Frank Fitzpatrick’s column in
the Philadelphia Inquirer offers a look back at Lew Tendler’s Restaurant, where
sports figures, newspapermen and mobsters used to hang out together.
When the sirloins were thick
and rare, the whiskey cheap and plentiful, the wise guys brash and colorful,
Lew Tendler's Restaurant was, as the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign over its bar
proclaimed, "The Quaker City's Sporting Hub."
"Sports bar" is now
a tired marketing concept, one connoting a place where young males gather to
ogle big-screen TVs, memorabilia, and waitresses dressed as scantily as the
house salad.
Tendler's was so much more.
"It was the kind of
place you can't find in Philadelphia any more," Gabe Oppenheim wrote in a
2015 Pennsylvania Gazette piece, "a pub where mobsters, athletes and
writers gathered."
Between its 1933 opening - 71
days before Prohibition's repeal - and its closing 37 years later, the ornate
establishment at Broad and Locust was home base for Philly's leading sports
figures as well as the Runyonesque barflies who buzzed around them.
In fact, Damon Runyon
himself, the newspaperman who immortalized New York's touts and hustlers, drank
at Tendler's whenever he was in town. Most of Philadelphia's sportswriters,
including Red Smith when he worked at the Record, haunted the place, as did
visiting scribes such as Jimmy Cannon and Dan Parker. On any given day, you
might find journalists; baseball and basketball players; boxers; jockeys; NFL
owners; mobsters; and an assortment of quirky gamblers with names like Mugsy,
Cappy, Frisco Legs, Oysters, Blinky, and Sassy Doc.
… But the real action was
boxing. In the late 1940s, two large TVs were installed and the bar was packed
on fight nights. When, in September 1952, Rocky Marciano challenged heavyweight
champ Joe Wolcott at Municipal Stadium, hundreds of sportswriters and bookies
made Tendler's their pre-fight headquarters.
And, according to a Marciano
biography, one of the Brockton Bomber's uncles, Pete Piccento, was able to
place $40,000 in bets that week at Tendler's.
Organized crime ran boxing
then. According to Oppenheim, mobster Blinky Palermo once asked Sugar Ray
Robinson - at Tendler's - to throw a fight. Though Robinson had no choice but
to agree, he instead knocked out his opponent.
"It was an
accident," Robinson later told Palermo at the bar. "I just happened
to catch him with a hook."
You can read the rest of the column via the below link:
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