Herman Taylor: Dempsey-Tunney promoter, Philly hall of famer
Herman Taylor's long life played out in another time, another landscape, another Philadelphia. For more than 60 years, from the second decade of the 20th century through 1975, the South Philadelphian, who apprenticed for his boxing-promoter career by sweeping gym floors and delivering posters in a horse-drawn wagon, dominated what was then his hometown's second favorite sport.
Herman Taylor's long life played out in another time, another landscape, another Philadelphia.
For more than 60 years, from the second decade of the 20th century through 1975, the South Philadelphian, who apprenticed for his boxing-promoter career by sweeping gym floors and delivering posters in a horse-drawn wagon, dominated what was then his hometown's second favorite sport.
In the 1920s, though Tex Rickard gets the credit, it was Taylor who actually promoted the first Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight here. In the 1930s, Joe Louis defended his heavyweight crown in a Taylor-staged bout at Municipal Stadium. In the 1940s, his stable of fighters routinely drew big crowds to that stadium, to Shibe Park, to the Arena, and Convention Hall. And in the 1950s, when there were only eight world titles up for grabs, he once put on three championship fights in four months.
"Herman Taylor was the greatest fight promoter who ever lived," J. Russell Peltz, who's been making fight cards here since the 1960s, said Tuesday.
Thursday night, during ceremonies at the City Line Hilton, Taylor, who died at 93 in 1980, will be one of the most anonymous inductees into the Philly Sports Hall of Fame's Class of 2016. But if the Runyonesque figure friends called "Mugsy" has been forgotten, it's because of time and boxing's decline, not any lack of accomplishments.
"There are more fighters in the International Boxing Hall of Fame who fought for him than fought for anybody, nearly every heavyweight champion from Jack Johnson to George Foreman," said Peltz. "Philly was a big-fight town and Herman was the guy. He was the best because he was the most ambitious and had the best connections."
Those connections, Peltz conceded, included mob ties, a prerequisite for any promoter in an era when crime bosses ran the sport and bags of money often were exchanged in back rooms.
In 1952, for example, Jersey Joe Walcott's manager didn't want the heavyweight champion to face dangerous challenger Rocky Marciano in a September Municipal Stadium bout Taylor hoped to stage. His mind was changed, however, during a meeting the promoter arranged with several mobsters in the basement of a Camden bar.
That classic fight drew a crowd of 40,379 and was won by Marciano on a 13th-round knockout.
"And when it was over," Peltz said, "Walcott's manager got a paper bag with $25,000 in it."
Born in 1887, Taylor grew up near Sixth and Catherine Streets. At 14, he took a job at the National Athletic Club just a few blocks from his home. That gym was run by promoter Jack McGuigan and the precocious Taylor soon became his protege.
"He swept the floors, collected the gloves after fights, drove a horse wagon around town advertising the fights," said Peltz, who met Taylor when he began promoting in 1969.
Taylor saved his money and in 1912 bought a gym at 15th and Washington. South Philly was teeming with boxing talent then and he and partner Bobby Gunnis started staging fights there and elsewhere, including big venues like Shibe Park and Baker Bowl.
He became the best of a group of local promoters who, according to the book Philadelphia's Boxing Heritage: 1876-1976 "knew how to build up crosstown rivalries and neighborhood feuds into epic confrontations."
By 1926, Rickard contacted him, seeking his help with what would be one of the biggest fights in ring history. With Taylor doing most of the legwork, the Sept. 23 Dempsey-Tunney bout drew a record 120,000 fans to what was then Sesquicentennial Stadium.
Afterward, an appreciative Rickard gave Taylor and Gunnis $100,000, the equivalent of $1.3 million today. With that kind of money, Taylor's financial interests expanded.
"He was a member of the Jewish mob," said Peltz, "and he had a piece of the first casino [the Flamingo] in Las Vegas with Bugsy Siegel. . . . When Atlantic City got gambling, you couldn't get a job as a blackjack dealer unless Taylor approved it."
He staged fights with great Philadelphia fighters like Lew Tendler, Benny Leonard, Bob Montgomery, Harold Johnson, and Joey Giardello, and with others like Dempsey, Tunney, Louis, Marciano, Walcott, Charles, Primo Carnera, Max Schmeling, and Sugar Ray Robinson.
When Gunnis died in 1936, Taylor kept at it. His office, just above the marquee of the Shubert Theater - now the Merriam - on South Broad Street, looked like those depicted in old movies.
It was there that a young Peltz, an Evening Bulletin sportswriter eager to promote fights and even more eager to get Taylor's blessing, encountered the legend.
"By the time I met him in 1969, he was already an old curmudgeon in his 80s," Peltz said. "But it was like asking your girlfriend's father for permission to marry her."
His most productive year came in 1952, when he was 65. Between June and September, Taylor put on three wildly successful title fights in South Philadelphia: heavyweight champ Walcott beat challenger Ezzard Charles in June; in July, Kid Gavilan defeated Gil Turner before a welterweight-record crowd of 39,025; and in September, Marciano defeated Walcott, a fight Taylor called "the greatest heavyweight match I ever looked at."
He lived in a condominium at the Claridge on Rittenhouse Square and each winter sent his wife to Florida.
"He hated Florida," said Peltz.
The last fight Taylor promoted was in August 1975, a matchup between popular middleweights Cyclone Hart and Sugar Ray Seals at Atlantic City's Convention Hall.
He was 88.
"Nobody ever loved the fight game more than Herman Taylor," Chuck Hasson wrote on PhillyBoxingHistory.Com. "And probably no one was ever actively involved in boxing longer."
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