Dempsey coming towards the fallen Gene Tunney during the Long Count in Chicage, 1927. The box office take was $2.5 million.
13
ALTHOUGH HE PROTESTED AGAINST BEING TURNED INTO A “TIN saint,” Charles Lindbergh was an image of moral perfection to most 1920s Americans. Other heroes were more fallible, beloved for their vulnerabilities and complexities as much as for their achievements. Charlie Chaplin was one such flawed idol; the salty, sulky baseball star Babe Ruth another. But the greatest sportsman of the 1920s, in terms of drawing power and personal celebrity, was the untamed boxer Jack Dempsey. The total gate receipts for his five big fights between 1921 and 1927 were almost nine million dollars, sums unequalled until the advent of Mohammed Ali forty years later.
Born in 1895, Dempsey came from the small town of Manassa, Colorado, the ninth of thirteen children of poor, itinerant parents of largely Irish stock with a splash of Cherokee blood. He left school after eighth grade and found work as a miner, saying later that his two career options had been mining and cattle-working. Dempsey’s adolescence was a rough one, lived in the mines and the hobo “jungles” where he and other impoverished workers and outlaws camped between catching dangerous but free rides on the undercarriages of cross-country trains.
Soon he found that he had another talent: fighting. Encouraged by his elder brother, who had made a name for himself as a bar-room brawler, Dempsey began taking on all-comers in local saloons. “I can’t sing and I can’t dance,” he’d say, in his incongruously girlish voice, “but I can kick any man’s ass.” He chewed pine tar to strengthen his jaw and soaked his fists in brine to toughen them against cuts. By the early 1910s he was touring the bars of the Southwest looking for fights, and at twenty he hired a manager and went professional. Although his real name was William Harrison Dempsey, he used the name Jack Dempsey in homage to a great nineteenth-century middleweight.
The next few years were hard. Managers came and went; a good-for-nothing wife demanded generous support; boxing promoters in New York, where he first arrived in 1916 with less than $30 in his pocket, had no interest in a skinny kid from out west. Only the hard-boiled young sports-writer Damon Runyon, whom he met as a youngster scuffling in Denver, saw Dempsey’s potential and encouraged him to continue. Runyon watched one of Dempsey’s early fights and gave him his ring soubriquet, the “Manassa Mauler.”
Finally, after dropping out of boxing for a time and working in the shipyards of Philadelphia, Dempsey was taken on by the manager Jack “Doc” Kearns and the promoter Tex Rickard, and his career began in earnest. Dapper Kearns was a con man, a master of the 1920s art of marketing “ballyhoo.” When someone accused him of being a crook, he responded, “I prefer to be called a manipulator.” Rickard, tall, taciturn and elegant, was cleared in the early 1920s of accusations of abducting and sexually assaulting young girls. Despite this shadow over his reputation, from which he never quite recovered, Dempsey adored him. Rickard was, he said, “a bourbon-and-branchwater man who could drink all night and not get drunk…a gambler of the old school.” The sports journalist Paul Gallico said Rickard instinctively understood the power of money: “He knew how to exhibit it, use it, ballyhoo it, spend it, and make it work for him.” Their informal partnership of Dempsey, Kearns and Rickard would make all three rich.
In 1919, under Kearns’s management, Dempsey knocked out his opponents in the first round in five consecutive fights. That July he challenged the World Heavyweight Champion, Jess Willard, for his title in Toledo, Ohio. No one in the audience thought Dempsey could win, although sports-writers were starting to take notice of the young boxer. Ring Lardner and Scoop Gleeson came to shake Dempsey’s hand before the bout, as well as his old friend Runyon.
At six-foot-five Willard was four inches taller than Dempsey and sixty-five pounds heavier, and far more experienced. But Dempsey was an instinctive fighter, lightning fast and graceful on his feet, possessing a devastating punch with both right and left fists. What set him apart, though, was his savage street fighter attitude. One journalist called him “part tiger, part wildcat and all killer”; others described him pursuing his opponents in the ring like a panther, smoldering with the intensity of his desire to win.
“Dempsey was a picture-book fighter,” wrote Paul Gallico in the 1930s. “He had dark eyes, blue-black hair, and the most beautifully proportioned body ever seen in any ring. He had the wide but sharply sloping shoulders of the puncher, a slim waist, and fine, symmetrical legs. His weaving, shuffling style of approach was drama in itself and suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes. His gorge lay close to the surface. He was utterly without mercy or pity, asked no quarter, gave none. He would do anything he could get away with, fair or foul, to win.
“This was definitely a part of the man, but was also a result of his early life and schooling in the hobo jungles, bar-rooms, and mining camps of the West. Where Dempsey learned to fight there were no rounds, rest intervals, gloves, referees, or attending seconds. There are no draws and no decisions in rough and tumble fighting. You had to win. If you lost you went to the hospital or to the undertaking parlor. Dempsey, more often than not, in his early days as hobo, saloon bouncer, or roustabout, fought to survive. I always had the feeling that he carried that into the ring with him, that he was impatient of rules and restrictions and niceties of conduct, impatient even of the leather that bound his knuckles.”
Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times in the first round alone. By the time the dazed, defenseless Willard was forced to retire, at the end of the third round, he looked like he was sleepwalking. He had lost several teeth and his jaw, cheek-bone and some ribs had been broken. The scale of Dempsey’s victory was such that rumors that he had worn loaded gloves to gain his title swirled around him for the rest of his career.
The Manassa Mauler’s success in the ring was marred by allegations outside it of his having dodged the draft during the First World War. Harold Ross, who had known Dempsey as a kid in Colorado, led a campaign against “Slacker” Dempsey in the U.S. Army magazine, Stars and Stripes, of which he was then editor. Dempsey’s estranged wife, Maxine, whom he had married at twenty-one when she was well into her thirties, had accused him of beating her and of falsifying his draft papers; she was hoping for a large payout.
In court in June 1920 Dempsey testified that he had tried to enlist but been turned down by the army; his appeal had not come through by the time peace was declared. He said he had spent the war years supporting his wife and parents, and helped the war effort by working in a shipyard and recruiting other workers. Although he won his case against Maxine, the photograph he supplied the court of himself working in the shipyard was rendered suspect by the fact that patent leather boots and pinstriped trousers were visible underneath his overalls. It would take Dempsey many years to shake off his slacker reputation.
Tex Rickard capitalized on Dempsey’s unfavorable publicity to promote his fights. After Dempsey had twice defended his title, Rickard set up a bout with the French light heavyweight Georges Carpentier in July 1921. No image could have been in greater contrast to Dempsey’s than Carpentier’s: he was a former flying ace, a decorated war-hero whose nickname was Gorgeous Georges, graceful, clean-cut, sophisticated, well-dressed, a good dancer. Ring Lardner said he was “one of the most likeable guys you’d want to meet—even if he did have a Greek profile and long eyelashes.” Rickard had no scruples about presenting Dempsey in a negative light as compared to this paragon. As he said, “hatin’ is as good for box office as lovin’.”
Rickard’s marketing genius was to draw in his audience by making each fight he promoted into a narrative, pitting a hero against a villain, turning a boxing match into an elemental struggle between glory and humiliation, triumph and disaster, good and evil. He expanded boxing’s appeal far beyond its traditional audience of working-class men, the kind of people who would have crowded the sawdust floors of Colorado bars to watch the young Dempsey take on all-comers. Having never watched boxing before, respectable and respected public figures—even women—attended the spectacles Rickard staged.
Dempsey’s fights generated extraordinary popular interest, even at a time when sportsmen were acknowledged heroes. Sports-entertainers like Dempsey, Babe Ruth, the golfer Bobby Jones and the tennis player Bill Tilden were idolized for their courage, heroism and strength. Sport provided a vicarious release for the new generation of white-collar workers who spent their days sitting behind desks, as well as an outlet for the surplus money they were earning and their newly acquired leisure time. Managers used sport as a business model, encouraging teamwork and a sense of competition among their workers. Like movies, radio and advertising (to all of which sport was closely linked), great sporting events helped create a sense of national identity and unity over and above differences in ethnicity, class and religion.
The tickets to the Dempsey-Carpentier fight were beautifully made, oversized, engraved and gold-embossed. They brought in the first ever million-dollar box-office take (of which Dempsey and Kearns were to receive a third each), and the audience of 80,000 was as starry as Rickard could have hoped, including tycoons like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, various Vanderbilts and Astors, diplomats, politicians, musicians, movie stars and three of former President Roosevelt’s children. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled playing poker on a special train with the Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, and his party all the way from Washington to New York, where the fight was being held.
Despite the public rivalry Rickard encouraged between his two fighters, when they met Carpentier and Dempsey took to one another immediately. Carpentier thought Dempsey was “a man made expressly to be a fighter” with his high Native American cheekbones and dark narrow eyes. His smile, said Carpentier, was almost childlike and lit up his face. Although Dempsey said little except to express the hope “that we would both make a packet” out of the fight, Carpentier found him immensely likeable. “Under the traditional rough exterior,” he wrote, Dempsey had “the equally traditional heart of gold.”
But Dempsey, dark and glowering, was cast as the villain. Even though Carpentier was a foreigner the crowd hoped he would win—he was smaller than Dempsey and it was so clearly an uneven match—and Dempsey sensed their antagonism. Carpentier looked like a statue, said Dempsey, while he was just a street fighter.
The street fighter knocked the statue out in the fourth round. Even the press reports afterwards favored the loser. “The more powerful but not the better man won,” said the Morning Telegraph. The New York Times stated that “Carpentier was quite rightly the more popular of the two men. He was beaten as a fighter but he remains superior as a boxer . . . Carpentier was the spirit of the fight; Dempsey was its body. Carpentier lost like a gentleman.”
Ring Lardner’s short story of 1921, “The Battle of the Century,” was a fictionalized account of the meeting between the hungry young American and the urbane foreigner. It focused less on the good-natured Jim Dugan (Dempsey) than on his wheeler-dealer manager, Larry Moon, a portrait of Kearns, whose pursuit of a triumph for his champion had brought about such a dangerously mismatched competition.
The next fight Rickard organized for Dempsey was against the Argentinean champion, Luis Angel Firpo, in September 1923. Paul Gallico remembered Dempsey’s training camp at Saratoga Springs before this meeting as “the most colorful, exciting, [and] picturesque” of gatherings. Sitting at a rickety wooden table with an illicit beer and a steak sandwich in front of him, Gallico joined the ribald, thrill-seeking gang of Dempsey’s supporters: “lop-ears, stumble-bums, cheap, smalltime politicians, fight managers, ring champions, floozies, gangsters, Negroes, policemen and a few actors thrown in for good measure.”
Jack Kearns, “smart, breezy, wise-cracking, scented,” guarded access to his champion. “Doubtful blondes who wandered in and out of the layout of wooden hotel and lake-front bungalows, and blondes about whom there was no doubt at all” mingled with sports-writers and aging boxers “with bent noses and twisted ears.” Dempsey himself, blue-black hair gleaming, “dressed in trousers and an old gray sweater, [played] checkers on the porch of his bungalow with a sparring partner.” Gallico was moved by the moments of beauty he glimpsed amid the organized chaos of the camp, “the smooth swiveling of Dempsey’s shoulder as he punched a rataplan on the light bag.”
For the editor of The Ring magazine the Dempsey-Firpo bout was the most exciting fight he witnessed in fifty years. The two men fought like animals, wrote another commentator, with “abysmal, unreasoning fury.” “Firpo came at me as no other living man ever did before, or since,” remembered Dempsey. The Argentinean matched Dempsey’s aggression, responding to his initial onslaught by knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the first minutes of the fight, only for Dempsey to be pushed back through the ropes by the ringside reporters on to whom he’d fallen. There were eleven knockdowns in the first round. Dempsey knocked Firpo out for a count of ten in the second, and then helped him up as he was declared the winner.
Dempsey’s no-holds-barred approach was becoming legendary. His rage in the ring seemed to express all the frustration of America’s marginalized underclasses, humiliated by the injustices of the society in which they scraped survival. Dempsey “seemed to have a constant bottomless well of cold fury somewhere close to his throat.” The champion of the underdog, the victim, the ignored and the hungry, his furious fighting style and rugged individualism reflected where he had come from and what he continued to battle against. He represented the desire for rebellion against the demands of an increasingly modern, stratified, bureaucratizing society, the impulse to smash and destroy the things that a man cannot control.
Some observers said that Dempsey fought foul, but it was more that he recognized that any ideas of fair and foul were irrelevant in the ring, where all that mattered was winning or losing. “Sometimes, with a touch of macabre humor, he liked to test out the courage and opposition of his opponent with a few low ones,” said Gallico, “but he was simply unconcerned with such niceties and obvious decencies as a belt line…When the bell rang he ran out and began to attack his opponent, and he never stopped attacking him, trying to batter him to the floor, until the bell ended the round.”
“Many said I was ruthless in the ring,” said Dempsey, looking back on his career. “How I’d stand over a fellow who was down and clout him again as he tried to rise. How I would get behind an opponent staggering back to his feet and flatten him with a sucker punch as he turned to face me. Guilty! . . . Why shouldn’t I have been adept at such tactics?…It was part of the rules—or lack of rules—through many of my ring years. I’ve been beaten into a coma in rings. I’ve been knocked down too often to remember. I’ve been knocked out…But I never lost a fight on a foul. Nor was I ever thrown out of a ring for not trying.”
In the 1920s stardom beckoned anyone with a saleable talent. America was looking for idols, and when it found them, it sent them to California. Increasingly celebrities were “normal” individuals who had transformed their circumstances through their own efforts, rather than men who had greatness conferred upon them by their rank or office. Few people in the 1920s would have called politicians or industrial magnates “great”; instead they venerated popular heroes like Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey as their own. But while high-minded Lindbergh resisted Hollywood’s siren calls, Dempsey was utterly seduced by them.
After winning his title in 1919, Dempsey had starred in a series of short films called Daredevil Jack. In late 1923 he returned to the West Coast and resumed his career as an entertainer. He had always done traveling vaudeville work—shadow boxing, rope skipping, laying out a stooge from the audience, offering $1,000 to anyone who could knock him out—but now a circus paid him $45,000 for a three-week tour.
In Hollywood, Dempsey found a group of people like himself from poor backgrounds who had suddenly made it big. As he put it, they were all just “freaks of nature,” handed success, vast wealth and popular adulation because of a good profile or a pretty mouth, or in his case a mighty punch. Until he died of a heroin overdose in 1923, Dempsey’s best friend in the film business was the matinee idol Wally Reid, “the best looking and most reckless of them.” Douglas Fairbanks took Dempsey under his wing; he made friends with Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and went to Marion Davies and W. R. Hearst’s parties at San Simeon.
Dempsey was becoming more of an entertainer than a boxer, a product of the press and the movies rather than the world of the ring. The only fight Rickard planned for Dempsey in 1923 after his meeting with Firpo was against Harry Wills, a black contender for the heavyweight title, but fears that a mixed-race bout would cause riots resulted in its being called off. Rickard was content for Dempsey not to fight because he realized that the less often people saw Dempsey in the ring, the more they would pay when he did defend his title; Doc Kearns, milking Dempsey’s new Hollywood income, was equally happy to let him enjoy the softer side of success.
Dempsey made half a million dollars in 1924 although he did not fight once, leaving himself open to accusations that he wanted to retain his title without bothering to defend it. By contrast the other sporting legend of the 1920s, Babe Ruth, was paid a yearly salary of $52,000 by the New York Yankees, over three times what the next highest-paid baseball player made.
In 1925 Dempsey married an actress called Estelle Taylor and moved with her to an expensively decorated hacienda-style house complete with its own pool, golf-course, bridle paths and Rolls-Royce in the garage. Estelle persuaded Jack to have his nose fixed. When Dempsey and Kearns fell out over Doc’s spending of Dempsey’s winnings, Estelle, hoping Jack would give boxing up altogether, encouraged him to sack his manager.
Kearns had been taking half of all Dempsey’s earnings, when the legal limit for an agent was a third, without declaring his income or paying tax on it. At first, Dempsey admitted, he had been so thrilled to be making so much money that he had not thought to question Kearns’s high-handed appropriation of his earnings, but when he began to feel that Kearns was mistaking “gratitude for stupidity” he had no choice but to get rid of him (while maintaining his links with Rickard).
One of the early issues of the New Yorker in the spring of 1925 carried a typically arch profile of Dempsey whom it described as having “learned that the camaraderie of poverty cannot survive the blight of wealth. Splitting the first dollar with a friend is not so much, but sharing the first million is a large contract.” Dempsey, the New Yorker reported, had the high, piping voice of a teenage boy and could not sit still. He didn’t take himself seriously and—hardly surprisingly—he didn’t read much. His appeal to women was admiringly noted, and his apparently happy surrender to the trappings of respectability commented upon. “If he is ever invited to become a Rotarian, he will accept, eagerly.”
Paul Gallico saw Dempsey’s Hollywood years rather differently. The wild animal had been “caged in a silken boudoir… He moved in those days through those absurd frills like a tiger in the circus, dressed up for the show in strange and humiliating clothes.” Dempsey was as intimidated as he was attracted by his beautiful, ambitious wife and her sparkling friends. Every now and then he’d realize that he “didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.” “I tried like the devil to fit in and couldn’t,” he admitted. He felt excluded and lonely; Estelle worried that “being married to a pug” was ruining her career.
While from a boxing point of view, Dempsey had been softened by the luxurious life he was leading, from a domestic point of view he was still too close to what Gallico called “the disgusting things that every prize-fighter needs in his trade.” He could not leave behind the savagery that he had once relied upon to win, and that had brought him his success; but it terrified Estelle. That was why she put so much pressure on him to retire—and that, ultimately, was why their passionate, turbulent marriage was doomed to failure.
For Gallico, Dempsey’s wildness only “added to the picture rather than detracted from it, because I like my prize-fighters mean. Cruelty and an absolute lack of mercy are an essential quality in every successful prize-fighter…His brutality and viciousness are carefully cultivated, fed, and watered like a plant, because they are a valuable business commodity.” But the qualities Gallico so admired in Dempsey’s fighting were gradually being eroded by his comfortable new life. By the time Dempsey agreed to defend his title in 1926 he had virtually retired, having fought professionally only twice (against Carpentier and Firpo) in the past five years.
The man Tex Rickard pitted against his 31-year-old world champion was Gene Tunney, a First World War veteran from Greenwich Village billed as the “Fighting Marine.” As with Carpentier, this was a gladiatorial battle of opposites. Twenty-nine-year-old Tunney was a sensitive, intellectual type as compared to Dempsey’s vicious tough-guy. While Dempsey, in Tunney’s words, “depended on his wallop,” Tunney was a highly disciplined, intelligent technician who relied on tactics and skills. Tunney’s wholesome public image blended “self-improvement, social idealism, and physical toughness” in contrast to the perceived hedonism and immorality of his era. Like Charles Lindbergh, Tunney managed to reassure his fans that old-fashioned values could coexist alongside the positive aspects of modernity and science. He attributed his success in the ring to his study of physiognomy, psychology and boxing technique. Where Dempsey was unruly, self-indulgent, passionate and spontaneous, Tunney was controlled, disciplined, methodical . . . and just a little boring.
The mood had changed at Dempsey’s training camp from the louche, carefree days in Saratoga Springs. Kearns was noticeably absent and the rich and famous Dempsey was guarded by detectives night and day. His relationship with Estelle was strained and he was suffering from eczema and intestinal flu, both brought on by stress. His retinue made excuses for him as he failed to land punches on his sparring partner, telling one another that he was taking it easy on his friend—but the truth was that Dempsey was not in ring condition. Physically and mentally he was no longer the “jungle Fighter” of the old days, but because Rickard persuaded him he could beat Tunney, Dempsey carried on. Dempsey’s reputation alone ensured that he was the 4-1 on.
A confident Tunney arrived in Philadelphia in an airplane for the fight, smiling and waving for the crowds. Over 120,000 people had come to the Sesquicentennial Stadium on a dark, damp September night, among them W. R. Hearst, Babe Ruth, Norma Talmadge (Constance’s sister), Florenz Ziegfeld, Charlie Chaplin, and the usual gathering of Astors, Rockefellers, Whitneys and Roosevelts in the $27.50 ringside seats, along side the sports-writers and commentators. Associated Press assigned first eight and then ten men to cover the contest; the New York Times devoted seven pages of its central section (rather than its sports pages) to its coverage of the fight. Gate receipts totaled nearly $2 million.
Tunney’s game plan was to psych Dempsey out before the fight by a demonstration of bluff self-belief. As they got ready to enter the ring, Tunney made an impatient Dempsey wait, taking as long as he could to bandage his fists. Once they started fighting Tunney hung back, allowing Dempsey to think he was afraid of him, waiting for the moment when a newly over-confident Dempsey would make a mistake that would allow Tunney to strike. Dempsey said later that he knew he was beaten from Tunney’s first blow. Out of fight-practice, flat-footed, his timing off, the champion lost on points in a unanimous decision by the judges.
In defeat, though, Dempsey discovered something he had never known before: the support of the crowd. Always in the past his audiences had booed him while they bet on him to win, but never until the Tunney fight had they taken him to their hearts. “Losing was the making of me,” he said later. “I had never been cheered before.”
Paul Gallico described the moment when Dempsey made the transition from “most unpopular and despised” of sportsmen to best-loved. In the early hours of the morning the former champion made his way back to his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel where his wife, who could not bear to watch him fight, was waiting for him. Estelle took him in her arms and touched his purple, shapeless face tenderly. “What happened, Ginsberg?” she asked, using her pet name for him. “Dempsey grinned out of the good corner of his mouth,” wrote Gallico: “‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’” Gallico believed that this dichotomy between Dempsey’s self-effacing gentleness outside the ring and his toughness inside it was the key to his appeal. “How wonderful to be so quiet, so gentlemanly—and yet so terrible!”
Moved by the crowd’s reaction to his defeat, yet devastated by the loss of his title, Dempsey returned to Hollywood. Babe Ruth, whom he had first become friends with in the early 1920s, sat him down and told him to fight to regain his title. Spindly-legged Ruth, “a connoisseur of booze, food and dames,” was another sportsman-entertainer who understood the importance of giving everything to a competition. The following summer he would hit the still unbeaten record of 60 home runs in the season for the Yankees.
Rickard scheduled a rematch for 364 days after the two boxers’ first meeting, for 22 September 1927, this time in Chicago. Dempsey’s final training camp was “the quietest and dullest of all,” said Gallico. Estelle was heavily medicated, teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown; Dempsey just wanted to win.
Dempsey met the young heavyweight Jack Sharkey in an elimination round for the title bout in July. He knocked Sharkey out cold in the seventh round. Damon Runyon was more impressed by the audience which included an Indian maharajah, the circus impresario John Ringling and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Runyon made his way to his seat, he said, he “fell under the hurrying hoofs of fourteen kings of the world of finance, twenty-nine merchant princes, six bootleggers and five ticket speculators, all owners of estates on Long Island and of Rolls-Royce cars.”
Given that the Dempsey-Tunney rematch was taking place in Capone’s Chicago, Rickard’s greatest challenge was finding a straight referee—and there are still questions about whether or not he managed to. Capone had been a fan of Dempsey’s since 1919, when he had offered him whatever he wanted to stage an exhibition fight at his private club. This time he offered to ensure Dempsey’s win. As Jack told it, when he refused, Capone sent him an extravagant bunch of flowers. The note read, “In the name of sportsmanship.” Capone was rumored to have bet $45,000 on Dempsey to beat Tunney. It was said that $2 million was wagered on the fight in New York alone.
Just before ten o’clock on the evening of 22 September 1927, the honeyed baritone of Graham McNamee came over the wire: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is the night.” Seventy independent stations across the country had bought rights to McNamee’s presentation of the fight; even the inmates of Sing-Sing prison had been given permission to listen. The fight was the first radio program to be broadcast worldwide, bringing in an estimated total audience of fifty million people. The trajectory of Dempsey’s career had run in parallel to the burgeoning radio industry. In 1920, when fewer than one house in ten thousand had a radio set, the first radio station received its license in Pittsburgh. Two years later, 576 stations were transmitting and the industry was worth $60 million annually. Tens of millions of Americans heard Dempsey floor Firpo in 1923.
Once again the huge audience of over a hundred thousand was packed with celebrities, many of them Dempsey’s friends from Hollywood, including Charlie Chaplin, the disgraced Fatty Arbuckle, W. R. Hearst, Gloria Swanson, Irving Berlin, Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Auto-magnate Walter Chrysler was there, as was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Al Capone sat with Damon Runyon. The box-office take was $2.5 million.
Perhaps for the first time, the public were overwhelmingly pulling for Dempsey to win. Boxing fans had begun to tire of Tunney’s know-it-all attitude, his use of over-long words, his self-regarding superciliousness; they were no longer impressed by the volume of Omar Khayyam’s poetry that he liked to carry around with him to show that he was something more than a mere boxer.
Dempsey was better prepared for this second fight, in better health and hungrier to win, but once again Tunney outboxed him, exploiting Dempsey’s raw, undisciplined style. Dempsey was losing on points when he knocked Tunney to the ground with a left hook to the chin in the seventh round. As he always had done, Dempsey instinctively stood glowering over his opponent, waiting for him to get up so he could knock him down again.
But a recently introduced (and not yet universal) rule specified that when a boxer was knocked down, his adversary must retreat to a neutral corner before the referee began the count. Only after Dempsey had reluctantly allowed himself to be escorted to the corner did the official begin counting, buying Tunney additional time to recover from Dempsey’s blow. Tunney, after a few seconds seeming fully alert as he sat on the canvas, waited to get back on to his feet until the count of nine, although he had actually been down for between fourteen and seventeen seconds; he knew as well as Dempsey did that there was no need to get up before the official count reached nine. This controversial decision became known as the Long Count.
Back up, Tunney retreated before Dempsey’s furious advance, well aware that all he had to do to win was wait. “Over his swarthy, blue-jowled fighter’s face there spread a look which will never leave me as long as I live,” wrote Gallico of Dempsey as he sensed his victim slipping out of his grasp. “First it was the expression of self-realization of one who knows that his race is run, that he is old and that he is finished. And then through it and replacing it there appeared a glance of such bitter, biting contempt for his opponent that for the moment I felt ashamed for the man who was running away. With his gloves Dempsey made little coaxing pawing motions to Tunney to come in and fight. That was it. Don’t run. Come in and fight. This is a fight. For that is what Dempsey would have done.”
Tunney easily won the next three rounds and retained his title on points by the judges’ unanimous decision. Dempsey knew why he had lost: Tunney was such a formidable opponent because he lacked (or could control) the “fighting instinct” by which most boxers are governed. He couldn’t be tricked into the attack, wouldn’t take a chance, wouldn’t play to the crowd—just relied on being able to evade and outlast his opponent.
Some observers suspected that both fights had been fixed, although few dared to say so publicly. Anyone betting on Tunney in either fight would have made a handsome profit. Both fighters had criminal connections. Leo Flynn, the manager with whom Dempsey had replaced Doc Kearns, was thought to be an associate of Al Capone’s. Despite his clean-cut image, Tunney had borrowed large sums from the Philadelphia mobster Boo Boo Hoff. Having watched their first fight in Philadelphia, Ring Lardner said, “Tunney couldn’t lick Dempsey if Dempsey was trying.”
After his loss there was nothing else for Dempsey to do but retire. Tex Rickard died in his arms in early 1929, having refused an operation for appendicitis. Later that year Dempsey and Estelle were divorced. For a while he promoted fights for Al Capone, but when Capone “started giving orders [about] who was going to win and who was going to lose—and naming the round,” Dempsey quit.
The ballyhoo that had surrounded Dempsey abated and he managed to build a life after his boxing career. In the 1920s a hero one day could be a nobody the next, but Dempsey’s vulnerability, as much as his invincibility, had earned him a lasting place in American hearts. “Nothing ever went to Dempsey’s head—not his money, not his title, and not the amazing change in his social position,” wrote Paul Gallico. He always “remained unspoiled, natural and himself.”
Dempsey continued to fight in exhibition matches, wrote about boxing technique and, in the 1930s, opened a bustling chophouse in New York. He was luckier than some other sporting celebrities: the college football hero Red Grange, who in 1925 had been paid $12,000 for his first professional game with the Chicago Bears and soon afterwards signed a $300,000 movie contract, was by 1930 working at a Hollywood nightclub.
Looking back on Dempsey’s extraordinary career a decade later, Paul Gallico said that though Dempsey overshadowed his age, “we were all part of the Dempsey cult and we were blinded by our own ballyhoo.” Dempsey was a victim of the American dream just as much as a symbol of it, puffed up by his promoters, and the hunger of the decade for heroes, into an expendable commodity rather than a man.
“I have seen the coming of the million-dollar gate, the seventy-thousand-dollar horse-race, the hundred-thousand-dollar football game, the millionaire prize-fighter, and the fifty-thousand-dollar golfer. I have witnessed an era of spending in sport such as has never been seen before and which may not be matched again, when the box-office prize for a single ringside seat for a heavyweight championship prize-fight was fifty dollars, and fetched as high as two hundred and fifty dollars a pair from speculators,” wrote Gallico. “And I have seen the bubble collapse as sharply and completely as did the great stock boom, and watched prize-fighting go downhill from a million-dollar industry back to the small-time money from which it came.”