Hugh D. McIntosh

Hugh Donald "Huge Deal" McIntosh (10 September 1876 – 2 February 1942) was an Australian show-business entrepreneur born to parents of Scottish and Irish origin and modest means in Sydney's Surry Hills, then a ramshackle suburb with a reputation for crime and vice among the largely Irish immigrant population. His policeman father Hugh Fraser McIntosh died when he was four.

According to an obituary, he was educated at Marist Brothers College, St Marys Sydney. but in an interview for Triad (a show-business periodical) in 1925, he gave a more colorful account, claiming to have run away to Adelaide as a silversmith's assistant at the age of seven, to have worked for BHP at Broken Hill at nine, then a variety of occupations culminating in working for a surgeon at twelve. Certainly by seventeen he was a chorus boy in a Maggie Moore pantomime Sinbad the Sailor in Melbourne.

In 1897, while working as a barman in Sydney, McIntosh began selling pies at sporting venues, and by the age of twenty-six was the owner of a catering company, then in an audacious leap that was to become a trademark, embarked on sports promotion. First it was cycle racing, notably seven-day events, while he was secretary of the League of New South Wales Wheelmen.

Then came boxing. Hoping to capitalise of the presence of the US "Great White Fleet" in August 1908, he hurriedly built a huge open-air stadium at Rushcutters Bay to stage a boxing match between local champion Bill "Boshter" Squires and World champion Tommy Burns. On Boxing Day 1908 he staged a world championship heavyweight title fight between Burns and Jack Johnson. He made a huge profit from seat sales and a film of the bout, which he took to Britain and America. He sold his stadium business to his referee, the famous sportsman Reginald "Snowy" Baker who, with John Wren, went on to develop a chain of stadiums. Author Peter FitzSimons asserts that McIntosh attempted to sign a US management deal with the Australian boxer, Les Darcy but, when Darcy declined, McIntosh threatened, in retribution, to prevent any fights Darcy might attempt in the USA. FitzSimons suggests that when Darcy made his controversial trip to the USA, McIntosh made good his threat and successfully enlisted the assistance of several state governors to ban the Darcy fights.

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