January 2, 1870 – January 6, 1929. Distant cousin of Helene Rickard Heald via the Rickard line — both in the Heald family GEDCOM.
George Lewis “Tex” Rickard was born in Kansas City, Missouri, raised in Clay County, Texas, and became the most consequential boxing promoter in the history of the sport. He was the man who turned prize fighting from a saloon-circuit hustle into a stadium spectacle that filled Madison Square Garden and generated million-dollar gate receipts. He started promoting fights in Nevada — including the famous 1906 Gans-Nelson lightweight championship in Goldfield — and by the 1920s he had become the dominant figure in American boxing. He was the main promoter behind Jack Dempsey’s career, organizing the heavyweight championship fights that drew the largest crowds the sport had ever seen.
He also built things. The third Madison Square Garden — the one that opened in 1925 on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets — was his project. It seated eighteen thousand for boxing. He was, by any measure, the person most responsible for making boxing a mainstream American sport rather than a legally marginal one.
He died in Miami on January 6, 1929, of complications following an appendix operation. He was fifty-eight.
His place in the Rickard family tree connected to Helene is not fully documented. The Heald.ged includes both Helene Margaret Rickard (Fred’s great-grandmother, born 1895 in Mendocino County) and Tex Rickard in the same Ancestry family tree, linked through the Rickard surname. Helene’s father was Elisha Palmer Rickard, born around 1863 in Maryland. Tex’s father appears in the GEDCOM under two slightly different records — one as Robert Wood Rickard of Springfield, Illinois, and one as Alanson Rickerd of Clay County, Texas, likely a duplicate entry. These lines do not converge at a documented common ancestor in the current GEDCOM data; they were joined in an Ancestry family tree by surname match. The exact degree of cousinhood — if any — remains unconfirmed.