Although there were many ideas for locations floated for the Sept. 13 battle between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford, it’s only fitting that it will take place in Las Vegas. Though the venues have varied over the years, the city has been the epicenter for the biggest fights in the history of the sport, a lineage that Canelo-Crawford already belongs in well before the bell even rings.

It's a city that has steeped in boxing history for the last 70 years, a place where some have ensured their names will be in lights forever, and others have found themselves in the Neon Graveyard. The fabric of the city feels as though it were woven specifically for boxing, and more specifically, for its biggest fights. The win-or-bust mentality of the felt tables reflects the requirements of the squared circle, and the infrastructure of the city with plentiful hotels offers ample lodging and spacious floor plans for fans and hangers-on alike to mingle in before and after fights and requisite donations to those tables.

Vegas wasn’t built for boxing, but the version of Sin City we know today exists in large part due to boxing. The boom of the 1960s and the tycoon race to build casinos was predated by only a few years by the city’s first true marquee fight — the May 2, 1955, heavyweight battle between Archie Moore and Nino Valdes.

Boxing in the mid-1950s was in a turbulent period, as a sport experiencing a boom in popularity thanks to the advent of television, but also severe existential threats stemming from the technological advancement, but also much seedier business. At this point in time, it wasn’t unusual for more than half of the television sets in the country to be tuned in to Gillette or Pabst Blue Ribbon Friday Night Fights. However, the markets those fights tended to be staged in — New York, Chicago and Detroit — were seeing major dips in the quantity of events promoted and tickets sold to them. People were opting to watch boxing at home, or at the local pub with a television, rather than pay the admission fee.

These cities were run, in a boxing sense, by James Norris and Arthur Wirtz, who formed the International Boxing Club of New York. Norris and Wirtz would go on to be best remembered for their time in professional hockey (which they also essentially ran at this time, owning half of the six-team NHL), but at this point were essentially the conveners of boxing.

However, it wasn’t necessarily their whimsies that dictated what would happen, it was their friends in the world of organized crime, namely Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. By 1961, Carbo and Palermo were in prison after being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy following a three-month trial that exposed the sport's unsavory connections and rampant fight fixing through the mob.

In the mid-50s, this was more of an open secret, one even written about in the pages of Sports Illustrated by Budd Schulberg in 1954, unsettling the status quo in the sport. One thing that had remained constant for several decades was the prominence of manager/promoter Jack “Doc” Kearns, who always seemed to have at least one mainstream star in his stable, and one more scheme up his sleeve.

Kearns was the mastermind behind the sport’s first million dollar gate when his charge Jack Dempsey faced Georges Carpentier in 1921, and the bankruptcy of an entire town when Dempsey’s bout against Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Montana, tanked to a historic extent. So when Kearns began floating the idea of a fight in Las Vegas, the question — provided it happened at all — was whether it would rival Dempsey-Carpentier or be the end of Las Vegas before it truly took off.

As always, Kearns, who was described in the Los Angeles Times as one of sports’ “great con-men of the century,” had a few tricks up his sleeve, ones that would become go-to maneuvers in the modern world of boxing promotion. Moore was a notorious resister of mob influence on his bouts, despite holding the light heavyweight championship. He’d been calling for a showdown with heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano, but didn’t seem to be getting any closer, despite being on a 19-fight win-streak dating to 1951 that saw him score multiple wins over Joey Maxim and Harold Johnson. “The Old Mongoose” was, well, old, by this point, but still a ways away from his final chapter as a fighter.

On May 16, Marciano would face Don Cockell in a defense of his title, battering the Brit in the daylight of San Francisco. Despite Marciano still being an active champion, Kearns decided he would create and issue a new title, the Heavyweight Championship of Nevada, with the implication being that Marciano had avoided Moore and Valdes (who had also been campaigning for a bout against The Brockton Blockbuster) and that the real champion was the winner of his fight.

Though this was an era of singular divisional titleholders, hokey belts for the purpose of boosting promotion predated the preponderance of sanctioning bodies by many, many years, even long before this one.

Kearns also syringed what would become the lifeblood of boxing for many years, and a critical gambling chip in promoting fights: Site fees from casinos. Though the fight itself would be staged at Cashman Field, which a few months prior had hosted an exhibition baseball game between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians to a crowd of over 12,000, Kearns sourced funds from local casinos who bankrolled the fight in anticipation of making the money back through hotel reservations and gambling.

At first, Kearns scrounged only $67,000 from casino magnates, but eventually got the number up to $100,000 based on his estimate of a $150,000 gate, and the need for a $25,000 purse for both fighters and $50,000 of advertising expenses.

Money problems weren’t the biggest threat to the event though, it was Moore’s health. The notoriously active Moore hadn’t been in the ring since August 1954, had ballooned up in weight as he began living the touring musician life on the side and had developed what some physicians had determined to be a dangerous heart problem. Moore later claimed in his autobiography that he had “27 cardiographs made” before being admitted to the Ford Hospital. Before the fight against Valdes could be formally finalized, a majority of a panel of doctors had to declare Moore fit to fight.

Pundits claimed that Moore’s heart issues were a sign of age and obesity, but he would claim that it was due to immense stress stemming from a woman whom he claimed was extorting him with the threat of releasing private photographs to the tune of many thousands of dollars — including a $5,000 payment for a house. Moore later described himself as being “financially drained” in this period.

Later in his career, Moore would shed the reputation for financial foolishness and become one of the only fighters to own his own training compound, the legendary Salt Mine in Ramona, California, outside of San Diego. His funds from this fight would go towards eventually purchasing that, but for this fight, Moore admitted that he neglected training mostly, especially since he did not have to make the light heavyweight limit.

When he did train, it was in Las Vegas at the Moulin Rouge. At this point it simply was a nightclub, but it was 22 days away from opening as the very first desegregated casino and hotel and having the world’s light heavyweight champion training and maybe belting out a tune or two was tremendous for publicity.

The city of Las Vegas was already receiving its share of publicity from the sports journalism world thanks to the Tournament of Champions on May 1, a golf event featuring the 21 best in the world with a record $37,500 prize pool on offer. The city was also in the midst of the peak of Atomic Tourism, at it was known, drawing people to town where they could catch nuclear bomb testing in the desert, many vying for the coveted Sky Room at the Deserrt Inn which promised the clearest views of the detonations.

In the weeks leading up to the fight, Kearn oscillated between May 1 and 2 for the bout, but settled on the latter, which was after the golf tournament but before the next bomb test, hoping to capitalize on tourists and gamblers who might stick around for a few days. As time has gone on, big fights in Vegas are often the attraction other event promoters look to capitalize upon, but the strategy of piggybacking off of existing audiences — like staging a fight on Super Bowl weekend — is a strategy that has persisted.

Aside from Moore’s heart issues, there were also disagreements as to how the fight would be officiated. Reportedly, the expectation was that the bout would utilize the 10-point scoring system employed by the Nevada commission a few years earlier, and that at least two judges would work the bout. Neither of those things would be the case, as former heavyweight champion James J. Braddock would be the referee and only judge, scoring simply rounds won with no "must system."

Kearns did make one concession to Nevada, however, when he decided to start the bout earlier in the day, at 6:15 p.m. to allow for spectators to hit the casinos afterwards. The same protocol applies for fights in Vegas today, for economic reasons, but also to accommodate viewership on the East coast, a consideration Kearns did not have to take into account as the bout was untelevised.

Though there’s every reason to distrust the figures released by Kearns, the announced attendance at Cashman Field was a little over 10,000, with $102,678 in gate receipts. The fans were treated to a rugged and entertaining fight between one of the greatest of all-time regardless of weight class in Moore, and the No. 1 heavyweight contender of the day in the Cuban Valdes.

Despite the reasonable concerns about his age, fitness and overall health, Moore managed to outlast Valdes on this night. He battled through a cut and a swollen eye to produce even greater damage on Valdes as the rounds went on. The fighters battled not only one another, but the same midday heat the fans paying $5, $10, $15 and $30 to attend withstood, and in Moore’s case, wisely used it to his advantage.

“As the sun began to settle on the west side of the ring I was sitting in my corner facing the sun and noticed that Nino was sitting with his back to the sun. The bell rings and I move to maneuver and before any activity starts I’ve already got my head under his chin and I’m muscling this big guy around,” Moore once told journalist Mike Silver. “I face him into the sun and I keep turning him to the sun. He’s trying to get back around and I keep cutting him off. I’m always maneuvering him back to face the sun which was very bright.

"And all the while I keep spearing him with the left hand and keep twisting and twisting and turning him and try as he could, he could never make me turn into the sun. The sun was of course bothering him and I kept thumping him with the left jab. Hard stiff stiff jabs. Pretty soon his eyes began to lump up. One eye closed up completely and the other was closing fast. By this time the sun was going down and the fight was coming to a close.”

In the end, Braddock scored the fight 8-6-1 in favor of Moore, taking a round away from both men for fouls along the way. The victory did eventually compel Marciano to face Moore, who demolished Bobo Olson in a light heavyweight title defense in the interim, two fights later. That heavyweight title bout between Marciano and Moore became the ninth biggest gate in the history of boxing at the time. Kearns would never promote another fight in Vegas after breaking even-ish on his second attempt at it.

That night in Vegas in ’55 portended plenty more that we’ve come to take for granted over the years, too. Boxing wouldn’t truly boom in Vegas in earnest until Utah’s Gene Fullmer started coming to town in the '60s with his nearby fanbase and became must-see television as the sport entered its next boom period as well.

Some of the people who would go on to make Vegas the fight capital were there that night, such as Johnny Tocco, whose gym became a landmark and living exhibit for the sport’s history. By the time Tocco’s was up and running, fights were mostly moved indoors to avoid the stifling heat, with the exception of the occasional outdoor venue built at casinos such as Ceasars, boosting the site fees from locations that wanted the big fights and their crowds all to themselves.

Though the impact of Moore-Valdes wouldn’t be felt immediately, pieces of that night remain. The home base for the fight promotion, Happy Vic’s Bar and Cocktails, is in the same location that the main stage on Fremont Street stands today. Moulin Rouge would close in October of that year but remains an important part of the country’s history of race relations.

Three days later, some of those same fight fans stuck around and watched watched a bomb blast in Yucca Flat, a phenomenon and existential fear that would subside as the years went on. But if catastrophe was a deterrent, Vegas would have never become a thing. As Kearns said in the buildup to Moore-Valdes: "This is Las Vegas’ first, last, and only chance to become the sports capital of the world.”

Seventy years later, another Black American fighter will move up in weight to face a Latino fighter in Vegas, but nowadays no additional coercion is necessary to get people to the fight game's capital city.