George Lewis "Tex" Rickard was an American boxing promoter, founder of the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League (NHL), and builder of the third incarnation of Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Background
George Lewis Rickard was born on January 2, 1870 in Kansas City, Missouri. During his picturesque career he was at one time or another, a cowboy, a rancher, a town marshal, a gambler, and a beef baron, but preëminently he was a showman. When he was four years old his family moved from Kansas City to Sherman, Texas, and subsequently took up a cattle range. When he was ten years old his father died and he became the main support of his family. He grew up in the saddle and at twenty-three was elected town marshal of Henrietta, Texas.
Career
Gaming was his favorite pastime and in the late nineties he was lured to Alaska by a report that flour was selling at a dollar a barrel along the Yukon, his reasoning being that money must be plentiful there and a good gambler might get some. He operated gambling houses in the Klondike for four years, quit with $500, 000, and lost it buying up claims that proved to be valueless.
He went to San Francisco but the gleanings there were lean and the roar of the mining towns of Tonopah and Goldfield drew him to Nevada. In Goldfield he learned that money could be made in the promotion of prize fights. Purely as an advertising device, the town offered a purse of $30, 000 to secure the Gans-Nelson fight (September 3, 1906) for the lightweight title, but Rickard, selected to handle the actual promotion, succeeded so well that the receipts went beyond $62, 000.
In 1910, venturing into fight promotion on his own responsibility, he paid Jeffries and Johnson $101, 000 to fight for him at Reno, Nevada, and made money. Putting aside prize fighting for the time being, he went to Central and South America as a prospector in beef, making and losing a couple of small fortunes.
Returning to the United States in 1916, he got a new stake out of the Willard-Moran bout which he sponsored in New York and which brought in $156, 000. Now his way was clear and he concentrated on fight promotion. He recognized the possibilities of a good future match even in its embryonic state, and none excelled him in developing them.
He lost money on the Willard-Dempsey fight at Toledo, Ohio, on July 4, 1919, but, operating strictly on his nerve, he took in $1, 626, 580 when, on July 2, 1921, some 90, 000 paid to see Dempsey and Carpentier in the arena he had constructed at Boyle's Thirty Acres, Jersey City, with money taken from the advance sale of seats. Having acquired the old Madison Square Garden in 1920, he built the new one and opened it in 1925 with, as he proudly pointed out, "six hundred millionaires" in the crowd. Meanwhile, he had developed Luis Angel Firpo as a rival for Dempsey through the medium of several spectacular and profitable fights, and at the Polo Grounds in New York on September 14, 1923, Dempsey and Firpo had drawn $1, 082, 590.
The "gate" went to $1, 895, 723 when Dempsey and Gene Tunney met in the Sesquicentennial stadium in Philadelphia on September 24, 1926. Dempsey and Jack Sharkey drew $1, 083, 529 at the Yankee Stadium in New York, July 21, 1927, and Dempsey and Tunney, in a return match at Soldier Field, Chicago, September 22 of the same year, drew $2, 650, 000. It was the last of the golden gates that Rickard, with the aid of Dempsey, had made possible. He was engaged in the promotion of a fight in Florida when he died at Miami Beach. Among his few and simple rules as a promoter was: "See that every purchaser of a ticket gets the seat for which the ticket calls. " Other promoters before him had arranged attractive fights but he was the first to guarantee that a patron would find his seat vacant no matter how late he arrived. This bred a confidence in Rickard that was the basis of his success.
Achievements
During the 1920s, Tex Rickard was the leading promoter of the day, and he has been compared to P. T. Barnum and Don King. Sports journalist Frank Deford has written that Rickard "first recognized the potential of the star system. " Rickard also operated several saloons, hotels, and casinos, all named Northern and located in Alaska, Nevada, and Canada.
Connections
He was married twice: his first wife was Edith Mae Rickard, whom he married at Sacramento, California, in 1902, and who died in 1925; on October 8, 1926, he married Maxine Hodges at Lewisburg, West Virginia. His second wife and a daughter survived him.
