Shelby
The fight was nothing to write home about. Dempsey bored in, bobbing and weaving. He tried to land squarely on Gibbons face but he was rusty and his timing was off.
After the fight Jack said, “Nailing him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind.” Gibbons stated in his biography “Punches That I Have Taken” that “People couldn’t seem to understand how I could take so much from Dempsey…All I did was slip this way and that…Brother Mike, he taught it to me.”
The challenger also clinched and held a lot. Tommy tried to land punches to Jack’s body but Dempsey was too fast for him. Gibbons opened a cut under the champ’s right eye in the 2nd round that bothered Jack throughout the fight. Dempsey seemed to have Gibbons in trouble in round 7 but couldn’t put him away. At the end of the 15th and final round referee Jim Dougherty raised Dempsey’s hand in victory. Gibbons did not protest.
He stated years later in his biography, “I could have licked him in Shelby if I had been thirty, but I was thirty-two… I never got so tired of a man in my life.” He was tired but happy. He had gone 15 rounds with Jack Dempsey and would live to brag about it.
Years later Tommy told a reporter for CBS Radio that “Dempsey could beat anybody he could hit. The only reason he couldn’t do anything with fellows like Tunney or Greb or myself was he couldn’t hit us.”
(by Norman Marcus)
(image courtesy of rockyssplitnose)
