Bert Sugar Eat Your Heart Out

On this night 52 years ago, Dr. Joyce Brothers became an enormous national celebrity, setting herself up for a career as a television and radio personality, a career that lasts until this day.

So what did she do? Well, she answered the $64,00 question. Her area of expertise? Boxing, of course.

The infamous mega-hit quiz show of the 50's made many a future star - Patty Duke, Barbara Feldon, and yes, Joyce Brothers. Until her appearance on the show, Brothers was a housewife with a doctorate in psychology. She tried out for the quiz show in the hopes of earning some money and was initially turned away. Here's what former host, Sonny Fox, had to say about Brothers:

She went down originally and presented herself as a psychologist, and she had an expertise in something and, I'm not sure I remember what it was, but it certainly wasn't boxing. And they said to her, "Well you're wonderful as a personality but we're looking for those dramatic juxtapositions." The marine officer who is an expert cook. The shoemaker who knows about opera. Those kinds of anomalies. That's what we're looking for. For instance, if you knew about boxing we'd love you!"

Joyce herself readily admits that this was the case. She knew nothing about boxing prior to her first audition, but when producer Mert Koplin suggested that becoming a boxing expert was what would get her on the air, well, she went home and became a boxing expert. A few weeks later she went back and said, I'm ready, I'm a boxing expert. They tested her and she passed and that was that. She was on.

Of course, we all know today that The $64,000 Question was completely rigged. In her early appearances on the show, Brothers was given easy boxing questions and she answered them, making it through to the $16,000 stage without difficulty. Evidently, at that point the producers of the show decided that they would knock Brothers off the program, because she wasn't testing well with the audience, which was the whole essence of the enterprise and the ultimate source of the scandal. Contestants that the audience seemed to like were given the answers and kept on the air, while contestants the audience didn't seem to like were knocked off with impossible questions.

So Joyce was expected to be shot down with her $16,000 question, which was...

"Who refereed the most heavyweight title bouts?"

The architects of her demise must have figured that no matter how much she was studying the sweet science at home, she couldn't possibly know trivia about boxing referees. And yet she nailed the question (the answer was "Arthur Donovan") and all of the rest of the impossibly arcane questions they would throw at her all the way up to the multi-part $64,000 question, all because, unbeknownst to the powers that were, she had an ace up her sleeve.

The subsequent scandal surrounding this show would mar the reputations of almost everyone involved with it, contestants, hosts and producers alike. And yet Brothers emerged with her reputation intact, largely because she was the only person who ever succeeded on the show who the producers actively tried to defeat. But despite the fact that they weren't feeding her the answers, there's a very good chance (through pure chance itself) that she was getting the answers anyway. The venerable Nat Fleischer (pictured right), publisher of The Ring magazine and encyclopedia, grandfather of boxing journalists and historians, had been employed by The $64,000 Question to draw up the show's boxing questions. As it turned out, Fleischer also was a good friend of Joyce Brothers' father and was coaching her on the side in her march towards boxing expertise.

Brothers always denied any cheating during her participation on the show, and that story wasn't probed very deeply, because, as I mentioned, she wasn't implicated in the larger scandal because she was never fed any answers by the producers of the show. But the fact of the matter remains that even for someone who claimed to be memorizing as many boxing facts as she could, it's almost impossible to imagine that a neophyte to the sport could have known the answers to the questions they hit her with unless she had some idea they were coming. Even she seemed to intuit that some further explanation was necessary, and told investigators that one of her prime sources for studying for the show was Nat Fleischer's book, Ring Facts.

As we now are well aware, Brothers used the celebrity she gained from becoming only the second woman to go all the way on The $64,000 Question to start a successful career as a syndicated columnist and pop psychologist. All because she knew the answers to the questions below. How many of them do you know? My feeling is that no man, woman or child alive knows the answers to all of these questions, not even Bert Sugar himself. I'll print the answers tomorrow:

• "Who was the referee in the Dempsey-Tunney "long-count" fight?
  
• "What man refereed the comeback attempt of an ex-champ against Jack Johnson at Reno, Nevada."
• "What was the glove that gladiators wore in ancient Rome?"
• "Who was the first scientific boxer to become champion of England? When?"
• "Who was the English champion who taught Lord Byron how to box?"
• "Who wrote the essay 'The Fight'?"
  
• "Who defeated whom in the fight that essay is about?"
• "When was that fight?"
• "What was the nickname of the loser of that fight?"
• "What was the full name of the Marquis of Queensbury?"
• "Whom did Primo Carnera fight in his 1933 heavyweight title defense? Where?"
• "How many times did Jack Dempsey knock down Luis Firpo?"
• "And how long was their fight?"