TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.5

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 4KB | 73 lines

                                                                                June 13, 1983

Memories of a Heavyweight

Jack Dempsey: 1985-1983


He won the heavy weight championship of the world 64 years ago
from Jess Willard and lost it seven years later to Gene Tunney,
but right up until the day he died last week, many still thought
of Jack Dempsey as champion. And one could not think of Dempsey
without thinking of Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red
Grange. Other athletes have survived to 87, but no other period
in sport, and maybe not just in sport, has lingered so
glamorously long. the '20s not only roared, they remained.

In one of life's delightful juxtapositions, reasonable people
are capable of making memories of events that occurred years
before they were born, never letting a technicality that slight
exclude them from an argument as rich as the "long count" fight
of 1927. Failing to withdraw  to a neutral corner, as a new
rule required after knockdowns, Dempsey inadvertently allowed
Tunney perhaps 14 seconds to defog his head in the seventh round
and go on to outpoint Jack for a second time. "The best thing
that ever happened to both of us was the long count,"  Dempsey
said a few years ago. "Half the people thought he won, the
other half though I won. They're still arguing about it."

Dempsey never contested either loss to Tunney, a wonderful boxer
but a colorless fighter whose unforgivable sins were that he
read books and beat Dempsey. "Honey, I forgot to duck," Dempsey
told his wife after the first fight, a line President Reagan
found use for 55 years later. When Tunney died in 1978 at the
age of 80, Dempsey said, "Now I feel alone."

He was Kid Blackie before he was Jack Dempsey, and he was
William Harrison dempsey before that. Also the Manassa Mauler,
for the Colorado cow town where he was born on June 24, 1895.
Toughening his face by marinating it in brine, hardening his
jaw by chomping pine gum, Dempsey set out hoboing across the
West and brawling in saloons. "You and your opponent would go
at it," he explained, "and if the bar patrons like it, they'd
pass the hat."

Names conjured more romance then. Jess Willard was the
Pottawatomie Giant. George Carpentier was the Orchid Man. Luis
Angel Firpo, the Argentine, was the Wild Bull of the Pampas.
Those were Dempsey's great foes. Knocked clear through the
ropes by Firpo in the second round, Dempsey cam back to floor
the Wild Bull an eighth, ninth and tenth time.

In Dempsey's lore of names there is also a town:  Shelby, Mont.
(1923 pop. 2,000). The way Johnstown had a flood, Shelby had
a prizefight. Hankering to be a world capital for a day, Shelby
constructed a 40,000-seat arena for a Dempsey-Tommy Gibbons
fight, only to have trouble raising the $300,000 guarantee
required by Dempsey's rascally manager Jack ("Doc") Kearns.
("Give Doc 1,000 lbs of steel wool," it was said, "and he'll
knit you a stove.") Barely 7,000 people paid to see the fight:
the rest crashed the fences. Two banks failed. The town
virtually bankrupted itself. And Dempsey beat Givons, who was
not paid.

Another Dempsey contribution to language was "million-dollar
gate," his 1921 knockout of Carpentier at Boyle's Thirty Acres
in Jersey City being the first. In an unusual result for
fighters of any day, he kept some of the money. Before settling
into the window table at Jack Dempsey's Broadway restaurant in
Manhattan, he tried a little barnstorming, some refereeing.
Always he was available to bat out an occasional dilettante,
like Writer Paul Gallico or Financier J. Paul Getty. After he
closed the restaurant in 1974, Dempsey returned full time to
being heavyweight champ.

--By Tom Callahan