Garden to Hammond

Inside one of the biggest rooms in the world one night last week batteries of searchlights played down on a canvas-covered ring where a big clumsy German named Walter Neusel wildly flailed his way to victory over cautious, thick-middled, aging Tommy Loughran of Philadelphia. Back from the ring, in a raised box among the shadows, an event of more importance was taking place. After a fourth change in management in five years the world's greatest sports plant was welcoming a new boss. Two days before, by acquiring with his associates 78,000 shares of Madison Square Garden Corp. stock valued at $546,000, Colonel John S. Hammond had become the Garden's board chairman. Since 1932, white-haired, soldierly Colonel Hammond has had to pay his way like any one else when he went to the Garden to see a rodeo, prizefight, bicycle race, dog show, circus, wrestling match, horse show, dance marathon or hockey game. That was a disagreeable novelty for the oldtime West Point and Olympic (1904) sprinter. Years before, when he was U. S. military attache in Bolivia, he had run into a shrewd promoter looking for speculative cattle lands. Then and there they became fast friends. Colonel Hammond stayed in the Army, serving in most of the important South American legations, later becoming identified with oil, railroads & banking. The promoter got into the prizefight business and made the name of Tex Rickard one of the most spectacular in a spectacular era. Colonel Hammond in 1923 helped Rickard raise the $7,000,000 necessary to move Madison Square Garden away from Madison Square and house it 25 blocks uptown in an arena the like of which had never been seen before. Rickard died when the era died six years later, and Colonel Hammond became Madison Square Garden's general manager. Like princes squabbling over an emperor's spoils, the heirs of Rickard soon fell out. Sturdy, speed-loving Richard F. Hoyt, through Hayden, Stone & Co's stockholdings, controlled the Garden. He chose a canal & railroad engineer and heavy Garden stockholder, William F. Carey, to be president of the Garden. But it soon became evident that the sports empire of Rickard was a hollow thing without Rickard to run it. Last year Carey, who had ousted Hammond as general manager, was succeeded by Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick, another ex-Army man and oldtime Yale footballer.

Such changes of management did not brake the Garden's steady downward plummet in prestige and profits. Boxing, once the corporation's most flourishing sport, attracted 206,000 spectators in 1932-33. 83,000 in 1933-34. The unpopularity of gaudy Matchmaker James Joy Johnston, who developed the practice of putting his brother's fighters on his increasingly unsuccessful cards, finally alienated the best of the country's fight managers and boxers who once considered a Garden engagement a crowning achievement. The final blow fell when the Ross-Petrolle lightweight championship tight was held last winter in a rival stadium in the distant and inconvenient Bronx.

While boxing was languishing, hockey made a slight gain in attendance in 1933-34. Exiled Colonel Hammond, who had grimly told his friends "I'll be back after the split-up with Carey, did not permit the Garden's stockholders and directors to forget that he had founded and been president of both of New York's professional hockey clubs, Americans and Rangers. In the show-down last week, his hockey successes weighed heavily in vanquishing the Hoyt interests.

The Baer-Carnera heavyweight championship fight June 14 should help Colonel Hammond in his campaign to bring back to the Garden once more the gilded days of his friend Rickard. Last week Champion Camera arrived in Manhattan looking more like a troglodyte than ever. In the Maine woods he had acquired a huge growth of whiskers to cover the bottom of his great snaggle-toothed face. In the Garden offices, where they formally signed fight articles, he met, shook hands with and drew a wince from his fun-loving opponent, Baer. That did not prevent the pugnacious cinema star, vaudevillian and radio broadcaster from growling to newshawks: "I'll murder him."

Hulking Primo Carnera replied with simple dignity: "Condition and ability will enable me to retain my title."

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