Radio: Gillette to Ringside?

Manhattan’s Adam Hat Stores Inc. owes a lot to prize fighting but last week it appeared that Adam Hat would soon be out of the ring. In the four years that Adam has sponsored the sportscasting of big-time bouts, it has boosted its business phenomenally, chiefly with radio plugs, built up a Latin-American market describing battles via short wave. Famed among finical fight enthusiasts is the NBC team of Sam Taub & Bill Stern that works for Adam, describing right hooks and Homburgs with equal competency.

Last week it looked as though Adam and NBC would profit no more from fighting. Shouldering into their sporting alley came MBS and Gillette Safety Razor Co., brandishing a contract with Promoter Mike Jacobs, by which all his Twentieth Century Sporting Club bouts would be theirs for the airing. Stunned were Adam and NBC, whose contract with Jacobs ends in June. Since Jacobs looms in boxing like a Mellon in aluminum, they would probably waste their time broadcasting any matches outside his jurisdiction. But NBC was not willing to be counted out, claimed at week’s end it still had a hold on Jacobs because of a $15,000 advance on a new contract for 1941-42. Countered Jacobs, who called NBC’s $15,000 “a loan”: his deal with MBS and Gillette was strictly the McCoy, would not be altered by legal squabbling.

No newcomer is Gillette to the sportscasting field. President J. P. Spang Jr. is ardent about athletics, shoots golf in the low 80s himself. His company broadcast the Baer-Braddock fight in 1935, has since sponsored radio accounts of a couple of world series as well as horse races and football games. Probable price paid for the Jacobs nod: $200,000, some $50,000 more than the Adam contract called for.