This Promoter Broke the Mold

The fight manager is an American original, as American as the pumpkin. There’s nothing quite like him in any other part of the world.

Tex Rickard was the prototype of the breed. Taciturn, laconic, he had been raised an orphan, a loner from the crib on. He made his bundle in the Klondike, lost it on a roll of the dice or the turn of a card, shrugged and looked for the next game.

Rickard was a professional gambler and putting on fights was the highest-stakes game he could sit in on. He put on the famous Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight in Reno in 1910 after it had been run out of San Francisco and no entrepreneur would touch it. He built an arena and talked Johnson into accepting short money by buying the champion’s wife a fur coat and lavishing her with perfume.

His ace in the hole was Jack Dempsey. He staged the Willard fight, then he put on the first million-dollar fight in a makeshift arena in Jersey City, where Dempsey demolished an undersized and under-gunned French challenger, Georges Carpentier.

If Yankee Stadium was The House That Ruth Built, Madison Square Garden was The House That Tex Rickard Built. Under his aegis, it became the Mecca of Mayhem, the Palace of Pugilism. If you didn’t fight there, you didn’t fight.

After Rickard, there was Mike Jacobs. Mike was a Broadway ticket broker. He got you seats to the top Broadway shows and branched into fight promotion mainly so he could get the ducats to scalp.

His ace in the hole was Joe Louis. What a successful promoter has to have basically is the reigning king of the manly art. Everything else plays off that.

Muhammad Ali was promoted basically by his co-religionists who called the shots, but he was briefly allied with the obstreperous Don King, who was the antithesis of the dour Mike Jacobs and the silent, close-to-the-vest Rickard. King was part-carnival barker, part-Barnum and all bombast. He was the first promoter ever to spout Shakespeare to try to sell fights.

King’s ace in the hole was Mike Tyson till he had to fold the hand in an Indianapolis court and cash out.

On Sept. 25, 1962, a curious thing happened to the fight game. For the first time since Johnson-Jeffries in 1910, it moved its headquarters to Nevada.

No one thought too much of it at the time, but the Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson rematch for the heavyweight title was a watershed event for the boxing game. The fight was shifted to Las Vegas. The reasoning was that, in those benighted days, for a promotion to be successful in its venue, the television signal had to be blacked out. Otherwise, no one would buy tickets.

This was a problem in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. No responsible TV sponsor wanted to have his product unpublicized in markets of that size.

Las Vegas posed no such problems. It was too small a market to cause major concern. Moreover, selling tickets turned out not to be a problem even if the event were televised. Casinos fell all over themselves to get ringside seats for preferred customers. Price was no object. Rickard had charged $50 for Jeffries-Johnson and $100 for Dempsey-Carpentier. Las Vegas charged $1,000.

It made Las Vegas the prizefight capital of the world, and it made Henry Gluck, considerably to his surprise, the logical successor to Tex Rickard, Mike Jacobs and company.

Henry Gluck is a departure from the cigar-chomping, spats-wearing, language-mangling stereotype of the fight promoter so dear to the Hollywood movies. Burgess Meredith doesn’t get this part, Sean Connery does. Gluck’s clothes are as tailor-made as a secretary of state’s, he doesn’t smoke or chew anything, his language is as impeccable as Churchill’s and he winces at obscenities.

Henry was not raised in a gym. Henry is the tall, proper chairman and CEO of the casino conglomerate Caesars World.

Hauled out of retirement after a successful career as a financial wizard at merger and takeover finance, Gluck was able to render to Caesars the things that were Caesars’--and turn a conglomerate losing $21 million a year into an Unholy Roman Empire grossing in the hundreds of millions.

And that’s how he turned from, so to speak, making money to making fights. “Prizefighting and the casino culture were perfect for each other. It brought the kinds of crowds and the kind of atmosphere we strive for,” Gluck explains. “It brings the highest-energy type of crowds any sporting event gets. We’re going to have over 100,000 hotel rooms in Vegas and, with the right event and the right promotion, we can fill all of them for the week.”

In the view of Henry Gluck, the positioning of a title fight in Vegas not only benefits the hotel where it takes place, it benefits the whole community. “The dateline ‘Las Vegas’ goes all over the world. It’s the kind of attention you can’t pay for.”

For Las Vegas to get into bed with the fight mob was risky. Pugilism is run by a set of Marquis of Queensbury rules, but not necessarily the Ten Commandments.

“I wanted to bring some order out of chaos that was the fight business,” Gluck says. “We wanted to control the process a little bit better. We wanted to do the most good for the game and for us.”

Henry Gluck realized, along with the Rickards and the Jacobses, that the first thing a promoter has to have is the champ. Accordingly, no sooner did Riddick Bowe take the title from Evander Holyfield last November than Gluck moved in to tie up the once and future champion.

“We gave him and his manager, Rock Newman, a number,” he puts it.

That number is believed to be in excess of $50 million, and it tied the champ to Caesars for three years of title fights. Included are this Saturday’s Bowe-Holyfield defense at Caesars Palace in Vegas--plus tentative fights with Lennox Lewis and three other challengers, including Mike Tyson when he gets out of prison.

Gluck didn’t have to buy any fur coats or jade necklaces for anyone. But he did have to underwrite Bowe’s first two “defenses” (if fighting Michael Dokes in Madison Square Garden and Jesse Ferguson in Washington qualify as defenses). Those fights did not otherwise make money, but Bowe was desirous of a showcase in his two hometowns.

The house has the edge as usual. Having the heavyweight champion is a bigger advantage than the zeros on the roulette layout or the odds on the craps table.

Of course, for the house to win, Bowe has to, too. They said that Rickard was always afraid Dempsey was in over his head--until the Tunney fight when he actually was. It was said Mike Jacobs didn’t watch Louis’ fights, he just waited till he heard the telltale thud.

Promoter Gluck will be listening for the “drop,” too. That is the term used by the casinos for the amount of money bet on the night. CEO Gluck hopes for a big drop on fight night. It will be nice if Holyfield’s drop is included. If not, well, it has to be remembered that you render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s--but to God the things that are God’s.