IF YOU BUILD IT BIG, THEY WILL COME B y the time Tyson Fury and Anthony
THE LONG-AWAITED FURY-JOSHUA FIGHT WILL DRAW A MASSIVE CROWD, BUT TITANS HAVE BEEN CLASHING IN STADIUMS FOR MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS By Don Stradley
curtain? If the U.K. boxing landscape has changed, and soccer megastructures are less likely to be filled in the coming years, then Fury and Joshua are wholly suited to close out a remarkable period in the business. After all, the stadium boom may not have boomed quite so loudly without them. Has it been chaotic getting them to this point? Have the ceaseless political maneuvers dampened what should’ve been a roaring triumph of promotion? Are these just a couple of faded icons making a money grab? Yes, yes and yes. But while the fight may nourish the inborn suspicion of boxing fans, it stands to be a memorable event full of glitz, grit and grandeur. Stadiums have a way of making fights memorable, even the ones that disappoint. This has been the case for more than a century. Tex Rickard may fairly be called the father of stadium boxing. Starting in 1910 when he erected a stadium in
Reno, Nevada, to house the era-defining Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries bout, Rickard created a template for promoters to follow, pulling boxing out of athletic clubs and saloon basements and presenting championship fights as full- blown cultural events. He understood that the size of the stage had an impact on the way a fight was perceived. The number of carpenters hired and the amount of lumber used became part of the “ballyhoo,” as they called it back in the Taft era. Rickard built another temporary stadium in the summer of 1919, this time in Toledo, Ohio, for the Jess Willard-Jack Dempsey bout. Some of the planks were so green that the day of the fight saw the pine benches sweat in the boiling heat wave; unwitting fight fans planted their butts right in the sap and ruined their clothing. Quick-thinking vendors began selling newspapers and cushions to the irate ticket-buyers,
anything to place between his oozing pine benches and a customer’s ass. Though attendance fell well short of the 80,000 capacity, Rickard showed that he was dreaming big. With Dempsey as his headliner, Rickard’s massive productions continued during the 1920s. To showcase the Dempsey-Georges Carpentier bout in 1921, Rickard oversaw a temporary stadium in Jersey City, a monstrosity that became known as Boyle’s Thirty Acres. His gamble paid off, as the fight drew upward of 90,000 fans and was boxing’s first million-dollar gate. Dempsey recalled the hastily built stadium as rather flimsy. “… it creaked and swayed,” he wrote in his 1977 memoir. The fight, won by Dempsey via fourth- round KO, was nothing special, but the spectacle was talked about for decades. Rickard’s two stadium masterpieces were the Dempsey-Gene Tunney bouts. The first, held on September 23, 1926,
at Sesquicentennial Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, drew 120,557 paying customers. The second, at Soldier Field in Chicago the next year, pulled close to 105,000 and smashed the $2 million mark at the gate. Dempsey’s retirement and Rickard’s death created a void in American stadium bouts, as did the Wall Street crash in 1929. Yet New York promoter Mike Jacobs, a Rickard protege, established a tradition of summer shows at Yankee Stadium. Jacobs’ high point was the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling rematch of 1938, which drew 70,000 – an anomaly during the pre-war years that needed the growing unrest in Europe as a promotional backdrop. If the Great Depression buckled the stadium business in America, there were still huge crowds to be found overseas. British idol Len Harvey attracted swarms of people to West London’s White City Stadium in the 1930s. His fights with
Joshua have taken their final bows at Principality Stadium, the last vendor has packed up and gone home and the fans have filed out onto the streets of Cardiff, it will have been obvious to all involved that the big heavyweight showdown couldn’t have taken place anywhere else but an 80,000-seat venue. The early talk about Madison Square Garden was just silly. Granted, the Garden has been, through various incarnations, a storied site. But sometimes an event calls for as big a stage as possible. Can you imagine Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla happening anywhere but downtown Tokyo? Of course not. Giants deserve a giant-sized setting, even an aging pair of behemoths like The Gypsy King and AJ. Moreover, if the cynics are correct and the so-called “U.K. stadium boom” is in its twilight, who would be better choices than Fury and Joshua to bring down the
Fury and Joshua will meet in the tradition of Jack Dempsey vs. Georges Carpentier, a fight that drew around 90,000 people in 1921.
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