With the contract as collateral, he borrowed $250,000 and built a seven-acre, 91,613-seat temporary stadium at Boyles Thirty Acres, near Jersey City, N.J. Rickard signed them to fight on July 2, 1921. The 6-foot-6 1/4 Willard-still the tallest of all heavyweight champions-maintained that Dempsey had used “loaded” gloves that day, a charge Dempsey hotly denied the rest of his life.ĭempsey next knocked out two contenders, Billy Miske and Bill Brennan, and Kearns and promoter Rickard stoked the flames for the first million-dollar fight-Dempsey vs. ![]() Dempsey won in what remains today one of the most savage beatings in boxing history.ĭempsey, 23, knocked down Willard, 37, seven times in the first round in a fight that was stopped after three rounds.Īrguments still rage over the controversial match. Kearns and promoter Tex Rickard booked Dempsey-Willard for Toledo, Ohio, on July 4, 1919. Kearns and Dempsey sized him up as a fatted steer. He had defended the title once and fought three exhibitions. Willard had been champion since dethroning Jack Johnson in 1915, but he had spent more time on the circus and vaudeville circuits than in the ring. Kearns launched Dempsey’s drive to the heavyweight championship with a triumphant tour of the Midwest, which included a one-round knockout of top contender Fred Fulton, and closed in on the champion, Jess Willard. But when he presented documentation showing he was the sole support of his family, which had been deserted by his father, he won a quick acquittal. And it was about to pay big dividends for both.įirst, Dempsey was tried on a draft-dodging rap during World War I. ![]() It was a fitting matchup, a mining camp brawler and a cardsharp. ![]() Dempsey won a string of fights in the Bay Area when Kearns, a con man from the Alaska gold fields, talked Dempsey into letting him guide his career. His career turned in 1917 in Oakland when he caught the eye of one of the great rascals of the American West, Jack (Doc) Kearns. He fought in Oakland, San Francisco, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. He began traveling in Pullman cars, not boxcars, and started wearing a suit. The first time we had a hell of a fight, a draw. “I remember fighting a tough guy named Johnny Sudenberg twice, in Goldfield and Tonopah. “In a saloon fight, they’d pass the hat and maybe I’d get 50 cents, sometimes two bucks,” he said. In a 1970 Times interview, Dempsey recalled the early purses. Pretty soon, they’d fall down.”ĭempsey’s early haunts were Ramona, Cripple Creek, Durango and Montrose, Colo. “I’d make ‘em miss a few times, move around, play it smart. “I learned pretty quick that bigger, older guys really couldn’t fight a lick,” he said. ![]() Appreciative patrons contributed change when the hat was passed. It started, according to family lore, when he won a scrap as a 5-year-old, while working as a restaurant dishwasher.Īs a teen-ager, first as a bare knuckle fighter, he began beating up on bigger, older, stronger lads in saloons. I didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork.” At about the same time that Babe Ruth, another titan of 1920s American sport, was pitching and hitting his way out of a Baltimore reform school, Dempsey was shoveling ore, riding the rods and fighting.ĭecades later, talking of his youth in the mining towns of Colorado, Utah and Nevada, the old champion said: “I was a bum.
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