Everlast Leaves The Bronx

There was a time during the 20th Century when New York was the boxing cpaital of the world. Young men from ethnic neighborhoods all over the city sweated in gyms and dreamed for a shot at the title. On weekends, fight clubs filled all over the city, and Madison Square Garden hosted fights just about every Friday night. And in good weather, title fights made regular stops at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds.

But no more. And, as Dave Anderson of the New York Times chronicles today, one of the last vestiges of that glorious past is finally leaving New York, as the Everlast plant in the Bronx is closing as part of a corporate consolidation:

FROM the outside, it's a gloomy gray building in a gloomy gray industrial section of the Bronx, not far from the Triborough Bridge, about as far away as you can get from the casino glitz of a big fight these days. But inside, the Everlast plant is where most of the boxing gloves in a big fight have been made for decades — Muhammad Ali's gloves, Joe Frazier's gloves, George Foreman's gloves, Larry Holmes's gloves, Mike Tyson's gloves, Lennox Lewis's gloves.

"When my corner wanted me to jab," Holmes has said, "they would yell, `Everlast.' "

But this Everlast plant is in its last days. Sometime next month, all of Everlast Worldwide's gloves, punching bags, headgear, boxing shoes, trunks and robes will be produced at its Moberly, Mo., plant, nearly a century after its original factory opened on the Lower East Side in 1910, long after Jack Dempsey and Benny Leonard popularized Everlast gloves in the years after World War I.

There was a time when men boxed in New York. There was a time when workers made things in New York. That time is long gone. And we all ought to be sad about it.

Eric 07:32 AM

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