Carey, Dempsey & Fugazy

Things are looking up in the fisticuff business. For years it has been unexciting largely because it was held in the horny hollow of one man's hand, Tex Rickard's. Others sought to enter the field of promotion from time to time but failed because they could not cope with the supreme showmanship of the old master. Then Rickard died (TIME, Jan. 21).

Last week William Francis Carey was elected to the presidency of Madison Square Garden Corp., the position left vacant by Rickard. When he announced, next day, that he had leased for outdoor bouts both the Polo Grounds and the Yankee Stadium, New York's big baseball parks, it appeared that the monopoly built up by Rickard was safe.

Then came the announcement that Jack Dempsey, former heavyweight champion, had signed a two-year contract to promote boxing bouts with Humbert J. Fugazy. Fugazy long had been the most formidable of Rickard's rivals. He has never reached the heights, but he has threatened. In signing Dempsey he gained as an asset the most magnetic personality in the fight game today. Dempsey proved as much when he rushed into the breach upon Rickard's death and by sheer ballyhoo turned the Sharkey-Stribling bout in Florida from a certain failure into a financial success. The Dempsey-Fugazy firm will begin with a lightweight championship battle -Sammy Mandell, the title holder, probably against Ray Miller of Chicago -to be held in Detroit, June 6. The Messrs. Dempsey and Fugazy say they will build themselves a coliseum comparable to Madison Square Garden within a year.

In William Francis Carey, new head of the oldtime Garden, newcomers will find no sleeping adversary. He is 50, a bronzed six-footer. He was born a farmer's son near Hoosick Falls, N. Y., earned $11 with his own cabbage patch while still very young and struck out for the West with that $11 as his capital. He learned rail road construction in the Colorado camps.

At 25 he was superintendent of the Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal, blasting and steamshoveling his way through mountains. To look old enough for the job he grew a beard. When he straightened out several miles of the Northern Pacific R.R. in Montana he risked the loss of $100,000 in equipment by discarding the slow mule-pack transportation and using cows through the swift currents of the Yellow stone River. In 1915 he decided China needed railroads, so he went there, got the concessions, built the roads. During the War he bored a hole through the mountains of Washington to reach the spruce forests and provide building material for airplanes. He has just finished a huge dam in Vermont.

At the moment his company is at work on a $41,000,000 railroad through the Andes mountains for the Bolivian Government. He also has signed an agreement to make the largest airport in the world on the Jersey meadows opposite New York. He has always been interested in sports but was drawn into the fight game by Rickard, who picked him as the man to build the new Madison Square Garden when the old one had to be abandoned. He is a millionaire. If he can promote fights the way the late Rickard could, he will be a millionaire again.