Harry Frazee has just changed the course of sporting history.
It's December 26, 1919, and the heavy-set man with a perpetually angry-like stare sits back in his chair and counts the money in his head.
His jowls bulge over a collar so tight that one has to question if the oxygen flow is sufficient to have made such a monumental deal.
Across the table, two men from New York — one a moustachioed businessman and brewer, the other a bespectacled civil engineer and military man — quietly smirk at each other, and pocket a piece of paper, signed by all in the room, that has handed them the grandest of Christmas presents, albeit one day late.
They all shake hands, have a quiet drink, a calming smoke, and then go about their days, the nation none the wiser about what's just happened behind closed doors.
On the other side of the country, the subject of the meeting is as ignorant to the moment as the rest of the United States.
Babe Ruth — the larger than life baseball star of the Boston Red Sox — is in Los Angeles to negotiate a contract for a new movie about his life.
When he's eventually tracked down on a golf course almost two weeks later, he's told that his future now lies with the New York Yankees.
His new teammate, pitcher Bob Shawkey, hears the news around the same time.
"Gee, I'm glad that guy's not going to hit against me anymore," Shawkey tells the media.
"You take your life in your hands every time you step up against him."
The most momentous deal in baseball history has been completed.
And the clock has started to tick on one of sport's greatest sporting curse.
The battle for Boston hearts
Ruth had become bigger than the game in Boston.
Originally a star pitcher, the 24-year-old from Baltimore had demanded more time in action with the bat, and had gone on to break the MLB single-season home run record in 1919, having been almost totally relieved of his pitching duties.
"[Even] when Ruth misses a swipe at the ball, the stands quiver," a Boston sportswriter penned that season, describing the fervour that followed 'The Bambino' around any time he stepped up to plate.
His success, of course, meant more value to the team, and more value to the team meant Ruth demanded more money.
During the 1919 season, he had negotiated a contract that would see him earn $10,000 a year over the next three years. By the time he had broken the home run record, he was asking for $20,000 a season, and had threatened not to play unless he received it.
It was a fee that Red Sox owner Frazee was not keen to entertain.
A theatrical producer and director who had been born in Chicago, but spent much of his professional life in New York, Frazee had been known to use the funds that his baseball team brought in to payroll his stage productions.
The $20,000 asking fee was unheard of at the time, and it was money that Frazee felt could be better spent elsewhere.
The Red Sox had won the World Series in 1915, 1916, and 1918 — but during Ruth's record season, the team had finished sixth.
''I do not wish to detract one iota from Ruth's ability as a ball player nor from his value as an attraction,'' Frazee said.
"But there is no getting away from the fact that despite his 29 home runs, the Red Sox finished sixth in the race last year. What the Boston fans want, I take it, and what I want because they want it, is a winning team, rather than a one-man team that finishes in sixth place.
''Ruth has been insubordinate on occasions and has insisted upon having his own way to such an extent that he endangered the discipline of the whole squad.''
Ruth was just as glowing of Frazee.
''He has done more to hurt baseball in Boston than anyone who was ever connected with the game in that city," Ruth said bluntly.
The relationship was untenable. And Frazee had made up his mind to be rid of baseball's greatest show.
The Yankees get their man
New York Yankees owners Jacob Ruppert Jr and Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston met with Frazee on that cold December 26 in 1919 to go over the sale.
It had been a complicated lead-up to the negotiations.
Due to a previous disagreement with league head honchos, Frazee could only deal with either the Yankees or the Chicago White Sox, after all the other MLB teams had been pressured not to work with him.
He had entertained the idea of trading for White Sox star "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, but Jackson had been caught up in the infamous "Black Sox" match-fixing scandal.
It had left Frazee with few options — and Ruppert and Huston knew it.
"I am not at liberty to tell the price we paid," Ruppert said through a poorly hidden grin as he made the announcement in early January of 1920.
"I can say positively, however, that it is by far the biggest price ever paid for a ball player. Ruth was considered a champion of all champions, and, as such, deserving of an opportunity to shine before the sport lovers of the greatest metropolis of the world."
The deal saw Ruth go to New York with his $20,000 per season pay cheque, while Frazee received $100,000 in four instalments, as well as a personal loan of $300,000 from Ruppert, with Fenway Park as collateral.
''The price was something enormous,'' Frazee said.
''But I do not care to name the figures. It was an amount the club could not afford to refuse. No other club could afford to give the amount the Yankees have paid for him."
At that point, the New York Yankees had never won a world series.
They would win one in 1923. And then again in 1927 and 1928. And once more in 1932, all with Babe Ruth strutting out to the diamond to wow the crowds.
Frazee would leave the Red Sox soon after in bankruptcy, using his funds, instead, to prop up his theatre shows.
From their 1918 World Series victory, the Red Sox would have to wait 86 years until their next title in 2004, more than a lifetime suffering under what would become known as the "Curse of the Bambino".
The Yankees now have a record 27 World Series titles.
"I do not mind saying," Frazee said of the Yankees at the time, "I think they are taking a gamble.''
