DOWN-N-OUT:
The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger (Dan McQuade, February 28, 2025, Defector)
“In 1916,” Adam Chandler wrote in the book Drive-Thru Dreams, “Walt Anderson first performed the magical, calculated act of crafting tiny ground beef patties and then smashing them flat onto a steaming, onion-laced griddle.” To reassure customers scared of the meat industry after reading works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anderson had his employees cook the burgers on a griddle right in front of patrons. The sliders made Anderson $3.75 in profit on his first day. The motto of his restaurant, White Castle, was “Buy ’em by the sack.”
“White Castle made this big effort to provide this place that looked really clean,” Chandler told Defector. “They would grind the meat in front of the customers and they’d made a big show of everything being choreographed down to the second. Every bit of the experience was just really, really managed. And all the stores look the same, too, and that was meant to convey comfort and familiarity in a sense that you’ll be safe in any of these places wherever you go. Now we think of that as kind of being soulless and corporate, but back then that was a big deal.”
White Castle was an instant and smashing success. Knockoffs with names like Blue Castle and White Tower failed to capture the same magic, but by the 1960s, the country was dotted with chains like A&W, Tastee-Freez, and Dairy Queen. By the time places like Champburger were opening, McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming the largest chain in the country. Franchisee Ray Kroc bought out its founders, the McDonald brothers, and pushed through an ambitious program of expansion that continues more or less to this day. That globe-bestriding empire, and many only slightly smaller ones, was built through franchising.
The franchise system was a boon to company owners. In exchange for a percentage of profits and a franchise fee, franchisees received the rights to operate their restaurants under a set of guidelines laid out by the companies whose recognizable brands gave those franchises value. Those guidelines were generally quite strict; chains still strived for comfort and familiarity even after The Jungle was well out of customers’ minds. From a business perspective, the franchisee took on most of the material risk. Eventually companies would turn to making money from the land under their own restaurants, which they leased to franchisees.
Many of those franchises were start-ups from people in the industry. Kroc was a milkshake machine salesman; McDonald’s was one of his customers before he made his start as a franchisee. The company spread under Kroc; competing fast food franchises like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken also found success. It was not long until celebrities started getting in on the action—not as franchisees, but as the faces of brands that wanted to expand in the same ways, if not on the same scale, as White Castle or McDonald’s.
The week before Ali reported to prison, Joe Namath was in Miami to open a Broadway Joe’s restaurant. Miami News sports editor John Crittenden described the scene: “When Joe Namath opened his restaurant here last weekend, it was done at great expense—extensive advertising, houseboat cocktail parties, the employment of buxom damsels wearing football jerseys to serve hero sandwiches.”
The celebrity fast-food craze can primarily be traced to the success of Gino’s Hamburgers, a restaurant founded by Joe Campanella, Louis Fischer, Alan Ameche, and Gino Marchetti in the late 1950s. All four had played for the Baltimore Colts, and the first location was in the city’s suburbs. In a city that loved its Colts, a restaurant owned by four of them predictably became a hit.
After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the Blue Castle/White Tower types to arrive. Those knockoffs came in varying forms, but they all had a celebrity attached. Namath had Broadway Joe’s. Johnny Carson had Here’s Johnny’s! Ron Santo had his own pizzas at Wrigley Field. Bart Starr owned drive-ins. Plans were in the works for something called Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen. While still with the Steelers, Brady Keys opened All-Pro Chicken. At one point his restaurants were so successful that they partnered with KFC to open Brady Keys’ Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in black neighborhoods. The colonel was pushed aside by a Pro Bowl cornerback.
Other companies attempted similar ideas. Minnie Pearl’s Chicken operated in white neighborhoods. It served the same food as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken, a name that feels almost but not quite sacrilegious. Glori-Fried Chicken locations were either attached to Gulf gas stations or standalone properties designed by black architectural firm McKissack and McKissack and made to look like a church. (This part feels notably more sacrilegious.)
“It’s getting ridiculous,” an anonymous stockbroker told the Detroit Free Press in January of 1969. “A celebrity sticks his name on a chicken shack and suddenly it’s $50 a share.”
Champburger was the brainchild of three white Miamians: Edward Gale, Leonard Lurie, and Philip Brooks. They worked with the Ali associate and Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyer Chauncey Eskridge to put together a prospectus for the business and looked for investors.
The Champburger prospectus was not promising.