Through the press of the country we are informed that prizefighters now-a-days make considerable fortunes. Then they did not, and having a surprisingly healthy appetite in a healthy body, the fighting profession sadly delayed the perfect development of my embonpoint.
LIVING BY MY WITS.
CHAPTER V.
LIVING BY MY WITS.
True, my fights with Tommy Gibbons and others had brought me some money, but the social obligations were so many and the celebrations so frequent that, after a short time of plenty, I always found myself "dead broke" and compelled to resort to my "wits" for making a living.
All Chatham street—now Park Row—and the Bowery teemed with "sporting houses," which offered opportunities to men of my class. In many of these places boxing was the real or pretended attraction.
On an elevated stage from three to six pairs of boxers and wrestlers furnished nightly entertainment for a roomful of foolish men, and—more's the pity!—women. The real purpose of these gatherings must remain nameless here, but this fact we must note, that all of these "sporting-houses," these hells of blackest iniquity, were run by so-called statesmen, patriots, politicians, many of them lawmakers, or else by their figureheads.
The figureheads were chosen with great carefulness. To become a proxy owner of a "sporting-house" one had to have a reputation, sufficient to attract that particularly silly and morbid crowd of habitués. Some of the reputations were made in the prize ring, viz: Frank White, manager of the Champion's Rest, on the Bowery, two doors north of Houston street; Billy Madden, Mike Cleary and other "prominent" prizefighters. A few of them, as Billy Madden and Frank Stevenson, later branched out as backers of pugilists, policy shops and gambling houses.
Reputations made in prisons were also accepted as qualifications, and "Fatty" Flynn, Billy McGlory, Tommy Stevenson, Jimmy Nugent, of Manhattan Bank robbery fame, and other ex-inmates of jails owed their wide popularity and money-making capacity to their terms spent behind the bars. An isolated position of especially luminous glamor was acceptably filled by the famous Mr. Steve Brodie, the bridge-jumper, and greatest "fake" and fraud of the period.
In places where boxing was not the attraction, the vilest passions of human nature were vainly incited by painted sirens, who, by experience and compulsion of their employers, had become perfect in their shrewd wickedness. In front of these "joints"—frequently called "bilking houses"—glaring posters, picturing the pleasures within, were displayed in most garish array.