One Summer: America, 1927 (37 page)

Dempsey charged from his corner and smashed Willard’s jaw so hard that he broke it in thirteen places, then followed up with a hook that sprayed six of Willard’s teeth across the canvas. Dempsey floored his opponent seven times in the first round, then pounded away at him for two rounds more, cracking his cheekbone and at least two ribs. Dazed and disheartened, Willard failed to rise for the fourth round. For the rest of his life Willard insisted that the tape under Dempsey’s gloves had been coated with concrete. It appears that it merely felt that way.

Dempsey’s purse for his title fight against Willard was $27,500. Within two years, Dempsey would be fighting for purses of nearly $1 million, and the whole world would be his audience. Boxing had just changed forever.

Damon Runyon dubbed him “the Manassa Mauler,” but the name was no more than partly correct. Dempsey didn’t maul; rather, he struck with deadly, repetitious precision, and Manassa, a small agricultural community in southern Colorado near the New Mexico border, was his home for just the first ten years of his life. After that he grew up all over—in Denver and smaller towns in Colorado, Utah, and West Virginia—as his alcoholic ne’er-do-well father drifted hazily from job to job.

He was born William Harrison Dempsey—his family called him Harry—in June 1895 (four months after Babe Ruth), into a clan that was unusually mongrel: part Cherokee, part Jewish, part Scots-Irish. Dempsey was the ninth of thirteen children, and the family was poor but close—a fact that would weigh heavily on him in the summer of 1927. As a youth he made a living by entering bars and challenging anyone in the place to fight him for a kitty collected from the other patrons. It made him awfully tough. From there it was only a short step to boxing for a living. He began to fight professionally in 1914, using the name “Kid Blackie.” Along the way, he picked up a wife, Maxine Cates, a saloon-bar piano player and occasional prostitute fifteen years his senior. The marriage, not altogether surprisingly, didn’t last. They separated after just a few months. (She would die horribly in a fire in a brothel in Juárez, Mexico, in 1924.)

As a fighter, Dempsey was instinctively brutal. “In the ring he seemed to enjoy hurting other people,” writes his biographer Roger Kahn. Once, in a bad mood, he knocked out every one of his sparring partners. When the writer Paul Gallico, then sports editor of the
New York Daily News
, accepted an assignment to spar a little with Dempsey, to demonstrate what it was like to face the champ, Dempsey hit him almost hard enough to kill him. Gallico didn’t remember a thing but reported afterward that he felt like a building had fallen on him. The sportswriter Grantland Rice, who was present, wrote: “At the end, the head of young Mr. Gallico was attached to his body by a shred. We only hope he is not asked next to cover an electrocution.” Al Jolson, in a similar spirit, took a playful swing at Dempsey for photographers. Dempsey smacked Jolson so hard it split open his chin.

Yet the instant a fight was over, Dempsey would often bound forward and solicitously help to his feet the person he had just made horizontal. Although he looked every inch a villain with his prison haircut and steely gaze, in private Dempsey was a pleasant, rather shy, surprisingly thoughtful, and articulate individual.

Nothing about Dempsey’s fight against Willard in Toledo did more to excite entrepreneurial spirits than the knowledge that Tex Rickard had spent $100,000 on a temporary arena and still made a fortune on the undertaking. The crowd of ninety thousand was the biggest ever to attend a sporting event anywhere on the planet—and in Toledo, Ohio, for goodness’ sake. Boxing was clearly too lucrative to be left to marginal cities in the distant west, especially when existing venues like Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds stood unused for 250 days or more a year. Almost at once, New York state senator (and soon-to-be New York City mayor) Jimmy Walker shepherded a bill through the legislature making boxing fully legal in New York. Other states quickly followed.

Boxing still faced a great deal of opposition in some quarters, however. Many people were horrified by its violence and brutality. Others fretted that it was an incitement to gambling. The Reverend John Roach Straton saw a worrisome threat to morals in allowing members of the weaker sex to gaze upon “two practically naked men, battering and bruising each other and struggling in sweat and blood for mere animal mastery.”

In fact, as it turned out, that was very much what women wanted, and the person they most keenly wished to see glistening and lightly clad was the French boxer Georges Carpentier. He was, by universal female consent, an eyeful. “Michelangelo would have fainted for joy at the beauty of his profile,” wrote one smitten female observer, and her comments were echoed in ladies’ magazines across the land. Women simply adored him. When Gene Tunney beat Carpentier in a later fight, a distraught blonde leaped into the ring and tried to scratch his eyes out.

Carpentier was not a great fighter, and occasionally he resorted to a helpful fix. This didn’t always work out quite as planned. In 1922 in Paris, a Senegalese fighter known as Battling Siki agreed, for a generous consideration,
to take a fall against Carpentier. Unfortunately, Siki forgot his commitment and instead knocked out the dumbfounded Frenchman in the sixth round. For Siki it was the high point of a mostly disappointing life. He never won another important match, and in 1925 was shot dead for no apparent reason on a Manhattan street. The murderer was never caught.

Carpentier landed a fight with Dempsey based almost entirely on three considerations: he looked strong, he made the ladies swoon, and he was a war hero. (He had been a decorated aviator in World War I, in which capacity he became great pals with Charles Nungesser.) The fight attracted unprecedented levels of public interest. Reporters came from across the world. The
New York American
hired George Bernard Shaw to comment. H. L. Mencken, in an essay, expressed his satisfaction that it was a fight between white men.

Carpentier claimed to have developed a secret punch that would catch Dempsey by surprise. Damon Runyon suggested that he would be better off practicing taking ten-second naps since that is mostly what he would be doing during the fight. Before the bout, Tex Rickard beseeched Dempsey: “Don’t kill the son of a bitch, Jack.” Rickard wasn’t concerned about Carpentier’s well-being, but about what a death would do to boxing just as it was getting lucrative and respectable. “The best people in the world are here today,” he said. “If you kill him, all this will be ruined. Boxing will be dead.”

It did not take long for Carpentier to discover how outclassed he was. Dempsey broke his nose with his first punch. Soon afterward, Carpentier hit Dempsey in the face with the hardest punch he could throw. Dempsey barely blinked. Carpentier had broken his thumb in two places. Dempsey took just four rounds to demolish the Frenchman and leave him unconscious on his back in the middle of the ring. From beginning to end, the whole lasted twenty-seven minutes. The gate was $1,626,580—a fourfold increase from the Dempsey-Willard fight of just two years earlier.

The problem for Dempsey now became an absence of opponents rash enough or worthy enough to climb into the ring with him. Boxing might well have lost its momentum had it not been for the timely arrival
on American soil of an Argentinean giant named Luis Ángel Firpo—“the Wild Bull of the Pampas,” as he was extravagantly but accurately dubbed. A poor youth from Buenos Aires, Firpo arrived in America in 1922 carrying a cardboard suitcase that held one spare shirt collar, a pair of boxing trunks, and nothing else.

He was not a stylish fighter—“he punches like a man throwing rocks” was how one observer put it—but he was huge and powerful, and he now proceeded to club to the canvas one opponent after another. By the time he met Dempsey at the Polo Grounds in September 1923, he had won twelve fights in a row—nine by knockout. Like Dempsey, Firpo was a fighter who was prepared to stand in one place and slug it out. The world couldn’t wait to see what Dempsey would make of him. What followed was perhaps the most exciting four minutes of slugging ever seen in the ring.

Firpo brought a gasp to eighty thousand pairs of lips by dropping Dempsey to one knee with his very first punch. Dempsey responded furiously and knocked down Firpo seven times in the first round, but Firpo got up each time swinging. After the seventh knockdown, Firpo reached back and caught Dempsey with a right hook so ferocious that it knocked the champ through the ropes and clear out of the ring. Dempsey fell into the crowd at ringside, and was pushed back by many sets of eager hands—“so many that it looked like he was getting a back massage,” Firpo recalled later. Among the enthusiastic pushers was Babe Ruth, beaming all over. Dempsey should have been disqualified for receiving assistance, but the referee let the fight continue.

In the first minute of the next round, Dempsey hit Firpo in the head with two mighty blows and Firpo slumped to the canvas, not to rise again. Most reporters declared it the most exciting fight they had ever seen. Grantland Rice thought it the most exciting fight there had ever been.

And then Dempsey stopped boxing. Fights were mooted and even negotiated, but in every instance came to naught. From September 1923 to September 1926, Dempsey didn’t fight at all. Instead, he settled in Los Angeles, acted in a couple of movies, had his nose fixed, married a minor
movie star named Estelle Taylor (and slept with several others), and became pals with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.

Dempsey’s brother Johnny, who nurtured dreams of being a Hollywood star himself, was in Los Angeles already and had formed friendships of his own with several well-known figures, in particular a matinee idol named Wallace Reid, then one of the biggest box-office draws in movies. Reid had the wholesome good looks of the boy every mother wants her daughter to marry, but in private life he was secretly and deeply addicted to narcotics. From Reid, Johnny Dempsey learned the dangerous pleasures of cocaine and heroin. Reid died from the cumulative effects of dissipation in 1923 at the age of just thirty-one, but not before he had made Johnny Dempsey a hopeless addict, too. The young Dempsey’s drug problems and deteriorating mental state would be a prolonged and painful distraction for his brother Jack.

In 1926, Philadelphia held a world’s fair, called the Sesquicentennial Exposition, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The enterprise was a fiasco from the start. The site chosen was marshy and difficult to build on. The vision for the fair was grand, but the funding meager. The State of Pennsylvania declined to contribute anything to the costs.

Construction efforts fell so far behind that hardly any exhibits were finished when the fair opened on May 31, 1926. President Coolidge declined to attend and sent his secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, and his omnipresent commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover. The park that greeted them was embarrassingly incomplete. An eighty-foot-high Liberty Bell, the exposition centerpiece, was still shrouded in scaffolding. Work hadn’t even started on the New York State pavilion. The tardiest exhibition of all was Argentina’s, which was dedicated on October 30, just in time for the exposition’s closing.

It rained almost all summer and into the fall, depressing crowds in every sense of the word. The exposition had just one successful event. On the evening of September 23, in a stadium otherwise rarely used, Jack
Dempsey squared off against an up-and-coming young boxer named Gene Tunney. It was Dempsey’s first fight in almost exactly three years.

After Dempsey’s long layoff, interest in the fight was huge. One reporter, with just a hint of excess, called it “the greatest battle since the Silurian Age.” The paid attendance was 120,000, but it is believed that as many as 135,000 packed in. Tunney was an intelligent boxer, but a light hitter, and it was widely agreed that he would be overwhelmed by Dempsey’s power. In fact, Tunney fought a brilliant and perfect fight, jabbing sharply, then wheeling away from Dempsey’s killer right hand. Dempsey stalked him all night, while Tunney stung him repeatedly with sharp but wearing jabs. The effect was cumulatively formidable. By the seventh round, Dempsey’s face was a swollen mess. One of his eyes was sealed shut, and the other wasn’t far behind. Dempsey chased Tunney all night but managed to land just one good punch. Tunney won easily on points.

When the bruised and puffy-faced Dempsey arrived home afterward, his horrified wife asked what had happened. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Dempsey famously replied.

Dempsey’s defeat caused nearly universal dismay but set the scene for the biggest rematch in boxing history. A small round of qualifying bouts was arranged as a way of maximizing excitement while milking the situation for every cent it would yield. The first qualifying bout was between Jack Sharkey and Jim Maloney. (This was the fight, mentioned many pages ago, at which twenty-three thousand people paused to pray for Charles Lindbergh, who was at that moment alone over the Atlantic.) The winner of that fight—which was Sharkey, easily—would then face a grand qualifying match against the aging but formidable Jack Dempsey on July 22. The venue for both qualifying bouts was Yankee Stadium, a matter that naturally warmed the heart of Jacob Ruppert.