beach" began to lose its relevance once its namesake departed the scene, and had utterly vanished from the lexicon by the time of his death in January 1953.
In the vacuum created by Jacobs’s official departure from the Garden in 1949, power had rapidly been assumed by an unholy trio of James Norris, the ostensibly respectable frontman for the International Boxing Club (IBC), and his even more powerful and ruthless gangster associates, Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. The result was an era of wholesale corruption that far outstripped anything the “red-light district of sports” (as Jimmy Cannon described it) had seen before or since. Although they were dogged by Senate investigations headed up by Senator Estes Kefauver almost throughout this reign of terror, it would be nearly a decade before Norris was forced from office and the IBC was dissolved in a consent decree, and Carbo was packed off to Alcatraz on conspiracy and extortion charges in a case personally prosecuted by Robert F Kennedy. (Blinky Palermo got a 15-year stretch in the federal pen at about the same time.)
Whether Kevin Mitchell, chief sportswriter for the Observer, considered the Jacobs era or the Carbo era or some other era to have been "the Golden Age of Boxing" remains unlearned, but since " Jacobs Beach" had ceased to exist during the period of the Mob's most malevolent influence, the book's title is at least curious, if not intentionally misleading. It is rather as if a treatise on English music from Elizabethan times through to the advent of the Arctic Monkeys had been packaged for the bookshelves under the title "Abbey Road".
Having come up with a title encompassing Jacobs, the Garden and the Mob, Mitchell devotes 288 pages to an attempt to prop up his thesis that they represented one and the same thing. Between some of his rather dubious choices of sources, an annoying inclination for latching on to opinions that support his position while ignoring more widely accepted ones that do not, and some fairly glaring factual misrepresentations, the effect is rather like watching a man persistently trying to drive a square peg into a round hole.
Schulberg, of course, could have disabused him of much of this nonsense.
In point of fact, Mitchell did interview the iconic author at his Long Island home two summers ago, but in his account of that visit in Jacobs Beach, fully eight of 11 pages are spent recounting a chatty conversation about On the Waterfrontand Marlon Brando. The ostensible subject of the book gets two paragraphs, which can be summed up in one sentence: " might not have missed Jacobs much, but he was hardly keen to see him replaced by Norris, Carbo, and Palermo."
In truth, Schulberg’s feelings about Mike Jacobs were essentially conflicted on both a personal and professional level. When it came to Jacobs “playing footsie with the Mob”, said Schulberg, “there’s plenty of evidence both to hang and acquit him”. Certainly, Carbo and his ilk enjoyed disturbingly free access to the Garden’s boxing offices while Jacobs was running the show, but while he might have occasionally tolerated the presence of what he described as “those motherfucking thieves”, Jacobs, in Schulberg’s view, actually kept the Mob at bay during his time on the throne – at least until 1946, when he may have occasionally left his guard down following a cerebral haemorrhage and an accompanying stroke. (The Carbo-engineered Jake LaMotta dive against Billy Fox, for instance, took place in 1947 – theoretically still on Jacobs’s watch.) But presumably since anything Schulberg offered might not have been easily reconciled with Mitchell’s contention that “the Mob never left boxing”, the subject was not allowed to intrude on their conversation.
MITCHELL RELIES HEAVILYon the opinions of Dan Parker, perhaps Jacobs's staunchest critic among the New York fight writers during the heyday of Jacobs Beach, while completely ignoring the more widely held views of Red Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Herald Tribune(and later the New York Times). "Although it is certainly true that nobody ever exerted such an absolute dictatorship as his over any sport and while it is probably true that no one else ever made such profits as he from boxing, it is emphatically true that no man ever ran boxing as well as he, anywhere," wrote Smith of Jacobs. "If anyone in the world has run fights on the level, Mike has."
Had Mitchell so much as asked, I've no doubt that Schulberg would have agreed gladly to look over the manuscript for Jacobs Beach. Though Mitchell probably wouldn't have liked much of what Schulberg had to say, a vetting by him, or almost anyone conversant with American history, might have spared him considerable embarrassment by pointing out some of the baffling inaccuracies that riddle the book.
The venerable New York newspaperman, Jimmy Breslin, who celebrated his 79th birthday last October, is described by Mitchell as “well into his nineties now and still kicking”. Babe Ruth, according to Mitchell, “moved from Boston to New York in 1923” (close – it was 1920). The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor becomes, in Mitchell’s telling, “the day of infamy, as General Douglas MacArthur memorably called it” (we’re assuming he means president Franklin D Roosevelt’s radio address, which began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a day which will live in infamy”). And those are unforced errors.
The book is replete with equally gratuitous observations, such as the description of Harry Markson as "the Garden's loud PR man". Jacobs Beachmay be the first place the words "loud" and "Harry Markson" have ever appeared in the same sentence.
Schulberg described Markson as "a literate, quiet-mannered college graduate", and on the occasion of his death the New York Timesobituary began: "Harry Markson, a soft-spoken and scholarly type . . ."
Markson would later be named the Garden’s director of boxing in the IBC era because, Norris explained, “there’s got to be somebody around here with clean hands”. Mitchell apparently took exception to Markson’s observation that, under the Jacobs regime, “boxing today is immensely more honest than it was 15 or 20 years ago”. “Nobody else thought so,” sniffs Mitchell, dismissing Red Smith, Schulberg, and the countless others who would have agreed with Markson.
THE FACTUAL ERRORSwould not be so damning in themselves, but getting so many known facts wrong doesn't do much for the credibility of a book that otherwise relies so heavily on gossip, conjecture, and second-hand tales from dubious witnesses such as Bert Randolph Sugar.
Sugar is one of two men ever to have been expelled from membership by the Boxing Writers Association of America. Mitchell describes him as "one of boxing's more reliable historians", even though he isn't particularly reliable about even his own history, assuming he was the source for Mitchell's glowing characterisation in Jacobs Beach: ". . . Sugar, who has insinuated himself into every corner of the fight game since coming to New York from Philadelphia as an ad man in the late forties". Bert Sugar was born in 1936. It seems doubtful that, even in 1949, Madison Avenue would have required the services of any precocious 13-year-old ad men.
After throwing around several unsubstantiated intimations attempting to tie heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano to Frankie Carbo and the Mob, Mitchell finally throws in the towel, but then, as a consolation prize in lieu of a smoking gun, he finds himself chasing down a bit of cocktail-party gossip and, not three paragraphs later, presents it as fact.
Mitchell recounts a conversation with a man named Rollie Hackmere, whom he describes as “an upright and dapper gentleman in his seventies.
“ called me aside one night at a meeting of Ring 8, the New York ex-boxers’ association, and said, ‘I knew Rocky. He was some guy. Do you know he fought his brother, Peter, nine times? Bo, I bet you didn’t. How about that?’ ”
Mitchell then presented the rumour to Lou Duva, the octogenarian cornerman who knew Marciano well. “Yeah, he did,” Duva supposedly replied. “He fought Peter. They was fights in the smokers. So what?” From that “confirmation” – Duva, by the way, denies ever having said such a thing – Mitchell allows himself to wax rhapsodic:
The night he looked across the ring in the Garden at Louis, Rocky might have reflected on those smoke-filled nights and how far he’d come . . .
With all the clinical detachment he might have brought to punching brother Peter in the nose back in Massachusetts he set about destroying what was left of Joe Louis.
That, in a nutshell, summarises what is wrong with Jacobs Beach: the prose is facile, but the history is flawed. On October 26th, 1951, when Rocky fought Joe Louis with these memories of beating up his youngest brother supposedly bubbling up in his mind, Peter Marciano was nine years old.
George Kimball, who writes the America at Large column for The Irish Times, is the author of the boxing bestseller, Four Kings,and is the co-editor, with John Schulian, of The American Boxing Anthology, forthcoming from the Library of America