Atlanta Daily World

Modern

Boxers

Get

Higher

Pay

Than

During

Mike

Jacobs

Era

BY PAT ROBINSON

NEW YORK- (INS) - Any fighter who can get on the card in Madison Square Garden can make twice as much today under Promoter Jim Norris as he could under the late Mike Jacobs in the so-called golden age of boxing.

It costs Norris twice as much for the preliminary bouts for any ordinary card as it did Jacobs. The break-down may interest you. Each man in a semi-final bout gets a minimum of $500. Four six round bouts cost a minimum of $2,000. Two four-rounders cost $600 and an emergency four rounder costs another $100 whether it is staged or not.

That's a total of $5,700 minimum and it can and does sometimes run much higher.

Now for the main event. That bout averages about 55 per cent of the net receipts for the fighters to split between them. In addition they are each assured of $4,000 TV money.

Thus you will note that the main eventers' earnings are limited only by their own drawing power. But even if they played to an empty house each fighter is assured of that $4,000 TV money.

Of course, for a title fight, the TV money can run up as high as the $300,000 paid for the Louis-Walcott fight in Chicago, with the fighters usually drawing the same percentage of TV that they draw on the gate receipts.

You will readily understand that Norris doesn't make as much from his garden promotions as Jacobs made. One reason he doesn't is that he doesn't speculate with his own tickets as Jacobs did.

The mugs in the fight racket like to talk about the good old days under Jacobs and bemoan some of the small gates in the Garden these days.

But the fact is there were a great many puny gates under Jacobs as well as Norris and some of those Jacobs fights were hot numbers at the time they were staged.

For instance, two outstanding heavyweights of the time —Lou Nova and Gunnar Barland—drew only $12,000.

And that was gross, mind you, not net. And the late Al (Bummy) Davis, a slugger with a large personal following, drew only $8,600 gross with Bernie Friedkin.

The mugs will say: "Yeh, but what about all those big fights Jacobs used to put on with Joe Louis in one corner?"

Okay. What about them? Last year Norris drew $167,000 in the Garden with Randy Turpin and Bobo Olson. How many Garden fights drew better in the last 20 years? Just two—Louis-Walcott and Servo-Graziano.

So the boys who can get on a Garden card are doing all right.

But the trick is to get on the card and to do that the chances are 100 to 1 a fighter will have to have a manager who is either a member of or stands well with the International Fight Managers Guild.