A Fallon Doctor, a Boxing Promoter, and the New York Knicks

You have probably heard the phrase “six degrees of separation.” It is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of friend-to-friend can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others. It was popularized in John Guare's 1990 play, “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Let’s play the six degrees game on a historical board. How is Fallon, circa 1906, related to Madison Square Garden, 2026, where, just this week, in NBA finals matches, the New York Knicks met the San Antonio Spurs?

The six steps include Dr. George Gardner, Fallon, Rawhide, Tex Rickard, Madison Square Garden 3, and Madison Square Garden 4.

I’ll start with Gardner. Dr. George M. Gardner was born in 1875 in Carson City, Nevada. He went to Stanford University in 1895, where he was a member of the first graduating class. He then attended Cooper Medical College in San Francisco and began practicing medicine in Elko. In 1904, he was hired as a Newlands Project physician and practiced medicine in Fallon until 1917. Gardner died in San Francisco in 1970.

While here, the “Doc” traveled throughout the area with his medical satchel in hand. He became the doctor at the Indian School in Stillwater. He traveled to the mining camps that sprang up around the periphery of Fallon. In one of those camps, Rawhide, Tex Rickard enters the story:

Gardner (from an Oral History given to Margaret “Peggy” Wheat in 1958): “When there was a mining boom you could sell drugs, so I wrote to Kirk Gary Company in Sacramento and said, ‘Send me $6,000.00 worth of drugs.’ The firm wired back and said, ‘That is a lot of drugs. What are you going to do?’ ‘I'm starting a drug store in Rawhide,’ I wired back. The drugs came by train to the nearest depot and then were freighted by team over to Rawhide, to the new drugstore which was a tent with shelves in it. I built that store right over the tent, and, when it was finished, I took down the tent. The miners used to come in and read all of the labels and then pick out what they wanted and bring it up and pay for it. My store was right next to Tex Rickard's Great Northern Saloon. Wherever he went, Alaska, Goldfield, or Rawhide, he built a saloon called the Great Northern.”

Rickard, born in 1870, was already a western legend when he opened the saloon in Rawhide: cowboy, friend of Wyatt Earp, Texas Marshal, boxing promoter.

Gardner: “One day Tex came into my store and said he had an awful pain on his right side. I told him to go into the back and lie down on a box and I would examine him. ‘Does it hurt here?’ I asked. He jumped and yelled. ‘You have appendicitis and you better get it out before it kills you. You come down to Fallon and I will take it out for you.’ ‘You doctors are all alike… always wanting to cut on somebody. Just give me some medicine and I'll get well.’

I gave him some, and he went home. Next morning he was back and said he felt fine. ‘That place on your side is still sore when you touch it, isn't it? I thought so. Well, that is because it broke and it won't bother you for a while but, mark my word, someday it will kill you. And when you get sick, when you are dying, I want you to do one thing for me, just remember me. Now don’t you forget. When you are dying, remember me.’ I pointed my finger at him and he said, ‘All right, Doc, I promise. I won't forget.’ He laughed and went on out. After that he [Rickard] went to South America and then came back to promote fights at the Garden.

By Garden, the Doc meant Madison Square Garden. The first MSG was built in 1879 at the corner of Madison and 26th Street in New York City and hosted concerts, dog shows, boxing and P.T. Barnum’s famous circus. It was torn down and replaced a year later because of structural issues. The third incarnation was built in 1925 at a different site, Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, financed and operated by…Tex Rickard. It was known as “The House That Tex Built.”

Gardner: “Well, one day, I picked up a paper and there I saw Tex Rickard had died while being operated on for appendicitis [Rickard died of a gangrenous appendix in Miami, Florida, in 1928.] You know, I often wonder if he thought of me. Someday I'll ask him.”

To complete the story, the fourth and current Madison Square Garden was built over the railway platforms of Penn Station in 1968 and became home to the New York Knickerbockers, who, as you know, can still hold their own.

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