Background
He was one of nine surviving children of Jewish immigrants who settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1868.
https://www.amazon.com/Michigan-Assassin-Sensational-Middleweight-Champion/dp/B00186WPCQ?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00186WPCQ
publisher sportswriter boxing authority
He was one of nine surviving children of Jewish immigrants who settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1868.
While attending P. S. 15 and Townsend Harris Hall, Fleischer was active in the neighborhood Oregon Athletic Club, becoming president and participating on the basketball, baseball, and boxing teams. At City College of New York Fleischer organized and managed its first basketball team while participating on the track squad and working part-time as a cub reporter for two city newspapers.
Fleischer received a B. S. in 1908 and for a while taught sixth-grade botany at P. S. 7 during the day and worked as a reporter for the New York Press at night.
Unhappy in the classroom, Fleischer enrolled in a graduate course in commercial chemistry at New York University and attended a summer course in forestry at Yale University.
In 1912 Nat became a full-time reporter for the Press, earning forty-five dollars per week. In four years he rose to the rank of sports editor. Fleischer was a favorite of Frank Munsey, owner of the Press and other New York newspapers.
Except for a stint in the army in 1917 and 1918, Fleischer worked steadily as a sports editor on five of Munsey's papers from 1916 to 1929. Fleischer was working for the New York Evening Telegram when Munsey died in 1929; the Scripps-Howard syndicate bought the Telegram after Munsey's death and immediately fired Fleischer.
His dismissal, it could be said, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him, for it changed the direction of his life.
In 1922 Fleischer and three partners had founded The Ring, a monthly magazine intended to promote boxing and combat efforts in New York State to curtail or outlaw the sport. After losing his newspaper job Fleischer began to devote his considerable energies to making The Ring a success.
He bought out his partners and began to promote The Ring as boxing's authoritative publication.
Working tirelessly to give boxing--a sport plagued by fixed fights, betting scandals, and other forms of corruption--greater legitimacy, Fleischer originated the definitive method of rating boxers from all over the world.
By 1933, with the aid of more than 140 ring observers in the United States and boxing reports published in seventy-five overseas newspapers, Fleischer was issuing monthly boxer ratings in a largely successful attempt to end mismatches and regularize the sport's operations.
The Ring lost money in its first years, but Fleischer subsidized the magazine with some of his considerable earnings from book sales. Training for Boxers, published in 1929, sold close to one million copies at one dollar each.
Over his lifetime Fleischer wrote almost sixty books on boxing and wrestling, including thirteen biographies of boxing titlists; Black Dynamite, a five-volume history of African-American boxers; and numerous "how-to" guides for boxers, referees, seconds, and managers.
In 1942 he began to write and publish the annual Ring Record Book and Boxing Encyclopedia, which instantly became the sport's premier resource volume. During World War II Fleischer was boxing's ambassador to the armed forces. He flew more than 150, 000 miles to visit 168 hospitals and camps, where he entertained the troops with boxing stories and his collection of fight films.
He donated $25, 000 worth of boxing equipment to military facilities and presented the army with 13, 000 free copies of The Ring, almost 25 percent of his government-restricted press run. He also sent copies of the Ring Record Book to 250 camp libraries.
The Ring lost money during the war years, but Fleischer reaped benefits from his wartime largesse when the magazine's 1946 circulation jumped by 30, 000, thanks to demobilized veterans who took out subscriptions.
In 1948 The Ring had a monthly circulation of about 160, 000 copies in the United States and 90, 000 copies elsewhere in the world. Fleischer conducted a worldwide campaign to reform boxing.
Appearing often before legislative committees examining the sport, he insisted that incompetent and corrupt officials in the various boxing organizations, not the sport itself, were the problem. Discontinuing the sport, Fleischer claimed, would only drive it underground.
Fleischer was unquestionably the world's leading boxing authority. In his office in Madison Square Garden he displayed the world's largest collection of boxing memorabilia complemented by the largest library of boxing and wrestling books; his collection and library are now The Ring Magazine Museum.
He was instrumental in securing standard padding in gloves and under ring canvasses; establishing physical exams and health protection for boxers; initiating a system for stopping contests before knockouts on the basis of cuts; and standardizing training sessions for officials, trainers, and managers.
Fleischer married Gertrude ("Trudie") Phillips on October 22, 1922. They had one daughter.