TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.5

Text File | 1990-10-09 | 4KB | 70 lines

Memories of a Heavyweight

June 13, 1983

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