Boxing: Boxing's Garden of champions

The venue for Saturday's world title fight between Lewis and Holyfield has staged many of the sport's greatest contests

Wlhen Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield face up for the undisputed heavyweight championship at Madison Square Garden on Saturday they will be in a place that lies very close to the heart of boxing history.

If the arena at West 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhatten (completed in 1965 as part of the Pennsylvania railroad station complex) is actually the fourth to be called after the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, the name does remain synonymous with championship boxing.

Harry Markson, a former president of Madison Square Boxing told of going to Rome in 1968 to sign Nino Benvenuti for a middleweight title fight against Emile Griffith, and accompanying the Benvenuti family to an audience with the Pope. "I was introduced to Pope Paul VI as Harry Markson of Madison Square Garden," Markson said. "And the Pope stepped back smiling, raised his fists, and he sort of exclaimed, "Ah, Madison Square Garden - boxing."

The Garden's history goes back to 1879, just 14 years after the American Civil War, when the famed showman Phineas T Barnum, who gave the world Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, took over an unused tram shed in Madison Square three blocks north of where 23rd Street crossed both Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Spending $35,000 to develop the depot, Barnum built an elliptical arena 270 feet long with rows of wooden seats for 15,000 people. After only three months Barnum was driven south by a hard winter and ownership passed to his bandmaster Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. With Barnum's freaks and animals gone, Gilmore turned to a new crowd-pleaser: boxing.

At the time, a New York State law threatened arrest for anyone who took part in "a contention with fists". To get around this inconvenience Gilmore simply called his "fights" exhibitions, or better yet, "illustrated lectures," with the "professors" appearing in tights and wearing strips of bucksin across their knuckles.

The "gloves" were important to Gilmore's enterprise because they supposedly brought his boxing "lectures" into line with the new rules written in London by the Marquis of Queensbury, which insisted upon three-minute rounds, a 24-foot ring, and the wearing of gloves. Gilmore's argument was that if his professors wore gloves, they could hardly be accused of taking part in a contention of fists.

The next owner, W M Tileson, added a riding school, an archery range, lawn tennis and ice carnivals to the arena's attractions. But the sideshow days were coming to an end.

And after reasserting control of his family's Madison Square properties William Vanderbilt announced that the arena would operate principally in the future as an athletic centre. He would bring in two great attractions: The National Horse Show, which drew high society, and John L Sullivan, who drew everybody else.

On 31 May 1879, the eve of opening night, Vanderbilt named his new auditorium Madison Square Garden. It was not an immediate success. Three years of moderate attendances brought Vanderbilt to the realisation that he needed a star. The brightest star in town was Sullivan, who by popular consent had become the heavyweight champion on 7 February 1882.

Installed as the Garden's main attraction, Sullivan went four rounds against British heavyweight Tug Wilson. The Garden was jammed and another 10,000 were turned away at the door. Sullivan's presence in the Garden persuaded even serious newspapers like the New York Times to cover fights, but police intervention caused some contests to be stopped and his subsequent arrest for "outraging public decency and tending to corrupt public morals". Described by Harper's Weekly as "a patched up, grimy, drafty, combustible old shall" the first Garden didn't have long to go and went under the wrecking ball in July 1889.

There was little or no boxing at a new, grander Garden (raised on the same site) which went through a series of owners and was just a step away from being demolished in 1916 when Tex Rickard came upon the scene. A colourful hustler who had lost a fortune on worthless gold claims, Rickard borrowed $10,000 from ticket broker Mike Jacobs, leased the Garden from New York Life, and matched heavyweight champion Jess Willard against Frank Moran. Held under the Frawley Law of no decisions, no knockdowns (it was the era of "newspaper verdicts' decision" arrived at by ringside reporters), the contest turned over a record $152,000 in Garden receipts.

In 1920, Jimmy Walker, who would become the swinging mayor of New York City and a close friend of Rickard's, pushed a bill through the State Senate that legalised boxing. With that and an arm lock on Jack Dempsey - Rickard was close to Dempsey's manager Doc Kearns - Rickard signed a lease for $200,000 a year with New York Life. Thirty four days after taking over Rickard staged the Garden's first legal fight, a lightweight contest between Joe Willing and Johnny Dundee. Ninety days later he had Dempsey in the ring against Bill Brennan for a second defence of the heavyweight title. Five years later Rickard could announce a figure of $5m as the Garden's total take from boxing.

Even before New York Life decided to replace the Garden with a four-storey office block Rickard was passing the hat for a creation of his own, an arena made specifically for boxing. With a $6m kitty raised among the Wall Street financiers he called "my 600 millionaires" Rickard was ready to move uptown. He moved exactly 25 blocks up and several blocks west.

Garden III was called The House That Tex Built. It was a box of a building on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets toward the Hudson River, and only one block west of the Great White Way. It had triple tiers of seats connected by escalators, and could take 18,500 fight fans.

Rickard's death from acute appendicitis in 1929 was followed by the Depression. In 1927, the Garden profits had exceeded $1m. After the market crash in 1931, profit fell to $130,000. A year later boxing shows made only $7,000 and was soon running at a big loss. Markson, who would leave sportswriting to become the Garden's promoter and stay for 40 years, recalled, "It was difficult to promote anything. Besides, after Dempsey and Gene Tunney we were blessed with heavyweight champions such as Primo Carnera and Max Baer."

By late 1933, boxing began to struggle back. Three sportswriters employed by the Hearst organisation led by Damon Runyon formed the Twentieth Century Sporting Club and hired Rickard's funder Jacobs as their promoter. Jacobs's masterstroke was to sign an up and coming heavyweight, Joe Louis.

After Louis knocked out a terrified King Levinsky in one round and a reluctant Baer in four, Jacobs rented the Garden for two fights. Louis won them both, in between he scored six more knockouts, and two months after his second Garden fight he knocked out James J Braddock in Chicago to win the championship. It was the signal for the Garden bosses to make Jacobs their promoter on a 50-50 basis. The partnership lasted until 1949 and by then Louis had defended his title 25 times.

In the 20s Rickard had Dempsey. In the 30s and 40s, Jacobs had Louis. In the 50s, Jim Norris had Rocky Marciano. And boxing at the Garden was alive and thriving.

Along the way, Jacobs brought in a fighting machine from St Louis named Henry Armstrong who won the featherweight title at the Garden in 1937 and later the lightweight and welterweight crowns and held them all at the same time. In 1941, Fritzie Zivic took the 147lb championship from Armstrong by knocking him out in the 12th round of a hard contest that set a Garden attendance record of 23,306. The Garden pipeline was loaded with talent. Before Armstrong and Zivic went to their corners that night the audience watched a young welterweight Walker Smith who would become one of boxing's most celebrated figures and a Garden mainstay under the name of Sugar Ray Robinson.

The lightweight Beau Jack sold out the Garden three times in one month. He lost his title to Bob Montgomery on 3 March 1944, defeated Al Bummy Davis on St Patrick's Day, and took Juan Zurita's NBA championship on the 31st, all in front of capacity crowds.

One night in March 1945 a highly-skilled boxer-puncher, Tony Janiro, had his hand pressed by a spectator after defeating Marty Pignatore in a hard fight at the Garden. Later, in his dressing-room, Janiro asked his manager Frankie Jacobs if he knew the man. "Sure," Jacobs replied, "that was Harry Truman, the vice-president. "Gee," Janiro said, "imagine that. The vice-president of Madison Square Garden." One month and three days later, Harry Truman was elected president of the United States.

From 1925 to 1945, from Dempsey's day until Louis's, the Garden put on numerous world championship matches. There was so much action at any weight that on a strip of the Garden lobby known in boxing as Jacobs Beach, more fights were made than in any other place in the world.

Muhammad Ali fought nine main events at the Garden, including two at the more famous address on Seventh Avenue. Joe Frazier had seven main events, the five-time world champion Griffith had 30. Welterweight champion Benny `Kid' Paret was killed in the Garden ring. The roll of honour is endless. Sullivan and Benny Leonard, Dempsey, Tony Canzoneri and Barney Ross. Robinson, Marciano, Kids Chocolate and Gavilan. Rocky Graziano, Tony Zale, Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler. It was in the Garden that "Hands of Stone" Roberto Duran took the world lightweight championship from Scotland's Ken Buchanan.

"Not boxing in the Garden was like a void in my career,' Sugar Ray Leonard said before his ill-fated comeback against the World Boxing Council's super-welterweight champion Terry Norris in 1991. "It's not about money, not this time. All the great fighters have fought in the Garden, it's like a fraternity. This is my initiation. I belong there."

A combination of punitive state taxes, casino boxing and television's refusal to black out fights in New York City almost finished off boxing at the Garden. "The corporate suits didn't want it anyway," veteran American boxing writer Pat Putnam said. The sport was too seamy for them and a lot more could be made from basketball, ice hockey, circuses and musical extravaganzas."

Even with all-time record gate receipts of $1,603,425, the Garden reportedly lost money on the Riddick Bowe-Michael Dokes fight in February 1993. That was the first heavyweight title fight at the Garden in nine years and only the fifth in 22 years. At the time it was confidently predicted that the heavyweight championship would never go back there.

The casino operators stood back and let the Garden have Holyfield and Lewis for the undisputed championship. Thus, nobody should expect a full- scale revival of Garden boxing. But next week history will speak for itself at Eighth Avenue and West 33rd Street. The name is the thing.