Prince knocks at Garden gate

Brendan Ingle has a picture at home in Sheffield of his brother looking up excitedly at the New York skyline. It was taken in 1939 when Jimmy Ingle came to fight at Madison Square Garden as one of a team of European champions. Fifty eight years later Brendan finally has the chance to stride across that sacred patch of canvas.

For Naseem Hamed's trainer, tomorrow's world featherweight bout at The Garden evokes childhood memories of the great Friday night fights at what everybody in boxing agrees is the sport's spiritual headquarters. It also takes him to a peak of personal achievement people said he would never reach as he was searching the impoverished streets of Wincobank for a champion he could take to the States. Around 2am British time on Saturday, Hamed will step through the ropes of the same ring that was occupied by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier on March 8th, 1971, in the first of their three epic struggles.

That fight sold out a month in advance and produced then record purses of $2.5m for both fighters. Press credentials were issued to 760 reporters and 500 more were turned away. The Garden's PR director John Condon later told Ali's biographer Thomas Hauser: "It was one of those evenings where everybody who was anybody was there. I look in the press section and I see Sinatra. I'd just finished kicking out Dustin Hoffman and Diana Ross. So I went over to throw Sinatra out and just as I got to him, one of the ABC cameramen said, `he's got one of our tickets.' That meant I couldn't do anything about it."

It was at The Garden that Frazier won the world heavyweight title. It was there in 1960 that his enduring foe walked into the office of Teddy Brenner, the Garden matchmaker, and said: "My name is Cassius Clay. I'm going to the Olympics; I'm gonna win a gold medal; I'm gonna be the next heavyweight champions of the world; and I want to borrow 10 dollars." Almost 20 years later Ali fought Earnie Shavers there and was told by a doctor from the New York State Athletic Commission that his liver was falling apart.

The same cast of crows still appear on the wire when The Garden stages a big event. They were there this week for the final Hamed-Kelly press conference, some a lot fatter but all a lot wiser. It was said that boxing disappeared from The Garden for two years in the early '90s because the mob had become involved. Bobby Goodman, then head of boxing at the arena, gave evidence in the mafia trial of Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. But the reality is more prosaic. Boxers were refusing to fight in New York because taxes were prohibitively high and the Las Vegas casinos were seizing the most lucrative shows.

Though The Garden has been supplanted by those Nevadan menageries, boxing's emotional baggage is stored in this evocative crucible above Penn Station in the dirty heart of mid-town. New York was always a fighting town, the rough-house immigrants passed through on their way to becoming American. The first of three Madison Square Gardens began staging prize-fights 115 years ago. Boxing has declined in the New York culture yet the gate for Hamed's scrap with Kevin Kelley may still exceed a healthy 10,000.

When the bell tolls, New York responds. And some of the fights outside the ring have been as good as those within. In 1978, when a riot broke out after Vito Antuofermo had beaten Willie Classen, the judges had to hide beneath the ring. Later, one of the three, Tony Castellano, said: "Guys with smiles all over their faces kept peering into the darkness where we were crouched and inviting us to come out. But they had chairs in their hands, so we stayed under the ring until order was restored." Last year there was a serious disturbance when Andrew Golota was disqualified for landing low blows in his first fight with Riddick Bowe.

Hamed claims to be acquiring a heightened sense of history through studying books and videos about the great fighters' lives. Two of boxing's most distinguished featherweights, Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep, provide tomorrow night's fight with an historical resonance which could help to root Hamed in the traditions of boxing at Madison Square Garden.

Pep and Saddler exchanged blows (and the undisputed belt) in New York throughout the late 1940s and early '50s. It assists the symmetry of Hamed's first appearance here that he is trying to dispose of a local fighter who has been a fierce advocate of the rights of boxing's little men.

If the pre-fight hype about 10,000 tickets being sold is truthful, this is one of the biggest promotions at The Garden in recent times. Oscar De La Hoya, boxing's second biggest draw after Mike Tyson, drew 16,000 recently but seldom does the attendance stretch into five figures.

As Brendan Ingle was extolling the romantic virtues of what he called repeatedly "the Mecca of boxing", somebody pointed out that the fight game in New York is in a severely dishevelled state when an overseas fighter has to be dragged in at a cost of millions of dollars in publicity to create the sense that The Garden is still capable of staging a major show. Ingle will be happy just to walk the path his brother laid.