BOXING : He Wants to Be Part of Garden’s History

Sugar Ray Leonard, in the 15th year of a professional boxing career that has earned him far more money than anyone else in his sport--he should go over $110 million tonight--has finally landed in New York.

He arrived here saying there was a void in his career that would be filled tonight. Finally, his name goes up on his sport’s most famous marquee.

“I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with people asking me: ‘How come you never fought in Madison Square Garden?’ ” he said.

He boxed in the Garden as an amateur, in 1975, but never as a pro. He was starting to feel like a major leaguer who had never played in Yankee Stadium, or a race car driver who’d never been to the Indianapolis 500.

For more than a century, Madison Square Garden was America’s grand stage for its greatest fighters. The move of boxing’s biggest fights to Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos is a relatively recent development.

Today’s Garden, on the edge of the garment district and rising above Pennsylvania Station between 7th and 8th Avenues at 33rd St., is the fourth Madison Square Garden and is 23 years old.

Until about 20 years ago, when casino operators discovered that boxing was the perfect lure for high rollers, it was automatic--if you were a great fighter, you fought at the Garden.

John L. Sullivan, George Dixon, Joe Gans, Jim Jeffries, Bob Fitzsimmons, Jim Corbett, Kid McCoy, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Harry Greb, Benny Leonard, Jack Sharkey, Jimmy McLarnin, Ruby Goldstein, Kid Chocolate, Fidel LaBarba, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano . . . headliners all, at the Garden.

The original Madison Square Garden was an open-air, horseshoe-shaped railroad shed on the corner of a 4 1/2-acre park named Madison Square--for President James Madison, who’d recently died--in 1836. The railroad facility was used to stable cars and horses.

P. T. Barnum held a circus there in 1874, calling the building “the Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome.”

Next, a bandleader named Patrick Gilmore leased the facility and called it Gilmore’s Garden. He was the first to promote boxing shows in the facility, and got around the fact that prize fighting was illegal at the time. He called them “exhibitions” and “pugilistic lectures” and called the fighters “professors.”

Late in the 1870s, Commodore William Vanderbilt took over the lease and he gave the place a name that stuck, Madison Square Garden.

The first major fight there matched Boston’s John L. Sullivan and British champion Charlie Mitchell. A capacity crowd--10,000 were turned away--watched Sullivan win a four-round bout, one that made him the Garden’s first major attraction.

The old railroad shed was razed in 1887 and investors put up $1.5 million to finance a new Garden on the site. It was an ornate Moorish structure, highlighted by a 320-foot tower. Perched atop the tower was a 13-foot copper statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens of a nude Diana the huntress, on her toes, spinning about on ball bearings so that her bow and arrow always faced the wind.

Inside were an 8,000-seat auditorium, a 1,200-seat theater, a 1,500-seat concert hall and Mac Levy’s boxing gymnasium.

MSG II was, for decades, the cultural and sporting center of New York, but it was also a major money loser. Operating losses were routine . . . until the mortgage holder, New York Life, leased the Garden to a Klondike gold prospector and all-around huckster named Tex Rickard.

Rickard, who had promoted the 1910 “Fight of the Century” at Reno between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, leased the place for $10,000 in 1916.

In 1919, Rickard promoted Jack Dempsey’s victory over Jess Willard in Toledo, Ohio, and gained control of Dempsey’s heavyweight championship. He used that leverage to lease the Garden for 10 years, at $200,000 a year.

When New York Life announced in 1924 that the building would be razed, Rickard recruited investors for the construction of a third Madison Square Garden, 25 blocks uptown on the site of an old trolley barn on 8th Ave., between 49th and 50th Streets.

The closing act at MSG II was a boxing show, lightweights Sid Terris and Johnny Dundee. Terris won, before 10,106, and then ring announcer Joe Humphreys directed a 69th Regiment bugler to play “Taps.” Humphreys led the crowd in “Auld Lang Syne,” then closed the place with a two-line poem:

Farewell to thee, O Temple of Fistiana; Farewell to thee, O sweet Miss Diana. MSG III, “the House that Tex Built,” was a boxy, triple-decked arena that seated 18,500 for boxing. In Rickard’s first show, Dec. 11, 1925, light-heavyweight champion Paul Berlenbach won a decision over Jack Delaney before 17,675.

Rickard died of appendicitis in 1929--he lay in state in a $15,000 copper casket for two days in the Garden--and the Garden fell on hard times. Boxing income nose-dived, but a basketball promoter, Ned Irish, arrived with a new concept: college basketball doubleheaders.

In 1934, eight doubleheaders drew 99,528 people and some said Irish had saved the Garden, which had been losing money since Rickard’s death.

Madison Square Garden boxing, with Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong on the scene, made a comeback in the late 1930s. Promoter Mike Jacobs sold every conceivable standing-room spot in the building and drew an all-time Garden fight crowd, 23,306, to see the 1941 Armstrong-Fritzie Zivic fight. In 1944, lightweight Beau Jack sold out the Garden three times in one month.

The decades rolled by. And although every conceivable form of entertainment visited the Garden--from ballet to circuses to dog shows--boxing remained its most visible offering. Onetime Garden promoter-matchmaker Harry Markson recalled being introduced to Pope Paul VI, in 1968.

“He said to me: ‘Ah, Madison Square Garden--boxing,’ ” Markson said.

Said boxing announcer Gil Clancy, describing his days as a trainer: “You could meet any prominent boxer in Europe or South America and if you told him you could get him a fight in the Garden, he’d sign anything.”

They began pouring concrete for MSG IV in 1964, in the “air space” above Penn Station. MSG III closed after a 1967 fight between Luis Rodriguez and Benny Briscoe. MSG IV, which cost $116 million to build, opened in 1968. The first boxing show was a championship doubleheader, Joe Frazier vs. Buster Mathis and Nino Benvenuti vs. Emile Griffith.

But perhaps the best remembered of any Garden fight, dating even to the first John L. Sullivan appearances, was held March 8, 1971--Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier I. For that one, Jack Kent Cooke put up $4.5 million and the fighters were paid $2.5 million each, breathtaking purses at the time.

The live gate was a record $1,353,597, the attendance 20,455 and the Garden turned an $800,000 profit. With closed circuit TV income, the fight grossed about $18 million.

Longtime Garden boxing publicist Tom Kenville recalled the excitement:

“The first thing we learned was that we didn’t price the tickets high enough. Tickets were $150 ringside, down to $20 in the rafters. The fight sold out in 30 hours. Crowds started building around the Garden at 10 a.m. the day of the fight.

“It got so bad outside they decided they would be unable to get Ali into the building that night, so they brought him in in the morning and he slept in the press room all day.”

Surprisingly, word got out a few years ago that MSG IV was coming down, that an office tower would rise in its place. But since the stock market dive of Oct. 19, 1987, not another word has been heard about it, Garden employees say. The Garden is owned by Paramount Communications, which also owns Paramount Pictures and Simon and Schuster.

Until last year, most Garden fight shows were held in the building’s 4,350-seat Felt Forum. Only occasionally was the main arena used for boxing. But the Felt Forum was closed a year ago for remodeling. It will reopen in September with 5,500 seats.

In the interim, MSG boxing has promoted fight shows at other New York area venues, and also at Lake Tahoe, San Antonio and St. Joseph, Mo.

The main Garden arena, where Leonard will fight Terry Norris tonight, is also being remodeled, with expanded food-service areas and 88 new suites being installed.

Life goes on. Another Garden lives. And the clock ticks down on the career of perhaps the most storied fighter--certainly the richest, anyway--of the 1976-1991 period. Leonard, at 34, seeks tonight to fill the void.

“I wanted to fight in the Garden,” he said. “It’s important to me.”