After an association of nearly 35 years with The Ring, Nigel Collins has been fired as editor-in-chief of the magazine by Golden Boy Promotions. The Ring office in Pennsylvania has been shut down and the operation will now move to Los Angeles, where GBP has its corporate headquarters. Doug Fischer, currently co-editor of RingTV.com, will take over the magazine, and its new direction is a troubling detour on the way to who knows where.
Although it has been considered an institution since 1922, it should be noted that the sanctity of The Ring has been?and always was?largely overstated. Its first ratings were compiled by a promoter (Tex Rickard) and throughout the years, The Ring employed managers, agents, and publicists as writers (including Bill Miller, Eddie Borden and Jersey Jones).
Nat Fleischer himself often had a ?see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing? approach to a profession that doubled as the playground of the underworld. Obvious hoaxes like the Fox-LaMotta and Saxton-Gavilan fights were defended as legitimate contests in The Ring, and his friendship with the leading promoter of the day, Mike Jacobs, apparently involved willfully ignoring the fact that Frankie Carbo pulled enough strings on Jacobs to make ?Uncle Mike?s? dentures rattle. You would never know by reading The Ring that Frankie Carbo, Legs Diamond, Owney ?The Killer? Madden, Waxey Gordon, Al Capone, Mickey Cohen, Champ Segal, and Dutch Schultz all owned pieces of prizefighters in those days. Fleischer also judged and refereed several bouts, as blatant a conflict of interest as can be imagined.
