Events & Discoveries

Lou Radzienda, NBA president and member of the Illinois boxing commission, said the question would be submitted to NBA's executive committee. A crony of Truman Gibson Jr., secretary of the International Boxing Club ( James D. Norris, president), Radzienda seemed miffed that other NBA commissioners had expressed opinions favorable to Helfand.

There was, of course, outright dissent, for the most part shrill and feckless. Though the IBC is not directly involved, Truman Gibson Jr. met with Charley Johnston, president of the International Boxing Guild, and Jack (Doc) Kearns, secretary, then announced that Helfand had "used a cannon to shoot a fly."

This was a curious paraphrase of an earlier lament from Jimmy Powers, TV commentator on IBC fights, commercial announcer and sports editor of the New York Daily News. Powers had compared Helfand's action to killing a dog to get rid of the fleas. (Retorted Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror : "The commentator in question...speaks with authority on the subject of fleas, as he is equipped with the brain of one and, like a flea, is interested chiefly in getting his bite.")

In the distraught prose with which he sometimes reports fights, Powers then paid tribute to an old benefactor, Jim Norris. It was delivered in a WRCA broadcast and its invective, directed against Norris' enemies, sank radio standards of good taste a fathom or two below burlesque.

"We owe a lot to Jim Norris," Powers said. "...His father, I knew his father in the old days, his sister Margery, and when William Woodward died, it demonstrated something to me. Nashua is going to be sold, his stable is going to be dispersed. What would happen if Jim Norris pulled out of hockey and Tom Yawkey pulled out of baseball, and all these men who are abused by people who couldn't get in the servants' entrance of their clubs to deliver toilet paper, what—supposing they pulled out of all this? We'd need their money...."

FOOTNOTE TO A MURDER

The mob slaying of Alex Louis Greenberg, financial genius of the Capone gang, drew attention once more to the persistent nexus between boxing and the underworld. Millionaire owner of the Canadian Ace Brewery, Greenberg was a friend and business associate of Truman Gibson Jr., secretary of the International Boxing Club ( James D. Norris, president), just as Norris is a friend of the gangster killers Frankie Carbo, Sam (Golfbag) Hunt and Eddie Coco (who is now retired).

Greenberg was shot by two men as he left a Chicago restaurant the night before the Sugar Ray Robinson- Bobo Olson fight. One of the truly notorious figures in the Capone mob, Greenberg was a shareholder with Gibson in World Champions, Inc., a company established in the hope that Green-berg's Canadian Ace beer could penetrate the New York market on the prestige of Sugar Ray and Joe Louis. The two champions were given 100 shares apiece for use of their names.

But Greenberg's background, acceptable to Gibson, was an affront to the New York State Alcohol Board of Control. It refused to grant World Champions a license.

This explains why Gibson was one of the first to be questioned by Chicago police after the murder.