Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, April 21st at O’Neill’s Restaurant, located at 64-21 53rd Dr, Maspeth, NY 11378. The guest speaker will be veteran boxing journalist Rich Blake.

About Rich Blake

A veteran journalist based in New York City, Blake is the author of Slats: The Legend & Life of Jimmy Slattery to be published by No Frills Buffalo in May. Blake is best known for covering the financial world at numerous publications, including Institutional Investor, ABCNews.com and Reuters HedgeWorld. Blake was a co-founder and executive editor of Trader Monthly magazine. The 46-year-old Buffalo native is the author of two nonfiction books, The Day Donny Herbert Woke Up and Talking Proud: Rediscovering the Magical Season of the 1980 Buffalo Bills. He is the co-author of a third work of nonfiction, Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager.

About Slats: The Legend & Life of Jimmy Slattery (Coming in May)
Jimmy Slattery the personification of the Golden Era of sports in the boom/bust 1920s and ’30s. Boxing legend Jimmy Slattery: sleek, handsome, lightning-fast. A phantom in the ring, “Slats” soared across the national stage like a comet — then crashed into oblivion. Discarded by the ages, this is the incredible true story of the Irish boy-wonder who captivated the boxing world at its peak.

Some Early Reviews:
“Rich Blake’s labor of love is the boxing genre’s newest classic … it roars like the Twenties.”
—Angelo Prospero, boxing historian

Rich Blake’s fondness for boxing phenom Jimmy Slattery infuses every page of this spellbinding tale. Through a spectacular work of journalism, Blake has reclaimed the forgotten history of a life that is both uniquely American and singularly astonishing. I kept asking myself, ‘Why have I never heard of Jimmy Slattery before?’ What a truly remarkable tale . . . delightfully told.”
—Ty Wenger, deputy editor, ESPN The Magazine

“ Blake’s deeply detailed narrative on Slattery transports you into the ring with one of Buffalo’s most beloved professional athletes. Readers will be knocked out by the rise and fall of this remarkable figure.”
—Tim Bohen, author of “Against the Grain: The History of Buffalo’s First Ward”

What Blake will discuss
Recounting his research into Slattery’s early burst to fame in the metropolitan area during the spring of 1924, Blake will share some highlights of what he uncovered, tying in Queens fight promoter Simon “Si” Flaherty, the Queensboro A.C. in Long Island City and the Queensboro bowl which was expanded in the spring of 1924 as part of efforts by Si Flaherty and Paddy Mullins to land a Jack Dempsey-Harry Wills fight (that never came off) … learn the story of how the New York City fire department condemned the club’s stadium built at the base of the Queensboro bridge, and how Flaherty managed to get around that. Blake: “The night Slats made his New York debut he was on the undercard of a historic main event: Harry Wills versus Bartley Madden of Hell’s Kitchen. Wills won but failed to knock him out, bruising his chances at getting a crack at Dempsey. Slats was the darling of the evening.”