NBC broadcast Boxing From St. Nicholas Arena twice a week—at 9:30 p.m. on Mondays and at 10 p.m. on Tuesdays.[2] The series ended on May 9, 1949, as a result of budgetary problems at the sponsoring Gillette Company.[3]
The DuMont version was hosted by Chris Schenkel; Schenkel took over for Dennis James, who had hosted most of DuMont's boxing telecasts prior to 1954.[4]
This regularly scheduled program, which aired boxing matches from St. Nicholas Arena in New York City on Monday nights, is notable for being the final program to air on DuMont.[5] The last network-aired program was broadcast on August 6, 1956, though a few remaining programs were seen locally on New York's WABD afterward.[4]
With limited finances, DuMont aired many sports programs throughout its history. Boxing, wrestling, basketball, and football were always network mainstays, even during prime time, as they were cheaper than most scripted programs (this in an era before sports rights fees accelerated to their modern levels) and filled large programming blocks that would otherwise have gone unfilled.[6] Most of DuMont's regular series were cancelled on April 1, 1955, and the last non-sports program, the panel show What's the Story, left the airwaves on September 23, 1955, leaving only a few cheaply produced sports programs on the schedule.
However, by August 1956, even DuMont's sports programs, including Boxing From St. Nicholas Arena, were axed.
About 60 episodes of the DuMont version, including the final program on August 6, 1956, survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. However, some of these episodes are from the non-network version which continued to run on WABD after the network closed (these are also notable due to the rarity of kinescopes of local programming aired on United States television stations during the 1950s).
