Jack Dempsey was the most loved and most hated prizefighter the ring has ever known, at once the most popular heavyweight champion of the world and the most despised. For a time, he was God’s most misunderstood and unhappy man, yet he fought his way out of the mist to become one of the most respected and successful figures of his era. Dempsey was a man who had to fight all his life. He was made for it. The word fight belongs to Jack Dempsey. It is synonymous with his name.
As a boy, bum, man, and gentleman there has never been a fighter with the color of Dempsey, of such heroic proportions, living a life so touched with spirit, excitement, tragedy, and drama. Out of the ring.a kind, human, warmhearted man, inside the ropes no one could be as rough‑and‑tumble, so much of a killer, so cruel, so much an animal, as Dempsey.
The Dempsey scowl, the hate in the flat‑black eyes, the murder in his brine‑hardened fists, struck terror into the men he faced. But, as the years rolled on, the fighters he had battered into bloody hulks became his friends. They came to him for jobs, to talk over old times, or just to shake his hand.
Few realize what the kid from Manassa did for the fight game. He took it out of the smoky back rooms and dance halls, the barns, pool halls, and bars. His fists built the million‑dollar gates, the huge arenas, the nationwide broadcasts. He changed the game and changed himself. Today little remains of the Dempsey of the early 1900′s, the bearded, cinder‑covered, poverty roughened “bo” riding the blind baggage from town to town, getting beat up and dishing it out in Western tank towns to get enough for a meal and a flop.
In the face of today’s Dempsey, the restlessness is gone. Only a few scars are still there to tell you what he once was. His manner is friendly, his life easy. His bashed‑in nose has been lifted. He’s learned the manners of gentlemen. He’s learned the ways of business and respectability. Only occasionally does the spirit of the old Dempsey‑flash through the veneer as his face comes alive with the old toughness, the competitive fire that made him so murderous in the ring.
It was a bitter and beautiful time for Jack Dempsey. It was a time filled with pain and hunger, and joy and extreme hardship. Nobody can talk about it the way Dempsey can, because nobody misses it so much. Of all the people who told me stories about Jack Dempsey‑the friends,
trainers, sparring mates‑none of them related the incidents about the Manassa Mauler as vividly as Dempsey himself.
On a Saturday afternoon we sat in the back of Jack’s glittering restaurant on Broadway. The noon rush hour was over, the place was almost quiet. Three of us sat around a table. Dempsey, his body too big for his chair, chewed on an unlit cigar. Al Buck, his friend and adviser, toyed with a pair of eggs. A few people drifted over to get Dempsey’s autograph. A woman came over and Jack got up and shook her hand.
“You don’t remember me, Jack,” she said. “It was a long time ago. I was twenty‑six.”
“You don’t look much older than that now,” Dempsey said, with a smile.
A friend from the West came over after she left. The friend looked at Jack the way a ten‑year‑old looks at a hero.
“You look good, Jack,” he said. “Bet you could still fight.”
“No, pal,” Jack said. “I couldn’t.”
When the friend went away, Dempsey turned to us. There was a certain sadness in his eyes. “Still fight?” he said. “I lost that a long time ago, long before most people knew I had lost it. But I knew it. I knew it before that Tunney fight. I had started to think then. Think,” he said, underlining the word with his voice. “That’s something a fighter should never do. The smarter you get, the less you can fight.”
Then he began to talk about the past, recalling old names, old towns, fights, struggles, the way it was when a tough kid named Dempsey had nothing m the world but a dream and a punch. He did not speak his thoughts m any sort of order‑he jumped back and forth over the years‑but all he said had in it the color and lustiness of raw life. After a while,. it got so that you could see old roads and hills of the West, the wild‑beaten, clapboard houses, the tough dives, the freights hurtling through the night, the sawdust rings with the clothesline ropes. You could smell the sweat and liniment and see the blood‑soaked gloves.
“Whenever I went into the ring then,” Dempsey was saying, “I felt like the toughest guy in the world. The scowl? I never felt I had it. I didn’t feel anything Too keyed up. I just wanted to get that guy in front of me: Belt the hell out of him, before he’d belt the hell out of me. No, I didn’t think much then. That’s why I had coordination of mind and body. It was a natural instinct. A fighter shouldn’t think. Just fight. I was good, then. But how many saw those fights? The real fights, the ones where I got a few lousy bucks, the hardest and best fights.’
Dempsey never had a “boxing match” with anyone in his life. It was always a fight. He began talking about one of the fights, one of the toughest. It was a ‘fight he lost to a roughneck puncher named Johnny Sudenberg in Goldfield, Nevada, in 1915. Dempsey was 20 years old then, not fully grown, weighing 165 pounds. He had been hopping freights, working in mines, traveling all over Utah, Colorado, Nevada, trying to get into the ring against anyone who would fight him.
Sudenberg was a heavyweight, one of the most rugged and skilful the mining country had ever produced. Dempsey went up against him as a substitute for a fighter who had backed out. The promoters were worried, because Jack looked too
small and seemed too green as a fighter. But Dempsey talked them into it.
‘He trained in a dive called the Northern,Bar. His first sparring partner was a rough Indian pug named Kid Harrison. Dempsey, never easy on spar‑mates, knocked Harrison stiff one day and lost him. He took on another boy named Roy Moore. This one managed to stay on his feet during the training. Before the bout, Moore, who had seen Sudenberg fight, advised Dempsey not to start slugging it out with his opponent.
That went against Dempsey’s grain. He knew how to do only one thing, go in there and slug. The fight was held in the town dancehall. For three rounds, the two men stood toe to toe and tried to kill. each other with punches. The place was a madhouse of screaming miners and farmers. They had never seen anything like it.
“Johnny could hit,” Dempsey said. “From the fifth round on, I had no idea what was happening Sometimes there was a face in front of me. Sometimes there was nothing. I just kept throwing my fists.”
The fight went ten rounds. Dempsey was on his feet when the bell rang, but for hours afterwards he didn’t know whether he had won or been knocked out. The fight went to Sudenberg on a decision. Dempsey dragged his battered body and welted, shapeless face to a shack outside of town where he slept. When he woke up the next morning, he discovered that his manager had skipped off with the $100 Dempsey was to get for the fight. He was flat broke.
The beaten‑up kid fighter hung around town for a few days, then a wire came from a promoter in Tonopah, Nevada, 30 miles away. Would Dempsey fight Johnny Sudenberg again? Dempsey’s answer was to start for Tonopah, walking. It was a walk over the mountains. He legged it 15 miles before he was picked up by a wagon. And ten days later, his face and body still swollen and bruised, Young Dempsey, as he was then known, climbed into the ring again against Sudenberg.
The second Dempsey‑Sudenberg fight was rougher than the first. In the first round, Dempsey floored Sudenberg seven times. Each time, Johnny bounced back and crashed into Dempsey. Round after round wore on. One of the fighters had to retreat. It was Sudenberg. He began to back up, but as he went back, he kept belting away and gaining strength. Dempsey, not used to fighting in high altitudes, began to weaken. In the seventh round, Sudenberg brought up a right from the floor and knocked Dempsey flat on his back. Jack got ‑up. Sudenberg knocked him down again. Dempsey took three knockdowns in that round, but kept on boring in for more.
The crowd watching that fight was as exhausted as the fighters. By the last round, with the two men still slugging at each other, they watched in silent, breathless awe. They had seen the greatest prizefight of their lives, probably one of the most brutal of all time. It was called a draw. Dempsey pulled himself across the ring at the final bell, put his arm around Johnny Sudenberg’s shoulders. They left the ring that way, supporting each other.
“He was a fighter,” Dempsey said. “I really liked that guy.”
Those were the fights, dozens of them, that made Dempsey the kind of fighter he was. Hard, back‑breaking work and cruel jungle‑camp brawls developed Dempsey into the merciless, stalking killer he became in the ring Those who criticize Dempsey’s lust for mauling his opponents don’t realize that these were the only tactics he knew. The fighters of that day asked no quarter and gave none. To win, you had to be the tougher. You fought to prove how strong and mean you were.
When Dempsey started on the comeback trail after losing the title to Tunney, he was knocked by many fans for smacking Jack Sharkey when his head was turned and his guard down in the seventh round. Sharkey had turned to the referee to complain that Dempsey had hit him low. Jack’s left hook cracked out and sent Sharkey to dreamland. It was a fair punch. It was fair by all the standards by which Dempsey had lived. Sharkey should have known better. Sudenberg would never have dropped his guard against Dempsey.
After the fight with Sudenberg, Dempsey was broke. His best friend in the world at that time was the man he had just fought. Sudenberg and Dempsey scraped up enough money to buy a pair of train tickets to Reno. At Nina Junction, they staged another fight, a four‑round affair, to get enough money to continue. They passed the hat and took in four dollars and split it up and shook hands and when they finally parted they were the best of friends.
Few fighters ever fought so fiercely, or smoldered with such a deep desire to annihilate an opponent, as Dempsey. But, once it was over, Dempsey never had the slightest feeling of dislike for the man he had tried to kill in the ring. In Toledo, to win the title, Jack cut big Jess Willard to ribbons, slashed the left side of his face open to the bone in 13 places. It was as ruthless and brutal a beating as any man has ever taken in the ring. But, today, Willard is one of Dempsey’s friends, and Jack gave him jobs on two occasions.
Dempsey likes to tell about the time he hired Jess to make the rounds of bars in Miami and plug a liquor bearing the trade mark Jack Dempsey’s Rye. Willard would go into a bar, ask in a loud voice how Jack Dempsey’s Rye was going, then order a drink of it for everyone. “Some of Dempsey’s Rye for everyone,” Jess would say “and make mine a scotch and soda.’
Dempsey once heard that Willard was telling people around town that the Manassa Mauler had cement in his gloves the day Willard was beaten in Toledo. Jack grinned gleefully. “Now, isn’t he a great character?” he said. “Why if somebody told Jess that I hit him with a handful of dung that day, he’d believe it.”
Tommy Gibbons drops in at Dempsey’s place frequently, as do many of the men who fought Jack. It is always a cause for celebration and good comradeship. When Dempsey was in Paris during the war, the first person he went to see was Georges Carpentier. The fighting Frenchman, who was banged to the canvas by Dempsey in the Battle of the Century, now runs a night spot called the Club Lido. When Dempsey saw Georges, the Frenchman was ill. It genuinely saddened Jack, and he spent long hours cheering up the man he had once knocked silly.
FANS will never forget the Wild Bull of the Pampas, Luis Angel Firpo, the huge giant who smashed Dempsey clean out of the ring that September night in 1923 at the Polo Grounds. It was the most primitive, savage title fight ever seen, eclipsing even the Willard massacre. In the first round, Dempsey knocked the giant Firpo down seven times. Then, in a frenzied, maddened rush, the Argentinian crashed into Dempsey with fists flying, and the champion sailed through the ropes, landing on newspapermen and breaking a typewriter to pieces.
“Between the rounds,” Dempsey said, “Jerry the Greek pushed smelling salts under my nose. I felt as though I had been fighting for hours. I thought I had struck thousands of blows and been hit as many times. I asked Doc Kearns what round it was. When he said it was the first round, I couldn’t believe him.”
Nobody is more honest about the things that happened in his fights than Jack Dempsey. For years, a hot debate swirled around the issue of whether Dempsey was pushed out of the ring by Firpo or knocked out. “He must have cracked me good,” Jack will tell you. “I didn’t know what hit me. I was groggy.” And did the newspapermen help Dempsey back into the ring? “I don’t remember whether they did or not,” Dempsey said. “They probably did. Damned if I know. I just know I was fighting in a fog, instinctively.”
Dempsey ended Firpo’s fighting career. But, even today, 24 years after the fight, Dempsey and Luis Angel Firpo still write letters to each other. Recently Firpo sent Dempsey a South American fighter whom he thought Jack might help. And Jack Sharkey, that surly, slugging gob who was so bitter about his KO by Dempsey’s fists, still drops in to see him.
“Sharkey still wants to fight Jack,” A1 Buck grinned. “He still thinks he can lick him.” In that charming way he has, Dempsey always cons him out of it, telling him that nobody wants to see a couple of old men fight. And a few years ago, he got Sharkey some work as a ref in the Southwest, in territory he’d once toured himself.
This is not an attempt to make Dempsey seem like an angel among men. He wasn’t. He was a man like the Western country that raised him, wide‑open, roughneck, cruel, generous, wild, and mean. In his fighting days, Jack had none of the civilized charm he has since worked so hard to attain. Then, he was just a tough guy in an old red sweater, a pug, a truculent, often sadistic, unpredictable tough. A friend of Estelle Taylor’s once said that although she loved Dempsey very much, she lived in constant fear of him. He was a fighter first in those days, a gentleman only by afterthought.
“Maybe I should have stayed that way,” Dempsey once said to me. “Just a tough mug from the working people. I was happiest that way.”
Dempsey’s old fight camps, the ones at Toledo, Shelby, and Saratoga Springs, were the most colorful, bawdy, brawling, and exciting places in the history of the ring. They were jam‑packed with the people Dempsey loved, the broken‑down pugs, the breezy dames, the prank‑minded sportswriters, the sharp‑eyed managers, the battered sparring partners, the friends and hangers‑on, the old pals from the West. They tore the place apart. Fights without gloves were common. They drank and swore and swirled around their hero, Jack Dempsey, the toughest of them all.
WHAT was the day of Dempsey and Kearns. The Doc, as Jack called him, the wise‑cracking, smart, flashily dressed man, the ex‑pug gone dandy, the only one who could handle the Killer of the Ring. ~ Dempsey and the old ballyhoo king were loyal, fine friends then. Kearns’ mouth and brains, and the Manassa Mauler’s courage and punch, had brought them a championship They were the world’s most typical fighter and manager combination. They were more romantic than fiction. They were in the tradition of H. C. Witwer’s famous fiction hero, Kid Roberts, and his boss‑man.
Even with the cracked‑in, wrinkled nose, Dempsey looked like a movie version of a champion of the world. He had a beautiful build, wide, magnificently bronzed shoulders, strong neck, narrow waist, legs as slim and fast‑moving as a dancer’s, bright, glittering black eyes and blue‑black, short‑cropped, curly hair. But he cared little about how he looked. He didn’t worry about preserving his face and body, and that added to his glamor. He went into a ring to kill or be killed.
Dempsey’s only real problem in those days was getting sparring partners. Farmer Lodge, that huge hulk of a man, became a sort of hero on the basis of the fact that he stayed with
Dempsey as a spar‑mate so long, and took such a merciless amount of punishment. Dempsey was cruel beyond reason toward the men with whom he trained. He expected them to be the same way. Sparring with his friend, Gus Wilson, he hit him so hard that Gus went to a hospital to have a damaged kidney removed. Jimmy DeForest, one of Dempsey’s best trainers, tells how Jack smashed a sparring partner named Jim Johnson so hard that the fighter, crashing into a ringpost, broke it completely in half.
Johnson, a 240‑pound Negro battler, made the mistake of throwing everything he had into a punch aimed at Dempsey’s head. Dempsey.’s steaming uppercut caught Johnson full force, then he was on him like a tiger, battering and smashing. All . Dempsey had to say, as they carried Johnson away, was: “He was trying to show me up, huh? Well, maybe nobody else will try it now.”
Dempsey was all business in the ring. He hated anyone who took it easy, or clowned. Training for the second Gunboat Smith go, Jack sparred one day with a fighter named Clay Turner. The boxer got too fancy and playful, danced beyond and behind Dempsey, and tapped him playfully on the back of the head. It was just a fun‑loving happy gesture. Seconds later, Turner was on the floor spitting blood, with three of his teeth on the canvas.
There never was anything like those old fight camps, but they changed after Dempsey married Estelle Taylor. Dempsey probably loved this beautiful, dark‑haired woman more than anyone else in his life. And Estelle loved Jack Dempsey. It was a tempestuous, stormy, picture‑book romance, filled with jealousies and tragedy and, often, high humor. They were introduced by the movie director, Mervyn LeRoy, in Hollywood, where Jack had gone to make a picture. They fell in love instantly. The match was strongly opposed by Doc Kearns, perhaps for sound reasons, perhaps not. But it was the beginning of the end of the Kearns‑Dempsey partnership. Estelle’s motion‑picture friends and business acquaintances were as down on the marriage as those in Dempsey’s camp.
“Estelle,” a famous producer told her, “you’ll be through in pictures, if you marry that pug.”
“I’m not marrying a pug,” Estelle flashed back. “I’m marrying a champion.”
They were married. They toured Europe. The rough fighter discarded the tattered sweaters, gave up the hard, ugly ways that had made him so tough. He wore silk underwear and fine suits and attended dinners. He watched his table manners, even met the Prince of Wales. He was feted, pampered, fawned upon. The cold, fighting fury was still in him, but it was no longer so close to the surface.
The fighter and the lady lived at the Ritz, lived there in all the fabulous party‑style and luxurious ease of the fabulous 20′s. It was the way Estelle wanted to live, the way she always had lived. Demsey liked it, but he was never at home in it. He never got bitter about what he enjoyed, although it quite possibly took the championship of the world away. from him.
Estelle Taylor may not have known what changing Dempsey would do to him as a fighter. But she had forebodings before the first fight with Tunney. Sitting in the lavish surroundings of their Ritz suite one afternoon in 1926, she said to a close friend, a woman writer, “They think he has to sleep in a flop‑house bed to be a fighter. They think he has to be tough all of the time.” And then she added, a little sadly and with unconscious clairvoyance, “Perhaps he does, at that.”
Estelle always felt worse about Dempsey’s losing the title to Gene Tunney than Jack did himself. When he came back to her on the night of September 23, 1926, came into the room followed by friends and reporters, there were tears in her eyes when she saw his bruised, cut, and battered face. She held him closely, and touched the sore spots, and said, “What happened, Dempsey?”
Jack struggled ,to get one of his eyes open. He grinned down at her with a swollen, raw, pulpy face. “I forgot to duck, honey!”
Those in the room that night swallowed hard‑and loved Jack Dempsey more than they ever had before. Those words, spoken without rancor and with great, good honesty, made him a champion more than his fists had the day he beat the giant at Toledo. He had fought hard. He had lost to Tunney fairly, and he was above bitterness or hate. Those things were for the ring. The after battle alibi was not in his code.
After that, Jack Dempsey was mobbed wherever he went. He became the most popular ex‑champion the ring had ever known. One night, a few months after the Tunney fight, Jack, Estelle, and a friend were sitting in the Silver Slipper, a popular Broadway nightclub. For hours he
was surrounded by friends and admirers. They brought him gifts, shook his hands, even loaded his table with flowers. Dempsey was tremendously touched. For years he had been subjected to vitriolic abuse. Now, no longer champion, he was adored.
Dempsey understood it: He understood it because he has an instinct for understanding the feelings of the average man, an instinct forged in the West, where the underdog is loved, where the beaten man who can take it is respected. With tremendous graciousness, with emotion and warmth, he accepted the praise and the love of those who had come to pay homage. Estelle Taylor did not feel that way.
“When he was up,” she said softly to the friend at the table, “they couldn’t tear him down fast enough. Now that he’s down, they can’t do enough for him.”
Dempsey and his lovely wife split up. They were torn apart by scandal, by fast living, or, perhaps, because they were too raw and fiery, too much filled with jealousy and emotion toward each other. The bridge between their two worlds was never quite completed. They broke up innumerable times, got together again, finally divorced and then, as the years went on, became good friends.
Even Kearns, who had hounded and abused Dempsey after. the break in their partnership, was forgiven. Kearns, who had dogged him with process servers while Jack was getting ready for the Tunney fight, the old pal who took away his belongings, forced his wife to get out of a car on the highway, and took that too. He was forgiven all this. It wasn’t in Dempsey’s nature to go on hating Doc Kearns. They had fought too many good fights together. Old grudges made Dempsey restless. It was better and cleaner to .slap a man on the back and say, “Let’s forget about it, old pardner.” So Kearns, too, became a friend once more.
It is good to remember this decency, this lack of malice, along with the other more tawdry stories that haunt the Dempsey legend. It is good to remember that‑and the fact that Jack Dempsey was a completely honest, loyal, and good friend to any man who faced him. He was not a phony. He never went high‑hat. No amount of fame, social position, idolatry, or money ever changed him. He never considered himself more than a fighter and a working stiff. He was a guy to touch for a five‑spot, to stake you to a claim when you needed it. In his life‑time, Jack Dempsey has given away, gratis, hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has been estimated he gave away a fourth of what he made, and he made five million dollars with his fists.
You might say that Dempsey’s great generosity comes from once being a lonely, hungry, down‑trodden man himself. But that’s not entirely it. During the days when he lived on the borderline world, an uneducated, hard, mean, and. struggling fighter, he was always proud. He worked hard for the little he could scrape from the dirty corners of the earth.
There is a story Dempsey loves to tell about a time when he was stony broke in Kansas City. He had been
working as a sparring partner for a great ox of a fighter named Carl Morris, readying him for a fight with Frank Moran. The fight was called off and Dempsey hung around Kansas City until he was down ‘to his last eleven cents.
“I was really busted, pal,” Dempsey says. “But there was a promoter in town, and I figured maybe he could get me a fight. I knew where he ate and I also figured that I would come up on him at chow time. If he couldn’t get me a fight maybe he might invite me to join him in a bite.”
But Dempsey arrived at the restaurant, the best in town, as the promoter was getting up from the table. Just before rushing over to where he was, Jack handed the hatcheck girl his tattered cap. The promoter began to walk toward the door, listening to Dempsey’s plea that he get him a match with Morris, or anybody. “I know you can fight, Jack,” the promoter said, as they got to the hat‑check girl, “but you haven’t got a name. Morris is too big for you. Nobody would pay to see you fight him.”
Dempsey turned away, sad and embarrassed. In his flustered state, anxious to get away, he. gave the hat‑check girl the penny instead of the dime. She let Dempsey get all the way to the door, then she opened her mouth and her voice filled the whole restaurant.
“Say you big bum!” she yelled. “Come, back here and get this penny you gave me!” Dempsey slunk back “Buy yourself a bean sandwich,” she said with a glare, and slapped the penny into his big palm.
Dempsey walked dejectedly across the street, met a friend who was also broke, and they spent the dime on doughnuts and coffee. Telling about it, Dempsey’s face stretches into a huge grin. “Now that little babe sure called the turn on me. That’s just what I was. A big bum!”
He was a broke pug, a fighter looking for a meal and a place to sleep. But he was also just three years away from his dream. It was the year 1916, and in 1919 he was to be heavyweight champion of the world. At that time, he never doubted it. The dream burned brightly in him. He was proud, he was strong, he was not afraid to work and fight and see himself exactly as he was, a tough hobo who would somehow get up on the top of the heap.
THE championship never changed what was inside Dempsey. One of the most touching stories Gene Tunney ever recorded about Dempsey happened while Jack was champ. Gene was just beginning to get a reputation. He was sitting one day on a ferryboat between Jersey City and New York, The last passengers were just coming aboard when Gene’s heart began to beat faster. Striding up the plank was a man Gene had seen in innumerable pictures. The wide shoulders, the fighting face were unmistakable. It was Jack Dempsey, the champion of the world.
Gene stopped Dempsey and asked to shake his hand. He told Jack he was a fighter. “. . . What impressed me most,” Gene wrote, “was his affable, friendly way. Jack Dempsey is, by nature, one of the most civil persons alive, with an instinct for courtesy.”
Dempsey asked Tunney how things were going. Gene said that he was all right, except that he was having trouble with his knuckles. His right hand was damaged, sore, stubbornly unhealing. Dempsey took his hand carefully, examined it thoroughly. He told Tunney how to bandage the hand next time he boxed. He said to bandage up the two sound knuckles on either side of the injured one with black tape. The thickness over the two sound ones would protect the injured one. Then he showed Tunney just how to do the taping, giving him expert advice, giving him the hard earned knowledge that years of battering with his fists had taught him.
It was that sore right hand of Tunney’s, fully healed because of Jack Dempsey’s advice, that thudded time and again into the Manassa Mauler’s face in Philadelphia to take his championship away from him. But looking at Tunney’s hand that night, encouraging a young fighter, was in the Dempsey tradition.
It began long before when Dempsey was a boy, when .he fought with the tough kids in the small mountain towns. They bloodied each other’s noses, battered each other’s ribs, then doctored each other up.
“I was lucky in growing up with a bunch of kids who loved to fight,” Dempsey said. “There were the Campbell boys, Fred Wood, Red and Bill Finnegan, Charley Diehl, Jake Fist, my brothers, Bernie and Johnny. All of us wanted to be prizefighters. I don’t think there ever was a tougher bunch of kids.”
THOSE fights began shaping Dempsey into the killer he was in the ring. A fight lasted until the other kid couldn’t get up. Those kids were really tough. The sharecroppers and poor farmers let them fight. Why not? Their kids had to be fighters to live. Life was a fight against the elements, against wind and storm and poverty.
Dempsey remembers one of his first fights, when he was eight. He was going at it hammer and tongs with a pal named Fred Daniels. They were egged on by their fathers. Fred’s father, watching young Jack butt his head into his son, yelled advice: “Bite him, Fred!” Fred turned his head to hear what his father said. Young Dempsey bopped him on the chin, and the fight was over.
Sharkey should have seen that fight. Or any fight that Jack Dempsey had in his early days, the fights that made him so quick to take advantage in the ring, the fights that molded and shaped him as a stalking, ferocious slugger who recognized no rules, except that a fight was a fight.
That code stayed with Dempsey all his life. A few years ago, his present manager and good friend, Max Waxman, took Dempsey into the dressing room of a fighter he was handling named Red Burman. The old smell of liniment, the sight of the gloves and equipment, stirred the Dempsey spirit. He began to tell Red how he should fight Tommy Farr.
“It’s a fight, see?” Dempsey growled “Let him know it. Hit him with everything, everything you got. Use your shoulder, like this!”
Dempsey cracked into Burman with his shoulder and sent Red sailing across the room, crashing into the pipes that lined the wall. Waxman hustled Dempsey out of the dressing room. He wanted his boy all in one piece when he went up against Farr.
Dempsey generally hit every opponent with everything he had. He was not, as most people believe,, a one‑punch knockout artist. One punch merely started it. That blow was the stunner. Then Dempsey would belt home a lightning series of vicious rights and lefts, so fast they could hardly be seen, punches that beat his man unconscious.
The Manassa Mauler was seldom the best boxer in the ring, but he was always the best fighter. He was always as dangerous as dynamite. Tunney found that out at Soldier’s Field, Chicago, in their second fight. Dempsey was 32 years old then, his legs gone, his punches no longer carrying the steam. But there was still enough zip and .hate and fury in him for one last, magnificent go. Tunney caught the full force of it in the famous seventh round when Jack trapped him in a corner and let him have it.
So much has been written about that round and the “long count” that it’s almost ridiculous to repeat what happened. Dempsey has taken the blame for not going to his corner. He explains it by saying, honestly, that he had fought too many fights where you stood over your opponent and waited until he got up and then smashed him again. That’s what he always had done. That’s what always had been done to him. You can’t go against the rules you’ve fought by. Not when you’re dazed and exhausted and hungry for the kill.
If it had been Dempsey who had been knocked down, he would have bounced up as soon as he could. He always did. Gene fought a smart, magnificent fight. He fought the way he had been trained to do. But there was something ,pitiful in the way he kept out of the reach of the aging Dempsey. It was Jack Dempsey’s last chance and he knew it.
N Dempsey’s eyes as he chased Tunney was more than the killer glare, more than hate. There was pleading, mixed with contempt for a man who would not come in and take a chance with him. And then he stopped, suddenly, and made that wonderful, dramatic, pawing gesture with his gloves and begged Tunney, growling, “Come on. Come on in and fight!” He was saying, in a sense, fight his way, the way fighters fight. Fight the way he ‑did when,, blind and reeling and‑bloody, he went charging in on Gunner Smith, the way he went after Firpo, out of his head, sick and groggy, but kept coming in. “That’s the way you should fight. Come on.”
But Tunney retreated. A few rounds later, he clipped Dempsey and knocked him down. Dempsey didn’t stay down. He got up and came in for more, holding his tired body together, forcing his trembling legs to support him. Everybody loved Dempsey for that. Everyone‑the rich in their box seats, the screaming, shirt‑sleeved men in the high, faraway tiers of the stadium, the frenzied women, the kids. Nobody ever forgot the way Dempsey was that night. And, for 14 seconds, he was the greatest champion of all time. He almost did what no fighter had ever done. He almost won the heavyweight title back again.
In’ 1940, when FIR was elected again, one of the first people to get in to see him and congratulate him on his victory was Jack Dempsey. Roosevelt always liked prizefighters. He knew them all, and Dempsey was one of his favorites. They talked about the fight in Chicago.
“Well, that fight is over, Jack,” Roosevelt smiled. “And so is this one. I guess you know how it came out.”
Then, as Dempsey told it, the President put out his right arm and asked Dempsey to feel it. “I felt it,” Jack said. “Say, that fellow had a hell of a strong right arm. You know what he said to me? `Jack,’ he. said, `if your legs were still as good as my arm, you’d still be champion. That’s the trouble with us, Jack, our legs have gone back on us.”‘
In his lifetime in the ring, the Manassa Mauler fought 69 professional fights. He won 27 of them by knockouts, only seven by decision. He fought five draws, lost four decisions, and was kayoed only once. The few times Dempsey talked to the late President, it always surprised him how much Roosevelt knew about his past ring engagements and his early history. It is strange, in a sense, because no two men could have had so completely different backgrounds. And yet, although Roosevelt did not come from the common people, he knew them. He knew their hardships, their aspirations, and their hopes. He also knew who their heroes were and why they worshipped them. And Jack Dempsey was one of those idols.
William Harrison Dempsey was born in a two‑room, one‑story, wooden cabin on the outskirts of Manassa, Colorado. It was on June 24, 1895, and he was the ninth child in a family of eleven children. Celia and Hiram Dempsey, pioneer people, had moved their family from Logan, West Virginia, to Manassa on a $300 stake They came from “feud” country, and were related to the famous Hatfields who fought the equally famous McCoys.
Dempsey’s ancestry is as mixed as is most early American stock. Celia Dempsey was Scotch ‑Irish on her father’s side and Cherokee Indian on her mother’s, and one of her great grandfathers was Jewish. Hiram Dempsey, Jack’s father, came from the hardy Irish people of County Kildare. The Dempseys were roving, restless, courageous people, springing from ancestors who first dared to cross the Alleghanies. They carried on the pioneer tradition, moved West across the treacherous Sierras, and took part in the building of the Western Empire. Hiram Dempsey was a sharecropper, a hunter, a dirt-poor farmer, a worker who swung a pick on the railroad. He moved his family all over Colorado and Utah..
Hiram Dempsey tried hard, but there was seldom enough for his family. Jack remembers driving to town with him as a boy and buying five dollars worth of staples‑to last them a month. . He remembers hunting and fishing for mean. He remembers working the hard earth for food. The Dempsey family hued in a succession of crowded shacks. The older children moved out into the world on their own just as soon as they could, to make room for the younger ones Harry, as Jack was called then, and one of his sisters, Elsie, were the only ones who had even a grammar‑school education.
Young Dempsey had a great and sincere love for his mother, which has lasted to this day. She died a few years ago. His father, at 90, is still living. Celia Dempsey was a much harder worker than Jack’s father. “She was more ambitious,” Jack said. “She had great dreams for us. She was always working, working very hard. She was away scrubbing floors, washing dishes, cooking, and she never had anyone to help her. My father worked hard, too, but he was less dependable than mother.”
All through his childhood, Jack Dempsey hued dust barely beyond the reach of hunger. The Dempseys were poor when Jack was born, and still poor when he left home to roam the count. With the exception of Joe Louis, no heavyweight champion ever came from a background of such hard, unending poverty as Jack Dempsey., As a child, he never had a piece of store‑candy. The toys he played with were whittled out of wood by his older brothers. He was shuttled from place to place by wagon. Over the Great Divide to Wagon Wheel Gap, where his mother tried to take out a living running a boarding house. .Then Montrose, where his father worked on the railroad, and his mother tried her hand at running a restaurant called the Rio Grande Eating House.
Before Dempsey was 12, his life as a working stiff began. He chopped wood, hauled coal, toiled in the beet fields, shined shoes in a barber shop, hung around pool rooms and fair grounds picking up odd jobs He does not remember this time with sorrow. There were good things too. He managed to find time to roam the woods and mountains. He became an expert trapper and hunter. He not only looked like a young Indian, physically, but he became .as self‑sufficient, as stoical, as hard. Years later, when Dempsey was rich and went hunting and trapping for sport, his companions were always amazed by his knowledge of wild life and the great outdoors.
The first name “Jack” was adopted by three of the Dempsey boys. The oldest one, Bernie, took the name because of a popular middleweight champion of the time, Jack Dempsey, the “Nonpareil.” Bernie fought many fights through the West, as did Johnny.
It was Bernie who taught his younger brothers, Harry and Johnny, how to strike blows and how to duck. They made their own punching bags out of sawdust and rags. They fought with bare fists or workmen’s gloves stuffed with padding. They chewed gum’ incessantly to make their jaws strong and knockout‑proof.
“We all wanted to be world’s heavyweight champion,” Dempsey said. “I remember one day my brother Bernie opened a package of cigarettes and a little cardboard picture of Jack Johnson fell out. We all dived for it, fighting and clawing. I got it. I carried it around for years. He was the man I thought I’d have to beat.”
When Dempsey finished the eighth grade he left home. He took to the freights, with less than two dollars in his pocket. It was the beginning of the years of restless roving, working, and fighting. He toiled as a ditch digger, switched ties under steam shovels, picked peaches for two dollars a day, worked as a bouncer in dancehalls, a loader in copper mines, a pick‑and‑shovel man in coal mines. When it started, he was not yet 16 years old.
Dempsey’s face and fists became known to railroad cops, to tough hobos, to panhandlers, drifters, the raggedy lot that rode the fast mails and fruit trains, East to West. There were always fights, and Dempsey was generally m them. They were the sort of fights that sometimes ended in a trip to the undertaker if you lost. Fights in the box cars of trains, in back alleys, in barrooms and .freight yards That life added to Jack Dempsey’s toughness. That life took up the job his hard childhood had begun. He soaked his hands and face in brine to toughen them. It took a terrible blow to cut his face. He wanted it that way. It was harder to fight with blood in your eyes.
FIGHTS in most towns were not even legal then. Promoters were scarce. Dempsey promoted his first fight himself. He drifted in off the rods to the town of Montrose, Colorado, to look up some pals. Fred Woods, the 200poUnd blacksmith’s son, was still the toughest guy in the locality, the most skillful fighter.
“Hey, Fred,” Dempsey said. “How would you like to fight me? We’ll hire a place and make some dough.”
Woods agreed. Dempsey hired a ramshackle building called Moose Hall. He strung up a ring, using clothesline rope, and got sawdust for the ring floor. He was his own manager and trainer, working out in the back of the blacksmith’s shop. On the night of the fight; Dempsey stood at the door collecting the money. When he had taken in as much as he thought he could get, he walked into the ring, took off his trousers and hung them on the ring‑post. He wanted that money to be where he could watch it.
When the fight started, Dempsey forgot about the money. He was too busy slugging Woods and getting slugged back. The first round was about even. In the fourth round, one of Woods’ wild swings from the floor caught Dempsey in the stomach and doubled him up. He sat down, bounced up again, and then tore into
Woods with rights and lefts. A chopping, powerful punch almost tore Fred’s head off. His eyes went glassy and he sunk to the floor. Dempsey stood over him snarling. Then the anger left his face. He rushed over to a corner, grabbed a bucket of water, and tossed it in Woods’ face. When the big blacksmith came around, he wanted to fight some more.
“Take it easy,” Dempsey said in his ear. “The fight’s over. They got enough for their money. You and me are partners.”
Woods got up, smiled, shook Dempsey’s hand. They divided t4e $46 that Jack had taken in at the door and went out to celebrate.
Watching that fight was a veteran pug named Andy Malloy, a man who had been in tank‑town rings all over the West, and in Mexico. He had once taken on Dempsey’s brother Bernie, and given him a terrible shellacking M a 11 o y approached Dempsey after the fight and said he would take him on. Jack agreed with enthusiasm.
A miner named Buck Weaver staged the Dempsey‑Malloy fight in a dancehall in Durango, Colorado. Andy was 11 years older than Dempsey, an experienced man in the ring. For the first five rounds, his jabs and uppercuts beat like rain against Dempsey’s face. But Jack wouldn’t go down. Malloy began to tire, and then Dempsey took over and began chopping him to bits. After the tenth round, the ~ sheriff stepped in and stopped the fight. It was all the gore he could allow in a “boxing ‘exhibition.” He called the fight a draw.
Dempsey and Malloy went back to Montrose and staged another fight in Moose Hall. This time, in the first two rounds, Malloy had Dempsey groggy, his knees wobbling. But at the start of the third round Dempsey sailed back out as though the fight had just begun. He had the kill in his eyes as he battered through Malloy’s defense. He knocked him stiff with a left hook. When Malloy came to, he grinned up at Dempsey.
“Kid,” he said, “you’re too good to be riding the rails. I’m gonna teach you how to be a fighter.”
With the exception of Jack Kearns, there never was any manager and friend that Jack Dempsey liked as well as Andy Malloy. He could not make a boxer of Dempsey, although he tried hard, but he taught Jack all the tricks of the trade he had picked up in the resin‑soaked rings of the West. He showed Dempsey how to improve the punches that had knocked him out, how to get more weight behind them. He had him punch the bag with lead weights in his hands to pick up power and drive and to strengthen his muscles.
The first fight Malloy arranged for Dempsey ‑was in a Colorado town named Olathe. There was a winner take‑all agreement, but before the fight started, the sheriff stepped in and said the boys would have to wrestle; he couldn’t allow a prizefight. Dempsey’s big opponent slammed Jack to the mat in two straight falls, and picked up all the money.
Malloy got hungry and took a job in a mine. Dempsey went back to the road. He hit Salt Lake City and fought several mauling fights there. He fought in Price, Provo, Ogden. He fought three fights with a murderous husky named Jack Downey, for a total of $30. They fought in the Garrick Theater, and Jack took a terrible pasting in the first go, got a draw the second time, and knocked Downey cold in the third. Dempsey fought men who outweighed him 30 and 40 and even 50 pounds. He picked up managers and dropped them. He traveled all over the West, fighting fierce brawls, winning most of them by knockouts, until few would fight him. He had to go back to the mines to make a living.
Jack’s brother, Bernie, was the foreman on one of Jack’s first jobs in a copper mine south of the Great Salt Lake. Young Dempsey, still in his teens, worked 3000 feet underground as a mucker. He worked his way up to timber man, then to miner, for the magnificent salary of six dollars a day. Once, when he was breaking out ore, a big, tough gent teased him by dropping chunks of dirt on his neck. Dempsey went up the bank after him. It was a kid against a man, but Dempsey knocked him cold in a few minutes. If the other miners hadn’t intervened, he might have killed him.
You could go on endlessly writing about the Dempsey of those days: He was a restless, impatient, eager, half savage kid, burning deep with the ambition to get back to fighting. He left his brother Bernie and went on the roam again. He worked in dozens of mines, Golden Cycle, Highland Boy, Golden Coin, Victor‑magic names that spelled work and danger.
Dempsey’s father tried to stake an old claim on a coal mine back in Logan, West Virginia, and Jack went out to help him. It fizzled out, and Dempsey took a job shoveling coal at 50 cents a day. He wound up back in Colorado with Bernie, who got him another job in the Cripple Creek Mine and a bout against a tremendous barrel‑chested, grizzly bear of a man named George Copelin.
Dempsey was not used to the altitude. Copelin was. As the rounds wore on, the fighters charged and slugged and ripped each other with fierce blows. Dempsey’s face soon was almost unrecognizable. Copelin was covered with blood from his chest to the top of his head.
Let Dempsey tell it. “The rounds began to blur together. When I took a breath, it was like I was on fire. I had knocked Copelin down again and again, but he kept getting up. I had been down myself, don’t know how many times. I told Bernie I was through. He would get me the next round. Bernie said he was as dead as I was.
“I WENT out at the bell. Rush him! That’s all I thought. Rush him and swing just once more. I felt his face hit my glove. I didn’t know whether I could stay on my feet. If he got up again, I would fall down in his place. Then I felt somebody lift my hand over my head and I had won.”
Dempsey got $50 for that fight. . And then went on down to Goldfield, Nevada, for those two savage tiffs with Sudenberg. After those battles, he began wandering the West again, picking up fights wherever he could. He weighed only 165 to 170 at the time,
and he would take on anyone. His eyes were still on the championship, but the more he fought, the further he seemed away from it.
It was the year 1916. Two young men stood gawking in Times Square. One was a pleasant‑faced, regular featured, slim young man named Jack Price. The other was a tough‑looking, wide‑shouldered, shy but scowling roughneck with the unmistakable scars and nervous manners of a pug. The fighter was Jack Dempsey. He was 21 years old. He had several years of fighting behind him. Price was his new manager. They had made enough in bouts in Utah and Nevada to try a go at the big city. They were eager and scared and filled with hope and touched with despair. They had $27 between them.
Nobody had ever heard of Jack Dempsey in New York. The tattered newspaper clippings which Price showed to promoters drew little interest. But Price finally got Jack a bout with a 215‑pound giant named Andre Anderson at the Fairmont Athletic Club on 149th Street and Third Avenue.
Billy Gibson, who later became Tixnney’s manager, owned the Fairmont Club. He came around one day to Grupp’s gym to watch Dempsey work out. Jack weighed 173 pounds, and Gibson, watching Dempsey, turned to Price and said: “This fight ought to be called off. Anderson will murder your boy, and it’ll hurt the reputation of my club.”
That was always the thing they said about Dempsey in the days when he fought the giants. At least, that’s what they said before they saw him fight. Jack and Anderson fought ten rounds. For the first five rounds, Anderson, a hard‑hitting boxer, smeared Jack’s nose all over his face. By the tenth round, Dempsey had the big man cowering and covering to protect himself.
DEMPSEY and Price got exactly $16 for that fight. The next match, a rougher go with a bruiser named Wild Bert Kenney, netted the Dempsey Price combo $43. Dempsey won the fight, knocking Kenney down three times in a last‑round slug‑fest.
Around the gyms in New York, fighters and hangers‑on began to talk about this “little guy” Dempsey who fought like a fury. Then Jack Price got a telegram saying his mother was dying in Salt Lake City, and he sold his interest in Dempsey to get enough money to go home. The buyer was a hard‑boiled, cold‑hearted man named John Reisler, known in fight circles as “John the Barber.” John ran a barber shop when he wasn’t promoting fights or managing.
Reisler paid Dempsey off in meals and free shaves and haircuts. He unscrupulously overmatched the youngster with a burly Negro fighter named John Lester Johnson. Nobody in town would fight the massive Johnson at that time, but the kid from Manassa took him on at the Harlem Sporting Club. It was a fight that even the most hardened fans did not enjoy watching.
In the second round, Johnson caught Dempsey with a pile driver right hand that broke two of Jack’s ribs. For the next three rounds, Dempsey fought doubled up. The
pain was too great for him to stand even half erect. But he went on fighting for ten rounds, and earned what some sportswriters called a draw. He was promised $500 for the fight, but he got $100, which went for hospital bills. John the Barber was disgusted because Dempsey would be out of commission for months. He refused to carry him. Dempsey, flat broke, had to leave New York, and bum West again to the mines.
But it was that body punch of Johnson’s that eventually made Dempsey a champion. He learned how to fight only one way‑in fights. He reasoned that if a punch to the body could do that much harm, he would learn how to use it. The giants that Dempsey fought after that came to fear the way the Manassa Mauler would pump buzz‑saw rights and lefts to their bodies, cutting them down to. his height, making them bring their guards down, and then blasting them in the jaw. Other fighters paid dearly ‑for what Johnson did to Dempsey.
Dempsey worked in the mines until his ribs healed. Then he knocked out a fighter named Young Hector at Salida, Colorado, collected $300, and hit the road back to New York. John Reisler was ready to get him another match. He wanted Dempsey to fight Gunboat Smith. The Gunner was the third ranking heavyweight in the country. For once, Dempsey said no.
“I knew,” Jack explained, “that Gunboat Smith was too good. My already battered dream of winning the championship would be knocked through the ropes if, at this stage of the game, I pounded myself to death against fighters who were still too good for me.”
Dempsey also turned down a fight against Frank Moran, then touted, along with Carl Morris and Gunner Smith, as the next challenger of the champion, Bid Jess Willard. It was the wisest thing Dempsey ever did.
He later went on to beat all three of these men under the guidance of Kearns.
Reisler dropped Dempsey and the fighter went back West a second time, to take on a promising heavyweight named Fireman Jim Flynn. The fight was held in the town of Murray, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Bernie came on to act as Jack’s second in the ring. Still a crude and unfinished fighter, Dempsey didn’t even warm up before going into the ring against the highly‑touted Flynn. He went in “cold,” rushed Flynn, who caught him with a beautiful right wallop that sent him crashing to the canvas. Dempsey got up. He rushed. Flynn caught him again. It happened three times. Bernie, in the corner, couldn’t take it any longer, and tossed in the towel.
IN the dressing room, in a raging
black and bitter mood, Dempsey berated his brother. “When you tossed in that towel,” he said, “there went the championship.”
“You’d never be champion if he killed you,” Bernie said.
“I wish he had,” Dempsey said.
Dempsey was dogged by all sorts of adverse criticism in his life, but nothing hurt him so deeply as the accusation that he tossed that fight to Flynn. Throwing a .fight is the worst thing you could accuse a man like Dempsey of doing. On the face of it, common sense judgment would indicate that Dempsey would not have thrown that fight for all the money in the mint. The years of knocking about, of fighting for small purses, bad just about come to an end when Dempsey met Flynn. He was beginning to get a reputation The Flynn fight ruined all that. He had to start all over again.
It was rough going now to get fights. But Dempsey somehow managed to get them and, against one of the best heavies in the country, Al Norton, he fought a fierce draw. In their next encounter he sent Norton to dreamland. Out in San Francisco, a sharp‑eyed man named Jack Kearns began to take notice of a kid named Dempsey. Then Kearns read that Dempsey had beaten a former fighter of his named Joe Bonds, a very classy heavyweight.
Kearns sent for Dempsey. He mailed him a railroad ticket from Salt Lake City to Oakland, enclosing five dollars for meals. That five bucks for eats impressed Dempsey more than anything Kearns ever did for him. Years later, when the millions began to roll in, it was Dempsey who insisted that Kearns get 50 per cent of everything he made in the ring. Not until long after Dempsey had become champion of the world did they have a written contract.
Jack Kearns wasn’t on hand when Dempsey got to Frisco. He had left instructions, however, that Dempsey was to live at the Kearns ‘ home in Oakland. Mrs. Kearns treated young Dempsey as though he were her own son. She became “Mother Kearns ” to him, almost as beloved as his own mother. She was a sweet and gracious and wonderfully warm person. She took in the road‑hardened bum and gave him a home such as he had never known.
Dempsey and Kearns became as close as brothers. At first, Doe brought him along slowly, got on to Dempsey’s ways, arranged matches that would give him confidence and experience: Then, one night about a year after their first meeting, Kearns told Dempsey that he had arranged a match with Gunboat Smith. This time, Dempsey was ready.
The Gunner Smith‑Dempsey fight, at the Mission Ball Park in San Francisco, was the turning point in the Manassa Mauler’s career. Nobody but Doc Kearns conceded Dempsey a chance. It was a foregone conclusion that the Gunner would lower the boom on Dempsey, finish him off fast with one of his tremendous fists. But it turned out to be a fight. A hell of a fight. Nobody remembers less about what happened after the second round than Jack Dempsey.
In the second frame, the Gunner maneuvered Dempsey into a corner. He got his opening and let the kid have it. It was a right swing to the jaw, catching Dempsey coming in. Smith put his shoulders into it. The men in the top row of the grandstand heard the smack. Dempsey’s knees wobbled. He fell into the Gunner, and hung on. And then he began fighting. He fought in a fog, in a haze of cobwebs, fought with all the fury of his six years of being a life battered bum, of taking it on the chin for nothing, fought with a deadly, furious hatred, fought intuitively.
On the ferry boat on the way back to Oakland, Dempsey looked at Kearns with misery in his eyes. He muttered incoherently. Kearns leaned over and patted his shoulder, smiling.
“I guess this fight washes me up,” Dempsey mumbled . . . “I’m sorry . . . sorry.”
It dawned on Kearns then that Dempsey thought he had lost.
“What’s the matter with you?” Kearns shouted. “Listen to me, kid, you won! Boy, you’re going to be the next champion.”
Dempsey began to come out of the punch‑drunk mists. He had remembered not one thing after Gunner Smith connected in that second round. Slowly the corners of his mouth began to turn up in a painful smile and he looked at Kearns in amazement. He had won! He couldn’t believe
it Doc Kearns began to open his mouth about Dempsey. Out of that clever and publicity‑minded mouth came some of the greatest ballyhoo talk of the century. Kearns proclaimed Dempsey the coming champion. He offered $10,000 to any fighter that could lick him. He hit the newspapers across the nation with colorful and exciting stories about his young giant killer, the Manassa Mauler, the toughest man ever to come out of the West.
Kearns talked. Dempsey fought. He took on the ‘big Cherokee slugger, Carl Morris, and beat him in a fierce fight. Morris weighed 235 pounds, stood six feet four inches, and was the top‑ranking contender for the crown. To stay out of the way of Morris’ sledgehammer fists, Dempsey had to bob and weave. It was the beginning of his famous style, the manner in which he always beat men bigger than himself.
THE life with Kearns was a new one for Dempsey. They rode the cushions to Chicago, slept in the best hotels, wore silk shirts, ate in the best restaurants. In Chicago Kearns’ tales about Dempsey grew more fantastic and wonderful. He offered to bet ten grand that Dempsey could beat any two fighters in the world in one night. It was a bluff. Kearns didn’t have the ten thousand then.. But the presses began to roll about Jack Dempsey. Crowds gathered at Kid Howard’s gym in Chicago to see the young wonder work out. They always went away disappointed. All his life Dempsey never looked good in gym fighting.
But in the ring a few weeks later against the massive, powerful Homer Smith, a six‑foot, three‑inch clouter, Dempsey was everything Kearns had said he was. Just before the gong sounded for the first round, Kearns growled into Dempsey’s ear those words from manager to fighter that were to become famous as ring talk.
“Kid, pull up your socks and smack that big bum down.”
Dempsey scowled and went in. The fight lasted one minute and 55 seconds. Dempsey viciously battered the big man to the canvas. Eleven days later, the Manassa Mauler climbed into the ring again against Carl Morris. The fight was held in Buffalo, New York, but it was almost called off when fight promoter Charlie Murray got his first look at Dempsey.
Murray walked into the hotel room, saw Dempsey on the bed, and figured he was some middleweight that Kearns was handling. Kearns, in the shower, shouted an introduction. Murray looked at Dempsey and couldn’t believe his ears. The Mauler, who weighed 178 pounds at the time, looked even lighter.
“I wanted to call the fight off right then and there,” Murray said. “They both had to argue me into it.”
“You let me go ahead with this fight,” Dempsey said. “If I don’t lick this guy Morris you can give my end of the purse to the poor kids in Buffalo‑and I’ll tell you right now that we need the money as bad as they do.” Murray agreed, but he went to Dick Nugent, the referee, and told him to stop the fight the minute Dempsey began to look bad. He wouldn’t believe that Dempsey had beaten Morris. Murray sat beside the timekeeper in Dempsey’s corner all during the fight. At one point, Kearns leaned down and said, “How about it? Are we doing all right so far?”
The fight was stopped in the sixth round. Dempsey was awarded the fight after Morris fouled him. And ten days later Jack was in the ring against still another fighter, against the man who 12 months before had knocked him out, Fireman Jim Flynn. They fought in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. It was a different Dempsey this time. He spent a half‑hour warming up before the fight and knocked out Jim Flynn midway through the first round. Now he was really climbing up there.
From February 14, 1918 to July 4, 1919, the Manassa Mauler belted his way through the biggest and best heavyweights in the country. He fought 23 battles, winning 20 of them by knockouts, 16 of them in the first round. The‑ fight that set him up for the title, the one that gained him his greatest reputation as a giant killer, was the go against the six‑foot, six-inch Goliath, Fred Fulton. They fought in Harrison, New Jersey, on July 27, 1918. Dempsey cooled him in 18 seconds, one of the quickest KO’s in heavyweight history.
Only one man in those days ever gave Jack Dempsey any serious trouble. He was a fat, jolly, but tough customer named Slapper Willie Meehan. The corpulent Meehan looked slow in the ring, but he was one of the cleverest boxers of his time, a cutie in close, a dazzling counter‑puncher. Dempsey lost two decisions to Meehan, and won one. It was one of those strange things in fight history. Meehan, never a top rate fighter, always gave Dempsey a tough time.
With the exception of Carpentier, Dempsey never looked as good against smaller men as he did against the bigger ones. Billy Miske, Jack Downey, Tommy Gibbons, and Gene Tunney always made things rough for the Mauler. He never seemed to be able to keep up that killer instinct against them. He never liked boxers. He liked to fight.
BILLY MISKE, the fighter from St. Paul, Minnesota, has been neglected in stories about Dempsey. Miske looked like Dempsey. Physically, they measured almost exactly the same. Miske fought Dempsey twice to a draw. They were very rough, hard‑fought tilts. It wasn’t until 1920, as the champion, that Dempsey was able to knock him out.
Of all the fighters that Dempsey faced, there was none he liked better or remembers so kindly as Bill Brennan. He faced the rugged, handsome Irishman for the first time in Milwaukee on February 25, 1918. Dempsey liked Brennan because he was a courageous, dangerous fighter. “He loved fighting as much as h did,” Dempsey once said. “He was a big, likable guy, with a hell of a punch and strong as an ox.”
The first time Brennan met Dempsey was back in the Grupp gym in New York. When he was matched against Dempsey in Milwaukee, he did not swallow any of Kearns’ ballyhoo. He still thought of the Manassa Mauler as being the hungry misfit of a fluke fighter he had been in the gym. On the way to the ring that night in Milwaukee, Brennan stopped in at Dempsey’s dressing room.
“I hate to have to stop you, Jack,” he said. “You’ve been coming ‘along fine. But I’ve got Willard just around the corner, so you can see how it is.”
“That’s okay, Bill,” Dempsey grinned. “I’d like a crack at that title myself. But I’m better than I was in New York.”
It was Dempsey’s fight all the way. He hit Brennan so hard with a right cross in the sixth round that Bill spun around and fell with his legs crossed, breaking an ankle. The referee gave Dempsey a technical knockout.
Dempsey went to Bill Brennan’s dressing room as soon as the fight was over to see how Bill’s ankle was. “I’m sorry, Bill,” Dempsey said. “It had to be one of us.”
“That’s okay, Jack,” Brennan grinned. “It’s all in the game.”
Dempsey always loved Brennan’s attitude toward a fight. Although he knocked him out again in New York, in 12 rounds, Bill Brennan was one of the first men Dempsey let have a shot at his title when he became champion. And Brennan, in that fight, almost took it away from him. Dempsey saved it with another savage, rallying 12th‑round kayo.
WHEN Jack Dempsey won the heavy‑weight title of the world from Jess Willard on July 4, 1919, it should have been the happiest time of his life. It wasn’t. Even though he had lived up to his reputation, and beaten a man five inches taller and 60 pounds heavier, Dempsey’s satisfaction was short‑lived. He knew he was not a popular champion. He was envied, but not loved. He was shy, uneducated, painfully unfitted for the social life that goes with being a champion.
Jack’s difficulties with the U. S. Government during World War I didn’t help him any. He was just clawing his way to the top when the war broke out, and he got a job in an Oakland, California, shipyard. Naturally, he was accused widely of being a slacker. The Government made a test case out of Jack’s action, seeking to establish whether or not a worker in such an essential industry was exempt from the draft. Jack won the case. He was acquitted. But the stigma of alleged draft evasion clung to him for years. No help to him was the famous picture taken of him in working clothes, with shiny black patent leather shoes peeking out from under his dungarees.
“My life up to then was like a war,” Dempsey said. “It seemed there would be no end to it. I fought and fought. I thought I never would be champ. But there was something to shoot at. And then one day the war ended. I was the champion. It was all over.
“When you’re a champion,” Dempsey went on simply, “they take your life away from you. They put you on the stage. They put you in nightclubs. They take away the fresh air. They make you live the life of a gentleman of the city. I didn’t belong.
I knew it. Now I belong,” he smiled slowly. “Now it’s natural. But it wasn’t then. I was just a tough guy out of my element.”
In spite of his unpopularity, Dempsey did his best to act like a champion. He took the abuse of sportswriters and fans and kept quiet about it. He set out to learn something other than prize fighting. He tried books. But books were always difficult for him. He was nervous, catlike, restless. He could never sit still long enough to study.
Something his father once said when Jack was a small boy having trouble in school, came back to him. “Almost anyone you meet can be a teacher, if you’re smart enough,” Hiram Dempsey had said. “At school they don’t teach you enough about asking questions and noticing things.”
When the Manassa Mauler fought Georges Carpentier, it was a bitter thing for him to know that most Americans were pulling for the Frenchman to win. The gallant Carpentier, a smiling handsome man with an enviable war record, captured the hearts and imaginations of fight fans. Staged by, the great promoter Tex Rickard, the fight drew the first million‑dollar gate. A hundred thousand people jammed into Boyle’s Thirty Acres to see the classy French fighter go up against the killer.
What a contrast the two men made in the ring! Carpentier with his smiling, friendly face, classic profile, his beautiful body covered by a well‑cut, expensive dressing robe. And Dempsey. Dempsey wearing the scowl on his unshaven, pugnacious fighter’s face. Over his powerful chest was the old red jersey he had worn in training.
The event was packed with drama, but it was not a great fight. The tough guy beat up the gentleman. Carpentier proved only what everybody knew. He had courage and was willing to fight. But he was in the ring against a man who was stronger and tougher and could hit harder. And Dempsey was too much of a fighter to car
him. After 57 seconds of the four round, after Carpentier had taken the Mauler’s vicious pounding, he couldn’t get up and go on. He was never the same after that fight.
The 1923 fight against Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Montana, was the worst fiasco as a fight that Dempsey ever fought as a champion. The bankers and promoters of the small town went broke staging the bout. The battle was a long, dull affair. Gibbons out boxed the champion, but Dempsey’s aggressiveness gave him a wide margin on points. Kearns and Dempsey had to get out of town fast to keep from being mobbed by irate fight fans and the broke, small‑town promoters.
But three months later,. the thrills that were packed into the two rounds that the Manassa Mauler fought against Firpo completely erased the stigma of the Shelby fight. Jack was the Dempsey of old that night. It was a return to the David‑and‑Goliath fights that had made the name of Dempsey ring across the land. It was the last fight Jack Dempsey won as a champion and undoubtedly one of his greatest.
When the bell sounded for the second round, every person in the Polo Grounds was still standing. They saw the unbelievable. They saw Jack Dempsey come out of his corner, hooking, weaving, throwing punches at the big man who had knocked him out of the ring. Firpo went down. He got up. Dempsey was standing over him, ready for the kill. Firpo went down again. Once more he got up. But it was the last time. The clock read 57 seconds when the final count was finished. The hand of the Manassa Mauler was held high in the air.
In the three years that passed before Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney, all that had made Dempsey the greatest fighting machine of his time crumbled away and was gone forever. The 18th champion of the world was 31 years old. He was out of shape. Three years of inactivity had dulled the spirit, softened the punch, killed the ferocity. His old friend, Doe Kearns, who had split with him, was harassing him with law suits. “Every time I hit a punching bag,” Dempsey told reporters, “I expect a summons to fall out.”
The first Tunney fight was held in the rain in the gigantic Sesqui‑Centenniai Stadium in Philadelphia. Slowly, as the rounds dragged on, as Tunney’s counter‑punching began to take effect, Dempsey saw the title slipping away. He hated to lose it. But he lost it like a champion.
Once, between rounds, Dempsey gave himself the old command that Doe Kearns had growled in his ear so many times. “Pull up your socks and smack the big bum down.” He came out with a rush. He charged into Tunney with some of the old fury. But there wasn’t enough. And from then on, he settled down to take the beating, concentrating on only one thing staying on his feet. He stayed. His face, was not pretty to see at the close of the fight. He could barely lift his hands above his shoulders. The title was gone.
The dressing room after the Dempsey‑Tunney fight was filled with people who didn’t know what to say. They came over to the tired and puffyfaced ex‑champion and patted his shoulder sympathetically and mumbled regrets. Dempsey sat on a wooden table, his head down, hiding the misery in his face.
Over in a corner, a poorly‑dressed, thin‑faced, derelict of a man who had slipped into the room unnoticed, watched the proceedings with calloused eyes. Suddenly the room was very quiet. The old Manassa Mauler glanced up and noticed the old fellow. He looked, Dempsey said, like one of the countless bums he had ridden the rods with in his early days, one of the nameless faces of the hard and hungry past. Their eyes met for an instant.
The old fellow spoke. “Hi, Jack.”
“Hello, pal,” Dempsey said.
The old .geezer grinned and shook his head. “This shouldn’t be like no wake,” he said to the room. “What if he is still the champion and what if he ain’t? He’s young, ain’t he? He’s got dough, ain’t he? He’s famous, ain’t he? I ask you‑what’s the championship of the world to a guy like that?”
Dempsey got up and walked over to the old fellow. He put his hand on his shoulders. “Those are pretty smart words, pardner. I’ll remember ‘em.”
Dempsey has said that the best job he has ever had in his life was being the champion, and the next best job was being the ex‑champion. Sentiment changed toward the Manassa Mauler. Like a gong that had ended a round, all the old grudges and malice and dislike melted away under the warmth and genuine humility and greatness of the new Dempsey.
He beat a stronger, younger man, Jack Sharkey, a man with a fine boxing skill and a strong punch. He climbed back into the ring again against Tunney in Chicago, on September 22, 1927, still full of fight, still scowling.
In that thrilling seventh round, the men who had been boys when the Manassa Mauler was belting down the giants, saw a brief and beautiful flash of the old killer in action. It was wonderful, but nobody knew better than Jack Dempsey that it was his last rush, the last charge that he would make, the last flurry of the vicious stunning blows that had made him a champion. And, for 14 seconds, he was the champion again.
THE old itch to fight kept coming back. It is still in him. At 37, years of age, Dempsey consented to fight four rounds against a rising, 21‑yearold fighter named Kingfish Levinsky. He took another licking, grinned about it, shook his head and said, “A man should know when he’s through. It wasn’t Levinsky that made me realize it, it was Old Man Time.” But the fans who had booed and hissed him at Shelby, Montana, who had wanted to see Georges Carpentier, a‑ Frenchman, beat him, at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, now stood up and cheered him to the rafters, crowded his dressing room, told him he was the greatest fighter that ever lived, shook his hand and said that Dempsey could have licked Levinsky with one hand in his youth.
Dempsey got married again, this time to the singer Hannah Williams. They had two girls, Joan and Barbara whom the Manassa Mauler loves deeply and proudly. Strollers in Central Park often saw Dempsey out with the carriage, followed by kids and well wishers. When they were divorced, the world was happy because Dempsey was given custody of his children. He has given them the best in life, the things he never had.
The second world war came. Dempsey went down to enlist. The doctors marvelled at the condition of the 50year‑old man who had lived life up to the hilt. He went into the Coast Guard, instructed in physical training, refereed fights on boats shuttling GIs to Europe and the Pacific. And, on one of these boats, an incident occurred that added one final touch to the legend of the Manassa Mauler.
Dempsey had been refereeing fights aboard the S.S. Wakefield. One big, bruising heavyweight was giving the old mauler a lot of trouble. This fellow, an ex‑pro, swaggered around the ship boasting that. he could lick anybody on board. Dempsey had refereed several of his matches and the big 210‑pounder, was almost as good as he said he was. One afternoon the ex‑pro fought a three‑rounder with a smaller man who gave him a terrific fight.
Dempsey called it a draw. The bruiser saw red, accused Dempsey of unfairness, turned on him snarling, and said, “You know damn well I can lick anybody here. How about you?”
Dempsey scowled. He tried to keep his temper. He knew how old 50 is. But the GIs aboard didn’t know. To them, he was still Jack Dempsey, an idol, a man who could lick anybody. They egged the fight on. The big pro sneered and dared Dempsey to face him. It was too much for the old Manassa Mauler.
“I should have known better,” Jack grinned, telling about it. “He gave me quite a pasting in that first round.”
The second round came up. The big pro came out, smiling meanly, moving in for the kill. Suddenly another man moved in the ring. It was Dempsey. In a blinding now‑or‑never rush, the old legs carried him forward with lightning speed, the right hand sunk into the other fighter’s body, the old mauler’s left hook crashed through like a rocket. The big man went down and out. He was as cold as the ocean spray. The GIs screamed and pounded each other on the back. The scowl on Dempsey’s face changed to a grin. He looked at his hands. He was not through, after all. Maybe he never would be.
On Okinawa, on D‑Day, the assault troops crouched in one of the landing craft, looked anxiously at the shore, at the hills beyond the beaches where the big guns had been pounding for days. They squatted on their haunches, peered anxiously over the side, held their weapons in tense arms. Then one of them looked over at another of the craft going beachward along side of them. “Hey, look,” he yelled. ‘‑’Ain’t that Jack Dempsey?”,
They waved at Dempsey. Jack waved back. “Hi, pals see you on Broadway.” Some of them did get back, and did go in to see him on Broadway. They came in‑and are still coming in‑to shake his hand, to pat his massive back, to talk about the things of war, their war. They come to get the genuine Jack Dempsey autograph, to listen to the champ say a few words about his old fights and the days when his scowl and his fists made him the toughest guy in the ring, the Manassa Mauler, the world champion.
Way down in this corner is a tribute to the life‑battered bum who became a beloved man, to the courageous fighter who would never quit, to the old Manassa Mauler and the gentleman, Jack Dempsey. It has been a long time since he was last seen, crouching and weaving in the ring. But the memory of the way he was still remains. The legend of Dempsey has been riveted into ring history. He stands with the greatest fighters of all time, an unparalleled heavyweight champion of the world, a man who never backed away from anyone in the ring, or from the blows dealt in a magnificent, hard, and glorious life.
(By Jack Sher)
