Cutting a Birthday Cake in Jimmy’s Corner
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Jimmy Glenn, who turns 75 on Thursday, is universally respected in the sweet science. He hasn’t captured the brass ring; not yet, anyway. The longtime trainer has been close to the top twice. In 2002, and then again last year, Jameel McCline challenged for the heavyweight crown with Glenn in his corner. But McCline failed both times.
That saddened a lot of people who were rooting hard for Jimmy. I’ve been writing about boxing for 22 years, and there are three people in the sweet science I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about: Eddie Futch, Al Gavin, and Jimmy Glenn.
Glenn was born in rural South Carolina on August 18, 1930. His grandfather was a sharecropper, and his mother worked on the same farm. When Glenn was still a young boy, his mother stepfather moved to Harlem with their children. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked and Jimmy’s uncles, who had remained in South Carolina, were drafted. So at age 12, Jimmy went back to work with his grandfather on the farm. When the war ended in 1945, he returned to New York and got a job as a delivery boy in the garment district. He also began boxing in the Police Athletic League.
In the 1940s, boxing was a main stream sport and deeply ingrained the fabric of Harlem. Joe Louis ruled the world, but the local icon was Sugar Ray Robinson.
Glenn’s face lights up when he discusses Robinson. “I used to watch Ray work out at a gym on 116th Street,” he recalls. “Ray had magnetism. He was something special. He was a partying guy; and to tell the truth, I’m more of a homebody. But Ray made the whole community proud.”
Boxing as an amateur, Glenn compiled a 14-2 record with two knockouts. “I started at welterweight and ended up at middleweight. I could box but I wasn’t much of a puncher.” In his most memorable amateur match, he fought a middleweight named Floyd Patterson. “He beat me,” Glenn acknowledges. “Knocked me down a few times, broke my tooth. But I went the distance.”
Ultimately, Glenn quit boxing. “I wasn’t good enough for it to make sense for me to keep fighting,” he says. But the sport was in his blood. When the Third Moravian Church opened a community center on 127th Street in Harlem, he volunteered to teach youngsters how to box. Later, in the 1980s, he ran the Times Square Gym on 42nd Street.
Through it all, Glenn has kept training fighters. But he has earned a living primarily by owning restaurants and bars. Les Nanette’s on West 43rd Street was the first. Two more establishments came and went. Jimmy’s Corner has survived for three decades. It’s a blue collar bar on 44th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues in Manhattan, open seven days a week. Every square foot is covered with photographs of fighters and posters heralding long-ago ring confrontations.
“It’s just a bar,” Glenn says. “Just a bar is easier. You don’t have to worry about food and cooks. I’d rather run a gym than a bar, but you can’t make a living running a gym. The rent’s too high.”
Still, Glenn remains committed to boxing. “The best thing about boxing is that it teaches respect,” he said earlier this month, sitting at a table in Jimmy’s corner. “You take a kid off the streets. He’s angry and scared and beefing about the system. But after a few weeks in the gym, it’s ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ and the lessons of discipline and hard work set in. Before long, the kid starts to make something out of himself and believe in himself. Kids in the gym want to learn. That’s why they’re there. People hear about the fighters who become champions. But a lot of young men who never go beyond the amateurs get good jobs and become good citizens because of boxing.”
Over the years, Glenn has managed several fighters and trained many more.
“There are times when it’s frustrating,” he acknowledged. “When you get a young fighter, everything you tell them the first few years, they listen. Then, with some of them, they become stars in their own mind. Everybody gets their ear, and they forget where they came from and what brought them from where they were to where they’re at. They start wanting to change the way they train. You got to beg them to do things, and they still don’t do it; or they do what you say, but they don’t do it like they did when they were starting out.”
There’s also the business side of things. Two decades ago, Glenn spoke openly to this writer about that aspect of boxing.
“Managers and trainers dream too,” he said. “You teach a kid. You give him thousands of hours. The kid quits; you bring him back. He gets in trouble with the law or with a girl, and you help him out. You put a foundation under him. You give him your heart. Then the kid starts to look good. He turns out to be that one in a thousand who’s really good. And all of a sudden, some guy walks in, offers the kid a salary, a bonus, and he’s gone. That’s always the way it is with amateurs on account of you can’t sign an amateur to a contract. And with a pro, even if you have a contract, where are you gonna get the thousands of dollars in legal fees to enforce it? Guys like me dream of a champion. But when a fighter hits ten rounds, the big money pushes the little guys out.”
“That’s what boxing is,” Glenn said with a shrug when those words were read back to him in Jimmy’s Corner. “That’s the way it was then, and it’s worse now. I’m not a pushy guy, and maybe I should be. In boxing, it helps to be that way.”