Jackie Fields

Jackie Fields medal table
Boxing
United States
Olympic Summer Games
gold	1924 Paris	Boxing (flyweight)

Jackie Fields (born February 9, 1908 in Chicago , Illinois as John Jacob Finkelstein , † June 3, 1987 in Los Angeles ) was an American boxer. He was an Olympic flyweight champion and a welterweight world champion.

Life

Fields grew up in a Jewish community in Chicago. After his father fell ill with tuberculosis, the family moved to Los Angeles, where he started boxing. There he chose his nickname. He started boxing in 1921 and competed in a national boxing competition in 1924. There, despite a broken hand, he reached the semi-finals and qualified for the Olympic Games in Paris.

Career

In the games Fields only defeated the later bronze medalist Pedro Quartucci from Argentina in the semifinals , before he met his compatriot Joe Salas in the final and also defeated him on points. At 16, Fields was the youngest boxer to date to win a gold medal in boxing at an Olympics. A year later he ended his amateur career with 51 wins from 54 fights and became a professional boxer.

Fields fought a National Boxing Association welterweight title bout and faced Jack Thompson in March 1929 . In July of the same year he faced welterweight world champion Joe Dundee and won the fight. Fields lost the title in May 1930 after losing to Jack Thompson. In January 1932 he won the title again, this time against Lou Brouillard , who had beaten Thompson. Later that year, Fields was involved in a car accident in which he lost an eye. He did not tell anyone at first and lost his title a year later in February 1933 after a loss to Young Corbett III . After this defeat he only fought once because his eye injury was too much of a problem for him. He ended his career with 74 wins, 30 of which by knockout, out of 87 fights, of which he lost only nine.

Late years

Fields received a total of $ 500,000 in premiums invested in real estate throughout his career. Through the Great Depression , he was financially ruined and lost his fortune. He got a job as assistant unit manager for 20th Century Fox and as a film cutter for MGM in the second half of the 1930s .

He sold jukeboxes for Wurlitzer until 1949 , after which he worked for the whiskey manufacturer J&B . In the 1950s he bought shares in a hotel in Los Angeles, for which he later also worked as public relations director. He also served for many years as Vice Chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission .

At the Maccabiade in 1965, he looked after the American boxing team. In 1977 he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame . As a Jew, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1979 and finally elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2004. His Olympic victory was filmed in the 1939 film The Crowd Roars .

Web links

• Profile at boxrec
• Biography of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame
• The Cyber ​​Boxing Zone
• Jackie Fields in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )