Ring Thing

The Topps Vault may no longer be in operation but they left behind a rich trove of images that, despite some hiccups with identification here and there, are a fabulous historical resource. I have a large amount of scans from the Vault piled up on my hard drive and while reviewing a gaggle of them today, re-realized there were Topps file copies of some contracts buried among the photographic images. Today we'll look at those by covering some subjects in the 1951 Ringside set.

These contracts were very basic agreements, unlike those being offered to baseball players at the time via the agents used by Topps, surely due to the fact the Shorin's didn't intend to issue annual boxing (and wrestling) sets.  Ringside, which featured a good number of retired boxers, is missing some big-name pugilists (Jack Dempsey for one) but they sure had a nice roster of talent overall. Here's a release agreement signed by the infamous Abe Attell:

Perhaps he took some merchandise instead of additional cash but I suspect this is just one of two parts, where the other was a little bit more involved and actually executed by Topps.  Here's Barney Ross's:

Topps used Arthur Susskind, Jr. as an agent for the set.  The son of a famous, hard-hitting boxer and longtime ring referee nicknamed Young Otto, the younger Susskind was also well known in the world of the sweet science and indeed in many sports; among other things he was the ring announcer at Madison Square Garden and a publicist for various New York based pro teams and leagues.

Despite the absence of the Manassas Mauler, whose famous Broadway restaurant near the old Garden was humming in 1951 (and exterior shots of which could be found in all sorts of places), many famous names did end up in the set.  Here's Jake LaMotta's release:

Some releases didn't have a dollar amount represented on them and I'm not sure why, Here we see Jersey Joe Walcott signed off using his ring sobriquet:

Walcott slugged his way to the Heavyweight championship in 1951, taking the belt from Ezzard Charles. The other signee here was his manager Felix Bocchicchio, who was a violent man with a criminal past. They look pretty chummy here but boy, boxing really attracted all types of unsavory characters:

(Courtesy camdenhistory.com)

These are all of a kind but the names involved were so famous, I want to highlight a couple more.  Joe Louis was about as big a name as there ever was in the boxing game:

Right behind him in "Q-score" would be Rocky Marciano, who would defeat Walcott in early 1953 for the Heavyweight crown. Here's Rocky abusing the speed bag:

 

Seems like Marciano was good at baseball too:

Another release, another sobriquet:

I'm not sure if Susskind was the sole agent for Topps; the set has 96 subjects and not all of them were even boxers. I mentioned wrestlers, here's one:

Ringside, as we can see, was another of the panelized sets Topps was releasing at the time, where gaudy five-cent packaging was designed to deliver, well, a knockout:

The reverse has what I'm betting is the first use of the word "fistiana" on a pack of trading cards:

Ringside is a fairly deep and very important set in terms of documenting famous boxers. I feel it's quite underappreciated today, in a world where UFC dominates the field of people knocking each other senseless for fun, money and entertainment.