Jeffries Became Only Los Angeles Champion

The 1900s will end in 10 months with only one Los Angeles fighter in that span having won the richest prize in sports, boxing’s heavyweight championship.

Jim Jeffries died 46 years ago today, at 77, at his Burbank home. He had made more than a million dollars in boxing and vaudeville earnings between 1900 and 1910, lost his fortune in ill-advised Mono County mining ventures, then earned it all back by investing in San Fernando Valley real estate.

For decades, he was boxing’s grand old man, hosting boxing and wrestling shows on his Burbank alfalfa farm in a facility known as Jeffries’ Barn.

He was born in Ohio, son of a preacher who moved his family to Los Angeles when Jeffries was 6. He quit school in his mid-teens and at 16 was a toughened boilermaker at Lacey Manufacturing, on North Spring Street.

Jeffries was big (6-2, 215 pounds), fast (he once ran 100 yards in 10 seconds) and strong (friends often told of Jeffries shooting a deer in the Tehachipi Mountains and carrying it on his shoulders for 10 miles).

He learned to box at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. With no amateur fights, he turned pro in 1896.

He won the title in his 13th fight, in 1899, by knocking out Bob Fitzsimmons at Coney Island in Brooklyn. He ran out of opponents and retired undefeated in 1905.

Friends, promoters and fight fans goaded him into a comeback, in 1910, to challenge the widely unpopular champion, Jack Johnson. They fought in 1910 at Reno, where Jeffries was badly beaten.

Jeffries’ grave is in Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Also on this date: In 1984, Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, was named commissioner of major league baseball, effective Oct. 1. . . . In 1965, in Boston, the Lakers overcame a 16-point deficit and Jerry West sank a 20-foot basket at the buzzer to beat the Celtics, 104-102. . . . In 1984, 19-season Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.