Five years after the dazzling debut of the New York Athletic Club’s splendid Sixth Avenue quarters, another, even more spectacular clubhouse opened a few blocks away, on Forty-fourth Street and Madison. This one belonged to the NYAC’s longtime rival, the Manhattan Athletic Club. Boasting sumptuous restaurants, a luxury hotel, a theater, bowling alley, and library, along with a magnificently appointed gym and the largest indoor swimming pool in the city, it quickly attracted more than two thousand members, including some of the country’s best young athletes. Before long it was challenging the NYAC for supremacy in every field of amateur competition.
In just a few years, however, the MAC was in serious trouble, a victim of poor fiscal management, made worse by the Panic of 1893. By 1894, it had gone into bankruptcy.
One year later, it was resurrected by thirty-year-old J. Herbert Ballantine, scion of the famous brewery family, makers of New York’s most popular beer. An ardent sportsman, Ballantine renamed his new acquisition the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and set about to restore it to its former glory.
To that end, he instructed his handpicked president, James E. Sullivan, to hire the finest athletic director in the country. The man Sullivan chose was Harry Seymour Cornish.
At the time Sullivan recruited him, Cornish—born on August 4, 1863—was not quite thirty-two. He had spent the first twenty years of his life in Hartford, Connecticut, leaving in 1883 to take courses at a business college in Pittsburgh. For the next five years, he made his living as a businessman before returning to Hartford to wed Adeline Barden (whose older sister, Celia, was married to Harry’s big brother, William). Nine months and twenty-two days after the nuptials, Cornish and his wife became parents of a girl they named Edith.1
There was a swagger about Cornish, born partly of his proud heritage (he was a lifelong member of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution), partly of his own physical attributes. He was a bullnecked, burly man with a jutting jaw, a handlebar mustache, and a prematurely balding dome that only enhanced his aura of extreme virility. A superb athlete, he was dedicated—in the fashion of that calisthenics-crazed age—to the pursuit of physical excellence. (Indeed, in later years, he would attend anatomy classes at Columbia College in order to learn as much as possible about the muscular system.)
Gruff in manner, he brooked no insults and was ready to “knock someone’s block off” at the slightest provocation.2 Aside from bodybuilding, bicycling, boxing, handball, and swimming, his most cherished pursuits were attending athletic events and hanging out with his chums at his favorite watering hole. He was also not averse to the occasional visit to a high-class brothel. Men admired him. Women found him deeply appealing.
His career as a sports professional began in Boston, where, after running the summer school for physical instruction at Harvard, he became athletic director of the Boston Athletic Club. His specialty was track and field. As a coach and trainer, he felt he had no equal. He boasted that he could tell precisely how fast a man was running simply by looking at him, without the aid of a stopwatch. After two years in Boston, he was hired away by the Chicago Athletic Club, where he continued to make a name for himself as one of the country’s leading amateur sportsmen—a reputation reinforced when A. G. Spalding himself commissioned him to write a book on physical training, All-Around Athletics, for the popular Spalding’s Athletic Library.3
It was during his years in Boston that Harry—by all accounts an inveterate philanderer—embarked on an affair with a widow named Mrs. Small. In 1893, when he and his family decamped for Chicago, his mistress moved there, too. Harry continued to see Mrs. Small on the sly until she died during an operation—reportedly, the abortion of Cornish’s child. Cornish paid for her funeral expenses. Not long afterward, he became involved with another woman, Mabel Wallace.
When Harry left Chicago at the start of 1896 to take up his position at the newly formed Knickerbocker Athletic Club, his long-suffering wife remained in Chicago. The following year, she divorced him on the grounds of adultery and was given custody of their daughter, Edith, by then eight years old. Harry saw his child a few times a year, sometimes taking her to the Sportsmen’s Show in Boston, where Addie and Edith moved following the divorce.
It seems possible that Harry’s decision to leave Chicago was motivated at least partly by his desire to extricate himself from an exceptionally messy private life. Or perhaps Ballantine’s offer was simply too attractive to turn down.
Whatever the case, his appointment was big news in Manhattan sporting circles. “Harry Cornish Coming Here,” The New York Times trumpeted in a headline on December 18, 1895. “As a mentor and promoter of athletics,” crowed the story, “Mr. Cornish is without a peer.” After describing his accomplishments—which included staging the athletic games at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—the paper predicted that, with Cornish at the helm, the club was sure “to be heard from in track and field sports in 1896…. If given good material, he will surely develop a team that will prove a worthy rival to any legitimate New York athletic club team.”4
It was only the first of many times that Cornish would be extolled in the press as the leading light of the KAC—a situation that, in the heart of at least one club member, would rankle bitterly.