The Magnificent Rube: The Life And Gaudy Times Of Tex Rickard

Charles Samuels

The story of George L. (Tex) Rickard, sports promoter and big-time gambler is Americana at its lusty best. None of this country's other spectacular showmen, from Barnum down to Mike Todd, contributed so much to our explosive history. Tex, from the moment he was born, somehow managed to be wherever the fast action was, and the turbulence. As he entered the world, a twenty-six-man sheriff's posse thundered past, guns blazing. They were after the outlaw brothers, Frank and Jesse James. whose family lied on the farm next to the Rickards' Missouri cabin. Tex grew up on the Texas frontier, where he saw men killed when he was ten. He became a trail cowboy at eleven and a town marshall in his early twenties. Rickard was up in the Yukon Valley, working in gambling houses, two years before the Klondike gold rush started; there he prospected made and lost several fortunes. His famous Northern, in Nome is generally credited with being the only honest Rambling saloon in Alaska during the gold-rush years. By 1906 Tex was operating another Northern, in Goldfield, Nevada. It was the most ornate and successful gambling saloon the Old West ever saw. Tex hunted for secret diamond mines in South Africa and ran a 5-million-acre ranch in the wilds of Paraguay.

His greatest fame, of course, came as the creator, with Jack Dempsey's collaboration, of the fabulous "million-dollar gate." But this was preceded by his first two record-breaking title fight promotions: Joe Gans and Battling Nelson in 1906, Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in 1910. His promotional masterpiece starred Dempsey and Gorgeous Georges Carpentier, at Jersey City. His second Dempsey-Tunney title fight at Chicago, in 1927, drew $2,658,660, still the world-record take for a sports event.

Though no one seemed to know Rickard intimately, he had millions of admirers. ranging from ex-President Theodore Roosevelt to Itchfoot Swanson, the old Klondike prospector. He tended bar in Dawson, shoulder to shoulder with Wilson Miner, and chopped wood through one terrible winter in the frozen wilderness with Rex Beach, the best-selling novelist. And when the old Texan died, savage ring champions cried like babies, and he was mourned around the world like a beloved elder statesman.

Charles Samuels, the author of The Magnificent Rube, also wrote His Eye Is On the Sparrow, the best-selling autobiography of the Negro star, Ethel Waters; The Girl in the Red Keher Swing; and, with his wife Louise, Night Fell on Georgia. This is his tenth book.

Biography

1957

McGraw-Hill

English