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SHOWMAN
ity and good taste, as well as his lithe grace in the ring, appealed to a public for whom boxing was formerly associated with low dives. You could see the change beginning when a woman smuggled herself into the Corbett-Sullivan fight in man's clothes. When women began wanting to attend boxing-matches, when the heavyweight champion could sit down on equal terms with any financier or senator in the land, the various state laws which prohibited boxing along with drugpeddling and horse-stealing could be repealed— and at that point million-dollar gates were just round the corner. Corbett, the new kind of fighter, came along just in time to finish the clean-up job which the Queensberry rules began.
Jim and I were old acquaintances long before he got famous. When we first met, he had no thought of turning pugilist and my dreams of getting into the theater were still as hazy as a San Francisco fog. Back then he was a clerk in San Francisco's Nevada Bank, the bank built on the capital that Mackay, Flood and O'Brien had dug out of the Comstock Lode, going in with shovels and coming out with millions. And I was the cocky, dandy peanut-butcher on a fast train from San Francisco to Santa Cruz— the local Coney Island— cleaning up eighty or a hundred a week and courting a girl at the other end of the route. Her sister was almost as pretty as she was. And "Pompadour Jim" Corbett, the young bank-teller who was already king of local amateur boxing, was courting the sister. Even when he was
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