One Summer: America, 1927 (59 page)

Popular sentiment was overwhelmingly with Dempsey. Tunney had all the makings of a hero—he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking—but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection. He had grown up poor in Greenwich Village, the son of Irish immigrants, and weighed just 140 pounds when he took up boxing professionally. Even when he had built himself up to 190 pounds, he lacked power. He made up for it through deft feinting and jabbing. As Tunney explained it, Dempsey was a fighter while he was a boxer—something much more scientific. He won his bouts by outthinking his opponents and wearing them down. The strategy nearly always worked. In sixty-six professional bouts Tunney was beaten just once, by Harry Greb in 1922. No one had ever knocked him off his feet.

Tunney promoted himself as an intellectual and a gentleman. He didn’t drink or swear and refused to advertise cigarettes, but he made a lot of money endorsing other things—cars, hats, shoes, pajamas, and walking sticks, among much else. He had an unfortunate tendency to pomposity. He liked to carry around a book with him. When asked what it was, he would reply casually, “Oh, just a copy of the
Rubaiyat
that I am never without.” This was largely why most people couldn’t stand him. The typical fight fan, as Paul Gallico of the
Daily News
put it, “wanted to see the book-reading snob socked back to Shakespeare.”

One serious concern with staging the fight in Chicago was the city’s reputation for corruption. Al Capone had long been a Dempsey admirer. He hated Tunney’s refined mannerisms. “A fucking pansy” was how he characterized him. Capone let word get out that he would make sure Dempsey didn’t lose this time. Dempsey was horrified to learn this and wrote to Capone pleading with him not to interfere. “If I beat Tunney, or Tunney beats me in true sportsmanship, it will prove who really deserves to be champion,” Dempsey explained. The next day he received three hundred roses and an unsigned card saying, “To the Dempseys, in the name of sportsmanship.” Capone reportedly bet $50,000 on Dempsey to win, and bought one hundred of the best seats in the stadium at $40 a seat.

On fight day Tunney and Dempsey both jogged five miles, then relaxed. Tunney passed the time examining rare manuscripts in a library
with his new pal Somerset Maugham. Dempsey’s pastimes were not noted, but presumably were a little less intellectually ambitious.

By early evening, Soldier Field was steadily filling and the atmosphere was growing electric. People spent most of the time before the fight picking out celebrities at ringside—though people in the most distant seats, it must be said, could barely see the ring, never mind those gathered around it. Some seats were over seven hundred feet from the action.

The most enlivening prefight moment was when Al Capone arrived, in overcoat and fedora, encircled as always by a protective ring of burly men. “Nothing smaller than a fieldpiece could penetrate his double-walled fortress of meat,” wrote
The New Yorker
later. Accompanying Capone as special guest was Damon Runyon.

The crowd was put at 150,000—enough to fill Yankee Stadium twice over. Six thousand ushers attended to the throngs. Each wore an armband saying “Tunney-Dempsey Boxing Exhibition”—a touch of gentility insisted on by Tunney. Never before had so many sports fans packed into a single space.

In the center of it all—a small, bright opening in an ocean of heads and enshrouding darkness—was the ring. Bathed in the light of forty-four 1,000-watt lamps, the ring was twenty feet to a side, the largest size allowed, which gave Tunney more room to escape. A crucial feature of the Dempsey-Firpo fight had been that Dempsey was able to stand over Firpo and clobber him anew each time Firpo tried to haul himself to his feet. It was this that led the Tunney camp to insist on the rule of retiring to a neutral corner after a knockdown—a consideration that would give boxing its greatest moment of controversy before the night was out.

The National Broadcasting Company linked eighty-two stations to form a national broadcast. More people listened to the fight that night than had witnessed any other event in history. For Lindbergh’s homecoming in June, the audience had been thirty million. This time it would be fifty million. As ever, Graham McNamee’s was the warm voice that nearly half the nation turned to.

The most striking feature of the fight was its lateness. The scheduled
starting time was 9:45 p.m. in Chicago—10:45 p.m. on the East Coast—and proceedings were running about fifteen minutes late when the two robed competitors finally emerged, to a stupendous and appreciative roar from the crowd, and climbed into the intensely bright ring. Both fighters looked calm and prepared.

The referee, Dave Barry, gave the customary lecture at the center of the ring, the men retired to their corners, a bell clanged, and the most eagerly anticipated fight in America to that time—and possibly ever—began. Dempsey came out swinging, and hit so hard that McNamee said he could see the ring trembling. But Tunney dodged and danced expertly, and Dempsey’s blows mostly fell harmlessly against his arms.

Tunney at the same time began picking Dempsey to pieces—jabbing and parrying, then dancing away. The strategy had a devastating cumulative effect. Dempsey’s face became more and more swollen with each passing round—eventually, it seemed, with each passing blow. Cuts opened above his eyes and he bled from the mouth. But still he marched on, “tirelessly, relentlessly, savagely, viciously, desperately,” in the words of
New York Times
reporter James P. Dawson.

Tunney was cruising to victory when, in the seventh round, Dempsey stopped him in his tracks, and brought 150,000 people to their feet, with a sudden, violent flurry of punches that left Tunney sitting on the canvas in a helpless daze, his left arm resting on a rope. He was almost certainly no more than a punch or two away from oblivion. “I am free to say I found the canvas a pretty comfortable place just then,” Tunney joked to reporters afterward, but he was in serious trouble and fifty million people in America knew it. At least ten radio listeners, it was later reported, dropped dead from heart attacks during the seventh round, though surely any such estimate was drawn from thin air.

Dempsey, his blood up, failed to withdraw immediately to a neutral corner as required, but hovered, waiting to clobber Tunney when he rose again. The referee Barry had to shoo him back to neutral territory before starting the count. This gave Tunney a few precious extra moments to recover. How many exactly has been a matter of intense debate ever since, but it was something in the region of five or six seconds.

At the count of nine, Tunney clambered back to his feet and, with surprising lightness, managed to dance his way out of further trouble. In fact, he had little idea what was going on. “I was oblivious … and had to be told later on what happened,” he admitted years later.

Dempsey had blown his chance. The exertion left the former champ exhausted. In the next round, Tunney floored him with a sudden sharp hook of his own. Dempsey bounded back up, but he seemed to have little left. Tunney dominated easily thereafter and won on a unanimous decision.

Dempsey supporters have always felt that their hero was cheated, as did Dempsey himself. “Intentionally or otherwise, I was robbed of the championship,” he told reporters in his dressing room immediately after the fight. “I am not an alibi artist, but I know down in my soul that I knocked Tunney out tonight and what’s more chased him all around the ring and should have won on points at least.”

According to Roger Kahn in his 1999 biography of Dempsey,
A Flame of Pure Fire
, the referee didn’t enforce the neutral-corner rule when Dempsey went down. Kahn said he was “consumed by outrage” when he first reviewed footage of the two key moments of the fight. “Two knockdowns, one round apart, and two different sets of rules. The explanation, I believe, is not complicated. In my tape of Chicago 1927, I am looking at a crooked referee,” Kahn wrote.

A viewing of the footage—now available to everyone with access to the Internet—is not nearly so clear-cut. When Tunney fell in the seventh round, Barry pushed Dempsey out of the way, clearly ordering him back to his corner, then turned and began the count immediately while Dempsey was still withdrawing. Barry could hardly have acted more quickly or decisively. In the following round when Dempsey fell, Barry didn’t send Tunney to a neutral corner because there wasn’t time to. Dempsey jumped up immediately, like someone rebounding off a trampoline, and began swinging again before the referee could step forward or even raise his arm.

The long count was unfortunate, but no one was to blame for it more than Jack Dempsey. Tunney chose to look at the bigger picture. “We have
fought twenty rounds and I think I beat him in nineteen of them,” he told reporters.

Tunney earned $990,000 for the fight, which someone calculated included $7,700 for time spent horizontal during the long count. Dempsey made just under $450,000. Tunney was eager for yet another rematch, but Dempsey declined. He never fought again. Tunney had just one more fight himself. He shunned the obvious challenger, Jack Sharkey, and instead fought a New Zealander named Tom Heeney at Yankee Stadium. Tunney won in eleven rounds and made $500,000 for his effort, but what was most notable about the fight was that only half the tickets were sold. Boxing without Dempsey was not the draw it had been. The promoters lost over $150,000.

In early September, from South America there came an intriguing story. A French engineer named Roger Courteville, while making a journey by car from Rio de Janeiro to Lima—the first coast-to-coast crossing of South America by motorized vehicle, in itself an extraordinary story—announced that en route, along a lonely track in Mato Grosso state, he had come upon the missing English explorer Percy Fawcett, last seen hunting for the fabled lost city of Z in the jungles beyond Fordlandia. At the time of their encounter, Courteville didn’t realize who Fawcett was, so he didn’t report the discovery.

In accounts he later wrote for the
New York Times
, Courteville said that he was brought up short by the sight of a gray-haired white man, about sixty years old, sitting by a rutted track in the middle of nowhere. “He was wearing shorts, a khaki shirt and old thick-soled shoes, which were tied to his stockingless feet by the fibers of swamp plants,” Courteville reported. “His hands were shaking with fever.” Courteville particularly noted that the man’s bare legs were swarming with mosquitoes. Courteville spoke to him in Portuguese but got no reply, then tried English. He asked the man why he allowed the mosquitoes to browse so freely on his legs.

“They are hungry, the poor devils,” the man replied flatly in an English accent. That, remarkably, was the extent of their conversation.

“The stranger, after the manner of Englishmen, was unresponsive and disinclined to talk about himself and his affairs,” Courteville went on. So, amazingly, Courteville got back in his car without making any effort to determine the man’s identity, render assistance, or even to ask what he was doing there. He just drove on and casually reported the encounter to an official in Lima when he got there some months later.

The official got very excited because Fawcett was the most famous missing man in South America.

As it turned out, the man Courteville encountered could not have been Fawcett. For one thing, Fawcett was bald and this man had long hair. So who he was and how he had gotten there were great mysteries. No one knew of any other Englishman who had gone into the jungle and not come out again.

Courteville’s discovery, even though it wasn’t Fawcett, stirred interest in Fawcett anew. A British American adventurer named George Miller Dyott announced plans to lead a search party into the fifty thousand square miles of tangled wilderness in which Fawcett might reasonably be supposed to be. Supported by ten mules, sixty-four bullocks, and a small army of guides and porters, Dyott spent months hacking his way into the interior, and nearly died himself, but didn’t find Fawcett or Courteville’s mysterious Englishman or anyone else who wasn’t known to be there already. Then two more people, a Swiss man and a reporter from United Press International, embarked on a separate expedition but were never heard from again at all. From England, Fawcett’s wife said people should stop their searching. She told reporters that she was in touch with her husband telepathically, and that he was fine and would come out when he was ready. He never did.

On September 2, en route to Cheyenne, Wyoming, Charles Lindbergh flew over Rapid City High School and the State Game Lodge where the Coolidges had made their home for the summer. President Coolidge came out and waved a handkerchief. Lindbergh dropped special messages at both places. The one at the game lodge was never found.

Seeing how tired Lindbergh had become, those responsible for his tour instituted a rule that he would provide no more than four and a half hours of personal appearances a day—two and a half hours of parades and speeches by day, and two hours of banqueting at night. Everything would have to be compressed to fit into that timetable.

Newspapers continued to report his progress around the country, but with a sense more of duty than enthusiasm, and the stories nearly always now appeared on inside pages. Only occasionally did something mildly out of the ordinary happen. In Abilene, Texas, Lindbergh arrived to find that the organizers had fitted his parade vehicle with a throne. Embarrassed at such a display of grandeur, Lindbergh refused to sit in it, and it had to be removed. That was about as interesting as Lindbergh’s tour got now.

With the Dempsey-Tunney fight concluded, sports fans turned their attention back to baseball and the question of whether Babe Ruth could break his home run record. It was getting awfully close. Ruth went two games, on September 24 and 25, without a homer, which left him four short of the record with just four games to play.

On the first of those four games, on September 27, Ruth got his 57th in style by hitting a grand slam off Lefty Grove of Philadelphia—one of only six home runs Grove gave up all season. Ruth didn’t hit grand slams often: this was his first of the season and only the sixth of his career.