I said good-by to him the day before he left New York for Miami, where he died following an operation for appendicitis. For a man of his years he looked youthful. The dark eyes were as keen as ever and the expressive lips just as ready to curl into a smile or to be compressed into a hard, fighting line. With his hat tilted on the back of his head, he looked at me and said in his usual quick manner and with his Texan cowboy drawl: “Nat, one big promotion, and I’m through.” I smiled. “I’ve heard all that before, Tex.” “This is straight. I’ve taken boxing from a thousand bucks to two million. One more big promotion, then I quit.” “You couldn’t quit if you tried, Tex,” I replied. To see Rickard towards the end of his life, king of the gilded age of boxing, one might have thought that he had been just lucky. Well, Tex had plenty of luck, and he needed it. But one must look into his personality and his career to understand the secret of his success. He was the last of the picturesque men of vision and daring: Western cowboy, gold-hunter, gambler, promoter: a man whose personality had as much color as a rainbow. “Nat, never lose your guts,” Tex once said to me after I had suffered a heavy financial loss. “If you do, you’re finished. Better shoot yourself and get out of it.” That stern creed was the rock on which Tex Rickard built his fame and fortune. But fate looked after him. For example, he left Goldfield, Nevada, in 1910 to sell copper properties to a big prospector. “I’m not interested in your copper,” the prospector said, according to Rickard, “but if you’ll promote a fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries out here at Reno, I’ll back you.” Every sports promoter in America was bidding for that fight but nobody had enough faith in the match to offer Jeffries what he wanted to come out of retirement. Tex staggered the fight world by offering $101,000, and he got the fight. I recall a scene in Naegeli’s Hotel in Hoboken, New Jersey, when Rickard appeared with several of his backers to clinch the fight. Tex walked into the hotel, waited for all hands to be seated, then opened the eyes of both Johnson and Jeffries by placing $20,000 in gold on the table. That gold settled the argument and got him the fight, for while other bidders for the bout were talking big, Rickard showed his good faith with money. Previous to the meeting in Hoboken, all the bidders and the principals had congregated in the Albany Hotel in New York City to discuss plans for the match. Almost every sports writer in New York, and many from cities as far west as California, were among those present. When the principals arrived to talk business, Police Commissioner Baker announced that he would be forced to arrest everyone if a contract for the fight were signed on the premises, for such a procedure would be against the law. That’s why the scene was shifted to Naegeli’s Hotel in New Jersey.