LAS VEGAS - Tonight, two welterweight boxers step onto a rope-ringed canvas on 36 plywood panels and foam for a $300 million purse. Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s bout is the 20th on the boxing ring, made by Everlast.
New York Times writer John Branch searched out the specifics of the 40-inch tall, 24x24-foot ring (20 x 20 inside the ropes with a 2 foot apron around it), which has been the site for 20 other bouts since the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas purchased it from sports equipment company Everlast in 2010:
Four steel corner posts (one red, one blue and two “neutral” white), 32 support beams, 36 sheets of 4-foot-by-8-foot plywood, 10 5-foot-by-12-foot foam mats (about an inch thick), four ropes (each more than 80 feet long), 16 turnbuckles (four for each corner) and various pads and covers.
There were no bolts (like those of a puzzle, the pieces connect with tongue-and-groove simplicity) and no springs (the bounciness of a ring is a product of wide swaths of plywood and padding).
Everlast offers a professional caliber boxing ring for $10,000 - exactly as described above, plus gong, and corner stools, everything except for the plywood sheets. The 24x24-foot foam pad alone is $1,150.
The name Everlast is synonymous with boxing, although the company started out as a swimwear manufacturer in the Bronx in 1910, when 17 year-old Jacob Golomb, an avid swimmer, began making suits that he guaranteed would last for a full year. He named them "EVERLAST."
Golomb transformed his company into a small retail store that carried a full line of sports equipment. In 1917, young fighter named Jack Dempsey introduced boxing to Golomb and Everlast. Dempsey asked Golomb to construct protective headgear that would last more than 15 roundsn and in 1919, Dempsey won the world's heavyweight championship wearing boxing gloves made for him by Golomb; Everlast became the headquarters for boxing equipment throughout the world.
In 2007 Everlast Worldwide Inc. was acquired by UK based company Brands Holdings.
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