The Whitechapel Whirlwind

The Jack Kid Berg Story

John Harding

• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785314773
• Year: 2018

Jack Kid Berg dominated boxing in the early 1930s like no other British-born boxer before or since. Born of immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the East End of London, gaining a fearsome reputation for scrapping in the streets of Whitechapel. Berg's American battles with Tony Canzoneri and Kid Chocolate gained him worldwide fame. His 1930 victory over Mushy Callahan made him world junior welterweight champion, and he won the British lightweight title at his first attempt in 1934. Old-timers recalled, "When you think Berg is going to slow down, he goes faster. He punched so fast he demoralized opponents rather than demolished them. No boxer was bolder and gamer." The Whitechapel Whirlwind features exclusive interviews with Berg in the years before his death in 1991, and makes deft use of eyewitness accounts, newspaper cartoons, statistics, and photos of Jack's 200-plus fights. Never a man to display false modesty, Berg is brutally frank about his wins, his losses, even his love life.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 How it all began
• 2 The fledgling fighter
• 3 Prize fight debut (1923)
• 4 Kid Berg at 14 (1923/24)
• 5 Pride and pet of Premierland (1925)
• 6 Harry Corbett: a tough option (1926)
• 7 Putting on the style (1927)
• 8 Chicago debut (1928)
• 9 New York sensation (1929)
• 10 Champion of the world? (1930)
• 11 The roughest of the rough (1930)
• 12 A meeting with Kid Chocolate (1930)
• 13 The private life of a gladiator (1930)
• 14 Canzoneri’s revenge (1931)
• 15 The iron man melts (1931)
• 16 The film star weds (1932–33)
• 17 British lightweight champion (1934)
• 18 Second stardom (1934–36)
• 19 Battling in Brooklyn (1938–39)
• 20 The Peter Pan of boxing (1939–45)
• Epilogue
• The Last Word
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Cartoonists who drew Jack Berg
• Jack Kid Berg’s fight record
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photos