The Battle of the Century: Dempsey, Carpentier, and the Birth of Modern Promotion

The Battle of the Century

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY Dempsey, Carpentier, and the Birth of Modern Promotion

Jim Waltzer

Copyright 2011 by Jim Waltzer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Waltzer, Jim, 1950– The battle of the century : Dempsey, Carpentier, and the birth of modern promotion / Jim Waltzer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-38244-4 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38245-1 (ebook) 1. Dempsey, Jack, 1895–1983. 2. Carpentier, Georges, 1894– 1975. 3. Boxers (Sports)—United States—Biography. 4. Boxing—New Jersey—History. 5. Boxing—United States—History. I. Title. GV1132.D4W35 2011 796.83092'2—dc22 [B] 2010049889 ISBN: 978-0-313-38244-4 EISBN: 978-0-313-38245-1 15

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Prologue

ix

1.

Gold and Gambling

1

2.

Dustup in the Desert

11

3.

The Mouths That Roared

19

4.

Color of the Crown

29

5.

Conjuring an Unlikely Champion

43

6.

Ships in the Night

51

7.

Tornado from the West

57

8.

Across War and Continents

67

9.

Dynamic Duo

77

10.

Near Death in the Afternoon

85

11.

Right Hands and Steamer Trunks

97

12.

Slacker Trial

107

13.

An Earful at the Garden

115

14.

Cuban Capitalists

127

vi

CONTENTS

15.

Going Solo in Jersey City

139

16.

The Fight Finds a Home

149

17.

Sketches from Training Camp

157

18.

Girding for Battle

175

19.

Battle du Jour

183

Epilogue

199

Notes

205

Bibliography

221

Index

229 Photo essay following page 114.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A word of thanks to staff who provided research materials at the Jersey City Main Library, Atlantic City Free Public Library, Marple Township Public Library, and the Parkway Central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. When an intrepid attendant at the last location reached into the tombs to disinter bound volumes of ancient issues of the Saturday Evening Post, Ring Lardner’s short story “The Battle of the Century” materialized before my eyes before nearly decomposing to the touch. Mr. Lardner would have had something hysterically wry to say about that, but I’m no match, so I’ll simply say I enjoyed the tale. Special thanks to the Internet for saving my eyesight from microfilm. Above all, my thanks and admiration for the colorful, comprehensive work of authors Charles Samuels and Roger Kahn, biographers of Tex Rickard and Jack Dempsey, respectively. They already told the story. I’m just trying to tell it a little differently. Jim Waltzer

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PROLOGUE

America, 1920. Isn’t it curious that, in a country of 10 million males in their physical prime—indeed, on a planet of millions more of the same—just one emerges as the most ferocious fighting force mustered by bone, blood, and sinew? As such, he helped transform the art of sports promotion from backwater grubbiness to slick urban proselytizing that seizes imaginations, not to mention dollar amounts equal to a fair-sized municipal budget. Did he spawn the behemoth, or did it create him out of evolutionary necessity? Fist fighting as sport is as old as hieroglyphics may testify, but the modern conception dates to the dozen dicta drafted in 1867 under the name of John Douglas, ninth Marquess of Queensberry—suitably from the civilized kingdom of Great Britain. Most of these rules still underpin the sport that struggles to survive today. Before their advent, it was all bare knuckles and a lick-any-man-in-the-house mentality. Jack Dempsey could lick any man in the house, bar, mine, scrap yard, and, finally, prize ring. He came of age in an American West not yet weaned from the frontier, a rawboned young man who found that his oversized fists, coil-and-spring reflexes, and predatory will were ideal for separating men from their senses. But not from their money. That took the vision and moxie of a pair of operators well acquainted with the powers of persuasion, two men who knew where the cash was and how to get at it. It took a country in the process of dismissing its inhibitions and exploring its wild side in the wake of World War I. It took the big-city newspapers of the East and their sportswriters’

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PROLOGUE

penchant for ballyhoo. It was time for a new breed of legend: actors who dashed and wept in histrionic splendor on the silver screen, and athletes who, with the help of their poets in the press, turned contests of strength and skill into pitched battles of high drama. Competition as supreme drama was not a new phenomenon. Centuries earlier, the Romans had filled their massive Colosseum with eager citizens and gruesome spectacle entailing the highest of stakes, and virtually every culture had sported its own festivals of clash and chance. But after sampling two decades of the 20th century, the United States was primed to sculpt singular heroes from the raw forms, men whose names would be better known than the president’s. In Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier, the apostles of fame had their gladiators, and they fit the bill better than any creations of central casting. Another Jack—slickster Jack “Doc” Kearns, sartorially inclined and gifted with gab—had the timing and keen instinct to latch onto the fearsome young Dempsey from Manassa, Colorado, and propel him toward destiny. Kearns nurtured, counseled, maneuvered and, later, sued, his charge on the way to ephemeral fortune and lasting fame. Meanwhile, the elegant Carpentier provided the perfect foil for the fierce, brawling Dempsey. Frenchman Carpentier dazzled the press, drew the females, and gave the enterprise class and international scope. The maker of the feast, however, was George Lewis “Tex” Rickard, an equally natty visionary who set the table for all likeminded extravaganzas to follow, who conceived of and executed the first million-dollar gate, who elevated professional sports to religion in this country and expanded the promotional arts from posters nailed on telephone poles to grand designs of dream building. He built stadiums for his shows. His methods drew people to the big event as if by magnetic force, irrespective of geography, social class, or sex (and as a result, for the first time, women showed up in significant numbers). The truth was sometimes a casualty of his campaigns, but the publicity mill was not subject to perjury. Rickard demonstrated exactly how to showcase ancient warriors for modern consumption. It all came to fruition in Jersey City, New Jersey, one summer afternoon in 1921.

Chapter 1

GOLD AND GAMBLING

The everlasting image of boxing promoter Tex Rickard is that of a calmeyed man wearing a fedora and sporting a Havana cigar and gold-headed cane—“a bland, thin-lipped, Stetson-hatted gambler and an organizer of prizefights on a gigantic scale.”1 But in an age of master promoters of amusements and stagecraft, the natty one was essentially a Midwestern hick who never strayed far from a perspective and patterns of speech that owed more to the dusty trail than the slick ways of moneychangers. Still, there was iron behind the folksiness and a drive best measured by results. He had the promoter’s gifts of fearlessness and creativity, and, most importantly, he knew how to make things happen. Long before his name became synonymous with grand boxing spectacles, Tex Rickard had distinguished himself from his ilk by building a reputation as an honest operator. He could be tough and cunning when he sought the upper hand, but once a deal was struck, his word was his bond. The stylish clothes and cane were nowhere near his cradle in Clay County, Missouri, where he was born George Lewis Rickard on the day after New Year’s, 1871—both the date and the place were the contention of his mother, Lucretia, but later in life, Tex seemed to juggle his provenance to suit his whims. Situated on the state’s western edge, Clay County was James (as in Jesse and Frank) country, part of a violent stretch along the Kansas border during the post–Civil War period. The James boys added their own brand of mayhem to the bloody deeds of Southern sympathizers, and posses in hot pursuit of them were a familiar tableau across the plains.

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

Finally, the commotion became too much for millwright Robert Woods Rickard. He packed Lucretia, their two children (four-year-old George and older sister Minnie), and their belongings into a covered wagon and followed neighbors (including reputed relatives of the James clan) south to Sherman, Texas, where prospects were deemed brighter. But Rickard senior, frequently ailing, and his Missouri emigrants found Sherman to be a bust. After a year, he moved westward along the northern Texas border to the freshly minted town of Cambridge in the Lone Star State’s Clay County. On Cambridge’s only street, young George—who had picked up the nickname “Dink”—shined cowboys’ boots and took a shine to the wranglers themselves. The youth learned his first business lessons, making sure that he was paid for his services and endearing himself to the cowboys, who were impressed by his diligence. The Rickards, who, with two additional children, now numbered six, lived in a shack. Making ends meet was akin to roping a wayward steer, especially given Bob Rickard’s spotty health. All the while, Dink dreamed the dreams of little boys. He listened to the tales recounted by veterans of the trail—even at a young age, he provided a willing ear for those seeking an audience. He was dazzled by Jesse James, who crossed borders to visit, leaving the gunplay behind. In the Rickard household, provisions were meager. But, stoked by the rugged natural beauty of the land and by the fires of his youthful imagination, Dink Rickard saw brighter days on the horizon. It would take some time for those brighter days to arrive. In 1882, Bob Rickard died, forcing his eldest son to leave grade school and take a job for $10 a month at a ranch in nearby Henrietta, the county seat. Rancher Jim Curtis hired and housed the determined boy to perform a variety of chores, including fetching the boss himself from daily drinking sessions with other cattlemen at saloons in town. On the last of such missions, Dink found his employer shot dead by a rival cattleman. An eyewitness injured in the gunfire told the stunned youth that the mortally wounded Curtis had grabbed the bar’s brass foot-rail to hoist himself partially off the floor, drawn his gun, and returned the favor to his assailant. John Wayne couldn’t have done it any better. Undeterred by violence and life’s sudden reversals, Dink Rickard hired on with an outfit of cattle drovers taking their herd north. Youths were common on the trail, typically tending to the horses and absorbing the japery of the hands. From the start, Rickard handled himself in a way that deflected or discouraged hazing. “He was a grave-faced, earnest, hardworking boy, always eager to please, but in no way a groveler,” wrote his biographer, Charles Samuels.2 The men were protective of the serious-minded boy, and there were many hazards that required their protection. The task of maneuvering

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tonnage-on-the-hoof overland for hundreds of miles was daunting under the best of conditions; toss a storm or an unsettling noise or a strange sight into the equation, and jittery longhorns could turn into a deadly stampede in seconds—young Rickard once steadied a herd panicked by an approaching prairie fire. The boy owned skills and a perspective beyond his years, and trail bosses and hands responded. Once, when a cowboy was shot in a squabble over a woman, Rickard—not yet in his teens—was asked to remain behind with the man, while the rest of the outfit kept their eyes peeled for the nearest doctor as they moved on with the herd. Rifle in hand, the boy sat all night with the fallen man, who died before daybreak, when a few of the men and a doctor arrived. So violence in its various manifestations—the brutal if alluring trespasses of the James gang, death by gunfight, the physical peril of a cattle drive, nature’s unpredictable temperament—visited George Rickard at a young age. Sitting up all night with a dying man in the yawning and dark expanse of the plains required no little courage from any man, much less a boy. But the privations of boyhood and the adult challenges Rickard accepted were building a foundation for future action. The boy thought big. He dreamed of growing rich. The stars that lit up prairie skies represented gold coins.3 When invited to participate in the planned robbery of a mail train, Rickard declined and told the schemer, “I ain’t gonna be a cowhand long. I got other plans.”4 Would-be bank robbers among the cowpokes also sought him out for their ill-fated escapades, but he declined those offers, too. He stayed on the trail for years, graduated to driver, watched the men spend all their earnings on whiskey and women and gambling in Omaha, Dallas, and other big towns on the circuit. He admired the nerve and forthrightness of honest lawmen. This was education, firsthand. He observed breeds—of cattle and of men. The money that the now veteran cattleman consistently sent home to his mother eventually enabled her to purchase a small farm on which she and the other children grew crops to feed themselves. But Dink Rickard—no longer dinky but a fraction shy of six feet tall and solidly built—used his leftover funds for less essential investments. He drew and dared in poker and faro, and he rolled the dice in crap games. He bought a carousel and ran it for a month, but after sampling the amusements business, decided to rejoin the cattle drovers’ ranks. Not for long, though. Moving a herd across a river, he was gored by a steer and rescued by the deft rope of a fellow cowboy. He had more than paid his dues on the trail. It was time to find another line of work. People felt that, despite his still tender age, Rickard had the courage and composure to be a lawman. In 1894, the 23-year-old Rickard was elected marshal of Henrietta, Texas. He was a law officer on commission: $2.50 for

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

each arrest, a buck for each stray animal impounded.5 Unlike those public servants he would later cultivate, the new marshal refrained from padding his pay, often dismissing dozens of rowdies with a stern warning rather than jailing them. But his style was more law-and-order than laissez-faire. He lived up to his billing, defusing potentially lethal confrontations by the force of his uncomplicated personality. Rickard’s new post coincided with his marrying Leona Bittick, a doctor’s daughter whom he had been courting for some time. The following year, a son was born to the Rickards but died after only a week, possibly of scarlet fever. A month later, a heartbroken Leona also was dead. A betting man would have been wise to wager a pile on Rickard leaving town for greener pastures. Indeed, soon enough, after hearing a former neighbor’s testimony about the action in Alaska, he resigned as marshal and made tracks for that frozen world, which turned luxuriously green come the spring thaw. He wanted to put a continent’s worth of distance between himself and the Texas town that embodied his grief. So Rickard and a local named Will Slack boarded a Texas & Pacific Railroad train and set out on their risky adventure, wending their way north. On a steamer, a passenger nicknamed Rickard “Tex”—not exactly an original handle, but one that matched the young widower’s big-time dreams and the outsized personality of his home state. The name stuck. But for now, rather than dreams of wealth and Texas bravado, the logistics of survival took center stage. Rickard would join a stampede, not of cattle, but of gold rushers, men hell-bent on extracting lustrous nuggets along the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Valley and in the forbidding reaches of Alaska. The mad dash attracted gamblers and thrill-seekers of every stripe, including a number of future impresarios and creative artists, who cut their professional teeth in the makeshift towns that sprang up to house, feed, and entertain the prospectors. In late 1895, Rickard, Slack, and other intrepid souls docked at Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle below Canada and, in the spring, hauled provisions strapped to sleds up the mountain trail toward steep, 1,250-foot-high Chilkoot Pass. On the other side, Slack, numbed by the cold, turned back. For his part, Rickard joined another party to build timber boats that somehow negotiated lakes, rapids, and the Yukon River en route to Circle City, which received supplies for miners hoping to harvest Birch Creek, 70 miles away and the newest strike. The Circle City that Tex Rickard encountered was a grid of log cabins, each the size of a bedroom. Its commercial strip featured saloons, dance halls, and gambling sites disproportionate in number to the mining population. In late spring, the settlement became home to garden delights and mosquito hordes. Out of money, Rickard took a job in one of the gambling

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5

shacks as a means, he believed, to gather a stake for prospecting. His boss, Sam Bonnifield, was perhaps the most notable gambler of the Yukon gold rush, and a rarity among the breed: an honest man. Rickard took note. The young Texan effectively began serving an apprenticeship at Bonnifield’s place. His duties ranged from menial chores to running craps and observing high-stakes card games. When Bonnifield had made enough dough (the currency was gold dust) to buy a bigger joint, he gave Rickard the existing shack and its contents. Tex Rickard was now the proprietor of a gambling establishment. For prospectors, gambling was more than just entertainment—it was an instinct. They gambled that they would find gold in the riverbeds, gambled their lives against food shortages and 50-below temperatures (and worse). Indoors at nighttime, the compulsion persisted. Women and whiskey, song and dance, were entertainments. Gambling was as automatic as breathing. Rickard must have understood this. But he was not one to take advantage. If the sourdoughs (indeed, sourdough bread meant survival for many a gold prospector) were genetically bound to gamble, they might as well get a square deal. In addition to Bonnifield, Rickard patterned his business practices after Leroy Napoleon “Jack” McQuesten, whose fur trading post had established Circle City a few years earlier. In his sixties by the time that Rickard set up shop, McQuesten had been trading in the Yukon for decades. Both the Indian fur trappers and the grizzled prospectors revered McQuesten. His willingness to extend credit and work with his debtors in their repayment was legendary. Budding gambling operative Rickard adopted that M.O. To honesty and liberal credit terms, Rickard lent a singular attentiveness to his customers. Perhaps all those lonely, sometimes threatening nights on the trail had made him a good listener. Whatever the source, Rickard fastened his blue-gray eyes on all comers seeking to unburden themselves, and his sympathetic hearings bound them to him as customers and friends. Despite these traits—or maybe, initially, because of them—Rickard lost his hand-me-down gambling house in short order and promptly went back to work for his former employer. The following year, when word arrived (several months after the fact) that the Klondike had yielded a major strike hundreds of miles to the south, the ever-opportunistic mining crowd left Circle City in the dust—and it wasn’t gold dust. Rickard interrupted his career in gambling management to try his hand at prospecting, but he arrived a little late for the party and had to settle for pieces of two claims in gold-laden, moss-ridden Bonanza Creek, formerly a moose pasture. Weary of the backbreaking work required to excavate gold and of the cumulative toll taken by the northern climes, he sold his share for $60,000 (a ton of

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

money back then, but others in the pick-and-shovel crowd were becoming instant millionaires) and planned a return to Texas. Reports that the gold bug had hopped to the town of Dawson, at the junction of the Yukon and Klondike rivers, reversed Rickard’s thinking. He was an easy sell, a quality that would advance his career rather than bury it. Digging gold out of the earth was not for him, but providing first-class gambling and drink for those who did held an undeniable appeal. Rickard and a partner went to the burgeoning tent city of Dawson, purchased $10,000 worth of lumber, obtained unskilled labor at $15 a day,6 and built The Northern. With the whiskey flowing, games of chance percolating, and French chanteuse Marie Berteau adding a dash of culture, The Northern was gangbusters for several months, its miner clientele paying up in gold dust. But business crashed in a single night when a bizarre streak of luck possessed a group of roulette players, and the house simultaneously got mauled at the faro tables. Rickard and partner lost their entire surplus, and, finally, the casino itself, into which Rickard had sunk all of his Bonanza money. To paraphrase Kipling, when you lose your pile of winnings, you start again at your beginnings. Rickard spent the next 15 months as a hired hand at several of Dawson’s finer establishments, the lion’s share of the time at the Monte Carlo, which created one of the more flamboyant fortune hunters of the age, “Swiftwater Bill” Gates, who had an eye for the ladies. His spurned wife contended that her poverty-pleading husband’s San Francisco digs had “gold toilet seats inlaid with diamonds.”7 Toilet seats, even sans diamonds, were not part of the décor in Dawson, which nonetheless spawned two-story buildings, commercial banners stretching from pole to pole, and a main street teeming with carts, horses, and milling miners. During the winter of 1897–1898, food was in short supply as a huge influx of new prospectors lured by reports of easy riches swelled the populace. The spring brought another surge of gold seekers. Meanwhile, Rickard continued his honest ways in the face of rampant fleecing by fellow gambling operators who were only partly checked by the Royal Canadian Northwest Mounted Police. At the Monte Carlo, a gangly young man named Wilson Mizner joined the workforce and manned the bar along with Rickard. A Californian and member of a wealthy distinguished family, Mizner had a verbal nimbleness matched only by his talent for larceny. The two men became friends. Rickard overlooked the skullduggery and focused on the tales of high society, a side of life that had been foreign to him. The images conveyed by Mizner stuck with Rickard, who, years later, sought to attract that segment of the population to his boxing shows. The Monte Carlo had a theater that offered lowbrow stage shows, dancing, and prizefighting. The enterprising Mizner soon took charge of the

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boxing cards (groupings of hastily arranged bouts), building turnouts by plucking natural rivals from the casino floor, exploiting ethnic resentments, overstating the chances of decided underdogs, even pitting a boxer against a wrestler. For the ever-observant Rickard, it was a primer on promotion and, in the fall of 1898, he sought once again to strike out on his own in the gambling trade. The town of Rampart, Alaska, on the south bank of the Yukon, fueled eager, peripatetic prospectors searching for nuggets downriver, and there Rickard managed to get backers for a gambling saloon, where he staged a prizefight as part of the grand opening. Prospectors packed the joint for Rickard’s maiden boxing show, encircling the fighters on the floor to, effectively, form the ring. Rickard’s career as a fight promoter thus began in the wilderness—the equivalent of a movie appearance without a screen credit. The triumph, however, was short-lived. As was often the case with boomlet towns, gold proved elusive in the nearby creeks, and fresh strikes beckoned elsewhere; the town of Rampart retreated to its native origins. His business dried up, Rickard scurried for shelter in a primitive cabin and chopped wood to survive the winter, sharing food scraps with three roommates. Their neighbors, in a similar plight, included future bestselling novelist Rex Beach,8 who had begun accumulating lots of rich story material. The next potential gold mine for leapfrogging prospectors was Nome, on Alaska’s west coast, which appealed to a new wave of would-be miners if for no other reason than that a mountain trek wasn’t required to reach it. Steamboats took hardy passengers to Saint Michael, a trading post with Russian ties, then smaller boats ferried them across Norton Sound to Nome on the Seward Peninsula. After hieing to Nome, Rickard joined forces (and meager bankrolls) with Jim White, a customer from the Dawson days, and local cigar salesman George Murphy to build and launch a new Northern,9 which opened, fittingly, on July 4, 1899. Six months shy of a new century, Rickard was back in business in Alaska—twice the size of Texas. The Northern in Nome was a success from the start. Rickard’s take was a hundred grand the first year. In his four years of part ownership, he made half a million dollars. He had parlayed a $21 investment into a relative fortune.10 During this period, Rickard burnished his management and interpersonal skills into high art, treating the sourdoughs like men of distinction, safeguarding their money when asked, taking their money—with their blessing—at the tables and the bar, granting liberal terms of credit, and lending a sympathetic ear to their troubles, his honesty always at the forefront. Meanwhile, Nome was belching gold, and instantly prosperous prospectors banked their pokes and let off steam at Rickard’s Northern.

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

The trusted proprietor had no urge to join their ranks on the beaches and in the hills; his treatment of them was paying sufficient dividends. He expanded The Northern, which now sported crystal chandeliers and a mirror behind the bar. Law and order had finally come to Nome, a dynamic with which Rickard was familiar. Town movers-and-shakers asked him to run for mayor; he declined but served on city council.11 Now all Tex needed to do was fill the void in his personal life, and the world would be gold dust at his feet. When classy singer Marie Berteau, who had performed at The Northern in Dawson, surfaced in Nome, he put her to work at the new Northern and the two quickly became a couple.12 Not for long, however, as the thrush flew the coop with an English actor who was Rickard’s polar opposite in style and mannerisms. Rickard had better luck with fighters and fight fans in Nome, promoting several boxing shows at a theater in town. He kept the momentum rolling at The Northern, as he parried or won over a succession of gamblers, scoundrels, and colorful characters. He gambled quite a bit himself and lost large sums of money. When he finally decided that he’d had enough of Alaska and its frigid weather, only $15,000 remained in his personal kitty. Northern partner Murphy bought Rickard’s interest in the casino for $50,000.13 Rickard once again had ranching on his mind, but his first stop upon returning to the United States was Seattle, where his remarried mother now made her home. What followed was a detour that sounds like the invention of a Hollywood scriptwriter, but then, so does much of Rickard’s life. The story is that Rickard, a sober soul and a man with law enforcement experience, arranged for the temporary release of a Walla Walla State Penitentiary inmate who, the ex-marshal believed, would lead him to a secret diamond mine in South Africa. So Rickard and the furloughed con journeyed to Johannesburg. When no such mine materialized, the odd couple crossed the ocean back to New York, then traveled by train to Walla Walla, where authorities welcomed back their prodigal prisoner. Maybe the promoter and the convicted burglar were not so odd a couple, at that. Rickard tended to believe people, and he believed in them. Meanwhile, he’d had a blast in Cape Town, where he had met a young touring comic, born William Claude Dukenfield, who had taken the stage name W. C. Fields. Once back in the States, Rickard worked his way south and stopped in San Francisco, where he chanced upon a Mrs. Flora Haig Myers, whose daughter Edith Mae had played the piano at The Northern during a mother-daughter trip to Nome the previous summer.14 In another version, the mother, a singer, had introduced herself to Rickard outside of Marie Berteau’s dressing room one night at The Northern, perhaps angling for a

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9

chance to spell or replace the French warbler. Mrs. Myers was now appearing in San Francisco.15 Tex remembered the daughter far better than her mama. Edith Mae was only 18 and a big-eyed sweetheart. Rickard was past 30 and a man of means. They married in Sacramento within the month. With his young bride and, soon, newly adopted baby daughter Bessie in tow, Rickard shelved his Texas ranching plans in favor of something closer and more familiar: a gambling saloon in Seattle he named The Totem. But the local protection racket took too big a bite of the action to suit him, and he promptly sold The Totem and returned to Nome, where he knew he could resume the life of a gambling-hall operator. And indeed, ex-partner Murphy reinstalled him at his former post and gave him a piece of the business, but Nome’s numbing temperatures weakened the new Mrs. Rickard and, in late 1904, the couple returned stateside, officially closing this boisterous and formative chapter in Tex Rickard’s life. He was only getting started.

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Chapter 2

DUSTUP IN THE DESERT

Nevada was back in the gold business. Silver, too. The giddy days of the Comstock Lode discoveries in the late 1850s had returned with new strikes in the southwestern part of the state. In Goldfield, its on-the-nose name conferred by the discovery of gold there in 1902, the earth pushed its treasure to the surface of a sand-filled hollow formed by the crater of a prehistoric volcano. By 1904, the town had produced $2.3 million worth of gold. Late in that year, Tex Rickard and “Kid” Highley, a churchgoing family man who had made a tidy profit from his gambling house in the lawless Klondike boomtown of Skagway on the Alaskan panhandle, arrived in Goldfield, which had Nome’s personality but not its weather. Rickard and Highley were not there to prospect for gold or silver, however. On February 15, 1905, they and a third partner opened The Northern in a Goldfield already well-stocked with such places. One of the floor bosses in their 24-hour gambling emporium was a former high-profile lawman who had been in the business in Nome. His name was Wyatt Earp.1 Rickard’s third Northern sold an ocean of booze and good will, as his stellar reputation had preceded him. He banked sacks of prospectors’ gold dust and silver dollars in a cast-iron safe, and even saved legitimate banks from failing. But what Rickard really peddled was the thrill of risk taking. Miners saw in him a kindred spirit, an inveterate gambler. He had a yen to promote a prizefight that would catch the popular imagination. He was hardly schooled in the sport of boxing, but he understood the arts of attraction and separating men from their money. He had seen firsthand Wilson Mizner’s brazen fight promotions at the Monte Carlo in Dawson

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

and tried a few of his own. Years earlier, while waiting to steam to Alaska, he had seen the look in the eyes of San Franciscans when they recalled the 1892 heavyweight title fight in which their fellow townsman, James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, dethroned the legendary John L. Sullivan in New Orleans. Rickard knew that a given boxing match could get the blood up, and he believed that he could craft an event whose appeal would extend beyond a rough-and-ready audience. The secret lay in salesmanship. So when town fathers solicited ideas to boost mining stocks and overall trade in Goldfield, Rickard conceived a plan designed to serve notice—not only on the rip-roaring mining town, but on the outside world as well. A gifted salesman may turn a dubious product into a hot ticket. Rickard lacked the expertise to judge boxing talent, but he had a keen sense of what kind of matchup intrigued the public. He also had the audacity, again and again, to launch a major promotion without cash in hand—a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality (“they” being investors as well as spectators). In 1906, his first big idea for Goldfield was a match between former featherweight champ “Terrible” Terry McGovern and former lightweight titleholder Jimmy Britt. In May, during a visit to New York to see the gambling resort of Richard Canfield, one of the first of the breed, Rickard, accompanied by former gunfighter/lawman and current newspaperman Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson, attended the McGovern-Britt fight in Madison Square Garden. Newspapers were split on which fighter had the upper hand in the no-decision, 10-round fight, which, by some accounts, was no barn burner. Rickard, however, liked what he saw and visualized a rematch on the other side of the country at The Northern. In his telegram to McGovern’s manager, Joe Humphreys, Rickard offered $15,000 for a “fight to the finish.” Believing the offer to be bogus—$15,000 was a huge fight guarantee back then, especially for the lighter weight classes— Humphreys, whose principal occupation was that of ring announcer, rejected it.2 With McGovern-Britt II no longer on the table, Rickard realized that he had overrated that proposed fight’s potential from the start. He promptly substituted a new match: “Battling” Nelson, the Durable Dane, versus Joe Gans, master boxer-puncher. Both men claimed a share of the lightweight title, Gans having most recently defended (against Britt) two years before, Nelson having whipped Britt and McGovern in his last two fights. Gans also held the world welterweight title, which he’d defended in January. Based on the record, then, Rickard’s second pairing promised superior fighters. The 24-year-old Nelson, born Oscar Mattheus Nielsen in Copenhagen, had been fighting professionally with astonishing frequency for 10 years. Gans, a Negro from Baltimore, where he once shucked oysters for a living, was nearly 32 and a veteran of more than 150 fights.

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To raise the necessary funds and properly promote the fight, Rickard and a handful of enterprising locals formed the Goldfield Athletic Association. Tex was president and one of his partners at The Northern served as treasurer. Even in a mining town, Rickard was determined to broaden the fight game’s appeal with his first large-scale boxing promotion. He sought respectability without sacrificing red-blooded spirit. He wanted women in attendance—proper, even cultured, women—and members of society’s upper strata, as originally described to him by Maestro Mizner. Rickard’s wife begged to differ. “The best people don’t go to prizefights,” Edith Mae protested.3 Tex had built for her the only brick house in Goldfield and equipped it with modern plumbing, electric lights, a piano, Brussels net curtains, and Circassian walnut furniture brought overland by rail.4 The Rickards’ house also featured turrets, stained-glass windows, and a tiny lawn that nonetheless boasted real grass, watered religiously—and, in the Nevada desert, expensively—by the master.5 In Goldfield, by many measures, the Rickards themselves were the “best people.” Rickard tacked an additional $5,000 onto his original Britt-McGovern bid to try to land Nelson-Gans—the $20,000 purse was the largest ever offered for a prizefight. Flat broke in San Francisco, Gans, known as the “Old Master,” accepted with alacrity (he somehow scared up money to send a wire and buy a train ticket to Goldfield), but Nelson’s manager, Billy Nolan, didn’t respond at first. That didn’t stop Rickard, who moved ahead with plans to promote the fight and purchased lumber in Reno to construct a stadium to hold the match. Meanwhile, San Francisco–based fight promoter James Wood Coffroth, in pursuit of the same match, had dispatched an emissary to Ogden, Utah, to meet with Nolan and Nelson. Coffroth, later called “Sunny Jim” for his seeming mastery of the weather timed for his horse-racing shows in Tijuana,6 was the top U.S. boxing promoter at this time, having arranged for four heavyweight title defenses by retired champ James Jackson Jeffries in San Francisco. More recently, he had been staging lesser championship matches and other colorful fights at Mission Street Arena, which he had built in Colma, along the El Camino Real just south of San Francisco.7 (Nelson had KO’d Britt there in the 18th round the previous September in what was hailed as the world lightweight title bout in some boxing quarters.) Coffroth had virtually invented reserved seating for spectators and sizable cash guarantees to attract name fighters. He and his San Francisco Fight Trust had survived the city’s catastrophic earthquake that April, and they were very much open for business, ready to package championship bouts up to 45 rounds during a period when the prevailing no-decision posture back East drove such fights into their laps.

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When Rickard learned of the Coffroth organization’s interest, he upped his offer to Nolan to $30,000. This time, Nelson’s manager accepted. Back in Goldfield, Rickard promptly tapped one of the local banks he had rescued for $30,000 worth of 20-dollar gold pieces, which he stacked by the bank’s front window, accompanied by a poster publicizing the fight, now scheduled for Labor Day. Big-city newspapermen came to town, saw Rickard’s stacks of gold, and found the man himself to be tirelessly cooperative, never bombastic, and damn good copy. They telegraphed their dispatches to San Francisco and New York, and the rest of the country quickly learned about the plainspoken but somewhat mysterious gambler who had prospered in the Klondike and translated his rough-hewn heritage into a fearless brand of promotion that insisted that all things be on the up-and-up. It was a good story, an American story, one that resonated with both the common man and the corporate tycoon. Rickard understood early that his personal story gave his promotions a leg up on publicity, for he was one of the production’s stars. Combined with a well-conceived boxing match that paired fighters whose own histories smacked of controversy or inspiring deeds, and whose styles and skill promised intriguing action, it all became a potent brew for the public to quaff. Shenanigans—none created by him—clung to Rickard’s promotion from the start, yet they seemed only to strengthen it. When Gans and his trainer arrived in town, a local bank president immediately shanghaied the Old Master with the promise of a sorely needed infusion of funds for a forfeit bond and training expenses. Lawrence Sullivan, major domo of Goldfield’s thriving Palace Bar and president—in name only, it turned out—of Sullivan Trust Company, asked only two things in return from his new client. First, he needed the fighter’s assurance that he would defeat Nelson, and do so handily—Sullivan cohorts would be placing sizable bets on the “colored” champ. Secondly, as a show of good faith and self-belief, Gans had to give his end of the purse to Sullivan, the money to be added to the betting pool at the most advantageous odds that Sullivan could secure. Gans was confident that he was the better fighter and would win. He also had no other benefactor in sight, although it’s a wonder he didn’t approach Rickard, who had a knack for untangling financial knots. In any event, Gans was a semi-desperate aging fighter and a black man. He agreed to turn over the money.8 The conniving Sullivan was not, in truth, the man behind Sullivan Trust Company. That distinction belonged to George Graham Rice, who, the previous year, had transformed his advertising agency into Sullivan Trust as a vehicle to promote a mining stock. Born Jacob Herzig in New York, Rice had done stretches at Sing Sing for forgery (victimizing his own father) and elsewhere for other misdeeds. He had a penchant for changing

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his name upon release from prison.9 Now, in addition to ensuring that newsmen touted Goldfield’s mines (with intentionally erroneous information), thus boosting their stocks, Rice sought a fat payoff from the fight. He coolly told Sullivan to persuade the referee to be partial to Gans and to convince Battling Nelson to tank the fight.10 The felonious Rice wanted all bases covered. Though his purse was at risk, Gans was being asked simply to fight his best fight against Nelson. During his ring career, he had received other kinds of requests from his former manager, Abraham Lincoln “Al” Herford, a Baltimore gym owner, restaurateur, racetrack bookie, and smalltime boxing promoter. In Gans, Herford had discovered a complete fighter and perhaps the best lightweight of the era. In fact, Gans was so good in gaining victory after impressive victory that Herford could no longer get a bet down on his boy. Since he had been deriving most of his income from payoffs on such wagers, something had to be done and, unlike the Illinois rail-splitter for whom he was named, Herford did not cleave to the principles of honesty. When he asked Gans to lie down in a few fights (including one in 1900 against McGovern in Chicago), the fighter felt he owed him and cooperated. Honest Al, of course, bet on his fighter’s opponent in those bouts. The problem was that Gans, a consummate boxer, did not know how to engineer his own loss convincingly. The press and the fight crowds spotted the fakery and lambasted him. Herford and Gans got back to legitimate business, and the fighter posted a string of impressive victories. Then, Herford’s ground rules changed slightly for the 1904 lightweight title defense against Britt in San Francisco. The objective in this fight was not to lose, but to carry Britt for several rounds (making him look good) and then allow him to commit a flagrant foul and, thus, be disqualified. But again, Gans was not quite up to the task—the foul (Britt’s clobbering Gans as he was rising after a fifth-round knockdown) worked out fine, but not the champion’s four pratfalls leading up to it. The fans cried foul. (That foul was quite believable.) Herford blamed Gans for ruining his little caper.11 Curiously, these missteps by Gans in an otherwise brilliant career only further whetted the boxing public’s appetite as the Goldfield fight approached. To which form would the Old Master revert? The sport of boxing traded on uncertain outcomes, and there was no such thing as bad publicity. And the publicity mill for Gans-Nelson ground with gusto. In a last-ditch effort to dissuade his rival promoter from going forward, Coffroth sent one of his San Francisco Trust buddies, Eddie Graney, to Goldfield to meet with Rickard and confirm the validity of his bankroll. Graney, who had significant experience refereeing fights, wound up asking if he could be the third man in the ring during the fight. Meanwhile, Gans’s

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putative manager, the corrupt Sullivan, had managed to wrangle the ringannouncing duties for the big event. The newspapers reported these episodes and that, at one point, Rickard sought to up the ante and wired an offer of $25,000 to a promoter in Juarez, Mexico, for a bullfight in Goldfield the morning of the Gans-Nelson bout—talk about preliminaries. Articles profiled the fighters in training and about town, informing the reading public that Gans got lucky and made a big score at the dice tables one night, and that a large turnout of Annie Oakley types and female prospectors had invaded Nelson’s camp to cheer on the Durable Dane.12 Speaking of the ladies, Rickard promised that society women from as far away as New York City would be attending the fight. The contentious Billy Nolan, however, threatened to derail the fight. First he hit up Rickard for more money, saying that he had signed on with the understanding that the promised $30,000 purse represented his fighter’s end only—Rickard eventually felt compelled to offer a concession and raised the total to $33,500 of which two-thirds would go to Nelson; Gans, as usual, acquiesced. Not yet satisfied, Nolan insisted on a ring smaller than regulation size to put the Old Master, noted for his boxing prowess, at a disadvantage. Finally, Nolan forced Gans, who was having difficulty making weight at this latter stage of his career, to weigh in at fight time, so he’d have no opportunity to restore his strength with a nourishing meal. Rickard evidently caved in to all of these requests because there was too much at stake to allow the fight to fold. For the referee, who would be the sole judge of the fight, he picked George Siler, who had officiated the fixed Gans-McGovern fight six years earlier. Sullivan buttonholed Siler at the train station and suggested that the ref would fear for life and limb if he didn’t give Gans the squarest of square deals.13 On the eve of the fight, gamblers packed the Goldfield casinos, their spirits roused to yet a higher pitch than the norm as they anticipated the big event. On fight day—Labor Day, September 2, 1906—out-of-towners took advantage of deep discounts from the Southern Pacific Railroad and rolled into town aboard flatcars filled with benches. The mines closed for the day (normally they would have stayed open on Labor Day), not just in Goldfield but the entire region, to enable their workers to see the fight. Alas, Rickard did not have a bullfight to present as a preliminary, but he had added such diversions as burro races and rock-drilling contests. The newly built arena waited in the desert, half a mile from the center of town. Goldfield’s mining mavens had staked Rickard a bankroll sufficient to construct a green-lumber bowl that sat nearly 8,000. On a clear desert day in early September, that meant a lot of bottoms sticking to the oozing benches. Among the saps were miners willing to recklessly bet their entire pokes on the fight’s outcome. But there were also luminaries in the crowd,

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such as Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (some sources say it was the president’s son Kermit), and, reportedly, three hundred of Rickard’s promised spectators drawn from the fairer sex.14 Every male covered his skull with a straw or cowboy hat. Photographers perched on stilt-legged stands on either side of the ring. Ring announcer Sullivan flubbed the introductions. Then, following a preliminary bout that ended in a second-round knockout and a 45-minute delay that unsettled a crowd sporting more than a few pistols, the mainevent fighters appeared for their weigh-in at ringside. This was Gans’s first test, for if he broke through the 133-pound limit, he would forfeit his purse and cause Sullivan and Rice to lose their investment in him, not to mention any potential betting payoff. The Old Master appeared cut to a fine edge. Taking no chances, he had shaved off all of his hair, both up top and on his body. When he made the weight and stepped into the ring, the arena shook with cheers—Gans was the crowd favorite by a wide margin. When Nelson, a natural lightweight, followed suit, he encountered a different reception: no gunfire, but lots of hooting.15 The threatening actions of Nelson’s manager had jeopardized the fight in the minds of the Goldfield faithful, and the Dane, whose personal style matched his roughhouse ring tactics, had done nothing to mollify the situation and so was guilty by association. The spirited Goldfield crowd sat in the corner of the Negro, this at a time when black contenders for the heavyweight title were largely limited to fighting each other. (Jack Johnson would change that two years later, but he had to go to Australia to do it.) If Rickard had failed to get his bullfight, Gans-Nelson provided a close approximation of one in the first 10 rounds, with the Dane making mostly cross-armed, ineffectual rushes and his face absorbing a strafing from the Old Master’s assortment of precision punches, delivered in classic standup style. But the Durable One justified his sobriquet and, on orders from his corner, stepped up his dogged pursuit and marginally legal infighting tactics. He quickly graduated to foul play, first butting his opponent, then hitting below the belt, actions that inflamed a crowd already antagonistic toward him. Siler issued warnings, but they did not discourage Nelson, and the ref seemed disinclined to do anything further. The fight—a fight to the finish—advanced past the 20th round, then past the 30th. Nelson was beginning to look like a gargoyle, but he continued his aggression and fouling, drawing blood from Gans, who kept raking him but couldn’t put him away. Sullivan (who, apparently, hadn’t gotten to the Dane), Rice, and other high rollers grew uneasy, their hefty bets in the balance. Finally, in the 42nd round(!), Nelson delivered the most flagrant of his fouls, belting Gans in the groin—the Dane either believed by this time that he was immune to being penalized, or he felt that his durability had been tested long enough.

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The blow dropped Gans, who lay on the canvas in ignominious pain. Siler hesitated a moment, then disqualified Nelson. Afterward, Nolan remained true to form and accused the ref of favoring Gans.16 It was a tawdry ending to what had been in many ways an exciting fight and an undeniable test of stamina, pain thresholds, and—to a lesser extent—boxing ability. Rickard’s gate had been nearly $70,000, from which he netted $13,215.17 He had snared the mantle of “Best in the West” in the art of promoting prizefighting and turned a nice profit to boot. More significantly, the skills he had developed in promoting the Goldfield fight would serve him well the rest of his career—he had crafted a template of sorts. There would be more dustups in the desert, more collisions in the oppressive summer heat, more sticky lumber stadiums constructed expressly for the occasion, more matchups with built-in conflict and backstories to fire the public imagination, more sly manipulation to embellish them even further. Several hundred miles to the southwest, where groves of orange trees perfumed the air and the Pacific Ocean seemed manifest destiny incarnate, a handful of Jewish immigrant tradesmen and peddlers would soon commercialize the new art form of motion pictures and transform the culture. They would shape their products for the country’s mass Christian audience. Born in the heartland and tempered by New World, rather than European, hardships, Tex Rickard was on his way to becoming a mogul in an allied field, the biggest operator in the world of sport, one quite pleased to play to boisterous crowds across the land, Jewish or Gentile, male or female, drunk or sober.

Chapter 3

THE MOUTHS THAT ROARED

More than a quest for riches, the push west was a chance to remake a man’s life in the image of his youthful dreams. Westward treks required physical toughness and the courage to dare. They implied hardship but promised adventure and, if the fates complied, reward. Individual stories may be sketchy and records nonexistent, but the essential truth of the venture persists. For Philip Leo McKernan, the stake of a lifetime was a gold mine in Montana—a hundred grand in equity and not a penny to show for it, thanks to the bankers’ thievery.1 The costly lesson was not lost on the mine owner’s son, born on a farm in or near Iron Mountain, Michigan, on August 17, 1882. Years later, after John Leo McKernan had become Jack Kearns and then “Doc” Kearns, he made sure that he was always on the right side of any business deal. By that time, he characterized himself as “a manipulator,”2 a term he doubtlessly regarded as a reflection of talent and hard work rather than disrepute. Indisputably, he was shrewd, dauntless, and unwavering once he fixed his eyes on a prize, whether a shapely chorine or the heavyweight crown. He had only a third-grade education,3 yet he all but invented the art of courting (read: seducing) the sporting press in an age when it consisted solely of newspapermen whose prose often aggrandized their subject-gladiators and shed only occasional rays of realistic light. In verbal dexterity and fulsomeness, Kearns was their equal. His patter and powers of persuasion sprang from a robust, picaresque youth. In addition to a yearning for excitement and the big payoff, young

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John Leo inherited his father’s peripatetic ways. A Civil War veteran, the old man had been a scout for the Union Army following the gold mine debacle. He shifted his family from the Michigan farm to a North Dakota ranch and then to the newly established state of Washington, where he led a more mundane life as a grocer and, later, a newspaper scribe in Seattle. His son, however, was just beginning to acquire a man’s sea legs. As a teenager, John Leo left home to chase the prospectors’ dream in the Klondike region of northwest Canada, stowing away on a freighter that delivered him to Skagway, Alaska, a prime launch point to reach the 1896 gold strike across the border.4 He stepped into the wilderness, surviving on his wits and the willingness of rugged men to lend a hand to a reckless youth. When gold was discovered two years later in Nome, McKernan journeyed up Alaska’s western shores to join the thousands of claim-seekers storming the site. There, he followed the miners into The Northern saloon and soon fell under the spell of Wilson Mizner, who put him to work at that raucous gambling emporium where future giants of show business forged their entrepreneurial personalities.5 When Mizner wasn’t promoting the paying customers or sidling up to extravagantly stockinged showgirls, he weighed gold dust offered as payment by drinkers and gamblers, managing to collect the spillage for himself. He showed young McKernan how to collect gold dust on the fingertips (and, ultimately, the scalp) during a weigh-in by running his hands through his hair, which was smartly lacquered with syrup masquerading as hair tonic.6 Every trade had its tricks. Possessed of a keen eye for promotion, the shameless Mizner roped youthful McKernan into a bare-knuckles fight in a saloon and paid off the ref to have the opponent disqualified. The teenager from Seattle may have encountered other present or future luminaries who frequented The Northern and other clubs, including already legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. One celebrity he avoided, McKernan always maintained, was head dealer Tex Rickard, who struck the youth as cold and unapproachable.7 While the action was heady, the payoffs were slim. As with countless others, a strike eluded McKernan. Gold lost its luster, and he returned to Seattle just before the turn of the 20th century. Back on familiar ground, he proceeded to compile a variegated work history. He smuggled Chinese immigrants into the country from Canada for a fee, drove a delivery wagon, and plucked healthy muscular dogs off the street for a broker who was furnishing them for dogsled duty in the Yukon. He hired out on a whaler, worked in lumber camps and harvest fields, and sold cemetery plots. His stated resume also included barkeep, boxing-club owner, and baseball player. Somewhere along the line, he made the acquaintance of brawling novelist Jack London—a man of the sea and of gold rushes—who took a liking to the young wayfarer and gave him the name “Jack Kearns,” after one of the author’s fictional characters.8

THE MOUTHS THAT ROARED

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Even today, though, resumes—like oil futures—are subject to inflation. Years later, when the Fox Movietone camera caught Jack “Doc” Kearns showcasing his marquee fighter of the moment, middleweight champion Mickey Walker, he demonstrated the skills of the one job classification that covered all: master hustler. He had the panache and resonant voice of a big top ringmaster, and the sleight-of-hand of a conjurer. As a young man of average build and uncommon guts, Kearns took to San Francisco’s raucous Barbary Coast, chief comfort zone for the California Gold Rush of a half-century earlier and still one of the world capitals of bad behavior—territory Kearns knew well from his days in Nome and the Klondike. As a bouncer, he soon began to finesse choleric drunks out of pseudo-civilized saloons. Wandering elsewhere in search of less hazardous work, he punched cows in Billings, Montana, piloted a primitive taxicab in Seattle, and drove a team of horses in Spokane after digging into the sandand-gravel business in that city. He also launched a weekly newspaper in Spokane, but it lasted for only two editions. Along the way came an arrest for selling liquor to a minor; an eight-month stretch at, he claimed, a reformatory in Walla Walla, Washington; and a short-lived marriage. The life of a small businessman held no appeal for Jack Kearns. But like a bouncer, a boxer got by on sock and guile—now that was a living. San Francisco sported perhaps the liveliest boxing scene in the country. Kearns looked up Dal Hawkins, a stocky veteran featherweight who had been the boxing instructor at the Seattle Athletic Club, and who had the distinction of having decisioned the great black lightweight Joe Gans in 1896 (before twice losing to him by early knockout four years later, still six years removed from Tex Rickard’s Battle of Goldfield). Hawkins tutored Kearns in the finer points of timing, punching, and ring generalship, lessons that Kearns would pass on to fighters he later managed. And that was to become his primary direction: to steer the fortunes of fighters and gain his own. By his own count, Kearns fought in more than 60 bouts, the first of which took place in Billings in 1900, followed by a match in Butte and then dozens more. The record books, however, show only two pro fights: a knockout loss to journeyman lightweight Maurice Thompson in 1906 at the Grand Opera House in Victor, Colorado, and the same result at the hands of Canadian lightweight Billy Lauder two years later in Calgary. Kearns claimed (via his posthumous autobiography) that, when he faced Thompson in Victor, he won by decision. In another apparently faulty recollection, Kearns indicated that he adopted his new surname when he substituted for Tim Kearns on a fight card in Seattle (thus denying London the honor). The bout in question, however, doesn’t show on the Massachusetts lightweight’s record and took place when he was fighting, as he almost always did, on the East Coast.

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

So if Jack Kearns sang no arias as a pugilist (or as an archivist), he still was made for the fight game—just not as a combatant. He could talk faster than he could jab—and with more impact. A fight manager dealt strictly in verbal jousts; he might eat crow, but no leather. Kearns started his management career on a predictably low level, latching onto Louis “Kid” Scaler, a Spokane lightweight, who, as a saloonkeeper, had teamed with his future fight manager to sell liquor to a 15-year-old girl, a transaction that resulted in the arrest of both men in March 1909.9 (Kearns claimed to have handled Freddie Weeks, of Cripple Creek, Colorado, in the January 14, 1909, featherweight championship fight against titleholder Abe Attell in Goldfield, Nevada, but this is questionable, coming as it did so soon before the sleazy arrest.) Kearns’s dubious stable grew when he took on one William Uren, a Grass Valley, California, native who had substituted for amateur boxer Dick Hyland in a bout at the San Francisco Athletic Club and decided to keep the latter’s name; identity theft was a simple matter among lower-echelon fighters. To “Fighting” Dick Hyland, Kearns added Petaluma, California, middleweight “Fighting” Billy Murray. They would soon make tracks for Australia. Kearns would trod the boxing muck for quite awhile, but at some point, while trying to drum up a fight in Los Angeles, he met showman-sportsman William Aloysius Brady and realized that image went a long way. Brady, a creature of the San Francisco and New York stages, had segued into boxing and managed a couple of James J’s: Corbett and Jeffries. Not a bad parlay. A prototypical big spender of the era, the sartorially splendid Brady taught Kearns the importance of going first class. It was a lesson that the younger promoter learned well. By this time, the boxing world had been knocked on its collective can by a man born Arthur John Johnson to former slaves in Galveston, Texas, in 1878. The youth they called “L’il Artha” had stayed out of trouble and close to his mother and sisters, working on the docks and taking other menial jobs. He had grown up to be a marvelous specimen, a prepossessing physical force with a singular talent to dominate virtually every opponent he ever faced in the ring. He could infuriate white society yet enchant at least some of its women, even those who aspired to class and culture. He postured, taunted, beamed incandescently, wore dazzling suits with sublime elegance, and commanded the prize ring with swift, graceful movement and an arsenal of punches that quickly found the range and destroyed the target. If GQ magazine had existed in his day, Jack Johnson would have been its cover boy a record number of times. Instead, to the boxing establishment and the U.S. public, he was merely “boy.”

THE MOUTHS THAT ROARED

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As a teenager apprenticed to a Dallas painter, Johnson participated in after-work sparring sessions cultivated by his employer, who stocked the shop with boxing gloves and loved the sport. He noticed the size, speed, and punching power of his young charge, and suggested that he train seriously for the ring.10 Early records for fighters of that era are often sketchy or nonexistent, but it is likely that Johnson’s first fight for pay took place in the summer of 1895 against a fellow dockworker. The combatants, policed by a referee and cheered on by an indigenous crowd, went at each other within a ring outlined in the sand. Johnson won the fight and the purse of a buck-fifty. The future Galveston Giant was still growing and filling out, clearly destined to reach heavyweight proportions and then some. But a Negro fighter faced the same kind of barriers in boxing’s heavyweight division as a Negro ballplayer faced in organized baseball. White men exerted a stranglehold on the heavyweight championship. Said John L. Sullivan the year that his prizefighting career began, which coincided with the year of Jack Johnson’s birth: “I will not fight a Negro. I never have and I never will.”11 The heavyweight crown needed to be kept pure, and the white heavyweight champ needed to be spared the ignominy of losing to a black man. Though his fight venues shifted from sand spit to convention hall, gymnasium, and athletic club, Johnson ventured out of Galveston only twice until 1901, both times for bouts against black fighter John Klondike Haines (gold rush connection unknown), who stopped Johnson in five in Chicago, then lost by a 14th-round TKO in Memphis in December 1900, two-and-a-half months after the epic hurricane that blasted Galveston, killing more than 6,000 people. In February, Johnson’s fight against Joe Choynski, arranged by young Chicago promoter Jack Curley at the behest of a Texas promoter desirous of silencing Johnson, marked a pivotal point in the Galveston native’s career. Choynski, a Jewish fighter whose blond pompadour conferred upon him the less-than-alpha-male moniker of “Chrysanthemum Joe,” spanned the eras, bare-knuckle to gloved combatants conforming to Marquess of Queensberry rules. He had fought an exhibition with Sullivan in 1891, debuted for real against Corbett and faced him three other times, and tangled with then future heavyweight champs Bob Fitzsimmons and James J. Jeffries in the 1890s. Ten years older than Johnson, Choynski took the younger fighter to school in their scheduled 20-rounder in Galveston, knocking him out with a left hook in the third. The schooling continued in a Galveston jail cell for 11 days, the sentence given each man ostensibly for flouting the unevenly enforced state law forbidding prizefights. But in reality, their sentences served a political agenda that reflected a rising tide of anti-boxing sentiment. Both fighters did their time during the daytime, as the trusting county sheriff released them overnight.

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Johnson emerged wiser in the ways of the ring. He also had adopted an unshakable self-belief: he was going to be the heavyweight champion. This perspective, of course, flew in the face of the segregationist ways of the fight game, but Johnson believed that he was the man to change the complexion. He attended James J. Jeffries’s heavyweight title defense in San Francisco in November 1901, watched the champion pulverize tough Gus Ruhlin, and nonetheless blithely offered, “I could lick that fellow myself.”12 Managed by a Mexican American named Frank Carillo and fighting in northern California, Johnson lost a close decision and then drew with formidable black heavyweight Hank Griffin before shifting south for a series of fights promoted by dapper Tom McCarey at Hazard’s Pavilion, a large wooden building in downtown Los Angeles. Carillo, who concealed a Colt and ignored scruples to make a buck, took half of his new fighter’s earnings but upgraded his competition and increased his visibility. McCarey sought to elevate boxing’s business profile in Los Angeles. In his first fight at Hazard’s, Johnson faced the reigning champion’s younger brother, Jack Jeffries, a good-looking athletic type with his own designs on the title, though his ring experience was less extensive than Johnson’s. The newspapers grabbed the public’s attention by playing up the white-black angle, and the presence of the heavyweight champ at the fight further spiked the gate. As for the action in the ring, Johnson toyed with Jeffries lite for four rounds, then put him to sleep in the fifth. Johnson’s career now progressed along a higher trajectory. Sandwiched around a victory over another Curley-managed white contender in San Francisco, he fought five more times at Hazard’s into early 1903, winning and defending the world “colored” heavyweight title, in the last two, respectively, and changing managers along the way. He went east and won fights in Boston and Philadelphia, then hopped back and forth from east to west for the next 17 months, through March 1905. During this period, Johnson fought eight times, dominating mostly rising black heavyweights until finally losing in San Francisco to Marvin Hart, dubbed the Fighting Kentuckian and one of the three top white contenders. Prior to the loss to Hart, the press had been divided about Johnson, some sportswriters frustrated by his preening and stretches of lethargy in the ring, others touting him as the top contender for the heavyweight crown—not just the “colored” version. If the public was edging toward the camp that sought to justify a Johnson-Jeffries match (a moot goal because Jeffries, like Sullivan and others before him, refused to fight a black man with the championship on the line, and no authority existed to compel him), many people hated Johnson enough to hurl the most vicious epithets imaginable from ringside and even threaten to kill him. He absorbed their wrath—in fact,

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he intensified it with his high-wattage smile and cocky public demeanor, his cultivating of white women—and continued to build his persona and record. Jeffries, of course, had fought black fighters—he had TKO’d the estimable Peter Jackson, and, in his last fight before knocking out Bob Fitzsimmons in 1899 to win the title, had decisioned a Tennessean named Bob Armstrong. But Armstrong was no more than a journeyman fighter, and Jackson, the Black Prince from Australia, came from another era in boxing. He was closing in on 37 at the time, at the tail end of a career frustrated by Sullivan’s declining to meet him—his loss to Jeffries was just the second in 53 outings and the first in 14 years. Jack Johnson was neither journeyman nor past his prime, and frustration was not in his playbook. Many felt that Jeffries’s avoidance had less to do with the prospect of the title falling into a Negro’s hands than it did with his risking health and reputation in the ring against Jack Johnson. The loss to Hart, however, slowed the Johnson express, though the outcome had been questionable. The brawling Kentuckian had vowed not to fight a Negro, but when two matches with top white contenders failed to materialize, he agreed to meet Johnson, who was a big favorite to win the scheduled 20-round fight. Promoter Alexander Greggains, a former boxer with a lack of appreciation for Johnson’s tendency to play and stall during the course of a fight, doubled as referee for the bout and warned Johnson that he “must fight all the time.”13 For the first half of the fight, Johnson boxed the Kentuckian’s ears off but did not quite meet the ref ’s standard of constant action. Instead of picking up the pace during the second half, Johnson—perhaps tired (though it is difficult to see how), more likely bored—did the reverse, allowing Hart to mount the semblance of a body attack. Seconds before the end of the 20th round, a camera flash disoriented the fighters, but Hart managed to rock Johnson with a right hand. At the bell, Johnson seemed to search for his legs for a second or two, providing Greggains with just the right moment. The referee-promoter instantly designated Hart the winner.14 Backed by many in the press who agreed with him that he had been jobbed, Johnson decided to test his boxing fortunes back East once again. Fighting at least 23 times—seven against the tough, skilled New Jersey heavyweight, Joe Jeannette—from April 1905 to November 1906, he plowed through a cast of mostly strong opponents that also included Boston transplant Sam Langford, a native of Nova Scotia and a talented, powerful fighter (he had beaten Joe Gans), who nonetheless was half Johnson’s size. Fighting in Langford’s backyard of Chelsea, Massachusetts, Johnson floored the smaller man but could not keep him there en route to a 15-round decision.

26

THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

Meanwhile, the heavyweight crown had changed heads. Jeffries married, retreated with his bride to an alfalfa farm near Los Angeles, and retired from boxing. He agreed to referee a match between Johnson’s spurious conqueror, Hart (now managed by Curley), and former light-heavyweight champ Jack Root, a fight trumped up to determine Jeffries’s successor. Hart became the putative heavyweight champion when he knocked out the lighter Root in the 12th round. Jeffries raised Hart’s hand before a small crowd in Reno, Nevada. Jeffries was again the third man in the ring seven months later, this time in Los Angeles for a fight promoted by the ambitious McCarey, as Hart gave a title shot to light-heavyweight Tommy Burns, who had lost to three of the top contenders. Burns, a Canadian born Noah Brusso, conceded (as had Root) about 20 pounds to Hart, but riled the Kentuckian with what we call today “trash talk,” eroding the bigger man’s already small store of discipline and winning a lopsided decision over 20 rounds. Afterward, the new, unlikely heavyweight champion vowed to defend his title “against all comers . . . without regard to color.”15 Before integrating the heavyweight picture, though, he wanted to defend the title against some qualified white fighters. And he did so, knocking out Fireman Jim Flynn (who would figure prominently in the careers of Johnson and Jack Dempsey) and defeating the man many considered the best of the lot, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, both fights in Los Angeles. Johnson had a new manager at this point, Australian Sam Fitzpatrick, and it was off to Australia they sailed after all the ranking white heavyweights in the United States rejected their overtures. The Aussies took to the American Negro, or at least acted like they did until a young socialite flipped for him, and a legal row with his Australian promoter hastened his departure. Johnson fought twice down under, first preserving his “colored” title in Sydney by knocking out the best heavyweight in the land, Peter Felix, with an uppercut to the chin in the first round, and then coasting before dispatching an amateurish Bill Lang in the ninth round in Melbourne. Back in the United States, Johnson won four straight fights in as many months, the first of which began to change the perception of his hard-core doubters in the states. Jeffries’s predecessor, New Zealander Bob Fitzsimmons, was 44 when he fought Jack Johnson on July 17, 1907, in Philadelphia. Fitzsimmons’s conventional color line had precluded any fight with a younger Johnson. Now it was no match at all—Johnson knocked the former champ out in the second round. The performance was no true barometer, but the Fitzsimmons name meant something, and Johnson’s stock improved. A month later, Johnson traveled a short distance to Reading, Pennsylvania, to face John L. Sullivan protégé “Kid” Cutler in the latter’s fourth, and what proved to be his last, fight; in the opening round,

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Johnson flashed his right hand, and Cutler sank to the canvas for keeps. In November, the scene shifted to San Francisco, where Johnson doused Fireman Flynn with a knockout in the 11th round, beating Burns’s timetable by four rounds. The winner said he “stood ready to fight him [Burns] any time.”16 In a later era, Muhammad Ali might have said, “I want Burns!” Burns, however, had embarked upon a fighting tour of Europe, knocking out softies in London, Dublin, and Paris. He wanted no part of Jack Johnson, but promoters expressed interest in matching the two of them, including London’s National Sporting Club, San Francisco’s Jim Coffroth, and a newcomer named Tex Rickard, who had pulled off a surprise success of major proportions in Goldfield, Nevada. Pursuing Burns overseas, Johnson and manager Fitzpatrick showed up at the Sporting Club offices and pocketed an offer of $12,500 from manager Arthur Frederick Bettinson.17 When word reached Burns, he said he would not fight Johnson for anything less than $30,000, a dollar figure that he and the rest of the boxing world regarded as preemptive. Burns soon hopped continents for more easy paydays in Australia, while Johnson stayed ring-ready—well, not really—with a July 1908 fight that produced an eighth-round TKO of huge, ponderous Ben Taylor, owner of a 3-8-2 record. Ironically, the Burns junket to Australia enabled Johnson finally to run his man to ground. Sydney promoter Hugh McIntosh had brought the champion to town to coincide with the arrival of America’s naval fleet sent by President Theodore Roosevelt on a worldwide voyage to flex its muscles. Thousands of U.S. sailors, ashore at loose ends, seemed like catnip for a big event, figured McIntosh, who had successfully promoted bike races and his boss’s daughter in Sydney. He offered Burns $20,000 for two fights and built a 15,000-seat stadium on Rushcutter’s Bay just east of Sydney.18 There, Burns defended his title against homegrown hero Bill Squires, knocking out the crowd favorite in the 13th round before a full house. Little more than a week later, Burns and McIntosh followed the fleet to Melbourne, where the champion took six rounds to knock out Bill Lang, the Aussie outclassed in the same city by Johnson a year and a half earlier. The two fights were big moneymakers for McIntosh and, all the while, he had been tapping well-to-do Australian blokes to help build the heretofore unimaginable $30,000 purse that would all but force Burns into the ring against Johnson. Then the fast-moving promoter sewed up Johnson with a lowball offer of $5,000.19 The champion could not go back on his word, which had been very public. And Johnson, who had been on the hunt for years, was not about to reject even an inequitable arrangement if it meant fighting for the world heavyweight championship, encompassing white, black, and in-between.

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On this second visit to Australia, Johnson encountered true prejudice surfacing in ugly ways, now that people understood that the heavyweight title might pass to a black man (and worse, not one of their own). Burns was lionized and Johnson denigrated up to the moment they stepped into the ring in the open-air stadium on Rushcutter’s Bay on the day after Christmas (Boxing Day in Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, though the focus is not fisticuffs, but additional holiday gift-giving). The fight began shortly after 11 a.m., and a Johnson uppercut to the chin sent the smaller Burns to the canvas almost before the corner men had withdrawn their buckets from the ring. For the champion, it was downhill from there. With promoter-referee McIntosh looking on dolefully, Johnson extended the fight—not, this time, due to boredom or a desire to entertain, but to punish Burns. The champion absorbed a fearful battering and was on his way out in the 14th round, when police at ringside signaled that the fight be stopped. As they climbed into the ring, McIntosh complied, declaring Johnson the winner. The constabulary had not wanted the white crowd to see its champion knocked out by a black man. But no one could deny that the heavyweight championship of the world had changed colors.

Chapter 4

COLOR OF THE CROWN

The two principals at Sullivan Trust Company in Goldfield had won a lot of dough by betting on Joe Gans, but not nearly enough to stave off the unraveling of the company, whose stock price was collapsing. Rice blamed his partner for his inept performance as ring announcer in the Labor Day extravaganza. Sullivan took out his frustrations by trying to plug Rickard with a six-shooter, only to embarrass himself yet again when the exmarshal/promoter snatched the gun out of his hand and flung it across the barroom floor. Gans fought again in the Nevada desert, this time on a frigid New Year’s Day, 1907, in the neighboring town of Tonopah, whose original strikes preceded Goldfield’s. The promotion was not Rickard’s, the site was more barn than arena, and the turnout was meager. Apparently, such undertakings needed the Rickard touch. That year, tragedy visited Rickard. Adopted daughter Bessie died from septicemia following a tonsillectomy. For the second time, Tex buried a child. Edith Mae recovered from a bout with diphtheria, but the death of her young child had struck a greater blow, and she needed care in one form or another for the rest of her life. The country had its own strife to contend with. A nationwide recession had deepened, following an October rout on Wall Street during which stock prices plummeted and banks evaporated—the deep pockets of financier supreme John Pierpont Morgan kept the damage from spiraling into disaster. In the Nevada desert, however, gold was still booming. The next bonanza was in Rawhide, a morning’s drive from Goldfield. Rickard couldn’t resist. In early 1908, partner Kid Highley bought out his interest

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in The Northern, and Rickard promptly built a new, if more modest, version of it in Rawhide. There to greet him was none other than G. G. Rice, who had selected Rawhide as new fertile ground for his scams. While Rice was a hard-core swindler with a trail (that would only lengthen) of victims, Rickard was a master pitchman who might shade the truth, but only in the service of boosting his promotion. Nonetheless, the two shared an interest in promoting Rawhide to prospective visitors and investors in the desert and beyond, and jointly launched a publicity campaign that was a thing of beauty, if not always journalistically sound. But even the most inventive ballyhoo was no match for dried-up strikes, or for the rampaging fire that treated Rickard’s latest Northern—and much of the tinderbox town— like kindling. Meanwhile, Tex had been acquiring some claims of his own. When he moved on to the town of Ely, a company with extensive iron holdings in Minnesota and Michigan hired him to purchase mining properties in Nevada. The head of the Minnesota Iron Company, Thomas F. Cole, had also made a fortune investing in copper.1 When Rickard learned that Jack Johnson had embarrassed Tommy Burns in Australia to win the heavyweight boxing championship, he began to think less about iron and more about gold—the kind of gold he might mine from promoting a title fight of greater import than Gans-Nelson. Burns’s facial lacerations had barely been swabbed before the international press began to vilify the new champion. Novelist Jack London, by this time renowned for the short story The Call of the Wild and the novel The Sea-Wolf, had covered the Johnson-Burns fight at the behest of the New York Herald. Although his report acknowledged Johnson’s superiority with his fists, it decried the Negro’s “golden smile” and depicted him as heartless in the way that he belittled and flogged outmatched opponents. London’s plea that retired champion Jeffries “emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face” resonated across white America and beyond.2 Jeffries continued to state his intention to stay retired. He was a bear of a man and, in his pre-boxing days, had toiled as a boilermaker, sweating and hammering from dawn until darkness. Now he liked to raise his crops, hunt and fish, drink and smoke and, presumably, eat—his weight had climbed to nearly 300 pounds. True, he needed money due to the red ink hemorrhaged by his saloon and fight arena near Los Angeles, but the popular ex-champion did not have to return to the prize ring to make money. He devised a compromise that would be bankrolled by vaudeville agent William Morris to the tune of $2,500 a week: Jeffries would tour the country and put on boxing exhibitions, then invite the public to determine his fitness to resume battle in earnest, specifically against Jack Johnson.

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There is nothing sadder in sports than an old boxing champion attempting to make a comeback; so it was before Jeffries, and so it has been in the many decades since. It is always a bad idea, whether fueled by money problems, the desire to reclaim the spotlight, or the temptation to test oneself against the erosions of time. Big Jeff had one foot on that perilous trail. Public insistence and idolatry would soon drag his other foot right off the farm. Meanwhile, Johnson steamed from Brisbane, Australia, to Vancouver, where, during his stopover, he fought a six-round exhibition with future Hollywood lug Victor McLaglen, knocking down the big Brit-turnedCanadian in the first round and holding his fire thereafter. Next stop, Chicago, and after that, Manhattan, where his fans treated him to a parade. In April 1909, Jeffries finally yielded to public pressure and the seduction of delusion, announcing before a crowd at a Broadway theater that he planned to train for an eventual fight with Jack Johnson. While Jeffries toured and trained, Johnson fought Philadelphia Jack O’Brien to a desultory draw in the latter’s hometown, and won an equally uninspiring decision in Pittsburgh against Tony Ross, a squat heavyweight whose anglicized name shortened the multi-syllabic Italian one. The peculiarly listless champion then shifted venues to Coffroth’s Mission Street Arena in San Francisco for two fights designed to hoodwink the public. His September minuet with sluggish Al Kaufman, a White Hope who hit what he could find, showcased the champion’s cockiness and the challenger’s ineptness over 10 rounds, giving Johnson an unenthusiastic newspaper decision but building the gate for the following month’s face-off with the brawling, popular middleweight champ, Stanley Ketchel. For that fight, the two camps struck an apparent deal that entailed Johnson carrying his man through the scheduled 20 rounds to safeguard the smaller Ketchel’s health and boost the potential of subsequent film distribution. (Films of high-profile boxing matches had expanded the business plans of promoters—McIntosh energetically marketed his Johnson-Burns footage and made serious money.) Ketchel, in return, would not get smart and try to sneak in a telling blow on the coasting champion. The fight adhered to the script for 11 rounds, with Johnson showboating, picking off punches, and landing a few of his own. Then, in the 12th, acting either on instinct or his manager’s instructions, Ketchel surprised Johnson with an overhand right, sending him to the canvas for the briefest of moments. Johnson sprang up and forward instantaneously, and delivered a right uppercut that knocked Ketchel spread-eagled on his back and unconscious, dislodging at least four teeth. Johnson’s momentum had carried him over the falling Ketchel and driven him to his knees, as if the two were mere boys engaged in an anything-goes game of leapfrog.

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No White Hopes of any size could hope to surmount Johnson, except perhaps the ex-champion now vacationing in Europe. Jim Jeffries was reported to be seasick as he headed home to the United States. A fight with Johnson, boxing insiders believed, would do worse for his equilibrium. On October 29, 1909, at the Albany Hotel on Broadway, a much trimmer Jeffries and Johnson met before a crowd of sportswriters and other interested parties to sign an agreement. They settled on a 45-round fight to take place the following July 4 (anticipating Rocky Balboa by 67 years), the winner taking 75 percent, the loser taking 25 percent. Promoters were invited to submit bids within 30 days.3 For the moneymen, the scramble was on. Despite Tex Rickard’s large success in small-market Goldfield, his was hardly the first name bandied about by the boxing cognoscenti of the moment, as they anticipated who might back Johnson-Jeffries. However, editorial cartoonist Arthur V. Buel, who had viewed Rickard’s desert escapade with displeasure, issued a newspaper challenge, “Where’s the big-talking Tex Rickard now?” and caricatured the homespun promoter as a jackass.4 But Rickard’s brand of stubbornness consisted of self-belief and an optimism born of his track record of overcoming obstacles. He was particularly adept at borrowing money on good faith alone, a knack that served him well when he approached his deeppockets employer, coal baron Thomas Cole, who gave him a war chest for Johnson-Jeffries.5 He also may have been staked by George Wingfield, who had owned a gambling parlor in Tonopah,6 and who had subsequently made mining fortunes there and in Goldfield. Suitably armed, Rickard took a train to Pittsburgh in late November and caught up with Johnson on the vaudeville circuit. The promoter’s reputation had preceded him, and the champion was all ears. Rickard offered a purse of $101,000, presumably a grand more than the amount he expected others to bid. He also offered Johnson a signing bonus of $5,000—half of it right away in three crisp bills—and a split with Jeffries of two-thirds of the film rights. Finally, Rickard promised a sealskin coat for Belle Schreiber, the woman accompanying the champ and introduced as “Mrs. Jack Johnson.” Johnson signed promptly with Rickard, and the three of them took the train that night to New York, where Rickard quickly learned that San Francisco-based promoter Jack Gleason, a former Broadway performer, had signed Jeffries for a $10,000 bonus. The well-fed, shambling San Franciscan provided a contrast to Rickard’s trim, tailored appearance. Between the two of them, they now controlled the fight’s principals, and they realized that it was in their best interests to strike a deal. Tex made sure to double Johnson’s bonus to match that promised Jeffries.7 Rickard and Gleason, then, had the fight virtually sewn up as they joined the other promoters for the formal opening of bids on November 30.

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The unveiling had been scheduled to take place in the same Albany Hotel where the two combatants had drawn up their personal agreement a month earlier, but the city district attorney chased the bidders out of Manhattan, arguing that the state’s current prohibition of prizefighting (like the weather, the state’s position vis-à-vis boxing was subject to sudden change) extended to bids for the rights as well, regardless of the fight’s eventual location (the early choice was San Francisco). So the assemblage, which included stakeholder Robert Murphy, owner of the Albany, ferried across the Hudson and reconvened at Meyer’s Hotel, a stately four-story brick pile in Hoboken on the New Jersey waterfront. Among the motley, fleshy crew of bidders, Rickard stood out—one newspaperman wrote that he was “sinewy as a cowboy” and “alert as an eagle,” and “bit his words off in a decisive manner.”8 In addition to Rickard and “partner” Gleason, who was doubling as either co-partner or proxy of San Francisco promoter Jim Coffroth, those vying for the prize consisted of Eddie Graney, Coffroth’s former emissary during the Gans-Nelson promotion; Tom McCarey, the Los Angeles promoter who had abetted Johnson’s progress; and the U.S. representative of the architect of Burns-Johnson, Australian Hugh McIntosh. These were the top-level boxing promoters of the day, and each sought to grab what promised to be the richest payoff in their sport’s history. They all sat at a table in the hotel’s grand ballroom, joined by Murphy, Jack Johnson with his current manager George Little, and Jeffries’ manager, Sam Berger, a former fighter who had been the former champion’s principal sparring partner during the nationwide exhibition tour offered up for a public verdict. Jeffries was not present for the conclave at Meyer’s. When Murphy unsealed the bids, McIntosh’s came up shy of Rickard’s for both purse and film cut, Graney’s offered all the film rights but a lower guarantee with an option for a percentage of the gate, and both Coffroth’s and McCarey’s had a higher guarantee but with lesser or no film royalties. Each bid contained a deposit in the form of a $5,000 certified check, but Rickard’s envelope also produced fifteen $1,000 bills—Tex Rickard of the Wild West and the Klondike was accustomed to wads of cash, towers of gold coins and silver dollars, bags of gold dust . . . and fanfare. Johnson asked for 24 hours to sort out the bids, but the outcome had been preordained. The following day, Rickard and Gleason emerged from Meyer’s Hotel as the promoters of the big fight and greeted the waiting press. Their rivals cried foul. Rickard denied speculation that Coffroth had orchestrated the proceedings from San Francisco and was the primary, if hidden, promoter. “He [Coffroth] doesn’t figure in the deal at all,” Rickard told newsmen.9 Tex’s star had eclipsed Sunny Jim. The promotional drumbeat sounded instantly, though the fight was eight months away. Jeffries versus Johnson was the “Battle of the Century,”

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Rickard and Gleason proclaimed, this less than two years after Johnson had drubbed Burns in what the press had also christened the Battle of the Century. (Neither the repetition nor the fact that the century was still in its first decade fazed them one bit—this was not a debating society, after all, and hyperbole was the principal staple of publicity. Indeed, Rickard had yet another Battle of the Century in store for the ticket-buying public.) Rickard promised that the event would be “on the square,” a believable pledge coming from him, and he fell back on his abiding intention to swell the crowd with women. At the Gans-Nelson fight, he insisted in an utterance not quite so believable, “forty baby carriages [were] checked at the door.”10 Ex-marshal Tex Rickard was the man to make the ladies feel safe at the prizefights. To referee the watershed fight, no mere mortal could fill the bill. Early picks tendered by the promoters and newspaper editors included Arthur Conan Doyle (presumably, the creator of Sherlock Homes would have at least a clue how to officiate) and Theodore Roosevelt (the ex-commander in chief and future Bull Moose had been an amateur boxer). One newspaper invited Booker T. Washington, the most famous black man in the United States, and three-time loser presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to be ringside reporters. All declined. Perhaps such estimable men were coveted to counter the circulation of rumors that the fix was in, that Johnson had agreed to lie down to Jeffries, who feared that he would lose and even be embarrassed, and refused to come to terms with the champion unless guaranteed a victory. Or that Johnson was sure to go in the tank because if he won, his revenue from the film distribution would be greatly reduced, given that a crestfallen white public would stay away in droves. Both fighters immediately and firmly denied this scuttlebutt and, as it was too soon to start training in earnest, resumed their lucrative wanderings on the vaudeville circuit. Meanwhile, reform groups intent on removing public sanction of the unsavory enterprise of prizefighting had made significant inroads in the bigsky West (as they already had done in the eastern United States), leaving only California and Nevada as the states that had not banned the sport in the region. Rickard initially chose Emeryville, one of many towns spawned by the California gold rush, to host the fight, but he and Gleason eventually settled on nearby San Francisco, rented an empty lot at Eighth and Market streets, and hired contractors to build a 30,000-seat arena. In early April, challenger Jeffries set up his training camp at Rowardennan Redwood Park, a resort high in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Ben Lomond, California. He and Mrs. Jeffries stayed in a hotel bungalow and ate in a cordoned-off section of the dining hall. To prepare his body for the coming battle, the ex-champ seemed more interested in testing his mettle

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as a woodsman than in sharpening his boxing skills. He constructed a dam of sand-filled sacks on the salmon-rich San Lorenzo River, chopped down some redwood trees (presumably not giant ones), and built a log cabin. When he traded his ax for a pair of boxing gloves, he looked less enthusiastic, sparring listlessly and breathing heavily. When Rickard dropped by one day, he was puzzled by Jeffries’s lack of aggression in the ring, but was quickly mollified when the fighter explained that he threw few punches because he was fearful of killing his sparring partners.11 Jim Corbett, conqueror of Sullivan, came to camp to assist with training and, according to author Geoffrey C. Ward, “fuel the racial fires that Rickard and Gleason hoped would sell tickets.”12 Joe Choynski, who’d helped set a young Jack Johnson on the path to the top, now oversaw Jeffries’s training and insisted that his fighter’s lethargy was due to overwork. Choynski, apparently well-versed in the physiological ailments that beset boxers, diagnosed a skin eruption on Jeffries’s broad back as a temporary blood disorder, and attributed it to the too-rigorous training schedule, which would now be lessened. Accordingly, the big fellow suspended the regimen one day and, accompanied by manager Berger and a party of friends, motored down from the mountains to the beaches of Santa Cruz, where the surf and hot saltwater tubs awaited.13 Despite the respite, Jeffries nursed a sullen disposition once he returned to camp, according to several newspaper reports. He fiercely guarded his privacy, glared at intruders, and rebuffed any members of the press who pushed too hard.14 Yet the writers who saw the trimmed-down Jeffries work out determined that he was in full possession of all his championship assets, that he was in proper condition to take the title back from Johnson. Others weren’t so sure. Former lightweight champion Jack McAuliffe, who had been undefeated in 42 outings (seven draws), suggested that Jeffries needed to spar with younger (read: faster) fighters to be ready for Johnson. Jeffries’s longtime but estranged trainer, Billy Delaney, gave his former fighter no chance.15 On the final day of April, Jack Johnson and Etta Duryea, who would become a legal Mrs. Johnson 10 months later, manager George Little, and several others in the champion’s retinue arrived in San Francisco and invaded the fashionable Seal Rock House, which also had served as Johnson’s training headquarters for the Ketchel fight. Repeating his Goldfield gambit, Rickard displayed $32,000 worth of two-dollar gold pieces (though the purse was three times that) at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Bank and posed with the loot for a publicity shot that included Johnson, his manager Little (with whom he was at odds), Berger, and Gleason. The referee for the July 4 bout had not yet been selected, but when Little soon suggested Rickard for the job, both camps agreed, and Tex said it would be his

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THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY

honor. Rickard’s name stood for integrity, a square deal (a phrase coined by another TR: Teddy Roosevelt). It also stood for cash. The planned fight film doubtless would be a big moneymaker only if the fight’s action and outcome were beyond reproach. Who better than the promoter to ensure that result? At Seal Rock, however, all was not harmonious. A level of mistrust had developed between Johnson and Little, as talk of throwing the fight was in the air, and various parties with vested interests likely stepped up the pressure on the champion to either tank or win decisively. When reporters and fans gathered on May 9 for the announced opening of training camp, they learned that Johnson would not be in action for a few more days, further fueling the rumors of manipulation. The truth was that he had twisted his back in a fall on the steps of the San Francisco office building where Rickard held forth.16 A week later, though, his muscles had knit and training was underway. Unlike Jeffries, Johnson enjoyed the spotlight and liked to share his passion for music, automobiles, and other pursuits (he didn’t discuss women) that gave visitors a peek behind his persona by turns jovial and truculent, but always confident. Many reporters regarded his casualness and decidedly non-Spartan training regimen as further confirmation that the fight was not on the level. The New York Times had employed John L. Sullivan as a special correspondent, and the erstwhile Boston Strong Boy was as pompous in prose as he was in his post-fight speeches during his boxing days—privately, he labeled Johnson-Jeffries a “frame-up.” California Governor James Norris Gillett, who had given the fight his blessing, now called it “a scheme to make a lot of money out of the credulity of the public,” and asserted that Johnson had “agreed to lay down for money.”17 Although he now opposed the fight, he insisted that he did not have the authority to cancel it. That changed on June 15, when the governor learned that San Francisco’s bid to host the 1915 Panama Exposition would be in jeopardy in the eyes of Congress if the City by the Bay were to stage Johnson-Jeffries. Gillett promptly instructed his attorney general to send Rickard and company packing. California law, the legal and political powers stated, prohibited boxing matches that were not mere exhibitions. The mayor of San Francisco squawked vociferously but quickly cooled down. The reform elements in the state and beyond were delighted with the governor’s ruling. Now Rickard faced the daunting prospect of finding a new location for his fight, and moving his just-built stadium to the site, all within three weeks. Nevada, the most liberal of the western states and the only one that remained open to legitimate boxing, was the logical stop. Nevada’s acting governor, Denver Sylvester Dickerson, didn’t give a hoot about the wishes of the clergy and the rest of the anti-boxing movement nationwide.

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The city of Goldfield made its pitch, imploring Rickard to “come back to your first love.” But old lovers seldom make it back, and Rickard chose the growing town of Reno, where divorce rode the express lane and rail connections were the best in the state. Somehow unnerved by these developments, the touchy Jeffries threatened to bolt. Maybe he believed those who espoused the “fix” theory and claimed that the change of venue nullified that arrangement, freeing Johnson to fight for real. Another explanation for Jeffries’s behavior was that he owed $25,000 to gamblers in Goldfield, where he’d run out of money while in town for, of all things, the Nelson-Gans fight. Rickard intervened, so goes the story, with his Goldfield brethren and made Jeff whole—at 50 cents on the dollar. Jeffries later said that he stayed on only because of his allegiance to Rickard as a friend. As he exited San Francisco, Rickard bemoaned the fact that he already had sunk nearly half a million irretrievable dollars into the promotion and now had to start almost from scratch. “I’m blamed glad to get away from here with my hide,” he said.18 But the hero’s welcome he soon received in Nevada rejuvenated his spirits. At the Reno train station, three brass bands belted refrains under a desert sky, as old Rickard cronies and acquaintances popped out of the sagebrush. With its rail nexus and laissez-faire appeal, Reno was clearly a coming town, but in truth, it was still but a settlement, whose 11,000 residents accounted for about one-fourth of spacious Nevada’s population. Drop a Rickard-style promotion into town, however, and those numbers could expand exponentially, or so it seemed. The press converged on Reno in big numbers, as reporters from across the land and overseas elbowed their way into the clamor for a firsthand look at this displaced event that now bore more layers of contention and controversy than a political convention. Adding color, if not always edification, to the reportage were celebrity correspondents such as the aforementioned John L. Sullivan (the Times) and Jack London (the Herald); Bat Masterson (the Morning Telegraph); Rex Beach, Rickard’s old Klondike buddy and now a bestselling novelist (Atlanta Constitution); and Al Jolson for the Hollywood trade paper Variety. Jeffries and Johnson arrived in town on consecutive days, and their personal styles continued to be as different as their skin color. Jeffries evaded an enthusiastic crowd at the train station and planted himself in what Beach described as a “vine-embowered cottage”19 in the nearby resort of Moana Springs, where he brooded and largely sequestered himself from the greedy eyes of visitors. He did allow big crowds to attend his training sessions, but though he had shed scores of pounds and restored his thick body to its former hardness, he displayed no appetite for battle—the treeshaded workouts ranged from perfunctory to listless.

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By contrast, Johnson’s motor was revved up. When he pulled into Reno, he went among the crowd like a seasoned political campaigner. He set up camp outside of town at Rick’s Roadhouse, a rowdy resort that had none of the bucolic privacy of Moana Springs and, therefore, suited Johnson’s taste for performance. Both in and out of the ring, he welcomed crowds and never failed to entertain them. He often chatted with ringside observers while boxing. When Governor Dickerson came calling, Johnson stepped up his intensity, pounding a sparring partner into submission. “I hope that Mister Jeffries is in as good shape as he looks,” Johnson told the governor. “If he beats me, I’ll take my hat off to him.”20 Most of the sporting press believed that Jeffries would do just that, either because, in their estimation, the ex-champ could not be beaten or because the fight was fixed in his favor. By the eve of the fight, the number of people in Reno had nearly doubled, and more were due aboard special trains the next day. Rickard’s 20,000-seat stadium of yellow-pine lumber had been erected in record time, possibly at city expense, on the footprint of the lesser stadium that saw Marvin Hart win the heavyweight title, as awarded by referee Jim Jeffries five years earlier. Rickard had refunded money to advance ticket buyers slated for San Francisco, and he printed new tickets reflecting the site as Reno. He had brought to the fight, at his own expense, several former champions to add even more luster to the occasion. He expected a thousand women to attend and sit in curtained boxes that he had built to afford privacy. Safety, decorum even, was paramount to Rickard, who hired armed deputies to separate potential troublemakers from their bottles and firearms. Wary that Johnson could be in harm’s way, the promoter got Jeffries to publicly urge fair play. The elements of a Rickard promotion—showmanship tempered by caution— had begun to coalesce. On July 4, 1910, dozens of automobiles streamed into town, many of them sporting signs that said “Reno or bust.” Workmen were still hammering in the last handfuls of nails, as people arrived via trolley and auto, or on foot, at the stadium, where vendors sold water and souvenirs, and the ring’s red-canvas floor absorbed the sun’s glare. There were no preliminary bouts on the card—just the main event—but a brass band blared a few favorites before corpulent, mustachioed ring announcer Billy Jordan introduced Rickard and Gleason and the VIPs they (Rickard, really) had invited, including the promoters they had outbid. Up marched John L, Fitzsimmons, Burns, Ketchel, Battling Nelson, and many others, all of whom filled the ring like a Broadway chorus line. With the crowd growing restless, Johnson, though the champion, entered the ring first at 2:30, a full hour after the fight had been scheduled to start. He wore a silk robe and a broad smile. Moments later, Jeffries

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and his handlers made their way toward the ring, the ex-champ tense and unsmiling despite the crowd’s thunderous approval. He wore a heavy suit jacket and a bulky cap that shielded his eyes from the sun and his uncertain expression from his adoring fans. Ex-champion Corbett, still youthful, reached a hand down from the corner to help Jeffries step up and into the ring. As announcer Jordan, his stomach pushing the boundaries of his three-piece suit, introduced Jeffries as “the great unbeaten white champion of the world,”21 Johnson sat in his corner and continued to beam for the cameras; he looked as relaxed as a guy on a Sunday picnic. Referee Rickard, in suspenders, shirtsleeves and straw hat, signaled the fighters to begin without so much as a handshake. At that point, the drama ended and the annihilation began. An old fighter restored to the body of his prime is an illusion. Hard training has melted the suet and cut the contours back into his musculature, but the wiring beneath has grown faulty. No longer can he deliver and avoid blows with the dexterity necessary to win or even survive. So it was with 35-year-old James J. Jeffries, when, after a six-year layoff, he entered the ring against Jack Johnson, only three years—but, seemingly, a generation—younger and in his fighting prime. The public, the white powers that be, and shapers of opinion had willed him to reclaim the heavyweight championship, and now he called on his body to fulfill the wishes of the misguided. It was not up to the task. And Johnson was simply too good. From the start, Jeffries seemed a man trying to negotiate a thicket, a huge polished piece of machinery missing a crucial cog, and so left to grind and sputter but not shut down. He shoved and clinched but did little punching, and when he did move his arms, his gloves found mostly air or his opponent’s ready defenses. Johnson, meanwhile, fired at will, sidestepped as he pleased, and fired again: right uppercuts, in particular, damaged the plodding, if forward-moving, Jeffries. Only in one round—the fourth—did Jeffries land punches of any impact, smacking Johnson with a right to the body and opening a cut in the champion’s mouth with a left.22 Because the right resounded even in the cheap seats, and the left drew blood, they momentarily buoyed the hopes of the crowd in Reno and the millions receiving telegraph reports across the country, but their surge of optimism barely lasted out the round. Johnson resumed control in the fifth and, despite Corbett’s ringside antics designed to distract him, never lost his composure or the timing of his sniping attack. Jeffries’s rugged features turned ghoulish with cuts and bruises; Johnson was chopping him down like one of those redwoods at Rowardennan. Finally, in the 15th round, the battered ex-champion went down three times from the cumulative punishment. The final time, as some in the crowd implored him to stop the fight,

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Rickard began his count but stopped when a towel flung from Jeffries’s corner preceded manager Sam Berger into the ring. As Rickard placed a hand on Johnson’s shoulder to indicate that the champion was the winner by TKO (though Jeffries was not going to rise anytime soon), Jeffries’s seconds attended their fallen fighter. The crowd was funereal. A strapping rancher who the hands called Bull Montana was seen crying at his seat. He would offer passionate allegiance to a future champion as well, a man named Dempsey. “I couldn’t have reached him in a thousand years,” Jeffries said later.23 It would take a fighter with longer arms, and the long arm of the U.S. government, to reach Jack Johnson. Tex Rickard had projected a half-million-dollar gate for Johnson-Jeffries at its original site in San Francisco, but realized little more than half that amount in the smaller stadium in Reno. Still, the take of $270,775 generated a profit of $120,000 that he and Gleason split,24 and that made wealthy men of the two fighters. Jeffries could retire once and for all to alfalfa land. Johnson could live the high life and defy the social mores of the time, eventually running afoul of the federal government, which convicted him three years later under the questionable precepts of recently enacted legislation authored by Illinois Congressman James Mann. The Mann Act, the popular handle for the 1910 White-Slave Traffic Act that prohibited, in addition to white slavery, the interstate transport of females for immoral purposes, seemed tailor-made to prosecute Jack Johnson, regardless of the merits of his case. Not dissuaded by ironic and lurid symbolism sufficient to fill a Rickard-size arena, the government prosecuted Johnson (he was eventually sentenced to a year in federal prison), precipitating his flight to France and hastening his boxing career’s decline. Johnson’s previous trip to Europe had been under happier circumstances. In the wake of predictable race riots following his battering of Jeffries, dustups with the law over debts and speeding violations, a torrent of bad publicity, and a laughable dearth of qualified American White Hopes, Johnson and his wife sailed for England, planning to decompress and court a more simpatico public. Hopeful of landing a fight with British contender “Bombardier” Billy Wells, the champion boxed exhibitions in England and France, and he maintained a high public profile that, for a while, did not ruffle feathers. But race and religion soon reared their implacable heads—the United States, it seemed, did not hold dominion over such dynamics—and the fight was derailed before it ever left the station (a good thing, in retrospect, for Wells). In need of money, Johnson returned to the States, where Fireman Jim Flynn’s time had come round again.

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Born Andrew Chiariglione in Hoboken, New Jersey, the stocky Flynn was one of many fighters who transformed their surnames from Italian to Irish. In the ring, he was tough but erratic. He now hailed from Pueblo, Colorado, where he’d been a railroad worker and, you might infer, a volunteer firefighter. Under Jack Curley’s management, he had been knocked out by Johnson four years earlier in San Francisco, but in 1911, he had had knocked out six straight opponents before Curley matched him in mid-September with another railroad man, Carl Morris, of Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Backed by oil money, Morris was considered the most promising of the Great White Hopes (though his ancestry was Irish-Cherokee) at the moment—all six feet four and 240 pounds of him. But in the ring at Madison Square Garden, Flynn pounded the Sapulpa Giant’s face into pulp and gained a decisive newspaper verdict. Morris went back to the gym for repairs. Flynn rode three more KOs and Curley’s initiative to a title shot against Jack Johnson in Las Vegas, New Mexico on July 4, 1912, exactly two years after the champion had humbled James J. Jeffries. New Mexico had just been admitted as a state (number 47) that January. Near the growing city of Albuquerque, Las Vegas South had been a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, the artery that opened up the southwestern United States in the 19th century. The town built an 18,000-seat, outdoor stadium for Curley’s scheduled 45-round fight—the manager-promoter had guaranteed Johnson $30,000 plus $1,100 for expenses. Few boxing insiders gave Flynn much of a chance, but a Curley-fueled promotional campaign had piqued public interest, and the Pueblo Fireman, for one, began to believe that he would indeed restore the title to the white race. Johnson trained for a cakewalk and came in 25 pounds above his fighting weight against Jeffries in Reno, but a sluggish overweight champion was still far too much for Jim Flynn. After five punishing rounds of catching leather, Flynn abandoned his useless fists in favor of his hard head, which had similar success in finding Johnson’s chin, a tactic that, despite its ineptitude, elicited a series of warnings from referee Ed Smith. Finally, in the ninth round, a state mounted police captain, apparently accustomed to riding to the rescue, climbed into the ring (sans steed) and halted the proceedings. Smith seconded that notion, declaring Johnson the winner per the challenger’s repeated fouling. The record books list Johnson’s victory as a TKO—by any measure, the fight was one-sided. The white race would have to wait. But at 34, Jack Johnson was getting on. “I’ve got sense enough to know that Old Dame Nature is going to take the speed and strength away from Jack Johnson the same as she did to . . . the rest of them,” he said to a visitor.25 And while his zest for training had diminished, Johnson’s appetite for life had increased, as had his penchant for tangling with the law. His

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troubled wife pressed a revolver to her temple and pulled the trigger. His relationship with his next paramour triggered an uproar and federal prosecution that led to the shuttering of his thriving Chicago café and indictment per the Mann Act. Free on bond, Johnson took a train to Canada and then sailed to Paris. He sent a telegram to the feds, promising them that he’d be back for his trial date. The Mann Act had not quite snared its man. In Paris, the heavyweight champion needed money and, to reassert his status as titleholder, some show of activity. In December 1913, nearly a yearand-a-half after he’d beaten Fireman Flynn, he faced another Johnson— “Battling” Jim (of East Orange, New Jersey)—with a shaved scalp, this one younger and smaller and a pedestrian fighter. Neither man showed much eagerness for battle, but in staggering the challenger with a thirdround flurry, the champion sustained a slight fracture in his left forearm. His whip-crack jab nullified, Johnson did little for the balance of the fight, which was ruled a draw. The crowd hooted its disapproval. Six months later, the bone in his arm mended, Johnson climbed into the same ring to defend his title against a white man, a strapping reddishblond-haired Pittsburgher named Frank Moran, after coming to terms with seasoned promoter Dan McKetrick, who doubled as Moran’s manager and who had made something of a name for himself as a Yank staging prizefights in Paris. The third man in the ring was quite familiar to Johnson, as the two had boxed an exhibition before an appreciative French crowd three years earlier during the champion’s “unforced” trip to Europe. The handsome young Frenchman had been his country’s welterweight champ at the time and quickly expanded that crown to include all of Europe, but he had since added muscular bodyweight and three additional European titles: middleweight, light-heavyweight, and heavyweight. He shared the U.S. champion’s boxing grace and instinct for counterpunching, if not his size and swagger. He was the idol of his countrymen.

Chapter 5

CONJURING AN UNLIKELY CHAMPION

At the heart of the coal basin in northern France, the town of Lens offered an existence that ranged from modest to hardscrabble. Most men in this region, known as Pas-de-Calais, harvested coal by day at the colliery, then returned to their families packed into small brick miner’s cottages typically lined up in a long, cheerless row. The family of Albert Carpentier, which included five children, lived in such a dwelling, but the paterfamilias was no miner—he transported factory goods by horse and cart, and later worked as a maltster for a brewery. His third and youngest son, born in the nearby smaller town of Lievin on January 12, 1894, was blessed with the imagination to envision a future beyond his boyhood environment, but he was not afraid of hard work. While he was still in grade school, young Georges Carpentier put the classroom behind him to apprentice for a boilermaker and to deliver messages by bicycle for a franc a day. His family attended Sunday Mass, and he received First Communion. All the while, he dreamed of broader vistas and gravitated to the circus when it came to town. There he came across a traveling exhibition featuring some well-weathered practitioners of the sweet science. The boxers stood outside the tent, while their boss invited males of all ages to try their luck and learn something about the rudiments of the ring. Fascinated, young Carpentier immediately abandoned his infatuation with the notion of becoming an acrobat and pictured himself as a skilled boxer. He had earned a schoolboy reputation as a scrapper, though his features were near-angelic and his manner nonthreatening. When he learned of a boxing instructional program based right in Lens, he knew he had to take a look. He was 12 years old.

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The school combined gymnastics, which suited Carpentier’s blend of sinewy strength and agility, with boxing of both the French and English styles, the former—la savate—featuring explosive kicks in the offensive arsenal. The all-purpose instructor was a rather odd duck in yellow flannels, tightly wound and passionate about his sport. He fancied himself a professor of pugilism. He was said to dabble in magic, as if transforming untutored scrappers into polished boxers were not magical enough. In his home gymnasium, he took one look at the scrawny Carpentier and decided the boy would provide a stern test of his powers. A log fire and oil lamps heated the otherwise drab, low-ceilinged space. Teacher and student strapped on the gloves and sparred. His name was François Descamps (also Deschamps), cyclist, gymnast, occasional anarchist, a small square man whose black mane rose from a hairline well down the forehead. Carpentier recognized him as the man who had broken up one of his schoolyard fights in the very recent past. It is fair to say that Descamps’s eyes had a certain twinkle, but as a trainer, he was something of a martinet. He was animated and voluble, and his piping, often excitable voice knew how to turn a phrase. He was unlike any other man in the coal-soaked precincts of Lens and, almost from the beginning, there was an affinity between him and the young Carpentier, as the boy took to both the instructor and the sport of boxing. But the crafty, quirky manager indoctrinated his new charge in more than just ring tactics and unconventional training gambits, such as swinging on a homemade trapeze to enhance suppleness. To stoke public enthusiasm for the youngster’s upcoming bouts and to boost the coffers of his training camp, Descamps schooled the boy in gymnastics, conjuring, and hypnotism to entertain the paying (through the passing of the hat) customers in local cafés. He had lived among the fakirs of the East, Descamps contended, though it was evident that he was more faker than fakir. But his brand of entertainment was not held to a particularly high standard, and with playbills exclaiming “renowned professor Descamps and his famous pupil, Georges Carpentier,”1 they advanced upon an unsuspecting, amused public. The professor scripted their demonstrations, and his wild-eyed manner mesmerized proprietors and spectators. The pupil tumbled and submitted to hypnosis and somehow told patrons’ secrets, cleverly obtained ahead of time. They were an act. Their boxing training, though, was no act, and the ambitious Descamps soon discovered that his skinny young fighter packed a wallop. In one sparring session between teacher and student, Carpentier conjured a right-hand punch to the jaw that knocked his mentor down and out. The same result obtained in a hastily arranged English-style match between the youth and a highly touted member of a visiting circus troupe: an Algerian named

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Ali, no less! It was time to send the young man into bigger battles. Descamps entered him in regional French-style boxing tournaments and the national amateur championship in Paris, in which Carpentier booted his way to the semifinals. Paris, with its soaring Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 World’s Fair, and the Arc de Triomphe tracing its beginnings to the Napoleonic Wars, entranced the young boxer-dreamer. The glory of France, however, would be better served by the brand of boxing cultivated across the Channel, so it was back to English-style boxing. After a trio of arranged (i.e., predetermined) contests, Descamps’s protégé debuted in earnest on November 1, 1908, in Maisons-Laffitte, a horse-racing hotbed northwest of Paris. Suitably, his opponent was a jockey—a rider named Ed Salmon, taut, tough, and, though diminutive, a full-grown man. Carpentier was two months shy of his 15th birthday. Promoter “Snowy” Lawrence, better known as a racehorse trainer, refereed the scheduled 20-round bantamweight fight. The kid gave as good as he got, and the even fight ended with the jock’s disqualification as the result of an unintentional low blow in the 13th round. The stable hands cried out for a rematch, which took place within the month, and this time a determined, iron-hard Salmon swarmed the stripling Carpentier from the opening bell and stopped him in the 18th. Descamps, feeling every blow at ringside, had wanted to stop the fight earlier, but his fighter resisted. Despite the loss, the fledgling boxer had served notice that he would be someone to reckon with as his body matured. One newspaper account called him “a born boxer, cool, calculating, precocious.”2 Boxers from the United States were invading Paris, their craft supplanting the French savate in the popular mind of young men seeking sporting combat. Impressed by Carpentier’s heart during his two bouts with Salmon, Snowy Lawrence—with Descamps’s enthusiastic blessing—pitched the young man to promoters in the capital. Matches materialized immediately and, fighting within weeks or even days in Paris and the provinces, Carpentier racked up a string of 19 victories against three draws and only one loss between December 1908 and February 1910. He had just turned 16. He had knockout power and the boxing ability to win decisions in lengthy fights. But he was still a beginner and a boy. In Brussels, he dropped a decision to Englishman John “Buck” Shine, who had lost eight straight. Back in Paris a month later, Carpentier fell to Edward Alfred Broadribb, whose moniker was Young Snowball, and who counted this as his only triumph in a three-fight career. The Snowball, whose boyish appearance belied both his age and toughness, pounded his young French counterpart until Descamps surrendered with a shriek and a flung towel in round four. A week later, the kid could not last the 13th against light-heavyweight Fernand Cuny. But Carpentier reversed the trend after a three-month sabbatical,

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earning a draw against featherweight Paul Til, avenging the loss to countryman Cuny with an eight-round technical knockout in the seaside resort of Cabourg, and then fighting with astonishing frequency, winning all but two (a draw and a loss on points) of 23 fights during a 12-month period, gaining the French welterweight title along the way. Perhaps weary, he faced black Missouri native Aaron Brown (aka Dixie Kid) in Trouville, another French resort on the English Channel. Scowling and unyielding, the well-traveled Brown battered Carpentier until Descamps conceded during the fifth round. For the storybook French duo, it was a reminder that they still had a distance to go to reach their lofty goal of capturing more boxing titles. While reviving his body and psyche at Trouville in the wake of the punishing loss to Dixie Kid, Carpentier received a wire from British financier James White, a man of money and imagination. White had been new to the fight-promotion business when he sought to match flamboyant world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, freshly arrived from America, with the lanky heavyweight champ of the United Kingdom, William Thomas “Bombardier” Wells, at the grand Olympia in London. When the financier invited Carpentier to cross the Channel and spar with Wells, the Frenchman accepted at once. Carpentier was only a lightweight, but he was still growing and gunning for the heavier weight classes. After several sessions in the ring with the British Commonwealth champion, Carpentier, who also boxed an exhibition with Johnson himself in Paris during this period, concluded that all he needed was some additional size to defeat Wells. “Wait until I am a little bigger,” he said to Descamps.3 When the Johnson-Wells fight fell through, White changed the venue and matched Carpentier against Sid Burns at Earls Court Arena in Kensington. Burns, a fast and stylish fighter, extended Carpentier for the full 15 rounds before dropping the decision. Three weeks later at King’s Hall, Carpentier punctuated his London stay by knocking out British welterweight champion “Young” Joseph to gain the European crown. Seventeenyear-old Georges Carpentier had come of age. Indeed, the boy was old enough to be a movie star, at least in France. The silent French short Le Roman de Carpentier (The Romance of Carpentier), released two years later, capsulized the young welterweight champ’s life to date. The film starred the fighter, accompanied by French character actor Harry Baur and Belgian actress Berthe Bovy. In his final fight of 1911, Carpentier returned to Paris to face the veteran Harry Lewis, a Philadelphian who had been active on the European circuit. Lewis, one of many skilled Jewish boxers of the era, dueled a well-rested Carpentier over the full 20 rounds, forcing the Frenchman to rally in the late rounds to win on points. Believing that he had taken Lewis lightly—a

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feeling reinforced by Descamps’s lectures—Carpentier reapplied himself to a rigorous training regimen. The dedication paid off in four consecutive knockouts in early 1912, leading to a match with British middleweight champ Jimmy Sullivan, for which the challenger trained in the gardens and basement gymnasium of a Cannes hotel. On fight night in Monte Carlo, the fashionable crowd in the open-air stadium looked upon prizefighting as a curiosity. Keeping his knockout streak intact, Carpentier disposed of an uncertain, immobile Sullivan with a right cross midway through the second round to gain the European middleweight title, which he subsequently defended against U.S. fighters George Gunther and Willie Lewis in the coming months, decisioning both at the Palais des Sports in Paris. No longer flesh-and-bones, Carpentier was filling out and, as intended, climbing the weight-class ladder. And winning titles. Then, a pair of setbacks. Frank Klaus, a top-heavy bruiser who hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dethroned Carpentier in Dieppe, France, carrying the fight to the host champion and bloodying his mouth in the penultimate 19th round, which prompted Descamps to burst into the ring and force the technical disqualification of his fighter. Four months later at the Cirque de Paris, Billy Papke, “The Illinois Thunderbolt,” drew the usually well-disciplined Carpentier into a slugfest and was awarded a technical knockout after 17 rounds. With their victories, both Klaus and Papke claimed the world middleweight title. Carpentier already had outgrown the class and been forced to drop weight for each bout. As before, Carpentier rebounded by reeling off a winning streak: a dozen straight from January 1913 to January 1914. He was fighting largely lightheavyweight now, and he won the European title for that weight class in February. But of all the weight classes, light-heavy had the least prestige, and although he fell far short of being a true heavyweight, Carpentier, a shade under six feet tall and lean as ever, set his sights on the big boys. He recalled his impression, received during sparring sessions with Billy Wells several years before, that with more heft he could beat the Bombardier, who was vulnerable to the body and lacked the resolve of a champion. Though impressive in many bouts, his six-foot-three-inch frame imposing, his punches crisp and damaging, Wells had a suspect chin and stomach— he’d been knocked out in the early rounds of three fights. It didn’t take much to destroy his equilibrium, Carpentier concluded. Still, Wells was the British Empire’s reigning heavyweight champion and the decided favorite when he squared off with Carpentier in an incomplete floral hall on the grounds of the Ghent International Exhibition on June 1, 1913. A long right hand from the Brit brought down Carpentier in the opening round, much to the surprise and dismay of Descamps and the hundreds of miners who had journeyed from Lens to the Belgian city

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to salute their standard-bearer. Carpentier rose at the count of nine, hoping merely to survive. But astonishingly, Wells did not press his advantage, unsettled by the fact that his foe had risen and wary that the hurt fighter could be dangerous. It took a couple of rounds, however, for Carpentier to dish out danger. He recuperated in the second and, in the third, mounted a body attack that doubled up Wells. In the corner between rounds, Descamps sensed the turn and urged his fighter with, “Finis!” In the fourth, Carpentier continued his body assault until, acting on a signal from his alert manager, he brought down the bigger man’s guard all the way with an uppercut to the gut, then brought the whole house down with a right hand over the top and onto the chin. Wells was counted out and the stirring strains of the “Marseillaise” rang throughout the crowd. Afterward, at a nearby café, the winner sipped tea as the proprietor relayed bouquets and congratulatory messages from ladies who had been in attendance at the floral hall. Years later, Carpentier’s attraction for the fair sex would manifest itself across the ocean. For now, the world of women, and the wider world, beckoned. Show people invited Carpentier for lunch in fancy bistros—he became close with French singer-actress-heartbreaker Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois) and her boyfriend, the young Maurice Chevalier. Carpentier had the looks of a boy aristocrat, an eye for fine clothes and the frame to showcase them, and impeccable manners. The elegant circles in which he suddenly found himself dubbed him Gorgeous Georges. Acclaimed English novelist Arnold Bennett said that the young Frenchman “stood out astonishingly from all the rest [of the boxers] . . . [they] had the faces and carriage of bruisers, but nobody could have taken him for a boxer. He might have been a barrister, poet, musician, Foreign Office attaché . . . but not a boxer.”4 Carpentier took a four-room flat on the fourth floor at 35 rue Brunel in Paris. The house that he built for his parents in Lens included a ground-floor café, which they ran. Not yet 20, Georges Carpentier was now a man of means and a figure of public adulation in France. In the aftermath of his Belgian disaster, the grounded Bombardier Wells sought to restore his reputation, and Carpentier, who had just survived 20 rounds with future world middleweight champion Jeff Smith (one account had the ultimately victorious Frenchman on the canvas seconds before the end of the bout5), agreed to a rematch. But when the two men met again in December 1913 at the National Sporting Club in London’s Covent Garden, the outcome for the rangy Englishman was even worse. This time, Carpentier, trained to a fine edge, launched flurries of punches right from the outset, and Wells, intent on protecting his middle, assumed an unnatural stance and failed to protect anything at all. He went down and out in the

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first round. The crowd hooted its derision. Carpentier, who certainly had the Bombardier’s number, was becoming a knockout artist. “I cannot take bodily punishment—that is evident,” Wells said after the fight.6 Distraught by their countryman’s showing, a band of upper-class Brits went to Paris to challenge Carpentier to do battle with an amateur boxer among them. The bet was that the Yorkshire fighter would survive longer than the Bombardier. Surprisingly, Carpentier agreed and met the amateur before a group of invited guests. He staggered the larger man with an immediate combination, but the challenger smartly went into reverse and dodged about the ring in a bid to exhaust the clock. By the time Carpentier caught him and knocked him out minutes later, the amateur had already lasted longer than Wells. British honor was restored. Carpentier had been happy to oblige the Yorkshire amateur, but he had bigger game in his sights. He asked Descamps to pursue a match with American “Negro” heavyweight Joe Jeannette, whose half-dozen fights in Paris in 1909 included a three-and-a-half-hour, 49-round decision over another fine black heavyweight, Sam McVea. Handsome and rugged, Jeanette had impressed the local populace with both his durability in the ring and his modesty out of it, the latter in stark contrast to the showboating style of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. Born in North Bergen, New Jersey, Jeannette was an effective emissary for his sport and, in the period perception of many, his race. Four years later, he returned to Paris and fought the redoubtable Boston Tar Baby, Sam Langford, in many ways— one being that he was a fraction over five feet seven—the most remarkable of the black heavyweights. The two went 20 rounds before Langford got the nod on points. Jeannette eagerly accepted Carpentier’s challenge. They met in March 1914 before a crowd of 6,000 in a festively lit arena in Luna Park, known for its amusement rides. Carpentier started aggressively, decking Jeannette in the opening round, but soon moved to a counterpunching mode, while his opponent scored points and dished out punishment at close quarters. Toward the close, Carpentier went back on the attack, but Jeannette met him on equal terms, absorbing punches with which the Frenchman had dismantled others—the New Jerseyan’s unconventional training methods included walking on his hands, an exercise he claimed prepared the brain to weather the effects of heavy punches to the head. After 15 rounds, the referee awarded Jeannette the decision, a ruling disputed in print the next day by the sporting press. (At the time, newspapers customarily decided fights that had gone the distance and were not judged, but, as today, they were certainly free to disagree with any official verdict.)

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It was not surprising that, despite Carpentier’s loss, his stock remained undiminished. After four quick knockouts of less than championshipcaliber opponents (and an interlude as referee of the heavyweight title match between Jack Johnson and Frank Moran in Paris in late June, a fight awarded the champion on points), he prepared to fight for the so-called World White Heavyweight Championship to be held at the Olympia in London, courtesy promoter Dick Burge, a former English lightweight champ. Carpentier’s opponent, former sailor Ed “Gunboat” Smith, was considered to be one of the best of the White Hopes, those sturdy Caucasians anointed by many to wrest the heavyweight crown from the dark, defiant clutches of Jack Johnson. Smith, born Edward J. Smyth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was big, tough, and experienced. (He had beaten Langford.) His specialty was said to be the occipital punch, a blow delivered downward to the back of the neck. Ever vigilant, Descamps sent a spy to observe the Gunboat during his training sessions in Harrow, a borough in northwest London. Armed with revelations about Smith’s roughhouse boxing style, Carpentier felt confident as he trained near Giverny, France. When he arrived by train at London’s Charing Cross station on the day of the fight, British crowds treated him like a returning hero, all but carrying him to a waiting horse-drawn carriage. Bands roared; women pecked his cheek. He had beaten their champion, Bombardier Wells, but the Brits had an affinity for this pale, gallant Frenchman, who almost always conceded tens of pounds when he fought the heavyweights. Such was the case once more when he entered the Olympia ring against Gunboat Smith on July 16, 1914. Telegraphs clacked below him. The crowd counted several nationalities, a measure of the broad interest in declaring a white heavyweight champion. But perhaps in keeping with a sporting event framed in this fashion, the fight itself was an eyesore. Carpentier’s superior skills dominated, reducing the already clumsy Gunboat to an awkward and ineffectual—if still dangerous—bully. In the fourth round, Carpentier’s patented left feint followed by a hard right to the chin sank the Gunboat to his knees after Smith already had begun a minioffensive of low blows. Only the bell saved Smith, and, two rounds later, after Carpentier had uncharacteristically lost his balance and stumbled to his knees, Smith picked that moment to launch his occipital punch, this one going downward more than customary. The referee immediately disqualified him. The world had a white heavyweight champion, a cachet as dispiriting as the fight that had conferred it. The Gunboat was temporarily in dry dock, but soon a different species of ship would be waging battle, reducing the whole notion of boxing supremacy to an afterthought.

Chapter 6

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

Down Under was where Jack Kearns hoped he might begin his ascent to the heights. Recruited by promoter Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker, Kearns and his stable of boxers—lightweight Red Watson; middleweights Eddie McGoorty, Jimmy Clabby, and “Fighting” Billy Murray; and heavyweight Joe Bonds—arrived in Sydney in July 1915 for tournament-like competition that extended into the fall. The wheat-thatched Baker, who had been an Australian boxing champion and a 1908 Olympian, had succeeded BurnsJohnson architect Hugh D. McIntosh as the dean of Aussie boxing promoters after learning the trade under “Huge Deal” himself. Baker’s headliner was Les Darcy, regarded by his countrymen as the genuine middleweight champion of the world. In Australia, Kearns’s fighters lost more than they won, three of them falling to Darcy a combined four times, Murray twice. Bonds split a halfdozen fights. Murray lost four times in as many bouts, three held in Sydney, one in West Melbourne. Back stateside, fighters and manager parted company. Murray, the Pacific Coast champion, had been Kearns’s best fighter prior to changing time zones. Indeed, the action had been in California, but ever since the Golden State had banned the racially charged JohnsonJeffries heavyweight title fight five years earlier, that action had slimmed. In an effort to reduce injury, even death, a limit of four rounds had been placed on all bouts, a ruling that reduced the livelihoods of fighters, promoters, and gamblers. Kearns drifted into handling pro wrestlers, including one whom he convinced dynamic promoter Jack Curley to match against the reigning world wrestling champ, Joe Stecher. The smackdown

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was canceled, however, after Kearns’s grappler, known only as “Mystery Man,” stepped into a water bucket and fell out of the ring during a training session. Kearns, who might have given thought to signing the water bucket at this point, formulated a plan to capture a much grander object that proved just as slippery. An accomplished boxer and something of a folk hero in his native land, James Leslie Darcy had been born in 1895 in New South Wales, the Australian state named by Captain Cook himself. By the age of 14, Darcy was an apprentice blacksmith and a professional fighter, a handsome youth who grew only to five-foot-six, but had long arms and a powerful build. In the ring, he displayed will, stamina, and boxing craft, and could absorb a punch just as well as he could deliver one. When Darcy whipped his visiting fighters in 1915, Kearns employed an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em mentality and made a pitch to manage Darcy, should the Aussie ever come to the United States, land of opportunity and larger purses. When Kearns left the remote continent, he believed he had struck a deal with the lad and proceeded to trumpet his intentions back in the States. By the age of 21, Darcy had won 46 of 50 professional fights (the losses attributed to dirty tactics by the opposition or poor decisions by the judges), held the Australian middleweight and heavyweight titles, and had never been so much as staggered in the ring, according to some boxing historians. He had an abundance of courage—before he stopped championswimmer-turned-boxer Harold Hardwick in the seventh round to win the heavyweight crown in February 1916 in Sydney, cornermen used gold pins to reattach his two loosened front teeth. So the new heavyweight champ had a gold-plated smile to go with a passel of siblings, a dirt-poor farmer father, and an adoring mother. He was the stuff that legends are made of. He was ready for the United States, for the world stage, for the deft touch of Jack Kearns. There was only one problem: World War I had broken out, and Australia, of course, had come down on the side of Great Britain and the Allies. Conscription was not the law of the land, but the pressure on young Aussie men to enlist was considerable and growing, as the nearby Japanese threat mounted. Darcy, though already a veteran boxer and beloved champion, was not yet of age, and his mum twice refused to sign papers granting her permission. On October 27, 1916, four days before his 21st birthday and one day before the prime minister’s referendum espousing conscription, Les Darcy—absent a passport and accompanied by his fiancée’s brother, one E. T. O’Sullivan—boarded the oil steamer Hattie Luckenback out of Newcastle after signing on as a member of the ship’s crew bound for South America. (So he said; another account has him sneaking onboard and

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hiding under a tarpaulin.) Some weeks later, the pair switched berths in Chile to the Cushing, which steamed into North America and arrived in New York Harbor two days before Christmas. Tongues had wagged as Darcy crossed hemispheres. When they learned of his departure, the Australian authorities and press lost no time in denouncing him as a shirker and kept up the drumbeat the whole time he was at sea. American newspapers would join the chorus soon enough. But Kearns, his chops freshly licked at the prospect of Darcy’s arrival, had his own military campaign to wage and fired off this broadside to rival managers: “Lay off Les, as I have him signed up legally, and every other way.”1 Any fight manager worth his mettle, of course, planned to do just the opposite. Kearns’s rivals converged on Lower New York Bay and schemed to reach the Cushing, once it dropped anchor. London transplant Charlie Harvey, who had been the manager of choice for most of Britain’s pugilistic exports, chartered a fishing smack with an auxiliary motor. Veteran manager Tom O’Rourke sought a lift from U.S. Health Service doctors slated to conduct medical inspections as the ship sat in temporary quarantine. A gaggle of other managers, promoters, and shadowy crime figures opted for the hospitality of Tex Rickard, who’d chartered a tug and invited them aboard. Rickard had this disreputable crew right where he wanted it—close at hand. Kearns had also announced that wrestling-boxing impresario Jack Curley would co-manage the coveted Darcy, but neither was on the scene as Rickard and the pack motored toward the Cushing. Kearns apparently had overrated his powers of persuasion. Somehow, but not surprisingly, the captain permitted only Rickard and three others to board, and Tex chose not the clamoring fight men to join him, but two aides and a newspaper photographer. Onboard, they encountered Harvey and O’Rourke, who’d been trying vainly to locate the sequestered Darcy. Rickard had better success. He dispatched his aides to fetch Darcy, who soon surfaced to meet the man who had matched Jeffries and Johnson. Rickard ushered the fighter and companion O’Sullivan out of harm’s way for a little chat, and when the three men re-emerged, Rickard announced that O’Sullivan was to be the boy’s “manager and sole representative while he’s here.”2 After the captain discharged Darcy, Rickard’s tug took him and all of his pursuers back to shore, where a swarm of newspapermen and more boxing operatives awaited. Rickard promptly installed Darcy and O’Sullivan at the Hotel Broztell in lower Manhattan, where Darcy fielded questions from the press. He was ready to fight, although no matches had been made as yet, he explained, and then offered the ill-advised forecast that he’d “loaf around a bit and look over the city”—hardly endearing words to those back

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home who already had branded him a slacker. Sensing a need to rescue himself, Darcy clarified his reason for enduring a nearly 60-day voyage to the United States. “My real intention in coming to this country has been to secure enough money out of my boxing bouts to enable my family back home to live comfortably,” he said, adding that he expected to fight four or five times, and then go to either Canada or England “for service at the front.”3 He had no contract with any manager, Darcy asserted, adding that he wouldn’t mind fighting heavyweight champion Jess Willard, a man who happened to be a foot taller and more than 100 pounds heavier than the compact Aussie. Rickard chuckled and suggested Georges Carpentier, the French boxing champion and war hero who was closer to Darcy’s size. Rickard took Darcy shopping for an overcoat and then on to the WaldorfAstoria, where the high-toned crowd, the kind of swells Rickard like to cultivate, only wanted to grab hold of the fighter’s sizable right paw. “He impresses me as one of the most wonderful pieces of fighting machinery that I have ever seen,” the suitably dapper promoter said of his new marquee name. Beaming, he expressed great satisfaction in having helped Darcy reach the United States of America.4 Indeed. A month earlier, Rickard had wired an associate in South America to arrange for Darcy and his travel partner to be his guests. Then he hired a horseman who had raced in Australia—one of his aides who would board the Cushing—expressly to cozy up to O’Sullivan. The next day, Kearns—beaten to the punch, to say the least—learned of this perceived perfidy and corralled a newspaper sportswriter in the taproom of the Hotel Prince George, which was around the corner from the Broztell. Kearns claimed that, when he was in Sydney, Australia, he had made a deal to manage Darcy once the fighter came to the States. “Why don’t you go upstairs and see him, then,” said the New York World’s Ned Brown, who already had interviewed Darcy for a column on boxing. “Rickard is keeping me out,” Kearns replied.5 The two men had never met, but their contentious relationship was underway. What happened next was worthy of the Keystone Cops. Brown promised he would fix it so Kearns could get in to see Darcy, and told him to wait near the elevator on the floor below Darcy’s suite. In the parlor of suite 702 at the Broztell, O’Sullivan was holding court with reporters, downing liquor furnished by Rickard. Brown found Darcy in the bedroom and asked the fighter if he had agreed to have Kearns represent him, but Darcy was evasive. He consented, however, to seeing Kearns in the suite. Brown immediately went down to the sixth floor, where he expected to see Kearns waiting by the elevator. But there was no Kearns in sight. Nor was he on any of several floors above or below the designated rendezvous. Nor was there a response when

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Brown called out his name in the hallways. Finally, Brown returned to his pint at the Prince George. In walked Kearns after awhile, wondering why Brown had stood him up, figuring that the newspaperman, too, was one of Rickard’s foot soldiers. Kearns indeed had been waiting—futilely—by a sixth-floor elevator, but at the Prince George—not the Broztell. Brown had failed to clarify which hotel housed Darcy, or maybe he assumed Kearns knew, or maybe the ale was flowing too freely. Regardless, the moment had passed. When Kearns tried suite 702 at the Broztell, Darcy was out; from then on, the boxer was as closely guarded as the bankrolls Rickard once raised to promote fights in the Yukon during the gold rush. “Tex Rickard’s dirty work,” said Kearns. “I couldn’t have played any dirty tricks on him as yet because I don’t even know him.”6 The hustler had been hornswoggled. Darcy, however, produced nothing further for Rickard or anyone else. The proposed bout with Carpentier failed to materialize, as the Frenchman could not secure a release from military service. Then, the Great War began to envelop the United States, and Darcy’s currency plummeted. Governor Charles S. Whitman barred him from boxing in New York, an action embraced by several other states along the eastern seaboard. An opportunity flickered in Tennessee, where the governor seemed inclined to approve a bout for Darcy after the Australian boxer enlisted in the Aviation Reserve Corps of the United States Army at Memphis. The corps commander pronounced Darcy the most perfect specimen ever to apply for enlistment. A foe more implacable than any governor, boxer, or canny promoter was coming for Darcy. His gums became ulcerated, the delayed effect of those blasted gold pins used to secure his front teeth during the heavyweight title fight in Australia. He developed septicemia, then pneumonia. He died in Memphis on May 24, five months after arriving in New York. Kearns accompanied Darcy’s remains to the West Coast, where they were shipped back to Australia for burial. “I could have got fights for that poor kid and squared all the squawks against him,” he said. “And I’m not forgetting it was Rickard who stopped me.”7 Boxing was a fine sport for turning bitter rivals into strange bedfellows. Rickard would stage his war hero versus slacker fight someday soon, with none other than Georges Carpentier in the co-starring role. The villain of the piece would be the franchise fighter for Jack Kearns, the era’s signature heavyweight champion, and the trio of Jack Dempsey, Kearns, and Rickard would define their sport’s promotional arts in the 20th century. Kearns swapped coasts and set about trying to find another fighter he could take to the top or somewhere thereabouts. His father now deceased, Kearns had purchased a home in Oakland and brought his mother and sister over from Michigan to live with him. That obligation satisfied, he

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scoured the waterfront for prospects. Sharply dressed one night in a saloon as grimy as the foundries that dwarfed it, he exchanged brews and small talk with a Salt Lake City middleweight named Vic Hansen, who had been in the Kearns stable and was unhappy he had not been among the fighters selected for the Australia junket. Soon they traded pleasantries for punches and were joined by Hansen’s drunken buddies. At the other end of the bar, a swarthy young man with high cheekbones and eyes like black marbles watched the action. Sucked into the fracas as if by centrifugal force, he more than evened the odds—principled in such matters, he had gone to the aid of the smaller, outnumbered combatant and proceeded to scatter the competition like duckpins. Hansen and company kissed the sooty floorboards. They had made the place a shambles, if it wasn’t already. Before the cops arrived or, more critically, before costs were assessed, the two-fisted rescuer beat a hasty retreat. Outside, in the cool of the garbage-perfumed alleyway, some of the participants in the brawl leveled blame on the cocky dude at the eye of the maelstrom, the fight manager who lived in the vicinity but didn’t dress like it. The newcomer overheard. Jack Kearns had lived to fight another day. So had his savior—Jack Dempsey.

Chapter 7

TORNADO FROM THE WEST

From the start, the image of Jack Dempsey, other than during one near career-shattering interlude, fit the all-American creed. He was straight out of central casting for the role his fists and the chroniclers of the day created for him—he would, in fact, forge an alliance of sorts with Hollywood and star in a few silent action films built around his heroic character. Author Frank Graham Jr. wrote that the young Jack Dempsey’s “broad-shouldered, slim-waisted torso, his brakeman’s haircut, and his dish nose” made him “a perfect fit for those stories about the young savage punching his way out of the West’s hobo jungles to win the heavyweight championship of the world.”1 In training and, of course, in the crucible of a prizefight, the look and movement of the man mesmerized the regular fight crowd and the ever-broadening boxing public. Gifted wordsmiths crafted descriptions. Paul Gallico, an ace sportswriter who became a celebrated fiction writer, noted “the smooth swiveling of Dempsey’s shoulders as he punched a rataplan on the light bag.”2 Novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “The swiftness of his attack, his disdain for strategies of defense, endeared him to greatly aroused crowds who had never seen anything quite like him before.”3 That most American of impulses shaped Jack Dempsey’s unique development. Bespectacled, bizarrely bearded Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, popularized the manifest-destiny mantra of the United States, “Go West, young man!” in an 1865 editorial. (He may have coined the phrase, too, though some credit another newspaper editor, one John Babson Lane Soule, with its provenance 14 years earlier.) Spurred by Mormon missionaries who had come to Logan County, West Virginia, the Dempsey

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clan followed that clarion call in 1880. Mary Celia Smoot Dempsey was attracted by the faith, her husband Hyrum by the prospect of a fresh start and work in the mines. Off they rolled, along with their two young children, overland in a covered wagon toward that glorious, if often forbidding, expanse touted by Greeley, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the lords of real estate. They settled in Colorado’s San Luis Valley in the small Mormon town of Manassa, founded just a year or two earlier, and produced nine more children during the next two decades. Number nine overall, William Harrison Dempsey, arrived on June 24, 1895. More so than all the other offspring, his features reflected the Cherokee blood that ran on both sides. As the youthful Rickard had been, Dempsey became devoted to a mother who toiled in meager circumstances with inadequate support from her husband, and returned her son’s devotion in equal measure. His mother’s hero, he would claim many years later, was the redoubtable John L. Sullivan, the man who established the modern lineage of the heavyweight champion and its hyperrealistic stature. The story was that Celia, while pregnant with her ninth child, had fed a famished peddler and accepted a book as his recompense—the volume turned out to be a biography of the Boston Strong Boy, and when newborn William Harrison eventually weighed in at eleven pounds, Celia took it as an omen. The first in the family to sample the pugilistic arts, however, was the oldest son, Bernard. While Hyrum lurched from struggle to failure, town to town, farms to ranches to mines to railroads, young Harry, as William Harrison was nicknamed, had a different career track in mind. He and his brother Johnny—a year older—grabbed Bernie’s boxing gloves and let fly. Soon it was the younger brother who emerged as the real fighter. When the Dempseys surfaced in Montrose, Colorado, where the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was tunneling west, enterprising Celia launched an “eating house” to stoke the railroad crews, and 11-year-old Harry flailed at broom handles waggled by Johnny, chewed pine gum to toughen his jaw, soaked his head in beef brine to thicken the facial skin, and took on school chums in arranged fights. He snuck out during the night to join railroad workers around the campfire and absorbed the rhythms and reminiscences of a rough-hewn adult world. Work dried up in Montrose, and it was on to Provo, Utah, where a teenage Harry Dempsey shined shoes, picked crops, and unloaded freight cars filled with beets for the local refinery for a dime a ton. Crouching and stepping smartly to maintain his balance atop the shifting pile of bulbous beets, he was augmenting his rudimentary boxing training, which held forth in a converted chicken coop that featured an improvised punching bag (sand and sawdust poured into a cloth bag). The kid loved to fight,

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loved everything about the sport, and he was fast with his hands. School was another matter, but Harry made it through the eighth grade, a mark of distinction in the Dempsey family. His true classroom, though, was of a different ilk. The new century was about speed and money, life on a larger scale. As in any century, however, getting from nowhere to somewhere could be an elusive journey. From age 16 to 21, by his own testimony the young Dempsey worked copper, silver, and gold mines in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. He also washed dishes, dug ditches, punched cattle . . . and fought. Maybe a hundred times. Some of his bouts made it into the record books; most did not. He was skinny with a high-pitched voice, but his oversize fists were wrecking balls—except that they moved much faster. In and out of the prize square (many of those scraps took place in saloons and the like), he was a young man in motion, moving to survive. He moved on foot, miles at a time. When the distances were too great, he defied death and rode the rods, clinging to the train’s underside, precious inches above the roadbed. When he had some change in his pocket, he would go up top and pay for the privilege of riding in a freight car. “I don’t think I was ever a bum,” he said. “I lived in hobo jungles. . . . I shared many a jungle meal with these strange guys who wandered the country with their wardrobe and fortune tied in a rag, or bindle.”4 As had been the case with boxing, Bernie drew his much younger brother to mining without schooling him in its fundamentals. In the bowels of a Bingham Canyon, Utah copper mine 3,000 feet down, 16-year-old Harry shoveled ore to be transported to the surface, where his brother worked as a shift boss. The work could be treacherous. If strange sounds and darkness and the ever-present threat of explosion unsettled Harry, the prospect of challenging large men to a fistfight did not. In a tale ripe for a comic-book ad for bodybuilding, he told of a mining-camp bully terrorizing the smaller men. As expected, the day came when the 200-pounder targeted the skinny youth and tossed successive handfuls of dirt on him. Finally, Dempsey lay down his shovel and approached his tormentor. The other miners took a breather to watch. The first right cross ended it, and the knockout punch didn’t come from the big galoot, who was all mouth, no chin. This encounter definitely failed to make the record books, but Jack Dempsey was not the type to make up stories. He didn’t have to. The black-haired kid was going to be a champion, you could make book on it. He was a realist and knew that the journey would be one of deprivation and reversals, but he would treat long odds as so many opponents to be dismantled. Yes, he was just a kid, with a new fighting moniker of “Kid Blackie,” but he was a man when he rode the rods—he was not the only passenger so precariously aboard—to Salt Lake City and challenged the

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best fighters in the gym and the saloons. He was a prospector with gloves or bare fists as his tools. At first, he fought for a couple of bucks a pop, or for free just to build a reputation. Promoters, or, more accurately, arrangers, of these little brawls sometimes skedaddled with his winnings; sometimes he caught up with them, coldcocked them, and retrieved the money. Managers came and went; so did towns. Dempsey continued to work in the mines, making much needed money and augmenting his training regimen with load lifting and pick wielding, the stamina and mental toughness mandated by a day’s work where the sun didn’t shine. He willed his body not just to survive, but thrive. Always, he moved from place to place, by design or necessity. He chained himself to the trains’ steel beams so he could steal some sleep; otherwise, death on the tracks awaited. Trackside, the fires from the hobo camps were a beacon. At 16, Dempsey had passed six feet in height, and had a lean, wellmuscled frame and a large pair of hands. He didn’t appear prepossessing until one of those fists crashed into an opponent’s jaw—he could bring down tough, fully grown men. By age 19, he had nudged his boxing career onto the fringes of the record books. Facing a fighter with the boastful name of “One-Punch” Hancock in Salt Lake City in November 1914, Dempsey validated the nickname by throwing one punch and knocking his man out. He fought in smaller, meaner Utah towns and in Pocatello, Idaho. Promoting his own fight in a Montrose, Colorado, dance hall, he purchased clothesline cord to serve as ring ropes, then rose from the canvas to knock out a local named Freddy Woods. Back in Salt Lake, Dempsey lost a four-round fight on points. Then he went to Reno, Nevada to knock out “colored” boxer Emmanuel Campbell, another one-and-done customer in the fight game, necessary fodder for a future champion in the early stages. A trio of fights—each in a different Nevada town (one of them Goldfield, where the fight took place at The Northern, previously owned by Tex Rickard)—with a durable Swede out of Omaha named Johnny Sudenberg produced two draws and a second-round knockout for Dempsey. Sudenberg didn’t quite make the boxing Hall of Fame—he failed to notch a victory in his first 16 professional starts and would finish with a record of 9-32-18 (win-loss-draw), but he did have a chin, and Dempsey was the first to knock him senseless. With a barber for a promoter, Dempsey fought a fellow named Andy Malloy in Durango, Colorado, and Malloy promptly became his manager for a short spell. The Durango fight, held at the Gem Theater on a block filled with ill repute, was hardly a gem, as the sheriff mandated an exhibition—the state fair was in town and, for the visitors, manly athleticism was fine but violence a civic no-no. (The other fleshly diversions on Main Street apparently passed muster.) Still, Dempsey received credit for

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a newspaper decision, as the local Herald Evening Democrat reported that the crowd saw it that way.5 Malloy proceeded to match his new client with the local strongman in the village of Olathe between Durango and Grand Junction, but another sheriff declared wrestling only, and in a livery stable in potato-land, young Dempsey took his lumps. Then Malloy set up a rematch between himself and his fighter in Montrose, and Dempsey knocked him out in the third round for his trouble. On a boxing card in the mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado, in November 1915, the peripatetic young fighter pinch-hit for his brother Bernie, who had lost his appetite for combining his day job with highaltitude fighting. Bernie fought as Jack Dempsey, an homage to the legendary 19th-century middleweight champion who had won hearts and the sobriquet “Nonpareil” but died penniless. Bernie’s substitute this night copped his name, then defeated a rough customer named George Copelin, earning enough money to cover training expenses. So Harry had become Jack, and soon enough, there would be only one Jack Dempsey in the public consciousness. The apprenticeship, however, and the nomadic questing, had much further to run. Dempsey had picked up a new manager in Jack Price, the brother-in-law of the Salt Lake promoter who had staged the epic One-Punch Hancock fight, and, in February 1916, they went to Ogden, Utah, for a match against a black fighter known only as Boston Bearcat. Dempsey deposited the Bearcat on the canvas early in the first round, the fallen man proclaiming that he had had enough, even as the referee was still counting. After two more quick knockouts at theaters in other Utah towns, Dempsey and Price set their sights on bigger game. In Ely, Nevada, Dempsey took on Joe Bonds, a Texan who hailed from Tacoma, Washington, and had lettered in four sports (including boxing) at the University of Puget Sound. Bonds had recently completed a five-bout tour in Australia, and Dempsey regarded him as the best man he had signed to face. He outpointed Bonds in 10 rounds, returned to Ogden to decision trial-horse Terry Kellar, and then KO’d opponents in Provo and Price, also managing a side trip to Salt Lake’s Commercial Street, a red light district right in the heart of Mormon country. There, in a saloon dubbed Maxim’s, Dempsey, a month shy of his 21st birthday, struck up a tête-à-tête with the piano player, a woman of the world—and of Walla Walla, Washington—named Maxine Cates. She played one heck of a piano. She had a way of leaning forward when she spoke, so that her breasts dueled with the constrictions of her dress. She was new to Salt Lake, she said, and wouldn’t mind having someone show her around. Dempsey, though, was headed east and, the next day, he bought a genuine railroad ticket for the first time in his life—he and manager Price had

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agreed that New York was the place to find “real fighters.” Maxine from Maxim’s, however, stayed in Dempsey’s thoughts. Someday, she would become perhaps his toughest opponent of all. On their way east, Price and Dempsey stopped at big cities, where the manager touted his boy to no avail. In New York City, Dempsey found the pulse of boxing at Grupp’s Gym, uptown at 116th Street and Eighth Avenue. Fighter and manager took a room near the Polo Grounds, an elongated baseball stadium some 30 blocks to the north and home to the New York Giants. At Grupp’s, Dempsey went through his paces and learned how to double-hook off the jab, a tactic he would use to great effect in the years to come. Outside the gym, he cadged meals and acquainted himself with sportswriters at New York’s many dailies. At the American, a baseball and boxing beat writer took a liking to him. Alfred Damon Runyon hailed from another Manhattan—this one in Kansas—and had dropped his first name on his byline. Runyon put his fellow westerner’s name in the paper. Soon enough, he would dub Dempsey “The Manassa Mauler,” consistent with the era’s penchant for florid nicknames. Indeed, when Manassa had a high school, its sports teams were known as the Maulers. Not that Jack Dempsey ever went to high school in his birthplace of Manassa, or anywhere else. Price and Dempsey had run out of money and exchanged their hotel beds for benches in Central Park before Madison Square Garden matchmaker Tom McArdle arranged a fight for Dempsey, on his 21st birthday, against a Chicago lumberjack named Andre Anderson at Billy Gibson’s Fairmont Athletic Club at 149th Street and Third Avenue. The big town teemed with promoters, fight managers, fight clubs, gyms, and arenas, and Gibson had built a commendable reputation at his uptown Fairmont. Anderson outweighed Dempsey by 40 pounds, and various accounts have Dempsey on the canvas early and often. But the newspapers contradict this and are in agreement that, midway through the fight, the big (six-foot-five) blond Midwesterner tired, and Dempsey dominated the rest of the way. As was the case with most club fights, the 10-round bout offered no official decision, but the sporting press weighed in with its consensus, an outcome that often settled matters for the betting public. The scribes, including Runyon, gave Dempsey the nod over Anderson. One writer reported that the winner was a great young fighter in dire need of a square meal. The payoff, though, was peanuts (Dempsey’s share of the purse was nine dollars), and the next Price-arranged fight, two weeks later against Bronx native William “Wild Bert” Kenny, fattened Dempsey’s wallet by just five dollars while producing another 10-round newspaper decision for the outof-towner. Kenny hit the deck at least twice, and each fighter donated a clinic visit’s worth of blood. At this point, due either to a rival’s ruse to get him out of town, a sick mother back home, or general homesickness, Price

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departed Gotham for Salt Lake City, leaving Dempsey—young, raw, and undernourished—on his own in Washington Irving’s mad city. He fell into the clutches of one John Reisler, the alleged perpetrator of the chicanery that got rid of Price. Reisler was a short, stout, red-cheeked fellow known as John the Barber, a minor-league operator who had gained some notoriety a few years earlier, when, as the principal witness in a murder trial, he got a sudden case of cold feet on the stand. (Reisler blanched at the murderous stares of the defendant’s henchmen, but eventually testified and fingered the murderer.) John the Barber had Jack the Rube in position for a good clipping. First, he claimed that the recently departed Price had sold him Dempsey’s contract, then he sought to feed his young fighter to the legendary black Nova Scotian, Sam Langford. Dempsey figured that Reisler was his only chance to make some headway in New York, but the fighter balked, wisely, at the proposed Langford match. After Reisler suggested fights with other top-notch veterans, his take-it-or-leave-town proposition was John Lester Johnson, a punishing black fighter whom Dempsey considered to be the others’ equal. Johnson busted some of Dempsey’s ribs in the second round of their fight on July 14, 1916, at the Harlem Sporting Club, but the younger fighter stayed upright and rallied. After 10 rounds, the sportswriters were split. The fight was a marker in Dempsey’s progress, but the Barber paid him only $35 (after expenses that included a loan repayment per the departed Price), despite a full house for the show. Dempsey had had enough of Reisler and New York. The West beckoned once again. He decided that somehow he would build a respected record out there and return to the East in triumph. Dempsey surfaced in Kansas City, Missouri, where he signed on as a sparring partner at six bits a day for heavyweight contender Carl Morris, the Sapulpa Giant, who had lost a decisive newspaper decision to Willard in 1913 and, the following year, avenged his earlier embarrassment against Jim Flynn with two victories over the Fireman. In their sparring sessions, Dempsey believed he could have outfought the larger man, but he remained the dutiful soldier and pulled his punches. Morris returned the favor by refusing to buy his strapped, but not yet strapping, counterpart a meal when the two of them crossed paths in a restaurant. When the Morris camp disbanded, Dempsey went westward once again, this time to Pueblo, Colorado, where he picked up a new manager (and then another) and his gear that Morris had sent COD from Kansas City (and for which Dempsey had no money). He was knocking on doors and offering to work for food, but he still saw himself as a boxing champion. Maxine was waiting on Commercial Street in Salt Lake. The young buck came back to town. She was 15 years Dempsey’s senior and marriageminded. Maybe she saw a future champion, but at present, he needed a

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fight more than home cooking and affection. Still, they were hitched on October 9, 1916. With Dempsey’s ribs healed (or nearly healed), he won four fights against less than stellar competition in Utah, Nevada, and Colorado to close out 1916. After a visit with Maxine, who had not accompanied him on the road and was still ensconced in the saloon in Salt Lake City and carping continually about money, Dempsey was offered a fight with Fireman Flynn, who, in 1912, had lost in nine rounds to Jack Johnson in a title bout and always sought out the division’s best fighters. Flynn was just the kind of opponent Dempsey wanted at this point: tough, tested, in the upper ranks of heavyweights, but smallish for the weight class and manageable in the hands of a skilled fighter—which Dempsey believed he was fast becoming. Ironically, however, the fight would be the low note in his boxing career. Dempsey would claim that he had been working in a bowling alley and his uncharacteristically poor showing against Flynn was due to a right hand all but incapacitated by a bowling ball dropped on it by a fellow pinsetter. Maxine later insisted that her husband had taken a dive for money, a charge supported by knowledgeable ringside observers, including Dempsey’s manager at the time, Al Auerbach. Whatever the root cause, some 400 spectators in Murray, Utah, on February 13, 1917, watched the Fireman torch Jack Dempsey. According to Dempsey, Flynn knocked him down several times within two minutes of the first round (hovering over him each time to put him down again—this was before the “neutral corner” rule) until Dempsey’s second, his brother Bernie, threw in the towel of surrender. However, newspaper accounts have Dempsey knocked down for the full count; it was to be the only official knockout sustained by Dempsey in his career. A year later almost to the day, Dempsey and Flynn would meet again with similar results but a reversal of roles, suggesting that Dempsey had a serious score to settle with both Flynn and himself. By that time, he had dispatched Gunboat Smith and the uncharitable Carl Morris twice, and he was primed for a string of early knockout victories, most of them in one round. But that was a year away. After the Flynn fiasco in Murray, Dempsey needed a change of scenery and a chance to redeem himself. The fight’s promoter and now Dempsey’s manager, Fred Winsor, apparently believed in second chances, wiring his fighter to come to the San Francisco Bay Area. For the only time in their ill-fated marriage, Maxine agreed to accompany her husband. She no doubt fancied San Francisco, where they stayed at the Gibson House. The hostelry, however, became a battle zone. Marital discord turned nasty, the police arrived, and Maxine said she had been slugged by her husband.

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The Manassa Mauler, though, had paying assaults to wage; Winsor lined up a March fight with heavyweight Al Norton, reputed to be a puncher, in Oakland. Dempsey managed a four-round draw (California matches had gone from scheduled marathons to brief episodes), then dropped a fourrounder a week later to Willie Meehan, a five-foot-nine-inch mound of flesh who had enough boxing skills to give Dempsey and many others fits. Progress came grudgingly in Dempsey’s comeback. After a rematch with Norton produced another draw, Winsor moved on. So did Maxine, disappearing from the Gibson and Dempsey’s life—for the time being. Without a manager, a wife or, despite having lost only three times in more than 30 fights, any boxing prospects, Dempsey drifted into a waterfront Oakland saloon, where he would meet, under decidedly impolite circumstances, the character who would change his life.

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Chapter 8

ACROSS WAR AND CONTINENTS

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian-Serb in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, it quickly led to war between the two small countries of Austria (AustroHungary) and Serbia, drawing in allies Russia, France, and Britain on the Serbian side. Georges Carpentier volunteered for military service at a recruiting office in Versailles and opted to enter the French aviation corps to train as a pilot. After reporting to a training camp near Versailles, he was assigned to an officer as a driver. The prospect was not one to stir the heart. Carpentier’s reputation as a boxing champion had preceded him, and the brass wanted him on terra firma. He fulfilled his chauffeuring duties for some time, but with the war heating up, virtually everyone soon was slated for the front. Carpentier began training in military aviation at Camp d’Avord near Le Mans in early January 1915. Four months later, he received his pilot’s certification. One test run in his Farman biplane (designed and built by aviators Henri and Maurice Farman) had ended in a forced landing,1 but Carpentier was fired up for action and somehow heedless, for the moment, of the danger in store. His navigational skills improved. He joined a reconnaissance squadron and flew into the fight. It would be a different sort of fighting from what he had known, and he would be in it for the next 15 months. Each branch of the armed forces has its particular brand of triumph and peril, and the ring-tested Carpentier was wise to those sensations. One time his plane stalled over the Vosges Mountains near the German

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border. Sighting targets for the gunners flying behind him, he regularly flew above enemy country and dodged fire from below. Over Germany on September 25, 1915, Carpentier encountered a thick fog that required him to fly just 500 feet above the ground. His plane emerged riddled with bullets from German infantry rifles but intact. Its pilot was unhurt. For this mission, Carpentier later received his country’s Croix de Guerre, signifying bravery in the face of the enemy. Recuperating after his narrow escape, Carpentier learned that a German officer billeted at his parents’ home in Lens (which had been taken by the Germans) was a boxing fan who promised to get word to him that his family was safe. A note with that information did arrive eventually through Swiss intermediaries of the officer—a touch of grace during an unsparing period. Fortified by the news and the interval of rejuvenation (including a notso-restful spree in Paris), Carpentier returned to action with a new squadron and was promptly ushered into the hellish, endless Battle of Verdun in northeastern France. When on solid ground, he was quartered in huts infested with rats. During one flight, he scurried to evade three German fighter planes that eventually were scared off by the intimidating red fuselage of countryman Jean Navarre,2 reputed to be the first of the World War I aces. Shadowing the ground as he flew surveillance for the benefit of the infantry, Carpentier routinely ran the gauntlet of antiaircraft guns, machine guns, and rifles. One such mission enabled the French to recapture the seemingly impregnable concrete fortress at Douaumont. Carpentier’s plane again was pockmarked with bullets and, this time, one had pierced his helmet. For his work at Douaumont, Carpentier received the Medaille Militaire from French president Raymond Poincare on November 5, 1916. In that moment of triumph, airman Carpentier cut a dashing yet modest figure in his uniform festooned with medals, a silk scarf sprouting from the collar to wrap his throat like a bandage. Not yet 22, he was boyish-looking with a slim physique, neatly trimmed hair, a toothy smile, and soft eyes that gave no hint of the violence he had weathered. But right afterward, the import of what he had been through caught up with him. Where he had escaped a physical knockout, he now fell prey to a different kind of toll. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, he became bedridden and soon was sent to a convalescent home for airmen and declared unfit for further active duty. His contribution had been made. The fighting continued. Years later, Carpentier suggested that it was influenza—soon to reach pandemic proportions—that had delivered the blow knocking him out of action,3 and that the French authorities, stunned by the loss of several athletic idols in combat, had decided to “preserve . . . the sporting patrimony of the country.”4 Shelved from the fighting, Carpentier resumed his service

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in a new role: physical education instructor at a military school near Paris. He gained weight and began to feel more like himself. When he visited one of the boxing academies in the city, veteran professional welterweight Albert Badoud invited him to spar. They agreed to take it easy, but Badoud was not one to pull his punches. He clocked the decorated flyer and pressed the attack as if he were in an official fight and had his foe in trouble. He was mistaken on both counts. Carpentier threw off his accumulated ring rust, made the old feint-left/fire-right maneuver, and knocked Badoud out cold. He had not dwelled on it before, but at that moment, Carpentier started to plan his return to the ring. He honed his physical condition, taking up the sport of rugby, showing world-class speed as a sprinter, and boxing in exhibitions for charity. After the Allies and Germany signed the armistice on November 11, 1918, to end World War I, he rededicated himself to boxing, though still stationed at the military school. He went to army camps and took on all comers—bigger men, as usual. At a U.S. camp at Saint-Aignan in central France, he knocked out a too-frisky U.S. Military Police sergeant, prompting congratulations from spectator General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing—“he had it coming to him,” said the American Expeditionary Forces’ top man of the KO’d sergeant.5 On another occasion, Carpentier fought an exhibition in Brussels, inspiring ovations from the locals before mixing it up with a British Army champion. The king of Belgium was in attendance and shook his hand. The war and its enervation were receding, but a different brand of pitched battle held fast to Georges Carpentier. After promoting and refereeing the first Battle of the Century (Johnson vs. Jeffries), Tex Rickard left boxing and the United States. He was in high cotton from the fight and, with a black man wearing the heavyweight crown (and no White Hope considered to be a serious challenge), pickings figured to be slim at boxing’s top echelon. In search of his next adventure, Rickard turned to an old flame: ranching. After the asking price of Texas land proved too high, he sailed with Edith Mae for South America, where he capitalized on a friendly government in Paraguay and bought a fat chunk of that country’s share of the Gran Chaco—250,000 square miles of lowlands. The cattleman hired indigenous Indians and raised nearly 50,000 head on 325,000 of his 5 million acres, impressing government officials and a visiting Theodore Roosevelt. The dynamic former president, who had embarked on a major South American expedition and knew something about cattle from his days as a young man in Dakota Territory, was, in his words, an “old Western friend” of Rickard’s from Alaska and the Texas Panhandle.6

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Rickard cited with pride that his livestock-raising methods had produced a tick-free herd. As always, his interpersonal style earned respect and made friends. He had imported cowboys from Texas to supervise the natives and made everyone feel connected. Lean as a plank, he would stand in the slanting shadows cast by a porch roof, one arm resting on a fencepost, and speak in low tones to his foreman, whose bullet-studded gun belt seemed to cinch his ranch jeans at the waist. With simple words and without fraying nerves, Rickard always made his point. Though Rickard was immersed in the cattle business, he found time to flex his promotional muscle, acquiring a small circus with which to tour coast and countryside. He also staged competitions, including boxing, for his workforce. They were not battles of the century, but the winners came away enriched, and Tex kept his flair for showmanship sharpened. The Rickards stayed in Paraguay for nearly five years, sailing in early April 1915 for New York. Tex planned to divide his time between the United States and South America, but onboard he learned of a startling development in the world of boxing. The heavyweight championship had changed colors again. The man with the palette was promoter Jack Curley. One of the pioneering personalities in early 20th-century boxing, and later credited with the establishment of modern professional wrestling, Curley had been born Jacques Armand Schuel in San Francisco on the nation’s centennial date: July 4, 1876. Displaying a flair for embellishment of the truth, he had invented stories as a ridiculously youthful (age 15) police reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle7 before heading east to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and eventually taking up with boxing promoter P. J. “Paddy” Carroll, a former heavyweight pugilist; and “Honest” George Siler, boxing editor of the Chicago Tribune as well as one of a handful of premier boxing refs of the day (indeed, Rickard’s forthright referee in Goldfield nine years earlier). The young, energetic Curley soon made a name for himself, boosting Jack Johnson’s career early on with promotional assistance and, a decade later, managing—along with future Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, the man who would sell Babe Ruth to New York—James J. Jeffries’s second vaudeville tour prior to the Johnson fight. Five years later, Curley conceived of, and snared, the heavyweight title fight between Jack Johnson and Jess Willard, the bout that restored the crown to the paler race. Willard, born in 1881 on a farm in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, grew to six-feet-six-and-a-half inches and 230-plus pounds. He began fighting at the advanced age of 29 after being swindled by his partners in a small freight business. His only goal was to recoup his financial losses. In his first pro fight, he hurled his man to the canvas and was disqualified. Acquiring

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at least a few of the rudiments of boxing, he won his next six fights against dubious competition in Oklahoma and landed Billy McCarney for a manager, but not for long. Facing fellow White Hope Joe Cox (nearly Willard’s height) in Springfield, Missouri, in October 1911, Willard ducked behind the referee to avoid his opponent’s assault and, at one point, actually left the ring. He informed the ref that he was through at the end of the fifth round. Although that streak of cowardice disappeared after the Cox fight, so did McCarney, who said later, “I quit the big dog on the spot.”8 Former barber Tom Jones (apparently barbering was good training for the fight game), a small and keen-eyed man, filled the breach and matched gigantic Willard against the top tier of White Hopes: Canadian champion Arthur Pelky and promising ill-starred Luther McCarty (who would die the following year after a fight with Pelky) at Madison Square Garden in 1912, and Gunboat Smith in 1913 at Coffroth’s Arena in Colma, California. Willard produced mixed results against these three—a win, draw, and loss, respectively—with each fight going the distance. He also fought lesser lights at lesser venues during this period, including three bouts against novice John “Bull” Young, a McCarty sparring partner. Each fight ended with a Willard knockout, the third on a right uppercut, Willard’s best punch. The next day, Young died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Murder charges against the shaken Willard, his manager, and others associated with the fight were later dropped. Included in the arrest roundup was promoter Tom McCarey, one of the losers in the Johnson-Jeffries sweepstakes. Though his size and strength made him, arguably, as good as any White Hope, Willard was not a true prizefighter. He had been late to the game and slow to develop boxing technique, and now any trace of a killer instinct had been destroyed. When he faced a South African fighter named George Rodel in his next fight, Willard was led to believe his much smaller opponent was ailing, and nursed him through 10 rounds; some newspapers gave the decision to Rodel. In two subsequent fights within the next six months, after he learned that he had been duped by Rodel’s promoter, Willard knocked out the South African. In winning other fights, including a 10-rounder against Carl Morris at Madison Square Garden, Willard was either unconvincing or faced inferior competition. When seasoned but much shorter, Pittsburgher Tom McMahon earned a 12-round newspaper decision against him in March 1914 at the Opera House in Youngstown, Ohio, Willard started looking for the exit gates. Curley had other ideas. The aggressive promoter was ever on the hunt for the white man who might dethrone Johnson—not because of his racial fervor, but because it was good business. He had, after all, helped advance Johnson’s career at several stages, but allegiance went only as far as the

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next payday, the next big idea that could excite the public. And, of course, Johnson would benefit financially as well; everybody won. So it was routine shoptalk when Curley had lunch with his old chum Frazee, now a Broadway producer, and the future baseball blunderer posed the question that Curley had been seeking to answer. “Why don’t you get somebody to beat the nigger?”9 Curley proceeded to get Jess Willard, bringing the big man to New York, and signing papers with him and manager Jones. Curley genuinely believed that, despite less than scintillating boxing talent, Willard was the man to beat Johnson, whom the promoter suspected was not the same fighter who had dominated the heavyweights. Curley crossed the Atlantic to seek out Johnson in England, and sold him on a Willard fight in Mexico at the champion’s going rate of $30,000. The fight was originally scheduled for early March in Juarez, but due to unstable conditions in Mexico (a rivalry between Pancho Villa and an opposing general) and fugitive Johnson’s fear that the proximity to the United States would put him in jeopardy, the venue shifted to Havana after Johnson sailed to Cuba and wired Curley that he was staying put. The promoter moved swiftly, bribing the Cuban president and securing a site in the Orient Race Track outside the city. With the principals assembled in Havana for the showdown, Johnson, turning 37, dogged it in training, while Willard, now 33, worked hard if unspectacularly. When they met on the afternoon of April 5, 1915, in 100-plus degrees for a scheduled 45 rounds, Johnson made Willard look amateurish in the early going, as anticipated. But as the rounds moved well into double digits, though Johnson continued to deal punishment, Willard remained decidedly upright and began to blunt the champion’s attack and land some heavy punches of his own. He was in the best boxing shape he would ever be, and as the sun broiled the fighters, it was Johnson who wilted. When his legs wobbled, he knew he was cooked and summoned Curley to arrange for Mrs. (Lucille) Johnson to leave the premises. She didn’t make it in time, because in the next round—number 26—Willard saw that Johnson was drained and attacked with the kind of devastating boxing skill he had not shown before, mixing hard body punches with well-timed shots upstairs. Finally, a big overhand right put Johnson on his back and down for the count. The crowd erupted. The heavyweight crown was in safe hands once more. As white America rejoiced, Willard hit the vaudeville and Wild West circuits, earning more money than he had for fighting Johnson. He eventually parted company with manager Jones and promoter Curley over money differences—yes, money was his aim and boxing never really his game. His discomfort in the spotlight comparable to that of Jeffries, Willard at

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least felt natural wearing western garb on tour. (He traveled in his own Pullman—hardly natural, but quite appealing to a onetime farm boy and horse trader.) Though Willard was in no hurry to fight again, promoters bidding for his services proposed dollar figures and opponents to the reluctant champion. In early November of 1915, local promoters signed Willard for a March title fight in New Orleans, the opponent to be named later. When they selected Fred Fulton—almost as tall as Willard but slimmer— then backed off from their original financial terms and sought to switch the opponent to Frank Moran (who had lost on points in 20 rounds to Johnson in Paris two years earlier), Tom Jones, at that point still managing Willard, balked and killed the deal. In New York, where some believed that the state’s legal constraint of a 10-round, no-decision title fight guaranteed failure at the gate, Madison Square Garden promoter James J. “Jimmy” Johnston nonetheless sought to land Willard-Moran. A conniving Brit of Irish descent, Johnston had been the promoter who convinced Willard that South African fighter George Rodel was not well (specifically, suffering from a heart condition) prior to their fight so that the big fellow would pull his punches. Willard could not have liked the prospect of fighting for Johnston, but when Tex Rickard outbid the pack, it became moot. And Willard would get the Garden anyway, because that’s where Rickard, having returned to New York from South America, planned to hold the fight in order to make a statement that he was back in the fight game in a big way after a five-year hiatus. Johnston, however, controlled rental rates at the Garden and, sensing Rickard’s eagerness, raised the ante to an extortionist level. “I’m going to break your lease,” Rickard promised Johnston.10 But “The Boy Bandit,” as sportswriter Damon Runyon had labeled Johnston, prevailed, fleecing Rickard for at least seven times the normal rate. Tex, apparently, wanted the Garden at all costs. He pledged a purse of more than $70,000, two-thirds of it for Willard. The champion trained in Chicago before shifting to the Pioneer Athletic Club in the Amsterdam Opera House on 44th Street. Moran went through his paces in Saratoga, land of horses and health elixirs, before finishing at a roadhouse located in New York’s Westchester County and owned by Jack Kearns’s old tutor, Dal Hawkins. Approaching fight time, the blond, handsome challenger appeared to be in the pink. Willard, on the other hand, looked overweight when he arrived in New York. Although he still had time to shed pounds, his appearance spurred city-based state assemblyman Martin G. McCue to action. Local and statewide promoters had besieged McCue, a former fighter, with their complaints that “foreigner” Tex Rickard had muscled in on their territory. McCue took up his constituency’s cause but cloaked it in the public interest, asking the assembly to ban the fight due to Willard’s

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alleged poor physical condition. The legislature quashed his resolution, but McCue warned, “This contest is not on the square. I haven’t any obligation to men from out of the state engaging in any sort of business here if it is run fairly and honestly. . . . Willard is in no condition to put up the fight New Yorkers who pay twenty dollars a seat have the right to expect.”11 Being accused of a promotion “not on the square” must have infuriated Rickard, who was all about the square deal, even when accompanied by a liberal dose of exaggerated publicity. Judging by his actions, Willard, too, took issue with all the fuss about his weight. Encased in woolen underwear while sparring with the likes of regular partner Walter Monahan, and recovered cardiac patient Rodel, Willard trimmed some of the blubber from his ponderous physique. At one such workout, a dozen well-dressed ladies in attendance liked what they saw and cheered more loudly than their male counterparts. As advance sales mounted briskly, Rickard wove his magic. “A lot of millionaires and . . . society ladies are going to be there,” he said to a sportswriter.12 Attending the champion’s final training session, James J. Corbett pronounced him fit and unbeatable. Rickard made good on his promise; women dotted a well-heeled crowd, the largest ever to see a boxing match in the Garden. The fight, itself, however, produced little excitement except in the seventh round, when Willard tired as he was on the verge of putting his man away, allowing Moran to launch a counterattack that pinned the champion against the ropes. During the three remaining rounds after this exchange, the fighters reverted to their pattern of the first six rounds: a slow circling of each other with fists moving like a juggler’s at half-speed and rarely connecting with flesh and bone. When one of them did land a punch, it usually was Willard. Afterward, he claimed that he had shattered the bones in his right hand in the third round, though no apparent impact caused an injury that pronounced. The physician who examined him afterward did find a single, slight fracture to Willard’s right index finger. The newspapers tapped Willard as the winner, most of them awarding him every round. The boxing cognoscenti were not impressed. Many itched for a newcomer to fell Willard as devoutly as they had prayed for him to do away with Johnson. John L. Sullivan weighed in: “If them two bums are champion and challenger, I’ll take on both of them the same night.”13 Rickard, however, was impressed by the success of his promotion. From a $152,000 gate—the largest ever for an indoor sporting event—he had netted $42,000. And he would likely make a few bucks from the exhibition of the fight film, although distribution was limited to New York State by

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federal laws originally aimed at restricting Jack Johnson’s exposure (and transport of women) across interstate lines. But even with a matchup as dreary as Willard versus Moran, Rickard had met his mission and then some. Think of what he might do, people speculated, with a gaudier marquee.

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Chapter 9

DYNAMIC DUO

The fracas along the Oakland wharves was their first face-to-face encounter, but it wasn’t the first time that Jack Kearns had seen Jack Dempsey in action. Kearns had split with his heavyweight prospect, Joe Bonds, after their Australian tour by the time he saw the fighter go the distance with Dempsey in losing a 10-round decision in Ely, Nevada, in April 1916. Kearns must have been more impressed by the decisiveness of Dempsey’s barroom rescue than by his pedestrian win against Bonds. Not to mention grateful. The young fighter—troubled in his marriage and stalled in his career—found work, by his own account, either as a lumberjack or in the shipyards of either Tacoma or Seattle. A letter from Kearns tracked him down at his mother’s home in Salt Lake City. Was he interested in fighting under a new manager? Jack Dempsey was interested. Kearns’s next letter included a train ticket to San Francisco plus five dollars for chow, and in May 1917, he installed a somewhat undernourished (not for the first time) Dempsey in his Oakland home. Kearns’s mother fed the scruff y-looking young man, who earned his keep by doing household chores, including the construction of a fruit cellar. At the gym, Kearns matched his newcomer against an aggressive puncher, Red Watson, in a sparring session. When Watson came out like a tiger freed from its cage, a surprised Dempsey quickly cast off his lethargy and pulverized his man against the ropes, forcing his manager to halt the action. Kearns liked what he saw. His new fighter was all coiled energy and violent outbursts. “There was a quickness in his movements and a smoldering look about him, much like a bomb about to explode,” he told his ghostwriter, Oscar

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Fraley, decades later.1 But Watson, though a handful, was a lightweight. Dempsey, broad and rangy, had added pounds of muscle to his lean frame, and was a bona fide light-heavyweight. And Kearns didn’t plan for him to stop there. It would soon be time to move Dempsey up the heavyweight ladder, but not before a couple of retreads. First up was round fleshy Willie Meehan, a ponderous but clever San Franciscan who owned a four-round decision over Dempsey four months earlier. When the two squared off in Emeryville, California, on July 25, 1917, the four-round decision was reversed. A third fight with Al Norton produced a first-round KO for Dempsey after two draws. Then it was Meehan twice more that summer in his hometown, each four-round fight resulting in a draw. In four short fights, Dempsey had not been able to solve fat Willie, but these were just a prelude to the most important fight of his career to date. Kearns secured a bout against top contender Ed “Gunboat” Smith, who, four years earlier, had outpointed current champion Jess Willard over 20 rounds, and a year after that had been disqualified in the sixth round against Georges Carpentier in Paris. John “The Barber” Reisler had wanted to feed Dempsey to Smith ahead of schedule, but now Dempsey felt that he was ready to sit at the table. In their four-round fight in San Francisco on October 2, 1917, Smith planted a big right on Dempsey’s chin in the second round. Dempsey remained vertical, but the punch knocked Kearns right off the stool he had been standing on below the ring.2 Dempsey finished the round, but he had slipped into the realm of the semiconscious. Afterward, he apologized to Kearns for losing, but his manager assured him that he had begun his march to the championship—the heavyweight championship. Guided by Queer Street’s automatic pilot, Dempsey had outfought Smith to a decision. The heavyweight title? Dempsey wondered if his dauntless manager knew something he didn’t. “You’re the doctor,” the fighter began saying, as others likewise followed the imperatives of Doc Kearns. Kearns had set his fighter on a course that, well within two years, would bring them to the brink of the heavyweight championship. Losing just once in his next 26 starts—the reversal to his old nemesis, confounding Willie Meehan, in a four-rounder ignored by the boxing powers and public— Dempsey knocked out almost every fighter summoned to meet him, ranked contenders and also-rans, most of them in the first round. A month after beating Gunboat Smith, he faced Carl Morris in a four-rounder at San Francisco’s Dreamland Rink and avenged his former employer’s stinginess, out-punching him and winning on points. It was time to leave California and step up to fights of 10, 12, 15 rounds— except that Dempsey’s fights rarely lasted the limit and often never triggered the gong for round two. Kearns browbeat reporters into paying attention

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to his man, insisting that Dempsey already was the heavyweight division’s top contender. Soon enough, his ring record substantiated that claim. In Racine, Wisconsin, he finished Homer Smith, a comer from Kalamazoo, in one round. From there, Dempsey-Kearns braved the snows of Buffalo and convinced local newspaperman/promoter Charlie Murray to back a rematch with Morris; this time, a beaten-up Morris let regression be the better part of valor, and fouled out in the sixth. Ten days later in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the rematch between Dempsey and Jim Flynn again ended in a first-round KO, but this time the fireman served as the canvasback—it was Dempsey’s eloquent answer, one year and one day later, to his suspected tank job versus the same fighter. Less than two weeks later, Dempsey squared off against another formidable opponent. Bill Brennan, a Chicagoan born Wilhelm Shanks (or Schenck) in Louisville, Kentucky, had fought light-heavyweight title claimant “Battling” Levinsky to a standstill in four fights within the preceding five months when he met Dempsey in Milwaukee in late February 1918. The two had sparred at Billy Gibson’s in New York. Possessing knockout power (his nickname, not quite earned, was “Knockout” Bill Brennan) and built along Dempsey lines, Brennan was regarded as one of the prime contenders for Willard’s crown, when his manager, Leo Flynn, yielded to Kearns’s persistent campaign. His fighter, in turn, yielded to Dempsey’s furious attack, which landed Brennan on his trunks four times in the second round and twice more in the sixth, the final one for keeps—Dempsey’s knockout punch had spun all of Brennan around except for one foot, resulting in a fractured ankle for the defeated fighter, who reportedly had never been knocked off of his feet before. Afterward, Dempsey visited the battered loser in his dressing room. The two had great mutual respect and a kind of rough kinship. Truly, it had been a big night for Dempsey, but Brennan showed no trace of resentment when he said, “Next time you get dumped, Jack.”3 And he meant it. And there would be a next time. By then, Dempsey would be the heavyweight champion and the most famous athlete in the world. After stopping Brennan, his next nine fights— against both nonentities and men of standing (Canadian champ Pelkey, trial horse “Porky” Dan Flynn)—produced seven first-round knockouts and a second-round knockout during a five-month period, slowed only by a 10-round draw with Billy Miske, the durable “St. Paul Thunderbolt” who would fight Dempsey twice more. The final bout of this string, against Fred Fulton on July 27, 1918, in a baseball park in Harrison, New Jersey, catapulted Dempsey into the top contender position, all by himself. On the same night that Dempsey mauled Brennan in Milwaukee, Fulton TKO’d Frank Moran in three rounds in New Orleans to emerge as

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the number-one challenger for Willard’s crown. (Fulton, in fact, had been claiming the title as his own by forfeit, due to Willard’s inaction.) Moran, boxing people pointed out, had gone the distance in losing a newspaper decision to Willard nearly two years earlier. Fulton, the “Rochester (Minnesota) Plasterer,” had Willard-like dimensions and, it seemed, more of a kick. He had, in fact, floored the heavyweight champ in an exhibition match in Rochester a month after Willard had taken the title from Johnson. Whether that unaccustomed position lingered in Willard’s memory or not, he continually rejected Fulton’s challenge throughout 1917. (Of course, Willard was content to reject everyone’s challenge and remain idle.) Then an upstart promoter gained Willard’s confidence and was on the verge of staging a fight between the two lumbering giants. Colonel Joseph Carson Miller was a product of the plains and western showmanship. He hailed from Bliss, Oklahoma, one of several towns within an expansive cattle spread called 101 Ranch, progenitor of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, which had featured freshly crowned Jess Willard for 20 weeks after Jack Johnson had wilted in the Havana sun. Cattle baron Miller, whose father had founded 101 Ranch, wore a wide sombrero and a narrow mustache, and was simpatico with the new heavyweight champ, who fancied western duds and preferred show life to ring wars. Not much of a boxing fan, much less a promoter, Miller had witnessed Fulton’s destruction of Moran in New Orleans and buttonholed Willard soon after. The champion realized that he would have to fight Fulton sooner or later, and regarded his Wild West boss as just the man to set it up. “Colonel, why don’t you get into this thing and promote the match?”4 he said to Miller, who did just that, though he had to double his initial offer of $10,000 to the challenger, when Fulton’s manager, Mike Collins, played hardball. For a year Collins had been trying to get Willard to agree to terms for purses as high as $50,000 but had been stonewalled by the champion;5 now he was determined to make Willard’s new sponsor pay. Miller and Willard were to be co-promoters of the fight tentatively scheduled for July 4, with the champion receiving three-quarters of the net profits. So the money was there courtesy of the cattle-rich colonel, and Willard finally was onboard to defend his title. But finding a site for the fight in the face of public opposition spurred by World War I proved another matter. Fighting for recreation and profit on the home front was intolerable at a time when U.S. soldiers were sacrificing their lives overseas, asserted growing anti-boxing factions. One by one, governors rushed to proclaim their states’ unwillingness to host the bout; Nevada and New Mexico, two early choices of Miller’s, withdrew in April.6 Minneapolis-St. Paul—Fulton country—seemed promising for a spell, but by May, Minnesota had fallen, too. Col. Miller retreated. Willard-Fulton was off.

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Tex Rickard, eyeing the next big event in his career as a boxing promoter, supplanted Miller in trying to line up Willard and Fulton. Meanwhile, Jack Kearns was anxious for Dempsey to fight either one of the “big bums,” and he was not shy about letting the world know it. In Denver for the DempseyPelkey fight in late May, Kearns received a surprise visit from Collins, whom he had been trying to corral for months. With Willard-Fulton dead at least for the moment, Collins sought a payday that would also enhance his fighter’s status. This young Dempsey, though he’d been knocking people out, looked quite beatable—he’d managed only a draw against Billy Miske earlier in the month, Collins calculated. (Fulton, however, had also done no better than a draw against Miske early in the year.) Kearns was all for it, though he envisioned a different outcome: Fulton would fall like a rotted tree in a high wind. The man who made it happen with a guarantee of $12,500 for each fighter was ever-ready Jack Curley, who capitalized on New Jersey’s generous stance toward boxing and staged the fight in the town of Harrison (near Newark) in a baseball park that had been dedicated to the shortlived, recently defunct Federal League, the last of the rivals to the National and American major leagues. After preparing in the seaside town of Long Branch under trainer Jimmy DeForest’s ever-present cigar, Dutch boy cap, and keen eye, Dempsey entered the ring in long white trunks with a high waistband, his face and arms browned by the sun, his hair shaved to the scalp for the three inches rising above his ears. Kearns stood at his side, wearing a striped shirt and short tie. Towering, slightly round-shouldered Fulton, whose height was listed anywhere from six feet four and a half to six feet six and a half, wore the type of short black trunks normally seen on a competitive swimmer. Dempsey’s dark eyes narrowed in concentrated willfulness. Kearns’s blue eyes were wide with anticipation and selfsatisfaction. He had educated the boxing world about the wonders of his fighter and snared the first of two giants whose elimination was necessary to the final goal. Kearns had never lacked confidence; now his self-assurance was rising to the next rung. When John “The Barber” Reisler had surfaced in the spring to reassert his spurious but annoying claim on Dempsey, Kearns had tapped New York American sports editor Bill Farnsworth for an introduction to New York Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, who gave Kearns sufficient payoff money to get rid of Reisler once and for all.7 (Big money was on the horizon for liberal-spending Kearns, who would be just as speedy in parting with large sums.) Kearns continued his baseball motif, as drinking pal John McGraw, the brilliant pugnacious manager of the New York Giants, introduced him to Tex Rickard at the Hotel Biltmore bar in New York. Kearns let the promoter know of his displeasure at being

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squeezed out of the Les Darcy sweepstakes (given the outcome, he should have thanked him), but the Doctor quickly changed his bedside manner for the man who was, at present, promoter for the heavyweight champion. “What about my boy fighting Willard?” “The champ’s too big,” Rickard said, echoing popular opinion. “You’ll be talking different if I knock out Fulton,” said Kearns.8 Despite his manager’s egocentrism, Dempsey would have to do the knocking out, a task for which he was inclined and well-trained. After the fighters moved slowly from their corners toward center ring, Fulton stuck out his long left arm to gauge punching distance and Dempsey’s reaction. He did not need to be concerned about throwing any actual punches. Dempsey sprang and cracked a hard right over the heart, dug a left to the stomach and, pressing Fulton toward the ropes, came over top with a high crashing right to the jaw. Out on his feet, Fulton spun and crumpled, his head falling over the lower rope.9 Twenty-three seconds. (Eighteen by some watches.) Curley’s crowd contained a handful of ladies and Broadway types, but the anticipated numbers had not materialized, and the promotion was a financial failure. Security had maintained decorum about as well as Fulton had contained Dempsey—crashers climbed the right-field fence and bolted past a brigade of uniformed Jersey Home Defense soldiers, while denizens of the bleachers waited for the right moment to stampede into the high-priced seats. Afterward, recriminations flew from the loser’s camp. Collins carped about the buildup of tape on Dempsey’s fists; months later, the embarrassed Fulton offered his own revisionist history that Dempsey had “doublecrossed” him in what was intended to be an eight-round exhibition.10 By that time, Dempsey had stormed through the rest of the year with six more early knockouts in eight fights and embarked upon a bum-of-the-week barnstorming tour, all of that a prelude to fighting Jess Willard for the world heavyweight championship. The eight legit fights included one loss (another inconsequential four-rounder to exasperating Willie Meehan) and a six-round newspaper decision over Billy Miske. (During this period, efforts to inveigle Dempsey into fighting formidable black heavyweight Joe Jeannette were rejected by Kearns, who simply would not permit his man to jeopardize the looming big-money match with Willard.) Of the half-dozen legitimate KOs, Dempsey’s three notable victims were lightheavyweight champ Levinsky—he had never been knocked out until his jaw met Dempsey’s right hand in the third round—and, in two statement fights late in the year, Carl Morris in New Orleans (first round) and Gunboat Smith in Buffalo (second round). A left to the stomach finished Morris one minute into the scheduled 20-round fight and, suitably chastened after

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three goes with Dempsey, he referred to the victor as “a man-killer.”11 In his second outing against Smith, Dempsey blasted the Gunboat to the canvas nine times in less than two full rounds, the final time for the count. These last two decisive victories over highly ranked heavyweights that he had once feared, and already beaten though less convincingly, made Dempsey the indisputable top challenger for the heavyweight title. If only his greatest challenge were limited to the prize ring. By now the Kearns persona—“smart, dapper, the perfect wise guy, groomed and scented,” wrote Paul Gallico12—was fully formed. Cocksure in public, Kearns paced the floorboards and snapped pencils in the privacy of hotel rooms, so intent was he to get Jack Dempsey into the ring against Jess Willard.13 Recalling master showman William Brady’s emphasis on image, he expanded his already considerable wardrobe and made sure that his number-one attraction was just as smartly tailored. Dempsey, who had scrounged food at hobo camps and slept in Central Park, now stayed with Kearns at the best hotels and ate in expensive restaurants. They traveled by cab and in a flashy red Buick. Kearns brought his fighter to the vaudeville circuit, where the keyed-up manager speechified onstage and trotted out the “next world heavyweight champion” to skip rope, hit the bags, and wow the public with his sleek, fierce presence. Sometimes Kearns offered $1,000 to any audience member brave and skilled enough to match fists with Dempsey and stay conscious, but always ensured that the “challenger” was bodyguard Max “The Goose” Kaplan, who had perfected the one-punch swan dive. Kearns never parted with the thousand bucks, but he spent money freely and, with no compunction, routinely stiffed haberdashers, hoteliers, and theater owners. There was one stop he wished he had not made. In Philadelphia for the Levinsky fight in September 1918, Kearns received a request from the U.S. government: Would Jack Dempsey pose for pictures at the Sun shipyards in nearby Chester? Sun Ship helped outfit the U.S. Navy. Why not boost both recruitment and his fighter’s standing with the public in this time of war, Kearns figured. The ensuing episode, however, had the opposite effect. In compliance with the expanded Selective Service Law enacted after the United States entered World War I, Dempsey had registered the previous year and received an exemption that deemed him the sole support of his wife, parents, and widowed sister and her children. Even with the fervor surrounding the war effort, top athletes who enlisted typically served in a capacity that enabled them to stay in the game—Babe Ruth famously joined the Massachusetts Home Guard and remained with the Red Sox, while boxers (including Levinsky) instructed soldiers in the finer points

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of their sport. Exempted from service, Dempsey consciously fought several bouts that raised money for the Armed Forces and charitable organizations.14 Official requirements aside, a streak of resentment toward able noncombatants simmered across the land. Dempsey heard the word “slacker” hurled in his direction more than once at his fights and, on the eve of Dempsey-Fulton, the Stars and Stripes editorialized, “The glorified, the commercialized, the spectatorial sport of the past has been burnt out by gun fire,”15 a measure of disapproval, if not of reality. So when newspapers ran a photo of a smiling Dempsey holding a shipyard worker’s riveter and wearing striped overalls above gleaming patent leather dress shoes, there was hell to pay, though not to Uncle Sam. Here was this premier fighting man dodging the draft and mocking it, critics charged. Unsympathetic newspaper writers lined up to excoriate the boxer ready to seize the heavyweight crown. The true champions were overseas, they wrote. By then, Dempsey had filed for divorce from Maxine for desertion. The decree followed a year later, but Maxine would reenter his life the year after that, this time as an avenging ex-wife and star witness for the prosecution in the draft-evasion case that restored the unfortunate shine to those patent-leather shoes and threatened to end Dempsey’s boxing career.

Chapter 10

NEAR DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

Heavyweight champion Jess Willard, who had become a national hero to white America by knocking out Jack Johnson, had squandered his popularity by making only one legitimate title defense (against Frank Moran) in four years, and offering the public a personality as compelling as an unpainted barn. Willard treated the heavyweight title like a prize horse that he wanted to keep in the stall rather than race or otherwise subject to public display. While he conveniently implied that respect for U.S. fighting men at war precluded a busy boxing agenda, he was accurately perceived as a mercenary rather than a sportsman, and regarded as one more physically capable man (at six and a half feet tall and 250 pounds, quite capable) who was unwilling to go to war. (He had a wife and a farm to support.) Now, though, Willard needed money and trusted one man to deliver a fair deal: Tex Rickard, who had matched him against Moran three years earlier. By late 1918, World War I fighting had ended, but even in the triumphant United States, feelings were still raw, and patriotism ran high. Rickard, the man attached to Willard and Madison Square Garden, had been contemplating matching the oversize champ against French boxing champion and war hero Georges Carpentier, calculating that the contrast and the opportunity to boo Willard would swell the crowd. But the greater contrast was one of size—next to the immense Willard, overgrown middleweight Carpentier would look like a shoeshine boy—so after rejecting the strongest of the black fighters on the grounds that they were box-office poison, Rickard turned to the logical stateside contender, Jack Dempsey, whom he worried also was much too small to survive against Willard; in

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fact, after papers were signed, Rickard fretted openly that the giant champion might literally kill Dempsey, who weighed 180 and change. Of course, that might have been yet another gate-building ploy. Rickard had learned from his press agent, Ike Dorgan, that Dominick Tortorich, promoter of the Dempsey-Morris finale in New Orleans, planned to offer Willard $75,000 to fight Dempsey.1 Rickard planned to up the ante. In January 1919, he found Willard in Chicago and huddled with him for two days. By the end of their conference, Willard had signed papers guaranteeing him $100,000 to fight an opponent chosen by the promoter in a title bout up to 40 rounds at a site chosen by the promoter, likely on July 4 of that year. Each party agreed to deposit forfeit money of $10,000 in a Chicago bank. The terms prohibited Willard from any other engagements between then and the fight. Rickard reserved the right to name the referee. “I haven’t any idea where the contest will be decided,” he said. “The laws of the state in which the battle will be staged will, of course, govern the situation. . . . Wherever the battle is fought, it will not be in a baseball park. I plan to build an arena with a seating capacity of fifty thousand.”2 Both the size and cost of the arena would increase. As he always did, Rickard acquired financial backers drawn to the excitement and his apparent forthrightness. The principal investor in the Willard-Dempsey promotion was Memphis banker and cotton broker Frank Flournoy, whom Rickard had met while raising cattle in Argentina. Flournoy’s stake of at least $100,000 helped foot the rising stadium bill. Claims in Jack Kearns’s ghosted autobiography credit him with bringing Flournoy onboard, and attribute the signing of Willard to the fight manager’s canniness, saying that he promised Rickard he would raise the money for the fight, then talked him into bluffing a $100,000 guarantee to Willard via telegram. The story continues that, two days later, while Dempsey was onstage at the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia, Rickard called with the good news that Willard answered the wire and wanted to meet. Whatever role Kearns may have played in corralling Willard, Dempsey’s participation required the champion’s thumbs-up. Rickard asked the pair to come to New York, where they checked into the expensive Claridge Hotel and met with him at his office at the Garden on Twenty-third Street. The promoter’s misgivings about Dempsey surfaced once again. “Every time I look at you, you get smaller,” he said to the fighter. “I strip big,” Dempsey replied. “I’m afraid Willard will kill you.”3 Kearns asked for a guarantee of $50,000; Rickard said he’d give it some thought. In early February, they met again, this time at the Biltmore Hotel. Rickard wanted to go no higher than $25,000. Kearns came in at $33,333

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(one-third the guarantee given Willard), then dropped it to $30,000. When Rickard countered that they split the difference and Kearns resisted, they agreed to give the final word to nine waiting newspapermen who included Bill Farnsworth, Grantland Rice, and Damon Runyon. The summoned scribes-turned-arbiters opted for the lower figure by a seven-to-two vote.4 Power to the press, true-blue to Tex Rickard, known for supplementing sportswriters’ incomes as a cost of doing business. Dempsey promptly left for Salt Lake City to visit his mother at the home he had recently bought for her. Within days, he returned to New York to commit his (Kearns’s) oral agreement with Rickard to paper, a normally static exercise turned mobile by the State of New York’s growing antipathy toward the sport of boxing; namely, officials wailed, the kind of violent extravaganzas favored by Mr. Rickard. The prudent promoter chartered a ferryboat to take his signers across the Hudson River and outside of New York jurisdiction to the New Jersey burg of Weehawken, where Aaron Burr had plugged Alexander Hamilton on a bluff in a different kind of battle more than a century before. (Again, the Kearns autobiography says its subject was the one to suggest this little trip as a way to stay on the right side of the law.) Dempsey and Kearns inked their signatures in a railway terminal, the excursion rich in symbolism for a sport long reliant on floating barges and secretive corners. Dempsey was to receive a guarantee of $27,500 with an additional $2,500 if the gate exceeded $250,000. To add promotional muscle, Rickard required that both Willard, who already had signed, and Dempsey train for at least six weeks near the selected site. Dempsey departed Weehawken for Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and a scheduled appearance in a stage play.5 (Even with the big fight set, Kearns was not about to dial down his boy’s exposure.) As for Rickard, signing the two fighters had been easy compared to the task that now confronted him. A tide of blue-nosed reform was engulfing America—Prohibition was soon to be the law of the land—and prizefighting was one of the unseemly activities in its crosshairs. Backed by much of the clergy and a swarm of ordinary moralists convinced that their time had come, reformers sought to ban boxing state by state, and many governors felt the rising political heat. Ministerial unions, religious assemblies, Sunday School associations, and street-corner proselytizers all joined in righteous indignation over the mercantile spectacle of two men clubbing each other into submission or worse, especially after the devastating war that had claimed countless lives in an honorable cause. (A cause, of course, to preserve our way of life and inalienable rights, perhaps including the right to imbibe and watch a prizefight?) Even Texas shot down native son Rickard, and Nevada was inhospitable; if his own stomping grounds didn’t want him, who would? The morality

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bloc slew bids from Maryland, Louisiana, Idaho, and New Jersey. New York, engaged in its customary legal identity crisis with respect to boxing, was out. Rickard had included a contractual clause allowing for a “contest abroad,” but that was a last resort. Deliverance came from one Addison Q. Thacher, a businessman in bluecollar Toledo, Ohio, and future mayor of that town. Thacher, who owned a gym and, appropriately in this instance, a salvage operation, reached out to Rickard and touted Toledo—railway accessible to New York and the big cities of the Midwest—as a site for the fight. Another version of this union lies in yet another Kearns claim: On a Dempsey vaudeville stop in Toledo, Kearns advance man Billy McCarney learns that Thacher wants his city to host the fight; Kearns subsequently meets Thacher, who says that Ohio would impose no legal barrier to the fight, but it would need the sanction of the governor to assuage reform groups. That governor was James M. Cox, to be the Democratic standard-bearer (joined by running mate Franklin Delano Roosevelt) in the following year’s presidential election against fellow Ohioan Warren G. Harding. Rickard hardly needed Kearns or anyone else to tell him that Cox’s endorsement was crucial to secure Toledo for the fight, and he proceeded to buttonhole the governor at a New York hotel, where Cox turned down the promoter’s obvious quid pro quo offer of a $25,000 political contribution but pledged not to buck public interest in his state and oppose the match.6 (The more colorful, Kearnsian telling of the governor’s assent finds Kearns, of course, and Rickard jointly crashing an Elks convention in Columbus and collaring Brother Cox, whereupon Rickard makes his ham-handed pitch, but Kearns proceeds to sweet-talk the governor into promising he will not resist the fight.)7 In May, Toledo Mayor Cornell Schreiber, a proponent of the fight from the start, made it official. Rickard could stage a 12-round title fight between Jess Willard and Jack Dempsey at an outdoor stadium to be constructed in Bay View Park near Maumee Bay, north of downtown. In return, the promoter would contribute seven percent of gate receipts to Toledo’s poor. The reform elements howled—the International Reform Bureau even sent its superintendent from Washington to exert pressure—but Schreiber would not be dissuaded from enlivening his city of whirring machines and belching foundries with the heavyweight championship fight. Nor could entreaties from the state legislature or protests from Congress change the mindset of Governor Cox. As he did for Johnson-Jeffries in Reno nine years before, Rickard enlisted San Francisco contractor James P. McLaughlin to build the arena, and soon an octagonal structure of Michigan white pine rose in the dandelion-studded park by the bay, just below Lake Erie. Rickard expanded the projected seating capacity to 80,000, with an optimistic

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standing-room-only maximum of 100,000. When he had signed papers with the city, he said that he expected receipts of $400,000, but privately, he yearned to produce a million-dollar gate. McLaughlin mustered an army of carpenters, 1.75 million board feet of lumber, and two carloads of nails. To preclude the shakiness experienced at his Reno structure, he built for a load well in excess of what a full house of well-upholstered fans would bring to bear. To discourage gate-crashers, another problem in Reno, McLaughlin built multiple barbed-wire fences around the arena and an enclosure of like material for Rickard’s “Jenny Wren” (after the dolls’ dressmaker of Charles Dickens’s final novel) section dedicated to unmolested viewing by female spectators—for the first time at a boxing match in the United States, women attended in appreciable numbers.8 Rickard also stipulated that the ring be reduced from the normal 24-foot-square to 20, freeing up two additional rows of ringside seats.9 Neither Willard nor Dempsey needed dancing room. As advertised and required, the fighters arrived in late May to train near the rising wooden octagon, which fundamentalists threatened to torch, prompting Rickard to post security guards and have his man McLaughlin hose down the pine pile nightly.10 The Dempsey camp set up shop east of Toledo in a frame bathhouse at the former Overland Swimming Club on Maumee Bay, which deepened into the western end of Lake Erie. Here, where the walleye ran, the mallard flocked, and the summer mercury shot skyward, the challenger and his team battled by day and bunked by night. On the morning of May 27, trainer DeForest unleashed Dempsey for six rounds of serious boxing, four against heavyweight Bill Tate and two against light-heavyweight Terry Keller, whom Dempsey had defeated twice. Tate, a veteran black fighter preparing to meet Sam Langford, duplicated Willard’s height and tested Dempsey with long left jabs, backpedaling circular movement, and overall ring generalship. But Dempsey, head and shoulders leading the body, was on him from the start, landing a right uppercut that nearly lifted Tate off of his feet. After the six rounds of sparring, Dempsey shadowboxed for a full 45 minutes and then punched the heavy bag with enough force to tear and snap one of the ropes tethering it to the rafters. Then he jumped into Maumee Bay to cool off on a blisteringly hot afternoon. While Dempsey was waging his assault, the Army, Navy and Civilian Board of Boxing Control launched an offensive against the Ohio churches protesting the fight. Seeking to take the high moral ground from the ecclesiastics, the Board offered this polemic: The Government made boxing an integral part of the training of soldiers for war, which resulted in a great revival of the sport. For every

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single person opposed to boxing in Ohio and in all parts of America, we are convinced that there are a thousand devoted followers of the sport to whom the proposed match will be a source of innocent and pleasurable entertainment, and we cannot see any reason why it should be denied them any more than we could see the justice of interfering with any of the religious entertainments which you frequently organize in conjunction with your church. If you will pardon our saying so, your opposition is half a century behind the times. We consider that those who are opposing this match are incurring grave responsibility, as such opposition can only react to the detriment of religion in the minds of millions of men who can see no harm in two exponents of the highest skill in a given sport engaging in a contest for supremacy.11 Take that. Willard rented a fine stone home in a residential Toledo neighborhood and, dressed in jacket and tie, arrived via chauffeured sedan for training sessions at a rustic casino on Maumee Bay. He acted as his own trainer. He told the world that there wasn’t a man alive who could hurt him. Willard charged 25 cents for the privilege of seeing him shadow-box, spar, and subject his stomach to the pounding of a medicine ball. A surprising number of women joined the ranks of spectators curious to watch the giant go through his paces. The heat rose in June and spiked late in the month. On June 26, Willard boxed 11 languid rounds with a combined five fighters, then lumbered about the ring in a shadowboxing session that showcased a series of short, vicious right uppercuts. This was the punch that the big man was fashioning for the smaller Dempsey’s jaw, a part of the challenger’s anatomy that seemed eminently reachable as he stalked in his crouch. Dempsey, though, was no plodder simply pushing forward, head down, into a volley of punches or a single bomb. He weaved as he charged, making himself a deceptively elusive target, and fired paralyzing punches from every angle. The combination of foot and hand speed enabled him to reach bigger men before they expected. And when he reached them, his punches destroyed. His work that afternoon at the Overland Club once again pointed up the physical contrast between the two fighters. Where Willard was majestic and largely stationary, Dempsey ducked and sidestepped, bounced and pounced. He hit the Jamaica Kid, one of three sparring partners this day, with shots that could be felt down in the islands. Willard, it was believed, pulled his punches in training and even in actual bouts, haunted by the memory of having beaten a man so badly in the ring that he later died. Dempsey had only one speed any time he entered the ring: flat out.

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Willard was blasé, Dempsey intense. Willard evinced the confidence, the indifference, of a potentate surrounded by subjects. Without another man calling the shots, he conducted himself according to whatever whim or boxing precept held sway at the moment. Dempsey followed orders and looked like what he was, a young hungry package of destruction bent on taking the world, as if making payback for the miles of hugging the underbellies of speeding trains, and the hellishness of toiling in the bowels of mines, and the privations of an itinerant life, hands warmed over flaming trashcans and body chilled by nights on a park bench. If Willard was worried about killing a man, Dempsey was worried about not killing him. He would punch through rings of fire to reach his mark, and no, it would not be a simple task to find him with an uppercut—especially if he found you first. The two training camps had become Toledo’s Greatest Show on Earth. Hundreds of autos clogged the roads leading to the bay. Scores of fashionably dressed women braved the heat and mosquitoes to attend workouts at a quarter a clip to see Dempsey. (It was now a buck to see the champion.) The 80,000-seat octagonal arena in Bay View Park neared completion. A motion picture deal had been struck, awarding equal shares to Rickard and the two fighters, and limiting domestic exhibits to the state of Ohio; anywhere outside the United States was fair game, and arrangements had been made to show the film to the American Expeditionary Forces still in Europe. The first few recorded bets were on a first- or second-round KO by Dempsey. Strictly long shots. Frank Moran, who had lost the newspaper decision to the Pottawatomie Giant at Madison Square Garden in Rickard’s first New York promotion more than three years earlier, arrived in town and predicted a Willard victory.12 Rickard supplied a bus to shuttle the press between camps. Kearns associate McCarney, a veteran fight manager himself, combined with theatrical manager Thomas Bodkin (who dabbled in prizefighters) to corner the concessions market for the fight after getting the green light from Kearns, perhaps when Rickard was occupied by weightier matters such as sluggish ticket sales. Reportedly irritated that Rickard’s failure to cough up sufficient advance money had stalled his order with a Chicago haberdasher, Kearns pulled the end run on concessions just to deny the promoter a fee for the privilege.13 As the atmospheric heat intensified, so did temperaments. Rickard banned a sportswriter from the shuttle bus. Kearns, who didn’t need rising mercury to get hot under the collar, declared two other scribes persona non grata at the Dempsey camp, where the challenger—as dark and hard as a walnut—savaged his sparring partners. Concessionaires Bodkin

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and McCarney, who doubled as informal press agents for Dempsey and spies for Kearns, wisely divested themselves of the cigarette and sandwich concessions—the cheese in the ham-and-cheese would molder in the heat, and the fire commissioner would prohibit smoking in the pine arena. In what proved another astute financial move, they also sold their store of seat cushions. Such cushions were essential for any seated spectator wishing to rise from the sticky boards—forewarned, almost everyone brought his own. Bodkin and McCarney also providentially subbed out the lemonade concession, which promised to do land-office business in the furious heat but succumbed to the quirkiest of fates. On the eve of the fight, as the lemonade cooled in readiness in metal tubs, one disoriented Battling Nelson desperately sought relief from the swelter. Half of Rickard’s gladiatorial team in Goldfield, Nevada in 1906, and now two years retired after more than 130 professional fights, Nelson had come to town at the behest of the Chicago Daily News, which was featuring his allegedly expert analysis of the title fight. In need of a bath as well as a cooling off, Nelson was on his way to a dip in Maumee Bay, when he spied the half-dozen zinc-coated tubs. Unable to wait for the bay waters, he picked a tub and immersed himself. The syrup fastened his underwear to his skin. The Durable Dane could not long endure this predicament and screamed for rescue, his cries eventually reaching the next day’s fight crowd, which, according to McCarney, studiously avoided the lemonade.14 As Nelson battled the drink, Jack Kearns entertained a frisky bunch of guests at Dempsey’s headquarters shack, and a rumor circulated that antiboxing forces were planning to burn down newly constructed Bay View Park Arena. Rickard drove to the site to make sure that the police guard was on duty and alert. Willard happened to arrive in his touring sedan, taking in the stifling night air. “There’s the man that rates the bows,” the champion said, referring to Rickard. “He paid me a hundred thousand dollars. Where he got it, I don’t know.”15 Tex Rickard always got his money and his man. Before the sun rose on the morning of the fight, Kearns dispersed the covey of late-night partyers and began preparations for the event that would make his career. Outside, a restive Dempsey paced in the early light, his trained body as flat as the shack’s clapboard siding. By late morning, as the first preliminary fight at the stadium got underway, the thermometer had climbed past one hundred. By mid-afternoon, the preliminaries concluded, it reached 114 degrees, and both animate and inanimate objects had long since begun to wilt. Major Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, of Philadelphia society and high finance (and a Rickard backer), chose this juncture to

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send a squad of marching Marines through close-order drill in the ring. A fresh canvas was to be stretched between the ring posts anyway; the extra delay forced a hurry-up in the heat and resulted in an overlooked strand of rope. Rickard was less concerned with loose ends than missed opportunities. If his crowd had matched, proportionately, the turnout of 600 sportswriters (including the dean and rhyming master, Grantland Rice; the acerbically erudite mixer of fiction and journalism, Ringgold Wilmer “Ring” Lardner; likewise short-story-minded Damon Runyon, who had conferred on Dempsey his soon-to-be-celebrated nickname; and former Dodge City lawman and Wyatt Earp confederate Bat Masterson), Rickard might have realized his grail of a million-dollar gate, but the crowd, although hardly anemic, was disappointing, as only the bleachers bulged with fans sitting shoulder to shoulder in 10-dollar seats on the sticky pine boards, cushions beneath their rumps and straw hats on their sun-struck heads. The women? Parasols and perspiration. The railroads, hampered by a series of strikes and still under the wartime aegis of the federal government, had come up short on special trains, and the city had failed to provide sufficient accommodations—or at least the newspapers had said so.16 Most of the sportswriters predicted a Willard victory, but some picked Dempsey, based on his youth and conditioning. When the fighters strode past the $60 seats and entered the ring, Dempsey wore a scowl, a white towel over his shoulders, and white trunks. His hair shorn from the temples down, his body like slate come to life, he appeared the perfect warrior. Willard wore blue trunks and moved like an ocean liner—he outweighed Dempsey by 60 pounds. When the fight started, the champion pawed the air with left jabs like a painter searching for a wall. Dempsey clinched and circled and evaded the lazy punches for a minute and a half, then exploded with a furious combination of six punches culminated by a crushing left hook against Willard’s jaw, fracturing it in 13 places and sending the big man, shockingly, to the canvas, the first of seven such trips he would make before the round’s end. And the precise moment of that end was open to debate, because the length of canvas rope that should have been tied down elsewhere stretched between clapper and bell instead, turning the clang into a low-level buzz. To start the fight, the timekeeper had been given a whistle, which was scarcely better. Now, with Willard sitting on the canvas (following the seventh knockdown) and the crowd unhinged, referee Oliver Pecord, a local man, and nearly everyone else failed to hear the timekeeper’s whistle signaling the end of the round. Pecord’s count had reached seven. Though, officially, Willard had been saved by the whistle, the ref had not acknowledged it and counted him out.

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Insisting that he be the one to appoint the bout’s official timekeeper, drillmaster Biddle had named close friend William Warren Barbour, a future New Jersey senator and the former amateur heavyweight boxing champion of the United States (1910) and Canada (1911) during the period of Great White Hope mania. None other than Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently vacated the White House, and retired champion Jim Corbett, who had wrested the heavyweight crown from John L. Sullivan in 1892, had urged the amateur champ to enter the Jack Johnson sweepstakes. But the New Jersey-born Barbour never turned professional. Like the Bull Moose, he had rallied from youthful infirmities through a rigorous regimen of exercise. Now, ringside at Dempsey-Willard, he had been betrayed by flawed equipment and the madness of the moment. Compounding the inaccuracy, at the outset he had failed to reset his stopwatch, which, in the opening bell-whistle confusion, had ticked off 10 seconds before the fighters were waved forward to start the round. The shocking slaughter that had preceded the ref ’s 10-count can be attributed to Dempsey’s savagery, Willard’s courage but also his misperception, and the ring rules of the day. Much had been made over Willard’s age and inactivity, his lack of discipline in training, his aversion to roadwork, his overconfidence. The fact is that he trained hard, got his big body into fighting shape, and was the same fighter (although four years older) who had hung with and then overcome Jack Johnson. But he was unprepared, and would have been so at any age or time, for the buzz saw that was Dempsey, a new-generation heavyweight with punching speed and power, and a stalking technique not seen before. And Dempsey could be craftycruel in the ring—he liked to hit his opponent as the referee separated them from clinches, and he hovered over a fallen fighter with chilling predatory intent, ready to blast his foe back to the canvas the moment he attempted to rise; boxing, in addition to permitting the bell (when it worked) to nullify knockouts, had not yet instituted the neutral-corner rule, which distances the attacker and allows the fallen fighter to get to his feet, unfettered. After Dempsey’s textbook left hook had obliterated Willard’s cheek and sat the champion on his haunches in the center of the ring halfway through the first round, the fight was ostensibly over. But Willard—huge, game, and trained to withstand abnormal punishment—rose, and continued to rise again and again, as Dempsey forced him to the ropes and dealt two-fisted, deadly accurate barrages that split open the big man’s face and ended in return trips to the canvas. As Willard tried to rise from the third knockdown, Dempsey stealthily positioned himself behind the deposed giant, though referee Pecord momentarily interceded while counting. Dempsey then smashed the unseeing, half-risen Willard to the face, sending him right back down. Dempsey immediately tried the same tactic again, but Willard had one eye on him this time and managed to stand up. Dempsey’s

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unsparing attack against those same ropes knocked down Willard a fifth time. Afterward, the challenger pressed him to the other side of the ring and dropped him twice more. The final time, Willard sat in the corner, head up, his left arm draped around the middle rope. This time he wasn’t getting up. Pecord counted him out, unable to hear Barbour’s whistle stopping the round three seconds before the end of the count—in truth, 10 seconds prematurely based on the original start of action. Jack Kearns had a great deal riding on the timing. Fevered by dollars and a dose of invincibility, he had sought out a gambler named John Ryan holding court at the stately Hotel Secor at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Superior Street in Toledo a day earlier and bet a lusty $10,000 that his man would knock out the champion in the first round. With his own timekeeper stationed in the corner, Kearns learned on the fly that only seven seconds remained in the round when Willard—all but unconscious—hit the deck for the seventh time. Apparently, Kearns’s personal timekeeper had not reset his stopwatch at the outset of the round, either. Realizing that, in reality, he was three seconds shy of winning 100 grand, Kearns hustled Dempsey out of the ring as soon as Pecord raised the fighter’s hand. As the crowd ushered them away in triumph, Pecord learned the awful truth from Barbour and summoned Kearns and his fighter back to the ring. That only delayed the inevitable, as Willard courageously stayed upright before a somewhat arm-weary Dempsey for two more rounds before giving up the ghost. Despite the butchering, there is no evidence that a ringside physician was in attendance, and the battered Willard was left to the ministrations of his seconds. Charitable youngsters tossed stones at him as he walked under his own power toward his dressing room. It would take awhile for the shock and excitement to recede, but matters of money never relinquished the stage. “I have one hundred thousand dollars [his guarantee for the fight] and a farm in Kansas,” Willard reportedly said in the aftermath. New York World reporter Lardner had lost a $500 bet on Willard. He was not likely to bet against Dempsey again. As immediate talk of Dempsey’s first title defense began to focus on French champion Georges Carpentier, Lardner said, “After what we’ve seen, if I were Carpentier, I’d stay in France until the new champion dies of old age.”17 Kearns, too, had been burned by wagering, but on the other side of the equation and by a few ticks of a misguided stopwatch. He thought he had won and, technically, should have won, $100,000, but instead merely lost his bet of one-tenth that amount. Finding Jack Dempsey, though, was enough luck for any one career; far bigger paydays awaited. The ungodly heat, the railroads’ shortfall, and ill-timed newspaper reports about crowded conditions in Toledo had denied Rickard his million-dollar—or even half-million-dollar—gate; some 20,000 ticket

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buyers accounted for a handle of more than $452,000, the largest gate in boxing history by a wide margin. Expenses, though, had been about $315,000, and after Uncle Sam took his share, seven percent was lopped off for the agreed-upon city charity, and a few local pockets were tickled, Rickard and Flournoy didn’t quite break even. Given the ailing bottom line, Flournoy played the bad guy and offered referee Pecord, who had labored without benefit of a working bell, just one-fifth of his contracted fee of $2,500.18 But if Rickard had failed to make money, he had gained immensely in reputation, having pulled off a promotion of such scale—one that had produced an upheaval in the sport it exhibited. He was clearly the king of boxing promoters and set his sights on future venues that surpassed Toledo, and so he and Flournoy sold Bay View Park Arena for $25,000 to a contractor who merely wanted the lumber.

Chapter 11

RIGHT HANDS AND STEAMER TRUNKS

While Kearns and Dempsey reached the pinnacle, François Descamps and Georges Carpentier regained their footing atop the European slope in the wake of World War I. Descamps, who had lost his wife and been discharged from military service early on due to rheumatism, had prospered during the war years after becoming a partner in a company that made boxes for packing cheese, a prime commodity in France. At his new home in the storybook village of La Guerche in central France, he had built a gymnasium amid spacious grounds. There, Carpentier romped with his black Chow, Flip, played with his widowed manager’s two children, treated himself to a cigarette after evening meals, and trained for his comeback fight against English light-heavyweight Dick Smith, a mediocrity who, four years earlier, had sent Bombardier Wells to the canvas for more than 10 seconds, only to have the referee bungle the count. (Rounds later, an upright Wells returned the favor and, this time, it stuck.) His army service not yet concluded, Carpentier felt adrift between two worlds. Despite his years away from the ring, he was the heavy betting favorite when he met Smith, a heavily tattooed ex-sailor, in Paris in July 1919, and though Carpentier won by knockout in the eighth round, most observers did not like his chances against stocky, powerful Joe Beckett, whom he had agreed to fight next for the European title he still held. Two months later, Carpentier was demobilized from the army and resumed training in La Guerche. In a tune-up fight in San Sebastian, Spain, he disposed of a setup (the man’s only fight) before the King of Spain. Beckett loomed next. The Englishman had knocked out Wells and the other top

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contender for Carpentier’s crown, and had the professional odds on his side. (Descamps reputedly made a hefty bet on his fighter at five-to-four.) On meeting his French adversary for the first time, the thick Brit tersely pointed out, “I’m not a Bombardier Wells, y’know.”1 A month before the scheduled 20-round fight, Carpentier shifted his training base to Stanmore in northwest London, where, despite his manager’s efforts, crowds infiltrated the gym to seek his autograph and watch him in action. The British seemed to be crazy about their French neighbor, but their presence during training sessions was not to his liking. Let Beckett train at the public baths of Southampton on the southern coast. Such an atmosphere was not conducive to proper preparation. “A boxer, in order to acquire perfect physical fitness, must do his work behind closed doors,” Frenchman Carpentier explained, his conviction not lost in translation. “Training in public is bad; it prevents complete concentration.”2 Hundreds of letters penetrated his closed doors daily, most of them from women, many of those with contact information, several of them with offers of marriage. A woman with different motivations—Descamps’s mother-in-law—cooked for Carpentier at the camp. Despite the distractions, he rounded into form, but on the eve of the fight, his right arm unaccountably and alarmingly ached and swelled. The doctor quelled both symptoms, and, the next morning, the arm felt nearly fine. It needed to be fine, for it held Carpentier’s chief weapon. “It must be with your right hand that you knock Beckett out,” Descamps told his fighter.3 The chauffeur who drove Carpentier from his Stanmore hotel on the evening of December 4, 1919, had been on the front lines in the war but seemed possibly more anxious about delivering his passenger safely to Holborn Stadium, where the sellout crowd of about 4,000 included the Prince of Wales, members of the House of Commons, and numerous women in evening dress. (Holborn, which had begun life as a theater, was an indoor arena.) Betting odds had shrunk to even and scalpers’ ticket prices had inflated.4 In his dressing room before the fight, Carpentier received an admiring visit from the London Police Commissioner, who cautioned him he “must take all consequences for the fight in which you are about to engage.”5 When Carpentier entered the ring to a rousing reception, he bowed to the Prince at ringside to his left. He removed his robe and his lean, pale torso shone in the ring lights. He looked relaxed. The stripped Beckett was swarthy, muscular . . . and nervous. Carpentier watched Beckett’s aimless movements across the ring. So did Descamps. “Two rounds, finis. Eh?” said the cocksure manager.6

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Carpentier began as if he meant to beat that timetable, firing a long, straight left that connected with Beckett’s unguarded cheek and shook him. The fighters clinched and separated, and Beckett was the one to retreat, if only slightly. Back at close quarters, he tried to work the body, but Carpentier knew how to break cleanly and was adept at establishing a punching distance advantageous to him. He nearly left his feet in throwing a left jab that scored, but he quickly regained his balance and looked for a better opportunity. He kept his left hand low at his side, the arm crooked at the elbow as if ready to pounce with a hook. Beckett’s rushes and ensuing punches were ineffectual, and, when they broke at a juncture barely a minute into the fight, Carpentier reached with a decoy left and crossed his right hand over the top and smack onto the left side of the befuddled Brit’s jaw, sending him into a spin. As Beckett spiraled toward the canvas, quick-fisted Carpentier pumped in a pair of left uppercuts as an exclamation point. Sprawled facedown on the canvas, Beckett made little fitful movements with his arms and legs, a foundered swimmer searching for a current. He was trying to rise. He could not. Seconds after the count expired, Carpentier lifted Beckett to his feet and walked him to his corner, the slack Brit appearing to have awakened from a disturbing dream. Carpentier’s people engulfed the European heavyweight champ, hoisted him on their shoulders, and escorted him out of the ring. His right arm, the weapon of choice, was beginning to swell again. The loser suffered only from bewilderment. After the fight, Beckett said to newspapermen, “I hadn’t started to fight when I got it. I didn’t realize what had happened. I was just ‘filling in’ for the first round when he slipped in.”7 Slipped in, indeed. In the immediate aftermath of the stunning early knockout, which had occurred a round earlier than predicted by Descamps, the little manager vowed to conquer Dempsey and threw a flurry of punches to underscore his claim; lucky for him, he would not be doing the fighting against the world champion. Bombardier Wells, who knew firsthand of the power and precision of Carpentier’s right hand, was among those offering congratulations to the European champion in his dressing room. The next day, messages, gifts, and invitations poured in. British producer-promoter Charles B. Cochran, who had the champion under contract, was set to sail to the United States on December 14 to make arrangements for a world championship bout with Jack Dempsey, presumably in London the following June. By convincingly dispatching the best of the British contenders and achieving the status of war hero between these definitive matches, Carpentier had become the idol of Europe. Gorgeous Georges was now the Orchid Man, a nickname that, wrote BBC correspondent and London

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newspaperman Harry Carpenter, “indicates well the feeling that Georges was a rare breed, a hothouse plant, somehow magically equipped with the charm of a boulevardier and the fists of a stevedore.”8 Descamps took his fighter on the road for appearances and exhibitions and fights against patsies. Just a month after knocking out Beckett in one, Carpentier authored a second-round KO of journeyman “Blink” McCloskey, a welterweight with a glass eye (outside the ring). Six weeks later, in late February 1920, after another series of exhibitions around his country, the French champ scored another second-round finis, this one against a Belgian heavyweight, Georges Grundhoven, who was fighting for only the third time professionally. Clearly, Descamps wanted his champion to stay active but not be tested for awhile. Carpentier toured Italy, appearing in Milan, Rome, and Genoa. He was boxing’s ambassador on the Continent, and he looked the part, his face unmarked, his smile genuine, his trim physique impeccably tailored. He was a scientific fighter, who, it was said, had sharpened the accuracy of his vaunted right-hand punch in the woodsy Parisian park Bois de Boulogne by aiming for specific leaves on tree branches.9 He was a student of the sport; his flat on rue Brunel in Paris was stocked with books on ring history. The flat also boasted an upright piano, Oriental rugs, and a new wife wed that March, a pretty young woman with sympathetic eyes and a short, soft hairdo. The new Madame Carpentier, Georgette Elsasser of Alsace, was not yet 20. She had met her future husband at the home of mutual friends a few months earlier. A daughter, Jacqueline, arrived before the end of the year. If it were three decades later, the couple, their baby, and their domicile surely would have graced the photo-filled pages of a Life magazine issue. Carpentier now had other lands to conquer. Five days after their nuptials, he and Georgette boarded the transatlantic liner SS La Savoie bound for New York. They were accompanied by their maid Gabrielle, a valet, a secretary, Descamps, trainer Gustav Wilson, and enough steamer trunks for a traveling theatrical troupe. They encountered rough seas on the crossing, and the newlyweds suffered from seasickness for most of the 10-day period. Once out of the chop, however, they quickly revived. Young, pretty, and gracious, Madame Carpentier wowed the stateside press and other onlookers on hand to greet the visitors. The trunks held 100 silk shirts, 20 overcoats, 75 suits, and a couple hundred ties, all from the European champion’s wardrobe. Satin, velvet, and fur dominated Madame’s raiment.10 Indeed, life had been good to the fistic-business partnership of Carpentier and Descamps. Carpentier also brought with him a patina of heroism and a touch of elegance, but with affability and a boy-next-door solidity. More than just

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a sporting figure, he was accepted as something of a French ambassador to the United States, capable by dint of stature, smile, or gesture, of repairing the wounds, perceived or otherwise, that had formed between the two countries in the abrasive aftermath of World War I.11 After clearing customs and hurdling the crowd, the continental champion climbed aboard an automobile commandeered by promoters Tex Rickard and Jack Curley, the Frenchman’s U.S. representative. The natty, taciturn Rickard could nearly match the champion’s haberdasher, while Curley offered much chatter but a fleshy physique unsuited to Saville Row. The opportunistic Curley shared Madame Carpentier’s Alsatian heritage but had a thoroughly American promotional exuberance and he was now Carpentier’s man in the States. In New York, the Carpentiers stayed at the Biltmore Hotel, marveled at the frenzied ambience of Manhattan department stores (the visitors were sufficiently stocked, thank you), and took in a performance by already legendary tenor Enrico Caruso (who was to die in little more than a year) at the Metropolitan Opera House. Boxing patron Anthony DrexelBiddle, who had precipitated the ringside snafu at the Dempsey-Willard fight, cornered Carpentier during a banquet in the Frenchman’s honor and persuaded him to engage in a round of sparring, an exercise for which the financier rewarded his guest with a check for $5,000. But there would be no fight versus Jack Dempsey in June, as originally anticipated by English promoter Cochran. The champion was embroiled in a federal case for draft evasion and faced an uncertain future. DempseyCarpentier would have to wait, if it were to happen at all. Still, the French Carpentier wanted to show Americans his stuff. On May 23, he signed an agreement to meet the world light-heavyweight champion, New Jersey’s own “Battling” Levinsky, no later than July 26, but preferably after concluding his present theatrical tour under Curley’s management.12 Before the live tour, Carpentier had been back before the movie cameras (after an eight-year interlude). Every morning at 8 a.m. sharp, a car arrived at the Biltmore to usher Carpentier to the docks for a boat ride across the river to movie studios in New Jersey for a starring role in The Wonder Man in which a French agent travels to the United States to uncover a plot to con his government out of millions of francs. Carpentier’s character, Henri D’Alour, possesses boxing skill on a par with his secret service know-how. For fewer than four weeks work, the now-veteran film actor received $45,000. Meanwhile, it was determined that Carpentier’s motion picture contract precluded any fight within four months of the release of the movie, so the Levinsky bout would have to be delayed until fall. As soon as The Wonder Man wrapped, the vaudeville tour began. Carpentier and company (his wife remained behind at the Curley homestead in Great Neck, New York)

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traveled by private coach on a two-month whirlwind to more than a dozen cities; in Pittsburgh, he encountered old nemesis Klaus, the Steel City native who had taken his middleweight crown some eight years earlier. During the latter stages of the tour, Carpentier’s act (boxing exhibitions and commentary) joined the Sells Floto circus, which, a few seasons earlier, had featured Buffalo Bill Cody. The peripatetic Carpentier was back in New York at the beginning of July, another $60,000 richer without being popped once on the noggin. The press took a dim view of his travels, questioning his hunger for real battle in the ring. But on July 5, he signed in earnest to meet Levinsky in the fall for the light-heavyweight championship, and, five days later, he set sail for home aboard the liner La Lorraine, France’s largest steamer and, like its ticketed boxing champion, a veteran of World War I. (She served for three years as an armed merchant cruiser.) Before crossing the ocean, however, Carpentier and his manager met with Rickard, Dempsey, Kearns, Curley, and William A. Brady at New York’s Belmont Hotel. The underlying assumption was that the champion would beat the federal rap, but the meeting accomplished nothing. Hot under his expensive collar, Kearns accused Descamps of ducking Dempsey and walked out of the room when Carpentier’s verbose little manager tried to explain that Cochran called the shots for his fighter. But Brady, Cochran’s representative in the United States, explained that the British promoter’s rights to the match applied only if it were held in London. The next day, Descamps and Carpentier sailed. Later in the summer, Rickard and Cochran met in Paris in a bid to lay groundwork for an eventual meeting between Dempsey and Carpentier.13 But if Dempsey was the repast, Levinsky was the appetizer. Carpentier would meet the light-heavyweight champion on Columbus Day, October 12, in seven-year-old Ebbets Field, home of baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers. The bout’s official promoter was the International Sporting Club, a two-year-old organization whose moneyed membership arranged boxing matches both public and private and had plans to build a clubhouse in New York City. Carpentier-Levinsky was ISC’s maiden effort, and, for this fight, the club was to double as Carpentier’s manager, although Curley would help bolster the promotion.14 Theatrical impresario Cochran, whose contract with Carpentier stipulated only a match with Dempsey in London by the final day of the year, waited in the wings, praying that his Frenchman would do well without breaking a leg. But Dempsey still had no intention of defending his title overseas; hence, the Levinsky fight under different auspices.15 Meanwhile, Rickard was keeping his powder dry. The fight date was subject to change, pending the outcome of the National League pennant race—if the Dodgers took the flag, the World Series would necessarily postpone the fight.

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For his return trip to the States, Carpentier left the French city of Le Havre, where the Seine River meets the English Channel, on September 4 aboard La Lorraine. He arrived in New York on September 13. Crisply turned out in a gray wool overcoat and tethered to his black Chow Flip (formal name, Felipe), the fighter strode down the gangway onto the deck at Pier 57 and doffed his chapeau to the considerable gathering and two brass bands. “I am confident I can defeat him (Levinsky),” he told newsmen through promoter Curley, who interpreted. “Then I will negotiate with Dempsey or his manager.”16 Of the outcome versus Dempsey, Carpentier was less certain. Enthusiasm, however, pervaded his coterie. Trainer Wilson, waiting behind a retaining fence, rushed to Descamps and showered the little manager with multiple hugs and kisses. Descamps faced the newsmen and insisted that, this trip, his fighter was here only to train and fight—no thespian activity.17 The ISC was developing an ambitious slate of fights and had agreed with Dodgers’ owner Charles Ebbets to stage many of them at his stadium. Carpentier-Levinsky was to be the first of the batch, and it had caught the eye of an American public eager for a look at the man who would challenge Dempsey. “Without detracting a bit from Levinsky’s record and popularity, it is easily to be seen that the interest centers chiefly about the French heavyweight,” said ISC Director William A. Gavin.18 But “Battling” Levinsky had held the world light-heavyweight crown for four years and did not plan an automatic surrender to his celebrated challenger from across the Atlantic. Born Barney Lebrowitz in Philadelphia, he had adopted the non-ethnic Barney Williams as a prizefighter until a new manager gave him his present moniker, restoring the ethnicity (though changing the surname altogether) and conferring via the nickname a status prized by fight fans. Levinsky battled everyone in sight, fighting with astounding frequency (sometimes two fights in one day) and durability (Dempsey’s third-round KO two years earlier marked the first time the Battler had gone down for the count.) He defeated Gunboat Smith five of the six times they fought and had faced a host of other quality fighters among his opponents in more than 200 fights. Still, Carpentier figured to be the superior fighter in this match. Just a year younger than Levinsky, he was at the height of his powers, while recent bouts had revealed the Battler to be on the wane. Carpentier enjoyed advantages in reach (three inches), speed, and punching power. Levinsky’s strength had always been clever defensive tactics that frustrated opponents, leaving them open for counterpunches. But it quickly became apparent that the ring mileage logged by the Philadelphian had eroded his skills, nullifying the wisdom of experience. For Carpentier, Levinsky capped his training with two weeks in White Sulphur Springs, Saratoga Lake, as if wished-for revivifying elements in the springs would restore the sharper reflexes of

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the earlier model. The Frenchman trained in Summit, New Jersey, where he stayed at the home of the sister of local welterweight Marcel Thomas, who had met Carpentier while fighting in Paris years earlier; paradoxically, Thomas had decisioned the Dixie Kid, who had thrashed Carpentier inside of five rounds. Nearing their fight, Carpentier and Levinsky each kept his distance from the crowded urban centers to minimize distractions. Carpentier counted Joe Jeannette among his sparring partners.19 When the New York State Boxing Commission, still excluding heavyweight bouts despite the newly passed Walker Law friendly to boxing, declined to approve Carpentier-Levinsky, the fight shifted quite smoothly across the Hudson and, instead of Ebbets Field, roosted in 20,000-seat Jersey City Baseball Park, which hosted International League baseball. There, on the chilly Friday evening of October 12, 1920, Georges Carpentier and Battling Levinsky met to decide whether or not the world light-heavyweight crown would change hands. (It would do so only if there were a knockout, because New Jersey rules stipulated that mere decisions did not suffice.) It had rained during the day, leaving the air and ground damp. A brisk wind blew across the stadium. Ferries brought fans across the river from New York. Steamer blankets were in evidence among the crowd. Women wore furs. Jersey City police patrolled smartly inside the park and out. Mayor Frank Hague, always receptive to a revenue-producer, was on hand. When clarion-throated announcer Joe Humphreys raised the bullhorn and introduced Edward I. Edwards seated in a box at ringside, the governor acknowledged applause and, sheepishly, the band’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s wry paean to Prohibition, “How Dry I Am.” The crowd, the most distinguished to witness a boxing match to date, also included a Whitney, the French ambassador, two Pulitzers, two Vanderbilts, Colonel Jacob Ruppert (the New York Yankees’ owner who, earlier that year, had purchased a pitcher-outfielder named George Herman Ruth from the Boston Red Sox), Bethlehem Steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, circus operator Otto Floto (of Sells Floto), and allied promoters Cochran and Brady. Carpentier sent all of them home after round four, providing both more and less than expected. He demonstrated little of the style and science that the Americans had expected, immediately abandoning caution and precision in favor of uncharacteristically wild swings. It was as if a fencer had turned barroom brawler. Eager to demonstrate his prowess and perhaps piqued by an accusatory U.S. press that had questioned his appetite for fighting Dempsey, the Frenchman sought to end matters quickly. He may also have been betting—influenced by intelligence reports from Descamps and company—that Levinsky was an effective battler no more. On this point he was correct, though Levinsky managed to make Carpentier miss until the final seconds of the first round, when the Frenchman followed a right

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to the jaw with a left to the cheek, a combination that shook Levinsky and left him vulnerable the next round to Carpentier’s right hand, which twice deposited the world light-heavyweight champ on his trunks for eight-second breaks, the last near the end of the round. Yet Levinsky rallied in the third, finding a rhythm of retreating and counterpunching that frustrated Carpentier. That pattern, however, quickly changed. In the fourth round, Carpentier forced his man to the ropes and launched a flurry of hard lefts and rights. When one of the latter landed on Levinsky’s jaw, the Battler descended through the ropes in a neutral corner, one leg in, the other out. When the count reached five, he swung his right leg over the lower strand and sat on the ring apron outside the ropes. Five seconds later, he was still sitting but now rocking and waving his arm in a gesture of either urgency or surrender.20 Levinsky had seemed a shot fighter, and Carpentier had not been impressive. Still, the Frenchman was now the light-heavyweight champion of the world, but he coveted the big prize, the heavyweight crown, that strange amalgam of status and savagery, distinction and danger. Carpentier comported himself as anything but a savage, but the fight game routinely devoured clinicians. The day arrived when you simply had to outgun your man. Maybe that realization had governed Carpentier’s ring demeanor right from the opening bell this night. The boulevards of Paris buzzed with talk of his victory over Levinsky and an insistence that Dempsey was next on the French idol’s agenda (and would meet with a similar fate as Levinsky). But Dempsey, U.S. sportswriters and boxing fans readily agreed, was a true savage in the ring. Back in New York, Carpentier stayed out of public view the day after his victory, but Descamps visited the International Sporting Club headquarters and extolled his fighter’s virtues, assuring the press and the wider world that Carpentier’s comparatively crude performance against Levinsky would not be repeated against Dempsey. “He has not one but a dozen merits,”21 Descamps said in broken English but intact optimism. Soon, he had his fighter take his manifold merits on an exhibition tour of Scandinavia. Meanwhile, Dempsey had resolved his legal troubles, if not his tarnished image. He was preparing for a December title defense in Madison Square Garden, now the province of Tex Rickard. In his only outing since seizing the title from Willard, the champion had fought a month earlier in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He had been busy on the vaudeville circuit and in Hollywood, capitalizing on his rocketing fame and muscular appeal. But fame was a fickle creature, and Dempsey’s appeal had changed course during the first half of 1920. For an anxious while, it had appeared that he might not fight again in New York, Michigan, or anywhere else.

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Chapter 12

SLACKER TRIAL

More than four decades after Dempsey had pulverized Willard in Toledo, Jack Kearns claimed that plaster of Paris had been layered over Dempsey’s taped hands prior to his entry into the ring, a contention that Willard himself, apparently in face-saving mode late in life, was all too eager to corroborate. The available evidence does not support the charge, and any writer subsequently commenting on the subject has debunked the notion. Some report that, as customary in boxing, Willard’s seconds observed the pre-fight taping conducted by trainer Jimmy DeForest and could hardly have missed a dollop of plaster added to layers of tape and Dempsey’s already considerable fists. (And there is not a sliver of evidence—plaster or otherwise—to suggest that Willard’s boys were part of a conspiracy against their fighter.) What they did see was a wetting down of the substantial tape buildup to further harden it, another common practice—in his biography of Tex Rickard, Charles Samuels does not refer to that, but cites “yards of heavy bicycle tape” being wound “around his [Dempsey’s] fists” without protest by the visitors from the other camp.1 So . . . perhaps a little extra on the tape, but no cement. In addition, when quasi-trainer Teddy Hayes scissored off the tape after the fight, no one in Dempsey’s crowded dressing room reported seeing any plaster, which, in any event, might have required dynamite to remove. Dempsey earned his living with his plaster-free hands, but his face was now famous. It greeted motorists from billboards advertising health drinks, it peered at audiences from vaudeville stages, and soon it would appear on the silver screen. The heavyweight champion, especially one as ferocious

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in the ring as Dempsey, was a public commodity, and in this rapidly modernizing age, the means of delivery were multiplying. For now, he made much more money outside the ring—no great achievement, since Kearns had gone through the entire $27,500 guarantee for fighting Willard, his expenses including the $10,000 lost bet! The United States was in transition but ambivalent about its direction and personality. Within months, Congress would finally grant women the right to vote, but Prohibition banned booze, spurring organized crime to industry status and, in turn, creating another bête noire for reformers. The urge to forget the horrors of World War I smacked into a persistent— sometimes misguided—patriotism, ever seeking foes to target. Before the championship month was out, Grantland Rice wrote in the New York Tribune that, because Dempsey failed to enlist, it would be an insult to every doughboy that took his heavy pack through the mules’ train to front-line trenches to go over the top to refer to Dempsey as a fighting man. It would be an insult to every young American who sleeps today from Flanders to Lorraine, from the Somme to the Argonne, to crown Dempsey with any laurels built of fighting courage.2 So let it be written. It would take more than words or even broad public opinion, however, to call Dempsey to task on the draft question. The dimension necessary for legal action came in early 1920 in the form of a now weathered, unstable, dance-hall girl, recurrent prostitute, and former spouse of the world heavyweight champion. But that was months away. For now, there was a big, boisterous world eager to embrace the man who had slain Goliath, the giant Willard who had been celebrated for upending the infuriating Jack Johnson. Sic transit gloria. Age, which arguably imparts wisdom to individuals, is less successful when the scale is global. Add that discouragement to the truism that the only thing the masses love better than building a hero is tearing one down, and you get a sense of what Jack Dempsey had in store for him. First, though, it was time to spar with fame and sow some oats. Kearns wanted to set things right with his shortchanged fighter (and enrich himself in the process), and he knew that their salad days were at hand. He booked them into a Cincinnati theater-in-the-park for a week at $5,000, and that was just for starters. A Chicago troupe doubled the rate for 10 weeks’ work, and although it went bust after paying Dempsey and company for only three, the champ already had eclipsed his career boxing earnings in terms of actual

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cash in hand. His compensation spiked yet again with the Sells-Floto Circus, a traveling show that had begun as the Sells Brothers Circus during the Civil War, merged with the Floto Dog and Pony Show sometime after the turn of the century, and joined forces with Buffalo Bill’s outfit for two seasons starting in 1914. Otto Floto, former sportswriter with the Denver Post and an avowed Dempsey fan, offered the budding big top performer $2,500 a week. At each stop, Dempsey told the crowd, in his high-pitched voice on the verge of squeaking, how he had defeated Willard and then demonstrated, using regular training partner Bill Tate as the Willard stand-in but never actually connecting with him. Their choreographed exchanges were a hit until the circus headed south and reached the lower Mississippi Valley, where the sight of a black man fighting a white man in a boxing ring was not simpatico with regional mores and editorial writers—the possibility that the black might embarrass the white curled hairs and claimed newsprint. The memory of the insufferable Jack Johnson abided: Keep the races separate. While Dempsey, as top contender and champion, took Kearns’s direction in avoiding matches with black boxers because they were bad for business, he was surprised by the negative reaction to his harmless exhibitions with Tate, with whom he had exchanged real blows any number of times before paying crowds in training camp. Aside from the money, the jamboree atmosphere of the circus held little appeal for him. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, he pulled out of Sells-Floto and left the southland in December 1919 for Hollywood, where the money figured to be even better and the fringe benefits more befitting a young, virile heavyweight champion. With a crew of Kearns, Hayes, and Tate (now deemed the champ’s butler), Dempsey cast anchor in a roomy home in Silver Lake, one of several Los Angeles neighborhoods that had become something of a film colony. In the land of Fairbanks, Chaplin, Valentino, and an inexhaustible supply of comely actresses, Dempsey availed himself of the fruits of his ring labors, the payoff for his years of privation, and his long, often brutal journey through the heavyweight ranks and the chaotic world of prizefight promotion. The gloves were off in Hollywood, a place of maximum social mobility, where immigrant peddlers turned into moguls and lifestyles often exceeded the extravagance portrayed onscreen. Midwesterner Fred C. Quimby, who had managed a movie theater in Missoula, Montana, and now was president of Pathe Studios, cast Dempsey as the lead in the serial Daredevil Jack, serials being the French film company’s specialty. Dempsey’s purse for playing a sports hero who saves distressed damsels and dads was 10 grand plus $1,000 for each of 18 episodes. W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, who had begun his big-screen career as an assistant on the set of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, wrote and directed the series, and none other than Lon

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Chaney dipped into his bag of illusions to neuter Dempsey’s battle-scarred face for film. Off-screen, the fledgling Thespian sampled Hollywood parties, squired lovelies to nightspots and beyond, and consorted with movie stars. He and Fairbanks, the most physical of the matinee idols, seemed to have a special rapport. With his newfound fame and vigorous appeal, Dempsey navigated Hollywood like a star among stars. The film capital also proved fertile ground for Kearns, who talked fast, dressed sharply, and spent money to support the image. An unforgiving past and the underside of fame devoured Jack Dempsey’s Hollywood idyll. In its January 23, 1920, edition, the San Francisco Chronicle published a letter written by divorced Maxine Cates Dempsey, now back in business in a dance hall in Wells, Nevada. Below the headline “Dempsey Slacker, Says Divorced Wife,” the letter, which ran on page one of the sports section, charged that the champ had not supported her during the war and had, in concert with Jack Kearns, fabricated information to gain his deferment. Kearns promptly countercharged that Maxine must have been put up to the task of defaming Dempsey, and that her letter was the malicious product of a vengeful woman. Maxine responded with the promise of a batch of letters written in Dempsey’s hand, corroborating her charges and further incriminating him. The story spurred newspaper circulation and had legs. Military veterans were split on Dempsey, while the press argued that, by avoiding service, he had shunned a moral obligation even if he had conformed to the law. In the veterans’ magazine Home Sector, Spanish American War veteran and New York Herald Tribune sports editor (and former San Francisco Chronicle reporter) William O’Connell McGeehan offered this image of a prizefight between champion Dempsey and his next likely challenger: “What a picture it will be, bringing ironical laughter and derision upon eternal justice— Dempsey, the dullard who could not see the vision of the holy fight, gloating over the prostrate form of Georges Carpentier, allied soldier.”3 Beyond moral qualms, Maxine’s campaign challenged the legality of Dempsey’s actions and attracted the attention of the government. But in early February, on the heels of a visit by Pathe chief Frank Spellman— the studio was still shooting Daredveil and had sunk a lot of money into the production—she had a change of heart, denying the existence of any smoking-gun letters, and saying that Dempsey had supported her as he claimed. She had invented the whole thing out of misguided jealousy, Maxine explained. Still, public opinion and the gears of government had been engaged and could not merely be switched off for such a high-profile matter. Charles Thomas, assistant U.S. district attorney for San Francisco, presented his

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case later in the month to a grand jury, which indicted Dempsey and Kearns on conspiracy to avoid the draft. The star witness at the indictment hearing was none other than Maxine Cates Dempsey, who, after government pressure preceding her appearance, flipped once again and reverted to her original claims. Courtesy of a federal agent, the government was now in possession of the 35 letters—some of them “salacious” in addition to prosecutorial—fingered by Maxine.4 Within days, Dempsey and Kearns were served by a federal marshal. If Pathe had a significant investment in Dempsey’s freedom, the fighter’s manager and promoter had a much greater stake in his potential future earnings. The two met in New York to discuss the best course of action for saving their meal ticket. Rickard had been advised to contact theater heavyweight William A. Brady, whose influence was said to extend to the White House. A young Jack Kearns had emulated the flashy, ultra-confident personal style of Brady, former manager of Gentleman Jim Corbett. When the men met, Brady took action. After a grueling and unsuccessful public campaign on behalf of his intended legacy, the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke, but in these days of minimal press scrutiny and no government provisions for such a circumstance, only two people were aware of the extent of his incapacitation: his wife, Edith Galt Wilson; and his top aide/advisor, Joe Tumulty. The pair effectively ran the country for the balance of Wilson’s term. Joseph Patrick Tumulty had risen from the streets of Jersey City to become the right-hand man of New Jersey governor, and then president, Woodrow Wilson. When Brady called him at the White House, Tumulty agreed to act as a go-between in the Dempsey matter only if his participation remained anonymous. Kearns and Teddy Hayes took a train to Washington, D.C., and Tumulty snuck them into the pillared mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue—two roustabouts, essentially, visiting the seat of government for a high-level meeting. Tumulty talked boxing and gave Kearns a referral letter to the defense lawyer he believed best suited to handle the case. “Before the Carpentier fight, remind me to get Tumulty a pair at ringside,” Kearns said to Hayes as they left the White House.5 San Francisco–based Gavin McNab had national stature, an imposing presence, extensive experience in federal court, and a way with high-profile cases—he had handled actress Mary Pickford’s divorce, freeing her to marry Douglas Fairbanks. Kearns and Hayes went back to the West Coast and, joined by Dempsey, met with McNab, who reviewed the case and agreed to take it for an upfront fee of $75,000. Kearns called Rickard. For all the money that flowed through their hands, each was typically short on cash; they clearly needed an outside

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investor to pay McNab’s retainer. That was Rickard’s specialty. John Ringling, who had merged his Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses a year earlier, shared a common goal with the boxing promoter: a larger Madison Square Garden to stage (and make more money from) their respective entertainments. Both men saw Dempsey as the linchpin in that scenario. Unlike Rickard, Ringling had plenty of cash in hand and sent a chunk of it directly to McNab to meet his requirement for taking the Dempsey case.6 Rickard and Ringling would soon join forces again for another crucial investment. After several delays, suggesting uncertainty within the government’s legal team, Dempsey’s trial for draft evasion began in San Francisco on June 8, 1920. Prosecutor Thomas sought to paint Dempsey as an unsavory character and to prove that he had not provided the financial support he had pledged, and that he had knowingly falsified his draft board application and asked for Maxine’s complicity. However, much of the evidence to substantiate these charges resided in Maxine’s testimony and her cache of letters, now in federal hands. Both of these sources proved problematic for the government. When McNab balked at Maxine’s testifying and asserted that spousal communication was privileged, presiding Judge Maurice T. Dooling sent the star witness back to the gallery pending his ruling. When Thomas tried to make his conspiracy case based on the now-notorious letters, Dooling took McNab’s point and refused to admit them as evidence. Defense 2, Government 0. Dressed to the nines, with a neckline dipping below three, Maxine had taken the stand, seemingly oblivious of the seated Dempsey. When her testimony was suspended, a madam and a prostitute with whom she had worked filled the breach and told the prosecutor that Maxine had received no money from Dempsey.7 McNab countered with a more sympathetic witness: the champ’s mother, Celia Dempsey, who had been in court all the while. The testimony of this small, white-haired woman aged by a lifetime of hard work effectively rebutted the prosecution’s earlier evidence that Dempsey’s claimed dependents had generated at least some income for themselves during the year in question, 1917. Celia testified that her son had routinely sent money home after his fights and been her sole support and the family’s main support dating back to 1913, a period of great hardship and misfortune for the Dempseys. She was a convincing witness. When Maxine did return to the stand, McNab’s cross-examination confronted her with telegraph-office records and anecdotal evidence that Dempsey had wired her money on several occasions. The high-strung witness began to unravel but let loose this haymaker: a Dempsey punch had dislocated her jaw during their years-ago stay at the Gibson House in San Francisco (Dempsey had told the treating doctor at the time that his then wife had likely tripped and hit the floor), and the reason he had belted

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her was that she was not generating enough money from her labors as a prostitute. Repugnant as this sounded, it had nothing to do with the draft, of course, and Maxine’s lashing out may have scored points for the defense rather than the prosecution. Another witness piled up more points. Testifying for the defense, one Tommy Fitzgerald, characterized by author Roger Kahn as “a boxing roustabout,”8 told the court that, while living at a brothel in Wells, Nevada, Maxine and a woman named Beulah Taylor had hatched a scheme that amounted to extortion. After Maxine’s initial letter—penned in large part by Taylor—appeared in the Chronicle, Fitzgerald related, Kearns had sent him to Wells to reason with Maxine, at which time she offered to exchange Dempsey’s alleged incriminating letters for $40,000. Dempsey subsequently rejected the proposal, said Fitzgerald. Worse for the prosecution, a pair of prostitutes on the Wells scene backed his story. It was Dempsey’s turn next and, as a McNab associate led him through his testimony, the fighter, who had been visibly irked by Maxine’s demeanor and words, seemed composed and believable as he denied his ex-wife’s charges and reinforced his claims. He never sought to evade the draft and failed to enlist because his family obligations came first. Most of his boxing earnings in 1918 supported the war effort or went to charity. He certainly did not strike his wife; she had tripped and fallen, and he had called the doctor. She had left him when he was fighting on the road, and he had to track her down to send money. With momentum on his side, McNab punctuated his defense with the testimony of U.S. Navy Lieutenant John F. Kennedy (an earlier JFK), who verified that, at a later stage in the war, Dempsey had boxed an exhibition at Great Lakes Naval Training Station and expressed a desire to enlist if he could “have my people looked out for.”9 The government could oblige, Kennedy had explained to the boxer, who then signed papers. It was early October 1918, Kennedy testified, and the war was still very much on. A month later, as Dempsey’s enlistment papers were being processed, the fighting against Germany ended on Armistice Day and enlistments ceased. After one week, the case went to the jury, which took only seven minutes to return a verdict of not guilty. Dempsey had not, knowingly or otherwise, falsified the draft board questionnaire that became the basis for his exemption. “I’m the happiest boy in the world,” he told the press afterward.10 The exoneration included the indicted Kearns as well, of course. But the forces of public opinion do not necessarily conform to courtroom verdicts. There had been a murkiness to the trial, which, while distasteful and at times combative, had stopped well short of explosive due to the excluded sheaf of letters—the prosecution’s centerpiece had been taken off the table.

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Dempsey detractors and anti-boxing campaigners continued to rail against the champion. Guided by his manipulative manager, he had been less than truthful with the draft board, they insisted, verdict be damned. And he had smacked his wife around—tripped and fell, my ass. How could society continue to handsomely reward a draft dodger and wife beater (and, perhaps, as suggested by the prosecution, an occasional rapist and pimp, as well)? The trial was over and the ignoble, revelatory letters never surfaced, but the man in the shipyard coveralls and patent leather shoes remained a target. He was an elemental man, and the furor and vilification—both the public’s and Maxine’s—wounded and confused him. He returned to Hollywood to complete the filming of Daredevil Jack. Even prettified by Lon Chaney’s facial magic, Dempsey in the persona of all-American boy was a tough sell at this point, but the series made money for Pathe. A documented savage in the ring, Dempsey in alternating roles of hero and villain was above all a source of fascination. In the year ahead, the latter perception fueled the dreams of the gate-builders, who understood how to make boxing big box office.

“Huge Deal” Hugh McIntosh, the Australian Rickard, promoted the December 1908 title match between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns in Sydney, the fight in which the heavyweight crown changed colors. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.)

Tex Rickard (center) shakes hands with Australian phenomenon Les Darcy following the fighter’s long voyage to New York in December 1916. The third man is Darcy’s traveling companion, E. T. O’Sullivan. Jack Kearns claimed that he had an agreement to manage and promote Darcy and resented Rickard for muscling in. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.)

Circus titan John Ringling provided financial support to Rickard at two critical junctures, effectively becoming the promoter’s partner at Madison Square Garden. (National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.)

Before bowing out, theatrical showman William A. Brady was one of three promoters connected to the Dempsey-Carpentier fight. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.)

Surrounded by newsmen and photographers, promoter Tex Rickard (front, center) appraises his newly built stadium at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City. The mammoth wooden octagon rose in less than two months. (F. C. Quimby/Library of Congress.)

The Dreamer: If clothes make the man, big dreams made Tex Rickard’s wardrobe. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.)

Dimpled and Debonair: Georges Carpentier grabs a Roaring Twenties photo-op on May 16, 1921, after arriving in New York City en route to his match with Jack Dempsey. The Frenchman had sailed aboard a transatlantic liner from France. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.)

A small crowd gathers to watch Carpentier (in the ring) train at the Matthews Farm in Manhasset, Long Island, in June 1921, as he prepares to fight Dempsey. In contrast to the champion, who appeared before large crowds while training in Atlantic City, the Frenchman allowed only limited access to his camp. (F. C. Quimby/Library of Congress.)

Real men wear tights: Jack Dempsey during a public training session on the airport grounds in Atlantic City in June 1921. A local developer had induced manager Jack Kearns to pitch camp at the seashore. (F. C. Quimby/Library of Congress.)

Moment of Truth: Jack Dempsey (center, dark sweater) and, to his immediate left, Georges Carpentier, meet at ring center, moments before their heavyweight championship fight on July 2, 1921, at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City. Carpentier’s manager, François Descamps, has just removed his fighter’s robe. (F. C. Quimby/Library of Congress.)

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Chapter 13

AN EARFUL AT THE GARDEN

While Dempsey’s preoccupation with saving his career and ensuring his freedom kept him away from boxing, the sport won a political decision that liberated its business potential in the city and state of New York. The so-called Walker Law, which hurdled the legislature and received cagy Governor Alfred E. Smith’s imprimatur in May 1920, authorized bouts of up to 15 rounds and real-time decisions, if needed, to determine the official outcome. It supplanted the already decommissioned Frawley Law, which had set a 10-round maximum and prohibited decisions, relegating bettors to the judgment of sportswriters for fights that went the distance. The new law gave that prerogative to ringside judges and the referee, and established other staples of the modern game, such as licensing procedures and state boxing commissions. In its bid to strengthen boxing, the Empire State was bucking popular opinion, or at least the version promulgated by religious and reform groups opposed to the sport’s violence and perceived dreadful cast of characters. The tides of business, however, were difficult to resist. The plain truth was that people would always be eager to spend a buck if the attraction were compelling enough, and a chunk of that money invariably found its way into government coffers. What was so bad about boxing, anyway, especially now that New York State had civilized it with regulation? With the enactment of the Walker Law creating a more favorable environment for boxing promotion in New York, a market to exhibit at Madison Square Garden reemerged, and mortgage-holder New York Life Insurance Company put the lease rights up for bids. Seeking command of the boxing

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capital, Tex Rickard coveted the storied arena on 26th Street, the northern boundary of Madison Square where Fifth Avenue met Broadway, and the world beat a path to the feet of titans. Sullivan had boxed here; Buffalo Bill had galloped here; William Jennings Bryan had roared here. The ownership had passed through names like Vanderbilt and Astor and J. P. Morgan. Phineas Taylor Barnum, the godfather of all promoters, had converted a rail depot on this site to a roofless circus hippodrome in 1871, and before the decade was out the structure had changed hands and been renamed Madison Square Garden. A decade later, the building was razed and replaced by perhaps the most elaborate creation of the supremely talented, lecherous architect Stanford White, who had famously bedded the lovely nymphet Evelyn Nesbitt in his Garden tower apartment and been shot to death by her estranged, unstable husband at the rooftop café-theater, all below the gilded copper statue of a half-nude Diana, goddess of the hunt and designated protector of virgins. Despite its adaptability to all sorts of programming (dog shows, bike races, public rallies, and, of course, boxing), the Garden had been a money loser for years. Still, Rickard wanted it. What he really wanted was a bigger and better Garden, and he figured that would come in time. He had been Willard’s promoter and now courted the explosive property that was Jack Dempsey for fight promotions on a scale as yet unimagined. Rickard was the man who created the outsize boxing event and built sweeping stadiums to suit. But while his promotional signature was size, he wanted the exposure and cachet of Madison Square Garden to solidify his power base. Not every promotion could be a festival fit for a pharaoh. The Walker Law would stimulate the creation of boxing shows just right for the Garden and other city venues, some not much larger than the infield at the Polo Grounds. In addition to business implications, roosting at the Garden would provide stability for the well-traveled Rickard and his ailing wife Edith. After years of hopping states and continents, they had entered that stage of life. They were living at the Biltmore Hotel and further draining Tex’s already depleted funds after he had bailed out friends who had invested in his failing Texas oil wells. On the boxing front, Rickard had been considering an alliance with the British-backed International Sporting Club, which sought a stronger New York presence (it maintained a headquarters on West 42nd Street) and would promote the Carpentier-Levinsky title fight in October across the river in Jersey City. The man behind the ISC, English gent William A. Gavin, hoped to tame the frontier of boxing with an international code linking the oversight of nations active in the sport.1 (A desire for international cooperation was in the air—witness Wilson’s League of Nations, although world peace was

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arguably a loftier objective that boxing reform.) But the code of boxing, of course, was closer to that of the vanished frontier. To survive, the sport had always been compelled to stay a step or three ahead of the law and been controlled by whomever could generate the necessary bankroll and gain the trust (if only momentary) of the fighters and their handlers—boxing never sought, nor would it have tolerated, a Pete Rozelle or a Kenesaw Mountain Landis. But Gavin and his well-heeled cohorts—ISC membership entailed purchasing $2,000 worth of the club’s stock in exchange for a pair of ringside seats at club boxing shows—soldiered toward organization and respectability. If boxing remained, without apology, the Wild West, its modern architect inevitably was Tex Rickard, who had marshaled, driven cattle on the trail and raised them in South America, ridden the bucking bronco that was the Klondike gold rush, and, at all stops, been revered for his integrity and admired for his ability to beat back the odds. He had always dreamed big, and that instinct likewise shaped him as a boxing promoter. By risking sizable capital he didn’t have, embracing controversial promotional themes, building huge arenas to stage his watershed events, and continuing to be a straight shooter, he had broken from the pack of lesser promoters. If Rickard and Gavin had different MOs and personalities, they shared the goal of boosting the sport of boxing, and perhaps their complementary skills could make for a happy partnership. Meanwhile, it was through Gavin’s initiative that the Walker Law arose, indirectly providing Rickard his entrée to securing the prize of Madison Square Garden. In the spring of 1920, Gavin enlisted the Army, Navy and Civilian Board of Boxing Control, which was more about lobbying than control, to join the ISC in an effort to tidy up boxing and revive it in the State of New York.2 Since the then seven-year-old Frawley Bill had been repealed three years earlier, prizefighting in New York had been limited to members-only clubs that skirted public policy by equating membership fees with admission charges; anyone could show up and join. Though the ISC was a private club of a higher ilk, professional boxing in any venue was reportedly in jeopardy in state courts, and even if not, the club’s ambitious plans were at odds with the murky climate. Gavin found a supporter in the colorful James John “Jimmy” Walker, state senate Democratic leader and the future mayor of New York. Walker’s bill, introduced in early 1920, sought to legitimize boxing in a way that would both satisfy naysayers and heighten its popular appeal. A product of Tammany Hall and Tin Pan Alley, the ex-songwriter had the right pitch for the state legislature, and his bill landed on the desk of Governor Al Smith, who didn’t care for boxing’s indigenous crooks and appreciated Walker’s comprehensive bill, but worried that signing it could damage his

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presidential aspirations. Walker argued that working-class people were in favor of the bill. Smith made him a proposition: get a hundred Protestant ministers to support the bill, and it will become law. With only a single weekend to muster support, Walker called Major Anthony Drexel Biddle, leader of the Army, Navy and Civilian Board of Boxing Control, and the impassioned boxing-money-military man whose ill-timed Marine drill exhibition in a Toledo ring had helped foul the bell at the Willard-Dempsey fight. Seems that Biddle’s passions also ran to Bible study, as he was the chief benefactor of the national Protestant Bible Society, whose members may have lacked an appreciation for ring tactics, but not heavyweight financial contributors. When Governor Smith arrived at his office on a Monday morning, wires and letters from as many as a thousand clergymen greeted him. Approve the bill immediately, they urged.3 Keep the money flowing. Money was the lubricant that greased the promotional skids, and Tex Rickard knew well its smell and texture. He also knew how to put on a show and draw people into the arena to see it. The prizefighting ranks had swelled, as newcomers and skilled veterans alike dreamed of Rickard-sized purses. New York City, brimming with ethnic favorites and their built-in followings, was now primed to host not just club fighters but boxing champions, and its indoor stage of tradition and turbulence was Madison Square Garden. Rickard still bridled when he thought of the haircut that Jimmy Johnston, then calling the shots at the Garden, had given him to stage Willard-Moran in 1916. Now Tex meant to shoulder Johnston and other bidders out of the way and take charge of the Garden himself. His success as a promoter had made him a high-profile target. A Wall Streeter named Frank C. Armstrong claimed that Rickard asked him for a war chest, and that the two agreed to be partners if a lease on the Garden were executed. Armstrong contended that he had advanced large sums of money to Rickard over a 10-year period for various enterprises. Rickard later denied and successfully fought the charges, saying that Armstrong had been the only investor to make money in Tex’s Texas oil company but “is not a partner of mine and never was.”4 Rickard’s partner, his backer, in pursuit of Madison Square Garden was once again John Ringling. He had paid Gavin McNab’s retainer to provide Rickard’s chief attraction, Jack Dempsey, with legal counsel recommended at the highest level of the White House. Now he staked Rickard to a 10-year lease of Madison Square Garden at $350,000 a year.5 The circus impresario wanted to keep his rivals out of the Garden when they came to New York, and, like Rickard, he foresaw the day—quite possibly in the near future,

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thanks to a resurgent New York boxing scene and a free, fighting Jack Dempsey—when the two master promoters would build a new Madison Square Garden with modern appointments and many more seats than the arena’s current eight thousand, seats to be filled by boxing fans and circus patrons. Soon, Tex and Edith would be living in an eight-room apartment across the street. Rickard gussied up the Garden with paint and polish before his inaugural show on September 17, 1920, at which he headlined lightweight Johnny Dundee, born in Sicily, guaranteed to draw legions of Italian-Americans. Dundee lost, but the crowd liked the look and tone of Tex’s Garden, complete with ushers and reserved seats.6 By then, Dempsey already was ticketed for the Garden. Six days earlier in Rickard’s office, Kearns and Bill Brennan’s manager, Leo Flynn, had signed papers to solidify a 15-round match “to a decision” between their two heavyweights on October 1. The champion would receive a guarantee of $100,000, the challenger $25,000. The two fighters had met two years earlier in Milwaukee and punched each other around for six rounds before Dempsey scored a knockout, Brennan suffering a broken ankle in the process. “I’m glad I have been matched to fight Brennan,” Dempsey said after the final papers were signed. “I am convinced that the public wants this bout and I am willing to fight anyone the fans want me to meet.”7 His words echoed those of his manager a month earlier when the two camps had signed a preliminary agreement. That this title fight—and the Dempsey box-office bonanzas that followed—materialized is testimony to the fact that business trumps personal animus. Rickard and Kearns made uncomfortable, if not strange, bedfellows; they didn’t like each other. They did have much in common— their rugged backgrounds, peripatetic ways, fondness for natty attire, genius for publicity, and single-minded drive—but while Kearns was forever the sharpie, Rickard was the grand orchestrator. At least that was the popular perception, which saw Kearns as angling for what benefited him the most, Rickard as arranging affairs to benefit all concerned. Kearns, the manager who would be king, resented Rickard for hijacking doomed Australian fighter Les Darcy and for other perceived slights. Rickard, the king promoter, didn’t trust Kearns. Their personalities clashed, and they tussled over Dempsey like competing suitors. Still angered by the draft evasion trial, the champ stayed in near peak condition, as if he could gradually dissipate his rage in sweat. For a thousand bucks, he and Teddy Hayes boxed a demo at the Hotel Elms in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, taking a page from the old vaudeville book, except

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this time a testy Dempsey drew blood from his trainer. The crowd was meager. The heavyweight champion was ready to get back to business.8 Dempsey and Hayes took the train to New York, where Kearns was waiting and plotting, and Rickard had just taken over Madison Square Garden. The promoter corralled Dempsey alone and assured him that, in the new boxing climate, the Garden meant big money with no hassles. Rickard also recommended that Dempsey unload Kearns. The champ liked and respected Rickard, but did not wish to part with the manager who had rescued him from the boxing ashcan and built his career. Especially not now, as bigger payoffs loomed beyond the tentative resumption of that career.9 A call from a fellow fighter dispensed with any hesitancy and brought Dempsey back to the ring. He had fought Billy Miske twice in no-decision matches in 1918; the newspapers split on the first and gave Dempsey the nod in the second. A year later, the very active Miske had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease, and now the Minnesotan sorely wanted a handsome payday to take care of his family. Dempsey, who regarded Miske as a stand-up guy and respected his boxing abilities, obliged. Kearns used the moment to satisfy a yearning. He was the best in the business at publicizing a fighter; overall promotion of a fight was but one step further. He called Michigan promoter Floyd Fitzsimmons, who had lofty ambitions of his own, and on August 3 in New York, the two men signed an agreement to stage a title fight between Miske and Dempsey on Labor Day in an open-air arena in Fitzsimmons’s hometown of Benton Harbor,10 where a canal had civilized the swamplands along a river leading to Lake Michigan. Ten days later, Dempsey boarded a train for points west. For weeks he had been doing roadwork on Long Island roads and training lightly at city gyms. Now he was headed for Benton Harbor to intensify his regimen; he needed to be in top shape because Miske was a dangerous opponent, he told reporters. His traveling partner, Jack Kearns, who, days earlier, had signed a preliminary agreement calling for a match between Dempsey and Bill Brennan, informed the sportswriters that the International Sporting Club, Tex Rickard, and a Philadelphia promoter were planning to bid on that fight.11 Kearns had his finger to the wind. He knew the action was now in New York, and that’s where he would go after he had proven his promotional mettle near the shores of Lake Michigan. In receiving bids from fellow promoters, including top-dog Rickard, he would be among equals. For the Benton Harbor bout, Kearns and Fitzsimmons guaranteed Dempsey $55,000 (out of which Kearns would pay himself his manager’s percentage), Miske $25,000. The promoters knew that this wasn’t a monster event but believed they had a moneymaker.

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The open-air site, billed as Fitzsimmons’s “new arena,” was a year-old minor league baseball stadium substantially enlarged to seat 20,000 for the fight.12 Training at the stadium to acclimate himself to the way the sun slanted onto the field,13 Dempsey sparred with regular partner Bill Tate, “Panama” Joe Gans, and future middleweight champion Harry Greb. Rickard paid a visit and again warned Dempsey about the perils of Kearns.14 “He [Kearns] is taking seventy cents out of every dollar you make,” Rickard informed Dempsey.15 The promoter sensed that, despite not being involved in Dempsey-Miske, he was the champion’s partner in future greatness and financial reward, Kearns or no Kearns. In Benton Harbor, Kearns seemed to have a good working relationship with his local co-promoter. Fitzsimmons had staged a lightweight championship bout (won by Benny Leonard) at the site in early July and failed to provide adequate “traveling facilities” for the fans. This time, he arranged for special rail and boat service from Chicago, and extra gas and oil at “supply centres” for motorists.16 Still, Benton Harbor (population 12,000) struggled to accommodate the influx of out-of-town visitors. Within a few days of the fight, local hotels and rooming houses had filled to capacity, and tents sprang up on vacant patches of land to provide sleeping quarters for newcomers. Hastily assembled outdoor eating booths augmented restaurants. A rigid code of traffic control necessarily relaxed, as uncertain automobiles found their way about town. With a nose for business that rivaled that of the two fight promoters, a traveling circus arrived and set up its exhibits. The overflow of overnight fight fans besieged sister city St. Joseph.17 As the cities coped and the promoters coexisted, it was perhaps inevitable that at least one Kearns-made row would disrupt the proceedings. It arose with the selection of the referee. Kearns wanted smalltime boxing promoter James F. Daugherty (spelled elsewhere as Dougherty; he already had made a bid to bring the Brennan fight to Philadelphia),18 who had helped arrange for Dempsey to land a job at Sun Shipbuilding (site of the infamous photo) in 1917. The state athletic commissioner, however, had his own ideas and overruled Kearns, who threatened to pull his fighter and nix the bout. A day before the fight, Kearns got his way.19 That night, fans lined up outside the ballpark gates and absorbed a drenching rain. The morning reduced it to drizzle, and the afternoon brought sunshine and heat. The 15,000 spectators included a few hundred women in summer finery—Kearns and Fitzsimmons had studied the Rickard playbook. Fans quickly filled the five-dollar bleacher seats before ticket holders advanced on the reserved sections. Eager to stave off a Toledo-like jumble of gate-crashers, the promoters had added soldiers and guards to beef up security provided by local police.20

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In the ring, the preliminary laborers on this Labor Day included Tate, future middleweight champ Harry Greb, and the great but aging Sam Langford. In the main event, a Dempsey right just below the heart halfway through the first round visibly hurt Miske, bruising his ribs and taking the spring out of his legs. He never recovered, and, in the second round, another body shot knocked him down for the first time in his professional career. Though he rose at three, lasted the round, and found Dempsey with a surprising left hook to the jaw in round three, Miske fought mostly in a defensive posture that acknowledged his predicament. Dempsey answered with a left hook to the jaw that stretched out the challenger. Somehow Miske managed to stand at the count of nine, but now even his defenses were gone. Dempsey finished it with a right; referee Daugherty tolled the 10-count, and the champion helped to lift his victim from the canvas. He stood by as Miske’s seconds further revived their fighter. Dempsey had been businesslike in the ring this night, as if incorporating some of the Willard persona into his labors. Now, as he gazed at Miske, he appeared almost regretful.21 But the next few years would prove that Miske was hardly a walking corpse at Benton Harbor—he won all of his remaining two dozen fights, including some against top contenders. Then, within two months of his final fight, he died. Everyone seemed to emerge from the Benton Harbor sortie in good spirits—Kearns proud of his promotion, Dempsey pleased to be back in action and eager for more, Miske now able to afford better medical treatment and still provide for his family. Even the co-promoter’s wife was a recipient of the fight’s largesse—Dempsey reached into his earnings and bought Mrs. Fitzsimmons a $13,000 automobile. (People, including Harry Stutz of Stutz Bearcat, had presented him with ritzy cars; maybe it was time for him to return the favor.) Stung by the draft evasion trial, a year of adverse publicity, and persistent cries of “slacker” even now, the champ was cultivating a new image. Two days later in a Chicago hotel, he visited with Mr. and Mrs. Miske in the dining room before leaving with Kearns aboard the Twentieth Century Limited for New York. Wealthier and no worse for wear after taking Dempsey’s punches, Miske was headed home to St. Paul for a hunting trip.22 Dempsey and Kearns arrived in New York at noon on September 9 and checked into the Belmont Hotel. The manager had earned his stripes as a promoter in Michigan, but the serious action now was in New York, and New York belonged to Tex Rickard, who, Kearns must have admitted if only to himself, had a way with people that he himself lacked and a knack for large-scale promotion. In addition to his greater gifts, Rickard had outbid the other promoters vying for Dempsey-Brennan. Still, he was not the only promoter in the boxing universe. Kearns did announce that he hoped

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to complete negotiations for a Dempsey-Brennan fight in Rickard’s New York, but also anticipated a third go with Gunboat Smith to be handled by promoters based near Boston. He also had an idea up his well-tailored sleeve to move a coveted Dempsey-Carpentier title bout closer to fruition, although he didn’t elaborate. At that moment, the Frenchman was sailing across the ocean toward the States and his match with Battling Levinsky.23 Two days later, Rickard and Kearns signed documents authorizing Dempsey-Brennan, and two days after that, Dempsey and company left for the coastal town of Long Branch, New Jersey, to begin training for the Brennan fight scheduled for October 1. Though he had wisely signed on with Rickard, Kearns relished his newfound dual status as managerpromoter and peppered the public with prospects of other promotions, fanciful or not. Gunboat Smith already had been dropped from the proposed Boston show and been replaced, at least in conversation, by Frank Moran. A Havana promoter had cabled a preliminary proposal for a match between Dempsey and the Spanish heavyweight champion, Doc reported. That sounded exotic, but it was not clear whether or not Senor Ordapal’s champion had actually earned his crown in the ring.24 Nor was it altogether clear when Dempsey and Brennan would fight, though Rickard had set a date of October 1. The state boxing commission indicated that it was not yet ready to lift the ban it had placed on heavyweight boxing matches, preferring to wait a bit longer to assess the Walker Law’s impact on the lighter weight classes. The lords of boxing were proceeding cautiously and, although it seemed almost certain that they eventually would let the heavyweights out of the barn, timing was another matter. Rather than wait, the ISC had shifted Carpentier-Levinsky across the river to Jersey City. Rickard, who already had lightweight and bantamweight title matches slated for the Garden before year’s end, set a new date of December 2 for Dempsey-Brennan, but even that proved premature, as commission chairman Joseph Johnson remained mum into mid-November. Finally, on November 18, Johnson gave heavyweight bouts a thumbs-up, per the full application of the Walker Law. His issued statement read, “The Boxing Commission and the License Committee decided that a point had been reached in the operation of the new boxing law where they felt justified in permitting heavyweight boxing contests.”25 Boxing and bureaucrats never did mix well. Rickard pushed the date back two weeks. Dempsey, who had forfeited another film opportunity due to the fight’s delay, shifted his operations to New York City. Kearns housed him in an apartment at Broadway and 97th Street. The champ ran in Central Park and divided the rest of his training between the outdoor Van Kelton Tennis Courts at 57th Street and 8th Avenue, and a gymnasium aboard the old wooden frigate Granite

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State, a gunship of Civil War vintage but now a floating armory docked at 96th Street near Riverside Drive. At the apartment, Kearns kept the spigot running for the thirsty press, and Dempsey enjoyed the companionship of at least one nicely contoured individual who was decidedly not a pug or a promoter. He was living the high life in New York; what the hell, he already was in shape from the recent Miske fight and had knocked out Brennan the first time they met. Meanwhile, the challenger continued to train at a gymnasium in Diamond Hill, Rhode Island, and considered himself Dempsey’s equal. Plus, he had Panama Joe Gans in camp, and the “colored” world middleweight champ had helped Dempsey prepare for Willard and Miske. Panama, manager Leo Flynn hoped, had the straight skinny on the champ’s vulnerable spots—even if Willard and Miske did not. As Rickard refortified the Garden and positioned it to become synonymous with big-time boxing, he envisioned matchups that could reach the pinnacle: the million-dollar gate. Dempsey was only half of the equation. To galvanize the public, his opponent needed to be perceived as a genuine threat, and, given the current crop of Caucasian contenders, such fighters were in short supply. The best heavyweights were black, and the prospect of a second coming of Jack Johnson was anathema to the public. Promotional magic and muscle, however, could transform an overmatched prizefighter into a supreme gladiator. Rickard was the master of that potion, and when Carpentier knocked out Levinsky in Philadelphia, the promoter understood that Dempsey versus the Frenchman had pinnacle potential, for broader themes could be woven into its tapestry, raising the stakes beyond those of a mere boxing match. Rickard had in mind another Dempsey opponent as well. He had set the table for a rematch with Willard in March and received the big man’s assent by telegram from Kansas. By late November, both Dempsey and Willard had signed with Rickard, although technically Willard was to meet the winner of Dempsey-Brennan.26 Brennan had his own ideas about that. In the Madison Square Garden ring before a sellout crowd just shy of 17,000 in seats scaled from $25 down to $2.50 on the night of December 14, 1920, the challenger wore short green trunks (a nod to his adopted Ireland, an early ploy to gather a following) and a red sweater, which, when removed, showed how closely his lean, hard-muscled physique resembled Dempsey’s. The champion wore long white silk trunks and a white towel draped over his shoulders. He weighed 188 pounds, nine fewer than Brennan. Kearns removed Dempsey’s towel, and the two fighters squared off for a photograph, which also captured Kearns, bushy-haired Leo Flynn, ring announcer Joe Humphreys in a

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three-piece suit, and dour-faced referee Johnny Haukop in white from head to toe. Although not without drama, the fight was largely a plodding affair enlivened by a handful of explosive punches and a few damaging flurries. The fighters spent much of the time groping toward and breaking from clinches, during which they banged each other to the head or ribs whenever an arm sprang free. It was strictly a blue-collar fight, as Dempsey pressed forward with a workmanlike body attack, and Brennan kept him off-balance with an efficient, though not active, left jab that set up occasional right hands delivered with power and accuracy. One of them, an uppercut to the chin in the second round, staggered Dempsey and dictated the pattern of the fight across the next nine rounds. Though a respectful Brennan failed to follow up his advantage, he had served notice that his fists did carry the knockout power advertised. As the rounds ticked by, the crowd cheered Brennan and met any Dempsey rallies with silence—he had been booed upon entering the ring. Dempsey’s timing seemed off, and while he remained the aggressor, his performance lacked the incendiary qualities the crowd had expected. Until the 10th round, that is. With Brennan slightly ahead on points according to some ring-wise observers, Dempsey landed a right-left combination to the jaw, drawing blood from Brennan’s mouth. The challenger clinched and, from these close quarters, crashed a right hook of his own onto Dempsey’s left ear, opening a nasty cut that produced a mini-geyser of blood for a spell. Enraged, Dempsey rushed Brennan and fired a series of short lefts and rights to the body. The round ended with Brennan holding on, and, in the 11th round, he jabbed and looked for opportunities to cross with the right onto Dempsey’s torn ear. Dempsey glared at him between rounds, as an agitated Kearns, who had been berating him straight along, told him he needed a knockout to remain champion even if he won the remaining 4 rounds. Dempsey’s wild swings at the start of round 12 suggest his level of frustration and willingness to heed his manager’s advice. Only when he shortened his punches did he find the range. Out of yet another clinch, he buried a right hook below Brennan’s heart, jackknifing the man who had ripped open his ear. It appeared that Brennan might sag to the canvas, but a Dempsey left to the chest kept him upright before a compact right to Brennan’s ear, appropriately, sent him to the deck and ended his dream of taking home the diamond-studded belt that Rickard had on hand for the winner. Brennan struggled to rise and did, but a split-second after the count had expired. On his feet, he was still doubled up in pain from that one body blow.27

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“It took you twice as long this time,” Brennan said to Dempsey afterward. “It’s my turn next.”28 “Nobody gave Brennan a chance against him [Dempsey] tonight,” Flynn told newsmen, “yet Bill gave him the fight of his life and actually had him going in the second round. I think we are entitled to another bout.”29 They definitely were entitled to the respect of the boxing community, and to $35,000 (Kearns and Dempsey received $100,000) of the fight’s handle and film rights, which combined to total $208,000.30 Reinforced by Kearns, Dempsey insisted that he had not been hurt at any time during the fight, but his body language in the second round betrays that contention, and wild rumors of deafness and a severed ear prodded him to submit to military-style hearing tests conducted not by doctors but by Chicago newsmen, who also noticed that the victor’s bashed ear remained very much in place, although an eyesore. Wending his way west, Dempsey passed the audiological tests and continued on, with Kearns, to Salt Lake City en route to the West Coast.31 Jack Dempsey could hear very well, and he could punch and take a punch even better. But the difficult, roughhouse fight against Brennan had dispelled his air of invincibility. Though a second fight with Willard reportedly was taking shape, most boxing people doubted that the ex-champion was much more than a punching bag at this point. And a third skirmish with Brennan was not an event to engage the public’s imagination. But what if a sharper-punching, more highly skilled pugilist were to take aim on the now vulnerable Dempsey? Better yet, what if such a challenger’s personal backstory shone in heroic splendor versus the champion’s sullied past? Now, that was a prospect to quicken pulses. Let Hollywood scriptwriters spin silly tales for celluloid Dempsey. Tex Rickard would craft a million-dollar scenario for the flesh-and-blood version, and he would move heaven, earth, and a governor or two to bring it to life.

Chapter 14

CUBAN CAPITALISTS

Professional boxing, like no other sport this side of politics, has always taken the public temperature and scheduled accordingly. Its franchises are individuals, not answerable to league formats, not obligated to perform at designated sites, unchartered by bylaws, and ungoverned by centralized authority. Sure, boxing has had its state commissions and assorted regulations and the latter-day alphabet agencies, but never an administrative czar such as football’s Pete Rozelle or baseball’s Kenesaw Mountain Landis, never a true ruling body. And yes, there have been tournaments and individual fights (such as Hart versus Root to fill the vacant shoes of Jim Jeffries) designed to determine successors for retired or deposed champions and ensure the sport’s continuity. But these typically have been met with yawns from the public or the back of its hand, or even the nonparticipation of the best available fighter—witness Joe Frazier’s boycott of the WBA heavyweight elimination tournament after the ousting of Muhammad Ali. Other sports stage annual climaxes per the calendar and prescribed competition: the Davis Cup, the Masters, the World Series, the Super Bowl. Boxing lacks the luxury of such regularity. Yet, every so often, the stars align. In regimented sports run by association officials or owner-elected commissioners, there is never a question of who’s minding the store. But in boxing, the shopkeeper is the guy with the bankroll. And the store can float like a craps game. The early foot in the financial race to land Dempsey-Carpentier belonged to theatrical manager-producer Charles Blake Cochran, promoter of the Carpentier-Beckett fight. Oxford-educated, the future

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knight understood the dynamics of the intellect and of mass entertainment as well, and believed that the two need not be mutually exclusive. He had attracted a crowd inclusive of bluebloods, fashionably dressed women, and some of the great thinkers of western civilization (e.g., playwright George Bernard Shaw and fantasist-futurist author H. G. Wells) to witness Carpentier’s sudden, shocking, glorious triumph at London’s Holborn Stadium on December 4, 1919.1 It had been a year since the armistice that ended horrifying World War I, and the distinguished elements within this gathering gave the event a symbolic weight, as if the reconstruction of Europe were embodied in, of all things, a fistfight between the English and French champions. Beckett, who looked like a wharf worker, knew little of such considerations and went down and out the first time a serious right hand collided with his British chin. Carpentier, who looked to be a perfect fit for the most expensively appointed drawing room of any well-heeled spectator, amplified his decorated war record with the first-round knockout, then elevated his stature yet again by raising the vanquished Beckett from the canvas. Europe and the world had a new hero and boxing a unique and fruitful attraction. On the day after the bout, Cochran announced that he had obtained Carpentier’s written pledge to fight Jack Dempsey for a percentage of a purse of 35,000 pounds sometime the following year, then reported that he’d just received a promising cable from Jack Kearns. The British promoter spoke like a man confident that he held the right hand. “I feel that the deal is virtually closed,” Cochran said. “The fight will be held next June 7 at the Olympia. I am starting for America immediately and am taking with me enough money to induce Dempsey to make the trip to London for the fight.”2 Hindsight tells us that Cochran overestimated the power of his pounds and miscalculated that he was in the driver’s seat for Dempsey-Carpentier. Money expectations would soar, non-boxing factors would intervene, and other promoters would enter the fray. As a latter-day sports philosopher might say, “A deal ain’t closed ‘til it’s closed.” Promoters are inclined to state as fact things that are formative or, heaven forbid, fabricated. While Cochran made his rose-colored announcements, New Orleans promoter Dominick J. Tortorich, who had struck out trying to match twin towers Jess Willard and Fred Fulton some years before, claimed that he had Dempsey under contract to meet the winner of Carpentier-Beckett in the Crescent City.3 By year’s end, a Baltimore-based racetrack owner reportedly had become Tortorich’s partner in the bid to land Dempsey-Carpentier.4 While Tortorich seemed to be trying to muscle in from New Orleans (it is not known whether his alleged contract with Dempsey was substantiated) and Cochran dealt confidently overseas, Tex Rickard played his cards

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close to the vest in New York. Once he learned of Carpentier’s decisive defeat of Beckett, he acknowledged that the Frenchman was the numberone contender for Dempsey’s title but wondered out loud about the match’s feasibility. “I am not at all certain that I care to consider such a proposition at this time,”5 he told newsmen in un-Rickard-like language likely massaged by the writers. Rickard’s chief concern was that finding a site to justify what he foresaw as a “large outlay of money” would be a near impossible task. Of course, this was before the advent of the Walker Law, his lease of Madison Square Garden, and Dempsey’s slacker trial. In Paris, a Monsieur Decoin, manager of the Wonderland stadium in Luna Park, proposed a 20-round fight for Bastille Day (July 14), and two Parliamentarians promised to secure for the battle nothing less than Pershing Stadium,6 built at Vincennes for the Inter-Allied Games six months earlier—talk about World War I resonance. If Carpentier-Beckett was emblematic of Europe’s rejuvenation, Dempsey-Carpentier would signify the Allies’ worldwide spirit and reach, hands across the ocean. Americans were crazy about all things French—what style, what class (and what stockings, per the Folies Bergère)! And France loved the Yanks, who had helped make the world safe for democracy. Allons. Transatlantic lines of communication and transportation were humming at the end of the second decade of the 20th century. While Cochran sailed for the States to meet with Kearns and Dempsey, Decoin received a Kearns cablegram that stipulated a tab of $250,000 with an option for a percentage to bring the champion to France to fight Carpentier; the French promoter promptly wired back, informing Doc that he would meet those terms.7 Carpentier issued an official challenge to Dempsey, and manager Descamps announced that he deposited 50,000 francs to bind the match.8 Meanwhile, though Rickard had expressed doubt that France could successfully stage the fight, he sent “Sparrow” Robertson, who had assisted the YMCA’ s athletic training and recreation program for the American Expeditionary Force In France during the war, to Paris to size up Decoin and see if a partnership might take shape.9 The French insisted that the fight had to take place in France or the United States to maximize financial potential and symbolic value—since no British fighter was in the scrap, England would not yield the big crowds necessary to warrant the anticipated record-breaking purse. English promoter Cochran, of course, had other ideas. After debarking in New York and taking the train to Chicago on other business in early 1920, he announced that he had offered Dempsey a guarantee of $200,000 plus ten weeks of theatrical engagements in England and France at $5,000 per. He had dispatched a personal representative to Los Angeles to meet with Kearns.

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“London is the logical place for the battle,” said Cochran. “It is neutral ground. We have there all the facilities necessary for staging a world’s championship and can be assured that our investment will be secure.”10 A world war had been fought over land and old hatreds. To mount an international boxing match would require a similar level of strategy and logistics. The geography expanded. In Los Angeles, on the heels of Cochran’s Chicago pronouncements, Kearns had one for the headlines. He had accepted an offer from San Francisco promoter James W. Coffroth, Rickard’s predecessor as boxing kingpin. For the lion’s share of a $400,000 purse, Dempsey would fight Carpentier for as many as 45 rounds in Tijuana, the Mexican tourist town in “Lower California,” where Sunny Jim ran a horseracing operation.11 Yes, this was about turf and old rancor. West Coasters Kearns and Coffroth were old pals, and it’s impossible not to think that Doc felt a little glee in sticking it to Rickard—even if it meant just upping the ante that Tex eventually would have to pay to land the fight. “We are willing to accept it on a winner or loser basis, perhaps $300,000 for the winner and $100,000 for the loser,” said Kearns, adding that “it’s up to Coffroth now to sign up Carpentier.”12 That Kearns would ratify a winner-take-most clause further suggests that he viewed the Tijuana offer as a ploy—he believed that Dempsey would flatten the Frenchman, but strange things happened in prizefights; Doc’s man, after all, was the champion, and champions got guarantees. Coffroth reportedly had sent a representative overseas to sign Carpentier for this dubious enterprise. That afternoon, Cochran reminded everyone that he had Carpentier under contract for a $105,000 guarantee for the fight and had already advanced him $25,000. The British theatrical magnate was not likely to go public on any final arrangements before the ink had dried. A few days later, the Kearns-Coffroth gambit ran into headwinds. Descamps balked at the proposed 45-round marathon (though few on the planet believed that the fight would last longer than a handful of rounds), Cochran nixed Tijuana (a far cry from London!), and the Mexican governor of the province of Baja California said he had not been informed of any fight plans. Undaunted, Coffroth said he probably would build an arena for the fight.13 Soon after, Kearns and Coffroth circulated word that Carpentier would, or had, come to terms. A fed-up Descamps categorically denied it. “Kearns has been doing a lot of bluffing,” the little Frenchman huffed to a reporter from the Chicago Trubune. “I have not received any communication from Kearns or Coffroth or anyone else in America.”14 Furthermore, Descamps pointed out, Cochran’s option binding Carpentier to a Dempsey fight was effective through the end of the month, and,

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what with exhibitions and other public appearances, his fighter’s schedule was full well into the spring. Indeed, the two fighters were busy boys, with Carpentier preparing to knock out visually challenged “Blink” McCloskey en route to a grand tour of the Continent, while Lon Chaney and lesser cosmeticians pancaked Dempsey’s puss for the Hollywood cameras. In early February, France asserted another conflicting prerogative. Theodor Vienne, founder of Wonderland stadium and front-man promoter Decoin’s putative boss, announced that he held a 60-day option on Carpentier’s services, extending from February 1 to March 30. Vienne was still game to host the fight in Pershing Stadium, and he now entertained joining forces with Rickard to rejuvenate the interest of Dempsey/Kearns in a French proposal. In addition, the U.S. motion picture company Fox Films, through its man in Europe, was reported to be another Carpentier suitor, to the tune of $250,000.15 Less than two weeks later, showman William A. Brady set the record straight. The former manager of heavyweight champions Corbett and Jeffries, and a lifelong man of the theater, Brady made a splash in his latest role as Cochran’s U.S. representative in “all matters concerning Dempsey and Carpentier” by clarifying his employer’s contract with the French boxer. The English promoter’s agreement with Carpentier had not lapsed, but rather extended until February 15, 1921, Brady told the world, or at least those interested in staging the next battle of the century. To corroborate his borderline-petulant statement, he had a copy of the contract in tow. Brady’s suave wrath was aimed at all the pretenders scurrying about in pursuit of the big fight, but it took aim principally at Tex Rickard (hardly a pretender) and William Fox, the Hungarian immigrant who had formed Fox Film Corporation five years earlier. Brady regarded the movie mogul as a friend and fellow traveler, both men essentially show exhibitors captured by the allure of prizefighting on the highest level. But in sending an emissary with the burnished British name of Winfield Sheehan to London to commandeer Carpentier, Fox had been a bit premature—he had the right month, but the wrong year, of the expiration of Cochran’s hold on the Frenchman. “A contest with Mister Dempsey cannot be held before February 15, 1921, unless by the consent of, or under arrangement with, C. B. Cochran,” Brady said rather loftily.16 By the end of the month, however, it appeared unlikely that Dempsey and Carpentier would meet in Europe, regardless of when, and for whom, they fought. The franc’s diminishing value compared to the dollar had knocked Parisian promoter Vienne, of Wonderland fame, out of the escalating bidding. Kearns, who years before had counted himself among Brady’s protégés, followed the showman’s prompting and put down the welcome mat for

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Cochran. But no signature was forthcoming from Dempsey, who wanted the fight to be in the States (as did his manager). Kearns recommended that Carpentier and Descamps come to the United States and meet with Rickard, advice that the French duo heeded in mid-March. And so the arrival in New York of the newly betrothed Monsieur et Madame Carpentier and their gangway of steamer trunks began the stateside love affair with Gorgeous Georges. Despite Brady’s previous rhetoric, Descamps did not foresee a hassle with Cochran, although he acknowledged the contract in force. “Mister Cochran is a personal friend of mine—that is why I gave him the preference after the match with Beckett,” Descamps said two weeks before leaving for the United States. “But inasmuch as he has not succeeded in securing Dempsey’s signature . . . he is too good a sport to stand in our way of putting the fight through.”17 Maybe. But Cochran would not go gently, if at all. No private contract took precedence over a prison term. The following months, as promoters reloaded for fresh assaults, Dempsey’s legal troubles emerged, courtesy his erratic ex-wife and ambitious federal prosecutors. Rudely yanked off the movie set, he needed the rest of the spring to decision the U.S. government. Newly married and instinctively charming, Carpentier visited New York with his bride and engaged in his own film work. But his vibrant reception dulled. Americans were not much interested in Carpentier the husband or in Carpentier the actor. They wanted to see Carpentier the fighter, specifically against Jack Dempsey for all the laurels and spoils a free world could confer. As the svelte Frenchman, per his manager’s arrangements, continued to perform on movie sets and in circus productions without making plans to fight Dempsey or anyone else, the public, prodded by impatient sportswriters, began to grow weary of his act. Was he serious about challenging the champion? Stripping away the pomp and proclamations, did he fear him? Prickled by the turnaround, Carpentier returned to France, but not before signing to fight light-heavyweight champ Battling Levinsky in the fall in Brooklyn. That would demonstrate his intent, he and Descamps believed—in the absence of Dempsey (who, after all, had larger concerns at the moment), Carpentier would fight the best available U.S. champion. A day after arriving in New York on a return trip in September and only a week after a legally vindicated Dempsey had defeated Billy Miske, Carpentier stood before a crowd gathered by the International Sporting Club for a luncheon in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the very Fifth Avenue footprint where the Empire State Building would rise a decade later. Speaking fervently in French to be translated by his U.S. rep, Jack

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Curley, Carpentier told the gathering, which had given him an ovation, that he would sign to meet Dempsey as quickly as it could be arranged. “I have no fear of him [Dempsey],” went Curley’s translation. “What terrors has he to make anyone afraid of him? He is but human, he has two hands and two feet.”18 Puts his trunks on one leg at a time. The Waldorf power crowd included movie man William Fox, serving as toastmaster and, apparently, staying in prime position to land the promotion; state Senator James J. Walker, who had sponsored the just-enacted law that promised to change the New York boxing landscape; and Brooklyn Dodger president Charles Ebbets, whose self-named ballpark was to host the Carpentier-Levinsky fight in a month. However, rather than Ebbets Field, a lesser baseball park across the river in Jersey City debuted Carpentier for American fans on October 12. The verdict was disappointment, but a knockout was a knockout and Carpentier was now light-heavyweight champion of the world. The path from here led directly to the big prize, to Jack Dempsey, who had a date soon with tough contender Bill Brennan, which figured to add another knockout to the champion’s totals. The Rickard drawing board did call for a title defense against former champion Willard in March, but though Jess had signed to that effect, any amount of money was likely to be poor recompense for another go with Dempsey. William Brady, who claimed Descamps as a “close friend,” sold Kearns on Carpentier as the one opponent, who, if paired with Dempsey, would make big money for everyone. Taking the initiative, Kearns donned his promoter’s hat, took Descamps to a “fancy lunch,” and told the excitable Frenchman that he, Jack Kearns, could get $200,000 for Carpentier alone to fight Dempsey. Descamps gasped and spilled champagne on his suit. Then Kearns buttonholed Cochran at a party at Brady’s Manhattan apartment and made the same pitch. The game was afoot.19 Whatever the eventual dollar figure, the Frenchman was the ticket, both Kearns and Rickard realized. It was time to get serious about solidifying arrangements for a Dempsey-Carpentier fight. Rickard, who had been keeping a low profile by working through intermediaries, was New York– serious about landing the fight and the one man capable of turning this mismatch on paper into a battle for the world, and, as Kipling proffered, all that’s in it. The other promoters fell away like peeled-off tape from a fighter’s wrapped hand, all except for Cochran, who still had contractual hooks into Carpentier. That was fine with Rickard because Cochran had money, or at least access to it, and no matter how big he got, Tex always needed a plentiful supply of other people’s dough.

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One other obstacle remained. The state boxing commission still had not brought the heavyweight division into the Walker tent of sanctioned bouts in New York, but the principals—Kearns, Descamps, Rickard, Cochran, and Brady—who met four times during the second week following the Carpentier-Levinsky fight, all sensed that the day was coming soon and made plans accordingly. They agreed in spirit and principle to hold the big fight in New York sometime the following year. Among other considerations, Carpentier wanted to be home for Christmas. While the fight’s purse had not yet been established, heavyweight promoters Rickard, Cochran, and Brady had agreed to pool their resources and work as a unit. Kearns told newsmen that the fighters were willing to accept a straight percentage of the gate, such was everyone’s belief in the promotion’s potential. The fighters were “anxious” to meet each other, Doc said. “Carpentier says he wants to prove to the American people that he is a better fighter than some have been inclined to credit him with being.”20 Kearns also informed reporters and the wider world that the proposed fight between Dempsey and the “Spanish heavyweight champion” in Havana was off. Señor Sanchez, whose existence, much less his validity, had been called into question, reportedly had been knocked out (presumably in a boxing ring) in that sun-kissed city. Descamps weighed in the next day, hitting the same optimistic notes as had Kearns—and in French. He forecast that the fight would take place the following spring. To hear the two managers tell it, negotiations were proceeding harmoniously and inevitably toward the triumvirate of Rickard, Cochran, and Brady. But then Kearns slyly snuck a couple of jokers into the deck, citing two other offers he had tabled to concentrate on the current deliberations. One, he admitted, was a $600,000 bid by veteran promoter Tom O’Rourke (who had once organized a tournament to produce a Great White Hope to fight Jack Johnson), who had entered the competition as far back as the previous December with an offer one-fourth the amount of his purported latest.21 The other came from the ubiquitous Jack Curley, whose proposition made Kearns a co-promoter.22 So said Kearns. Though he had mentioned these two bids merely in passing, the whirring of Doc’s brain was almost audible. It was no surprise two days later, then, that Kearns boycotted a morning meeting thought to be a pro forma session for the official signing. Unspecified provisions in the contract were not to his liking, and he sought to accelerate the promoters’ payment schedule and gain more leeway in naming the referee. The previous day’s meeting between the Big Five had resulted in the tentative adoption of an agreement with a guaranteed purse of $500,000 split between champion and challenger on a 60/40 basis, $100,000 to be posted in advance by the promoters, matched by $50,000

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each by the fighters. According to the “articles,” the fight could take place only in the United States, Canada, Cuba, or Mexico at a site, and on a date (with 60 days notice), chosen by the promoters.23 So Rickard and company were talking half a million, the fighters were onboard for a guarantee rather than a percentage, and Europe was excluded as a possible site. New York City was the preferred venue, but its fate hinged on the actions and timing of the state boxing commission. Rickard discounted Madison Square Garden as too small to host the fight, and speculation immediately centered on the mammoth Polo Grounds and Coney Island. Or another Rickard-built stadium in some pasture somewhere. Close, of course, to major transportation lines. Meanwhile, Kearns’s signing pen was idle. The next day brought more intrigue. While Dempsey played a round of golf in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, his manager stayed indoors and fielded more offers. A syndicate eager to promote the bout in the city of Beardstown in west-central Illinois telegrammed its proposal to pay Dempsey $75,000 plus 35 percent of the gate plus 35 percent of the profits generated by exhibiting motion pictures of the fight. The earlier offers from Curley (now joined by former partner and Boston baseball bozo Harry Frazee) and Tom O’Rourke were still on the table, and a new bid came Kearns’s way from the ISC through its matchmaker, also named O’Rourke but known as Tex. A jumble of names, indeed—Kearns and sportswriters needed the proverbial scorecard to keep track. The ISC offer called for some of its wealthy, influential members to underwrite the bout and top the Rickard-Cochran-Brady purse. In the midst of appraising his various suitors, Kearns was summoned to an evening meeting with Rickard, Brady, and Descamps at Brady’s New York office. Afterward, Doc was all smiles. His previous objections, including his rejection of the posting of boxer/promoter forfeit funds with a trust company rather than a stakeholder, had been resolved, and he seemed quite at ease with the bombshell contained in the promoters’ statement: the fight would be held in Havana with the additional backing of “Cuban capitalists,” whose representative would be in New York within a week. Rickard refused to identify the newcomers.24 As of yet, no one had signed anything. Kearns and Dempsey left for Canada, where the champion boxed an exhibition in Montreal. Descamps and Carpentier made preparations to sail back to France in a week. During that week, no Cuban—capitalist or otherwise—arrived in New York to meet with Rickard and his co-promoters. Still, Tex announced that fight papers would be signed and sealed on the afternoon of November 5, a day before the Frenchmen were scheduled to depart. The New York Times

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wrote of the Cuban flirtation: “The fact that the promoters are reticent on their plan to go to Havana lends strength to the popular opinion that there was no sincerity in the plan when it was originally announced.”25 But who was the source of the insincerity? And to what end? According to subsequent tales told by estimable, though instinctively inventive, eyewitnesses, Kearns had duped Rickard into believing that a genuine offer of a half-million-dollar guarantee had been made by a pair of sugar and tobacco millionaires from Cuba. The charade had been staged, in all probability, between the October 24 and October 26 meetings of Rickard and company, as the latter date set the fight’s purse at, you guessed it, $500,000. The scene of the sting had been the Hotel Claridge, a regular lunch spot for Rickard. Kearns outfitted a couple of waiters in millionaires’ duds, slipped them $25 each, and stuck Havana cigars in their mouths. The smoke must have clotted Rickard’s senses. Kearns, who had been on movie sets with Dempsey in Hollywood, knew something about stand-ins; he bought his two extras lunch and listened to their excited, well-coached pitch to bring Dempsey-Carpentier down to Havana. This caught Rickard’s attention, and the promoter asked the headwaiter who these new fellas were and what the hell was going on. But Kearns had cast his scenario expertly; the headwaiter, playing himself, was in on it. Moments later, Kearns invited Rickard to sit in. Partners in literary mischief, Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon looked on from nearby tables.26 On November 5, 1920, one day before Carpentier and Descamps sailed for France, the Frenchmen met with counterparts Dempsey and Kearns, and promoters Rickard, Cochran, and Brady for the final time in this sequence of negotiations. They all signed contracts in the ballroom of the Hotel Claridge, which had also witnessed the Willard-Dempsey signing. This time there was no need to take the ferry to Weehawken in order to legalize the papers across state lines. Former Evening World sports editor Bob Edgren also signed, having been chosen stakeholder/arbiter. Neither the date nor the site had been set—Havana was still in play, said the promoters!—but the combined guarantee had been settled at $500,000, $300,000 being the champion’s end. The fighters would also each receive 25 percent of the movie revenues. Provisions specified for the deposit of the purse and forfeit monies ignored Kearns’s earlier fuss. Doc, apparently, hadn’t really given a hoot about that technicality; he’d just been buying time. Kearns’s Cubans, introduced as Marcos Gonzalez and Rafael Posso (also seen spelled as Passo), were in attendance—Doc was playing this to the hilt. (In one version of the story, they had been introduced to Rickard at the lunch drama as Juan Rodriguez and Manuel DeCosta,27 but Tex could be forgiven for not retaining their names, as his mind was on dollar figures.)

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Bidding for an Oscar, though the first Academy Awards would not premier until the end of the decade, Gonzalez told the ballroom crowd that he and Posso, joined by fellow capitalists Felipe and Lionel Padro (busboys?), were prepared to guarantee Rickard’s proposed purse, which they would sweeten by $50,000 to stage the bout in Havana. Other Cuban investors could raise it as high as $700,000, Gonzalez said. He could also guarantee Dempsey $100,000 to fight bullfighter John Sanchez, who was not a boxing champion (or even a boxer) after all.28 Kearns had been talking up a Dempsey-Sanchez match for some time, but the Spaniard’s line of work somehow got lost in translation. For the moment, the dutiful members of the press (Lardner and Runyon notwithstanding), like Rickard, swallowed it whole, or nearly. Or seemed to. Rickard finally had his signatures, and though he was one of three partners in this expensive enterprise, no one doubted that the event would be his to shape. But between the signing and the fight, new impediments arose to give the promoters indigestion.

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Chapter 15

GOING SOLO IN JERSEY CITY

Three days before Dempsey and Carpentier signed the papers authorizing their fight, U.S. voters ticketed Republican presidential nominee Warren G. Harding for the White House by nearly a four-to-one electoral margin. With his leading-man looks and bland message of returning to “normalcy,” Harding had clicked with an electorate still decompressing from war and eager to part with the eggheaded, liberal ways of the Democrats. He proved to be an unfortunate choice—unseemly personal, and broad public, scandals rocked his administration. The Republican landslide swept owl-eyed Nathan Lewis Miller into the New York governor’s mansion, ousting Al Smith, who would return next time around. Smith had cleaned up in New York City, but the rural upstate vote elected Miller, a tenant farmer’s son who had become a corporate lawyer and an effective advocate for U.S. Steel—Andrew Carnegie was his primary patron. No surprise, then, that wealthy conservatives augmented Miller’s constituency, and the governor-elect who opposed women’s rights also rejected the prospect of a Dempsey-Carpentier fight in his state, even as the boxing commission took steps that smoothed the way for Dempsey to fight Brennan at Madison Square Garden in December. The scale of Dempsey-Carpentier, with all of its attendant vices, did not sit well with Miller, who threatened to work to repeal the Walker Law if the fight took place in the 34,000-seat Polo Grounds (Rickard’s pick at first blush) or anywhere else in the state.1 There were other states in the union, however, and Rickard was confident that the fight would land on its feet, even if Carpentier would be quickly

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knocked off of his. The promoters had money to make and reputations to sustain; they had guaranteed Dempsey a cool $300,000 and Carpentier $200,000, astronomical figures for the time. Two days after the signing, Cochran announced that the fight would take place close to New York City in early summer in a 100,000-seat stadium constructed for the occasion. Havana, which did not qualify as close to New York City, was no longer in the running. “The [Cuban] proposers did not make good their promises regarding financial conditions,” Cochran explained.2 He did not know that the “Cubans” likely had resumed serving spring lamb with asparagus au gratin at the Claridge, but by this point Rickard may have smelled something gamy about the whole escapade and put the polished Brit center-stage to save face. The proposed building of a new stadium to suit—one with three times the seating capacity of the Polo Grounds in 1920—suggests that Rickard realized that the new governor’s stance doomed the venture for New York (although Long Island, off the beaten path, might still work, he said), but was more broadly indicative of the promoters’ (particularly Tex’s) belief that the fight would attract an unprecedented crowd. Cochran told newsmen that the planned arena’s size meant moderate ticket prices—everybody won in this scenario. The New York Times wrote that the promoters’ plans “revealed an undertaking which has no parallel in pugilistic history.”3 Cochran needed a break from pugilism; he was off to see the Broadway opening of the French operetta “Afgar,” with all its Moorish delights, and he planned to sail to London in 10 days’ time aboard the White Star liner Adriatic; Brady would tend to his business in New York. Carpentier and Descamps had already sailed. The next day, Rickard sallied forth and told reporters that he favored the afternoon of July 2 (a Saturday) for the big fight, a date that would draw better, he said, than Independence Day two days later. He confirmed that it would take place in a new outdoor arena and said that ticket prices would be scaled from $5 for general admission to $50 at ringside. Nothing further on the site, but the newspapers suggested New Jersey as an alternative to New York.4 A week later, the three promoters obtained a New York State charter for the American Athletic Club, Inc., capitalized at $10,000 to be expanded to the $500,000 “liability” (read: purse) for the Dempsey-Carpentier fight. The corporate name provided the leeway for the Big Three to conduct future promotions as well.5 But promotions in show biz and sports (which was, after all, show biz) were volatile enterprises and liable to come aground on the smallest of shoals: a misread expression, a misfiled document. Events would conspire to turn the corporate Big Three into a Big One.

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The first red-letter date specified by the contract was November 20. That was the deadline for each fighter to deposit a bond of $50,000 (10 percent of their combined purse), and each promoter to deposit one-third of the $100,000 guarantee at the Central Union Trust Company in New York. When November 20 arrived, only Cochran’s share ($33,333.33) resided in the vaults of Central Union. Nonetheless, both Cochran and Brady soon announced that they planned to withdraw from the promotion. Though Brady later maintained that he and Rickard had withheld their deposits after seeing that the fighters had failed to make theirs,6 in truth the promoters were reticent because they feared Governor-elect Miller’s opposition to the fight. Rickard had additional cause for concern, in that a repeal of the Walker Law, as threatened by Miller, could knock out resurgent Madison Square Garden.7 No money, no promotion, no fight. With New York turning inhospitable toward Dempsey-Carpentier and Rickard presumably reaching for a financial life preserver, other promoters circled, shark-like. On December 2, a group of Ottawa sportsmen offered a guarantee of $250,000 and a site in the nearby Canadian city of Hull.8 Five days later, Michigan promoter Floyd Fitzsimmons announced that he wanted to bring the fight to the Benton Harbor ballpark where he had staged Dempsey versus Miske,9 but nearly two months passed before he wired Kearns that he was ready to make Rickard an offer.10 In January, a clutch of Montreal capitalists offered to buy the fight outright (for a rumored $700,000), or become Tex’s partner and shield him from any losses from a fight in Canada.11 Moving further afield, a report that a British syndicate headed by South African diamond-and-gold tycoon Solomon “Solly” Joel planned to offer Rickard $500,000 to stage the bout in London was subsequently denied by Joel’s brother-partner Jack.12 Making an offer was one thing, delivering the goods quite another. The new bids did not impress Rickard, who, either frustrated or angling to hook a new backer closer to home, even suggested that London might get the nod if New York fell through. That, of course, would require changing the contract, which limited site selection to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.13 But the contract was in jeopardy anyway because only Cochran had come up with his share of the forfeit money. The new year brought more legal and financial tap dancing. Descamps insisted that Carpentier’s money, in the form of gold held by a French bank, had been frozen by the government, which was unwilling to allow that large a sum to leave the country. Acting on behalf of both himself and Cochran, who was overseas and under the weather, Brady had announced that the two partners were withdrawing from the promotion due to violation of contract. (Amusing, since Brady

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himself, apparently, had been one of the violators.) New York City attorney Harry Saks Hechheimer, authorized by the contract to act for both Dempsey and Carpentier, claimed that there had been no breach since the contract’s specified arbiter, editor Edgren, now a nationally syndicated sports writer and cartoonist, had not yet declared a forfeiture by any of the parties. In the next breath, Hechheimer threatened to sue Brady, Cochran, and the bout’s third promoter, Rickard, who essentially agreed with him regarding the contract’s validity. Further complicating the issue, Central Union Trust said that Brady and Rickard had both met their contractual obligations after all, each having “covered” (guaranteed) their eventual deposits with “surety bonds.”14 My, what a tangled web these boxing folk weaved. There was method to Tex’s madness, of course—Brady and Cochran were prepared, it seemed, to sign over their interest to him. Rickard cabled Cochran for direct word. Regardless, the New York promoter maintained, he would go forward—solo, if necessary—with the promotion.15 The New York Times wrote that “talk of the match has gradually diminished until it is now almost forgotten.”16 Rickard intended to rejuvenate the conversation. “The bout, to the best of my judgment, still is the greatest enterprise in the history of the ring sport,” Rickard said. “It is bigger and more attractive today than ever before. . . . If they [Dempsey and Carpentier] adjust themselves to conditions, however, and agree to work on a percentage basis, the conditions would be improved and in addition there would be a greater assurance of success for the match.”17 Always comfortable playing the percentages, Rickard had retrieved this gambit, which had been attached to the original negotiations, to test all interested parties. The date of the fight would still be July 2, he reaffirmed, though the location remained undecided. He was being wooed by bidders from Montreal and Hull, and other offers, he said. Meanwhile, speaking in Los Angeles, stakeholder-arbiter Edgren indicated that the contract allowed for the fighters’ forfeits to be deposited directly with the promoters in addition to Central Union, and that he had been notified by Rickard that Dempsey’s money had been posted. In Oakland, Jack Kearns confirmed as much. “The Dempsey-Carpentier contest will promote itself,” said Dempsey’s canny manager. “Tex Rickard is going to be the promoter if Cochran and Brady are out, and he will stage it where it will draw the most money.”18 Kearns added that the status of a return match versus Willard, booked for March 17 at Madison Square Garden, was uncertain. (In truth, it was all but dead.) In a bid to thwart blatant commercialism (and perhaps highway robbery, given the spectacle provided by some matches), the New York State Boxing Commission had ruled earlier that the maximum admission

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fee to any boxing match in the state was to be $15; even Willard-Dempsey, or especially Willard-Dempsey (i.e., fights of that magnitude and cost) could not return a profit based on that limitation, according to Kearns. He might have added that the same logic applied to Dempsey-Carpentier. Of course, all of that was moot anyway, if the governor did not want prizefighting in his state. The plot thickened. Kearns soon revealed that his fighter’s bond of $50,000 had been executed by the Fidelity Surety and Deposit Company of Maryland and placed in his office safe, where it had been stored for delivery to the promoters; it was now in Rickard’s possession. Cochran’s London office issued a statement saying that, Brady notwithstanding, the British promoter was still in the game and held his contract with Carpentier regarding any Dempsey-Carpentier fight to be valid. Attorney Hechheimer voiced the opinion that Brady’s bid to break the contract was a charade to force a fight in London under Cochran’s auspices. Aware of the news from London, both Rickard and Brady awaited official replies from Cochran on the matter. Tex was on his way to deposit Dempsey’s 50K in the vaults of the Central Union Trust Company, established three years earlier with the merger of Union Trust and Central Trust in the big-dollar New York banking market. The game of financial and promotional Musical Chairs continued.19 Months earlier, Descamps had claimed that his fighter’s contract with Cochran went beyond site selection and a 1920 timetable regarding a bout with Dempsey. It also precluded, the manager maintained, any promoter other than Cochran from handling the match—at any time.20 But Dempsey versus Carpentier was too weighty and lucrative an event to let founder on technicalities. In a meeting in Rickard’s office on the final day of January, Kearns agreed in theory to accept a percentage offer to make the fight and indicated that his French counterpart was onboard as well. The $500,000 from a guaranteed purse he had helped build through subterfuge was a possible casualty, but there was still money to be made. Rickard then went to Brady’s theatrical offices and arranged for the transfer of the interest of his two co-promoters. Brady, acting on his own and Cochran’s behalf, was glad to be rid of the burden. Cochran, apparently, offered no word of protest this time. The transfer became legally binding on the last day of February, the legal papers ratified by New York attorney Nathan Vidaver, who had been representing all three promoters in the venture.21 Ultimately leery of a U.S. promotion anywhere but in New York, Cochran and Brady—joined at the hip in this endeavor—had officially pulled out. Rickard was now the sole promoter, a prospect that thrilled him, and

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one that, arguably, he had sought all along. Two days later, he reiterated that Dempsey-Carpentier was on for July 2, and announced that DempseyWillard II was still breathing but postponed until Labor Day, both bouts conforming to the $15 maximum on ticket prices, and both likely to take place in a 50,000-seat outdoor arena he would build for $75,000 in Manhattan or Brooklyn. He ruled out New Jersey.22 Either Rickard was not as fearful of the Miller menace as believed, or he was testing to see how far he could push the new governor. Either way, he was moving ahead. Now all he needed was money—what else was new? He had found himself in the middle of a pile of it three weeks earlier when Anne Morgan, youngest daughter of J.P., had co-promoted a lightweight title match won in spectacular fashion (a sixth-round KO after an opening round that featured four knockdowns, one of them sustained by the eventual winner) by champion Benny Leonard at the Garden. The record (for non-heavyweight classes) gate of more than $162,000 benefited the American Committee for Devastated France,23 an organization founded by Miss Morgan, who had spearheaded relief efforts near the front during the war.24 Might she be persuaded to back the fight that would showcase France’s most visible war hero? Morgan’s connection with, and attendance at, the Leonard fight had drawn an elegant crowd, including many bejeweled women, to the Garden, but Baptist ministers had howled at her proximity to the bloodletting.25 Rickard needed funds in a hurry, and trying to tap the same well again so soon was bad form. But he did find a familiar moneybags in New York ticket-broker Mike Jacobs, who had performed a similar service, though on a smaller scale, for the Willard and Brennan fights, and had first met Rickard at the Gans-Nelson fight in Goldfield. Michael Strauss Jacobs had cut his entrepreneurial teeth as a youth in Coney Island before the turn of the century, and he had fairly invented the fine art of ticket scalping. He shared Rickard’s million-dollar vision, lent the Texan twenty grand, and raised $180,000 more to be reimbursed by tickets to the fight—tickets, of course, that he would surely move at a nice profit.26 Rickard was off and running. Ringling, Morgan, Jacobs. People of different strata but with big bankrolls in common, gravitated toward and trusted Rickard. With the funds from Jacobs, Rickard made good on the $100,000 promoter’s bond for DempseyCarpentier. No more complications with Cochran and Brady, who were out of the picture; Cochran got his deposit money back. Rickard told a few trusted newsmen on the q.t. that he was using ticket revenue, which was instant, to pay for other expenses related to the promotion. The previous year, a man named Charles Ponzi had soared and crashed with a similar

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financial scheme. Tex Rickard planned to stay airborne and distribute the rewards he promised. Building a sports stadium today requires years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars, many of which come from unwitting taxpayers whose communities are expected to reap the economic benefits. The state of the art was different in 1921. Tex Rickard’s timetable for erecting an outdoor arena to stage Dempsey-Carpentier was a matter of months—not years—and the Man from the West, the ex-marshal, trail loner, and Klondike gambler didn’t plan on asking New York City (or any other town) for one cent. But he was confident he would get it done, just as he had twice before. He would build a huge wooden arena from scratch and pack it to the gills, and no one would be impaled on a deadly splinter, consumed by fire, or crushed in a collapse. And his made-to-order crucible would seat many more—perhaps double—spectators than the baseball Giants’ sweeping, banner-studded Polo Grounds. He could build it in a month if necessary. What Rickard didn’t know just yet was where he would build his stadium. The day that he officially assumed the interests of promoters Cochran and Brady was the original contract’s deadline for announcing the site; the two fight camps now granted him a 30-day extension.27 The calendar flipped to March 1. Tex stuck by his fight date of July 2. He could do the math. In mid-March, even as C. F. Graham of Eastern Canada Securities Company, Limited, pressed for Rickard’s answer to the month-old Montreal bid, Tex teased his suitors, newsmen, and the public. “Nobody knows just where this battle will be held except myself,” said the wily ex-faro dealer. “I have several [prospective sites] in mind right now. . . . When the announcement does come, you’ll be surprised.”28 In late March, as the deadline approached for Rickard to name the site, three more bidders joined the lists. Cochran may have retreated from the fray, but some of his countrymen were eager to lift a lance. Representing an English syndicate, a Walter C. Percival visited Rickard’s office high atop Madison Square Garden and offered $500,000 to bring the bout to London’s Olympia arena or an open-air stadium to be constructed at Epsom Downs, whose horseracing heritage dated to the 17th century. Lloyd’s of London would insure the promotion against financial loss due to unfavorable weather. The second newcomer was a Dr. W. E. Harrison of Fallon, Nevada, whose telegram, on behalf of another syndicate, offered $800,000—the highest figure yet—to hold the fight in the Nevada silver camp of Broken Hills, a site that had, if nothing else, historical resonance for both Rickard and Dempsey.29 Raising Harrison’s silver with coal mined in Cumberland, Maryland, hotelier John W. Snyder trotted out his city’s mayor and Chamber of

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Commerce chief to talk turkey with Rickard. Two years earlier, Cumberland had bid on the Dempsey-Willard fight that landed in Toledo. “[Our] miners are in a prosperous state just now and they can be counted on to purchase high-priced seats,” said an overly optimistic Snyder, who emphasized that his state’s governor was onboard, and the gate would surely reach the million-dollar plateau.30 Rickard certainly had an affinity for miners, and he was happy to have large numbers of them attend his promotions. But for Dempsey-Carpentier, Rickard wanted a unique fight crowd, one swelled by the moneyed set and high-class women and a diverse lot of personalities readily identifiable in print and public. Avatars of society, culture, Wall Street, sports, and the underworld. And, of course, he wanted the crowd to be the largest ever to attend a boxing match or any other sporting event, including the Colosseum’s grisly fare witnessed by the ancient Romans. For this heady admixture, the Cumberlands of the world were insufficient. Rickard had played for rough-and-tumble crowds in Goldfield, Reno, and Toledo, the last hinting at the changes to come. With Dempsey-Carpentier, a matchup gloriously suited to capitalize on the swirling loyalties, rooting instincts, and international fervor in the wake of the Great War, Rickard planned to elevate forever the platform for his promotions. He had no feel for overseas. He did not want to go across borders north or south. He wanted the United States. He wanted the East with its dense population, transportation hubs, and pillars of finance. He wanted New York. But New York, courtesy Governor Miller and the $15 ticket maximum, did not want Dempsey-Carpentier, no matter how grand an enterprise. The not-so-poor cousin across the river saw an opportunity. New Jersey governor Edward I. Edwards offered Rickard the Garden State. Cagy operators and government officials in Newark, Atlantic City, and Jersey City pursued the promoter and his million-dollar dream. Meanwhile, Rickard and Kearns continued to spar at a distance, each confident they would come together when it counted most. Kearns expressed his impatience over the delay in determining a site for DempseyCarpentier, but after Rickard smiled in rejecting an offer transmitted from Los Angeles by vaudeville and motion picture exhibitor Alexander Pantages (a fellow adventurer-entrepreneur whom he had known briefly during the Dawson City gold frenzy) to purchase the fight for a paltry $50,000, Kearns seemed relaxed as he told newsmen that he knew of the promoter’s plans but was bound to secrecy. On April 1, a fresh crop of aspiring promoters from Montreal learned from Kearns via telephone that Jersey City had sewn up the deal. When the press printed the story, Rickard denied that he had made a final decision on site selection, though he suggested, tellingly, that he might have pinned down which state would host the fight.

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From Philadelphia, Kearns told him he hadn’t said what the Montreal report claimed.31 April Fools all around. The offers kept coming: Racine, Spokane, Coeur D’Alene. From Seattle, Pantages wired an offer that increased his original offer by a mere 1,600 percent to $850,000, though it wasn’t clear if the showman intended an outright purchase or a partnership.32 Little was clear in the charge-andretreat of high-stakes promotion and its breathless reportage. The money came easy when it was no more than figures scrawled on a sheet of paper not backed by legal commitment. Rickard’s deadline to produce a site had been tacitly extended by Kearns and Descamps. On April 9, the promoter revealed the state he had chosen sometime earlier: New Jersey. Governor Edwards gave it a thumbs-up and said that, of the three cities under consideration, Jersey City was the best situated. Per New Jersey law, the fight could not exceed 12 rounds, nor could a decision decide the outcome.33 Few expected Dempsey-Carpentier to go the distance. Within a week, Tex broke bread with Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague at an Elks’ Club luncheon before a Chamber of Commerce committee showed him five possible fight sites in their fair city across the Hudson River from Manhattan. “Not since I have been in the promotion game have I met a more enthusiastic body of men than in Jersey City,” said Rickard,34 feathering the nest. Four days later, he returned their enthusiasm, announcing on April 19 from his office in Madison Square Garden Tower that the DempseyCarpentier title fight scheduled for July 2 would take place in Jersey City. He planned to begin construction of the wooden arena on May 1 at one of three sites: a 30-acre fen known as Montgomery Oval, a 50-acre tract near the intersection of two highways, and a seven-acre plot closest to the ferry. Rickard preferred the Oval but said he didn’t think arrangements could be made in time for him to obtain it.35 However, Rickard would get his Oval. He had underestimated, or at least pretended to, the power of the man who ran Jersey City and the surrounding county.

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Chapter 16

THE FIGHT FINDS A HOME

As the political leader of Jersey City’s Second Ward in 1913, Frank Hague, dubbed the “Big Fellow”1 by an increasing number of constituents, had plotted an Irish takeover of City Hall as a prelude to himself taking over. Irish generally meant Democratic, even though three-term Irish mayor Mark Fagan had been a Republican. Now the mayor was Otto Wittpenn— German, Democrat, and anti-Davis reformer, Davis being the longtime Hudson County boss known as “Little Bob.” Taking his cue from Davis’s tactic against Fagan five years earlier, Hague stole Wittpenn’s liberal mantle by pledging a campaign against prostitution, backing a conversion of city government to commission-style, and labeling the incumbent a tool for the railroads. Jersey City voters passed a referendum substituting five commissioners for the antiquated board of aldermen and, on Election Day, Hague made the cut, soon becoming commissioner of Public Safety. He fired policemen long compromised by the town’s madams and saloonkeepers and crushed a fledgling union. Hague built his reputation and power base. A few years later, another Jersey City election seated all five Hague-picked commission candidates (including himself ), who then made their leader the mayor. It was 1917, the year that President Woodrow Wilson, by then a political enemy of Hague’s, asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Mayor Hague was not averse to using thugs to beat sense into public servants who didn’t share his point of view. Turnabout, however, was not fair play. Hague chased corporate-hired strikebreakers to defuse potentially violent strikes by express company and refinery workers, and trolley-car

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operators. When his warnings delivered in advance to company execs didn’t quite finish the job, his now staunch police faced down strikebreakers at the site. Then the mayor hammered out agreements with union negotiators. His actions endeared him to the local populace. Lean and straight and somber in public, often boisterous and profane in private, and ungrammatical with an Irish brogue in either venue, Frank Hague was always nattily attired, and wore a chilly expression to go with his high shirt collars and expensive suits. He was partial to diamond-studded tiepins. Some locals bemoaned his lack of refinement (wardrobe aside), but most regarded him as their warrior-knight. He got things done. He put Jersey City on the map. Like many other Americans who attained positions of power, Hague rose from impoverished beginnings. Born in Jersey City in 1876, the fourth of eight children of Irish immigrants, he was expelled from sixth grade and promptly exchanged his formal education for the life of a street hood in his native “Horseshoe,” a square mile of tenements, dozens of saloons, and floating garbage courtesy of New York City across the Hudson River. By the age of 16, he had matured enough to hire on as a blacksmith’s helper at the Erie Railroad yards, but the life of a tradesman was no long-term aspiration. He stayed on the job for two years, then entered the fight game as the 18-year-old manager of Joe Craig, a featherweight boxer lacking in skills and earning power. But this atmosphere suited Hague’s scrappiness and provided connections with men of clout who were attracted to the action. One such man was Denny McLaughlin, who ran a saloon, a racetrack, and Jersey City’s horseshoe-shaped Second Ward, gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled legislature in 1871 to diminish the strength of the Democratic (read: Irish Catholic) vote by isolating it. Impressed by Hague’s aggressiveness and penchant for sharp suits, McLaughlin brought the young man into the Democratic fold as a watchdog and enforcer. One of Hague’s responsibilities was to get out the vote on Election Day, a task in which he would become an expert. But political alliances could be short-lived and rivalries inevitable. Hague soon shifted his allegiance to Edward “Nat” Kenny, a Horseshoe saloonkeeper (of course) and disaffected McLaughlin man not above a little ballotbox manipulation in favor of his candidates for local office. His candidate for constable in the 1897 election was none other than his new protégé, 21-year-old Frank Hague. In a close race transformed by a bit of sleight-ofhand, the newcomer won. Hague held office for the first, but hardly the last, time. Soon the ambitious Hague chafed at the low-level duties of ward constable and began to resent Kenny for failing to move him up the political ranks. It was time to find a new patron, and, this time, Hague moved

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upward rather than sideways. As Hudson County’s Democratic boss, Robert “Little Bob” Davis controlled party affairs in Jersey City and several other growing towns along or near the burgeoning riverfront, and had amassed a tidy portfolio of business and real estate holdings. Again, Hague’s drive and moxie attracted an older power broker. Davis asked him to rescue the county sheriff ’s re-election bid in 1899, and Hague, who by now had solidified his own bloc of devotees per his years on the street, drew voters to the polls in sufficient numbers to return the incumbent. Davis, who had been sheriff of Hudson County the previous decade, rewarded Hague with the deputy sheriff post at a generous salary. Hague’s stock in the Democratic Party rose further when Republican reformer Fagan became Jersey City’s mayor in 1901, breaking Davis’s hold there. In the age of Teddy Roosevelt, Fagan advocated parklands and education and was re-elected twice. But after a half-dozen years, Davis charted the path back to power in Jersey City. For the 1907 election, he turned his Democratic candidates into reformers à la Fagan and pitted county supervisor H. Otto Wittpenn, of Jersey City’s German Eighth Ward, against the mayor. To bolster Wittpenn’s candidacy, Little Bob made Hague—now married to Horseshoe girl Jenny Warner—boss of the Second Ward. Hague worked his powers of persuasion and lassoed enough voters to help Wittpenn win a close election. Meanwhile, the new Second Ward leader was building a power base that owed its allegiance only to him. When a now wary Davis unseated him as ward leader, Hague had his charges physically intimidate the new man’s aides, and he meted out the same treatment to Jersey City aldermen asked by Davis to assume Hague’s City Hall “custodial” duties, a patronage plum that entailed no menial labor but lots of fringe benefits. When Wittpenn bested Fagan a second time in 1909, Hague goaded the mayor into announcing his candidacy for governor, in defiance of Davis’s wishes. Shaken by Hague’s brazenness, the veteran county boss joined forces with longtime rival “Big Jim” Smith, of neighboring Essex County, to support Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, for the governorship. On the campaign trail, Hague spoke more against Davis than for Wittpenn. Locally, he produced his own candidates to battle the Davis picks. In the end, however, with violence flaring on both sides, Little Bob and Big Jim prevailed. Hague’s candidates lost handily in the 1910 election, and the erudite but rather severe Wilson was ticketed for Trenton, his way station en route to Washington. The scrabbling, dramatic rise of Frank Hague had stalled. Events, however, soon provided him an opportunity to reclaim his lost stature. When “Big Jim” Smith entered the Democratic primary race for U.S. senator (a post he had held before), Governor Wilson publicly opposed the Essex

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County boss. In a move that would prove sharply ironic in the years to come, Hague joined Wilson and Mayor Wittpenn in opposing Smith as an exemplar of boss politics. Hague scored points across the state; Smith withdrew. Then Hudson County bust wide open when longtime boss Davis died in early 1911. Seeking to fill the Democratic leadership void, Hague reversed course and joined the thwarted Smith in a bid to erode Wilson’s support in New Jersey and quash the sitting governor’s presidential aspirations, precipitating a battle with Mayor Wittpenn, who remained a loyal party man. Although Wilson made it all the way to the White House, Hague and Wittpenn continued to fight for dominion over Jersey City, with Hague still cloaking himself as a reformer. Now the leader of the Street and Water Commission, Hague vigorously cleaned city streets despite temporarily cutting spending and manpower, and he embraced the proposed commission style of local government, seen as more efficient than the existing mayor-council structure. Wittpenn, who had eyes for the statehouse, failed to grasp the popular sentiment, and when Jersey City citizens approved commission government, he ran handpicked candidates for the five commissioner slots in the election of 1913. Hague offered his own quintet, and three of them, including himself, were elected. Wittpenn was shut out and, though ex-mayor Fagan was the leading vote-getter and so regained his old job, Hague was named public safety commissioner and was now the heir apparent to Boss Davis in Hudson County. He took aim on the Jersey City Police Department, managing to sneak into a city statute amendment some language that gave commissioners the power to hire and fire. Once the amendment passed, he purged the ranks and installed his own loyalists. He compromised ward chiefs by recruiting their top men for city jobs and cultivated new governor James Fielder, a Jersey City native. When Wittpenn, now a Wilson man, once again sought the Democratic nomination for governor, politics made additional strange bedfellows by aligning him with Smith against Hague. On Election Day in 1916, Democrat Hague marshaled his enforcers to discourage the Democratic vote, and Republican Walter Edge took the statehouse thanks to a decisive Jersey City margin. Word was that Hague secured the Edge vote in return for a promised hands-off policy for North Jersey. By subterfuge or fiat, Hague was fashioning a new brand of bossism. The following year, Hague, Wittpenn, and Republican Fagan dueled in the Jersey City municipal election, each providing a slate of candidates for the commission. Fagan crossed party lines and enlisted the support of President Wilson in a bid to stem Hague’s momentum. The president sent his foremost aide, Jersey City native Joe Tumulty (who would receive Jack Kearns at the White House for a crucial meeting three years later), into the

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fray to rail against Hague, but the strategy was futile. All five Hague candidates were elected, and the boss himself became the mayor. Mayor Hague set about the business of empire building. The Hudson and Manhattan railroad tubes that had been built in 1914 and ran under the Hudson River to Jersey City had dramatically expanded the region’s commercial profile, but Hague quickly learned that railroad local real estate assessment levels lagged other commercial properties by a wide margin, as did those of gas utility Public Service Corporation and New Jersey behemoth Standard Oil. So, in 1918, the mayor substantially hiked these local taxes, incurring Republican wrath throughout the state and prodding the state tax board to overrule him. Hague countered with an end run. With President Wilson in Paris for the international talks that would end World War I, the mayor ran roughshod over the state Democratic Party and eventually gained the gubernatorial nomination for Edward Irving Edwards, banker, state senator, Jersey City boy, and a thoroughgoing Hague man. In the election, Hague’s strongarm tactics subsequently put Edwards over the top on the strength of his overwhelming Hudson County margin (58,000 in Jersey City alone). The new governor functioned as little more than a puppet, rubber-stamping the boss’s selections for state office. Those included a new batch of commissioners for the state tax board. In short order, Hague’s desired property assessment increases became law. In putting his own man in the governor’s mansion, Hague expanded his sphere of influence to include district attorneys and several government boards statewide. Two years later, his five-man slate was reelected to the Jersey City Board of Commissioners, with the Boss himself garnering all but 120 of the 4,620 votes cast in his home Second Ward. A state senate committee had labeled the Hague machine a “saturnalia of crime” and accused it of manipulating the vote tally, but in the victory celebration at City Hall, Hague asserted, “The decent and liberty-loving people of Jersey City are not to be fooled.”2 He was the unquestioned leader of Jersey City and Hudson County, and kingmaker for the whole damn state. A year earlier the Democrats had been ousted from the White House— the ill-fated Warren G. Harding had been elected—and suffered reversals on all levels of government throughout the land. In New Jersey and elsewhere, the Irish had become turncoats and voted Republican, unwilling to forgive Wilson for a host of grievances including his lack of support for Ireland in the aftermath of the suppression of the 1916 Dublin uprising, a bloody protest of British rule. Yet in the local elections of 1921, Frank Hague not only held onto his office but maintained an additional measure of power by managing to return his chum, Thomas “Skidder” Madigan, to the post of county sheriff, whose responsibilities included selecting grand

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juries. The Skidder was saved, it is believed, by a flurry of suspect, lastminute votes.3 Hague’s hard work in the political arena was often legitimate. He knew each of Jersey City’s wards top to bottom, pressured his lieutenants to perform, and was unrelenting in registering new voters. He enriched city coffers with corporate tax money, refusing to be beholden to big business. Still, much of his independence came from illicit or shady dealings. He dumped the houses of prostitution but commandeered the bootleg and betting businesses for City Hall. He forced those who owed their government jobs to his Organization to hand over three percent of their pay. The state Democratic Party benefited from these extra funds. So did Frank Hague’s personal bank account.4 Another laurel claimed by Jack Kearns was that his prior association with Frank Hague led to a meeting that, ultimately, brought Dempsey versus Carpentier to Jersey City. The mayor then handpicked the site for the new stadium, Kearns maintained.5 If the Chamber of Commerce was the cheerleader and Governor Edwards the figurehead, Frank Hague was the seat of power. Whatever role Kearns may have played, Hague was the magnet that drew the fight to his town, and he did have a particular spot in mind. John F. Boyle, treasurer of New Jersey’s Democratic Campaign Committee, owned the box factory at Montgomery Street and Cornelius Avenue, and the vacant tract across the street. Rickard could build his stadium there. Something surely could be worked out with Boyle, who after all, had declined to run for commissioner and recommended Hague in his stead, and routinely relied on the Boss to send him good, strong, Irish immigrants to fill the 80 to 90 jobs as laborers at his factory.6 Hague put Rickard and Boyle together and, indeed, something was worked out. A local man named J. W. Hack and the Public Service Railway Company also had ownership stakes in the vacant tract; Hague persuaded all parties to lease the land to Rickard for six months at a nominal price.7 Apparently, the lease permitted improvements, because Tex had a whopper in store. Montgomery Oval’s 30-plus acres were a bit marshy, but Rickard’s engineers, who had surveyed the site with him and produced a cartload of blueprints, could work that out as well. So could the crew that had assembled Bay View Park Arena in Toledo for the Willard fight. On April 25, Rickard announced that he would build his stadium and stage his fight on schedule at Montgomery Oval, now dubbed “Boyle’s Thirty Acres,” and formerly known as Montgomery Park, which had hosted minor league baseball in the 1890s and had, at one time, sported a storage barn for horse-drawn trolleys. This site had been Rickard’s first Jersey

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City pick—its vantage point, its proximity to rail lines—among the five shown him by the Chamber of Commerce, but certain objections had been raised, though not by Rickard. Those obstacles had since been removed, replaced by guarantees. The shifting landscape’s legal groundwork bore the footprints of Frank Hague. Others, including Kearns, insisted that Rickard cinched the deal by making a nice contribution to the Jersey City treasury. Chastened by his overbuilt stadium in Toledo, Rickard planned to erect a 50,000-seat arena in Jersey City, but the spate of advance ticket reservations from across the country would force him to nearly double that capacity. First, the land—six-and-a-half acres (of the tract’s actual total of 34) specified in Rickard’s lease—had to be cleared and graded for construction. Laborers and mechanics descended, built shelter for themselves, installed a water line, and unloaded the first of many arriving carloads of lumber. Building his stadiums must have given Rickard memories of the gold rush towns that sprang up overnight. The promoter believed he had tapped a new vein in Jersey City. Trolley cars originating in Newark ran past the Oval, which was minutes away on foot from the ferry, the Hudson Tube (bringing people under the river from New York) stations, and the terminals of three railroad lines. Montgomery and Cornelius and other streets were sufficient to accommodate the expected flow of motorists, as were the number of parking spaces at and around the site. The railroads promised to add special trains, sorely lacking in Toledo. The big-city police across the river offered to bolster the efforts of the local gendarmes to contain a crowd approaching 100,000—and spending a million dollars.8 Rickard had pulled off a promotional coup paralleling his maneuver in 1910 in the service of Johnson versus Jeffries. On that occasion, he had shifted the venue from San Francisco to Reno, exchanging an unsympathetic governor (California) for a sympathetic one (Nevada) and building a stadium for the event. Now, 11 years later, he had followed the same blueprint, fleeing the harsh precincts of New York and Governor Miller (who, obviously didn’t understand the concept of economic stimulation or appreciate the manly arts) for the welcoming burg of Jersey City and Boss Hague, and building a mammoth wooden bowl. The 50-cent program hailing the “International Heavyweight Championship of the World” called the site “Thirty Acres Oval.” Whichever handle people used, they knew what it was and where it was. In Jersey City of 1921, and in the international publicity generated by Tex Rickard and his minions, it was impossible to miss.

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Chapter 17

SKETCHES FROM TRAINING CAMP

Carpentier left Le Havre, France, for New York aboard the SS La Savoie once again on May 7, 1921. His wife remained behind on this trip, but not four-legged Flip. Eight days later, Descamps wired the New York Times: Crossing excellent. Georges is in perfect condition. We will be happy to see New York again.1 The ship docked before a thousand fans on the morning of May 16 at Pier 57 at the foot of West 15th Street. Rickard and a gaggle of newsmen arrived on a Coast Guard vessel to greet the French champion on his third and most momentous trip to the United States. Descamps, trainer Gus Wilson, business rep/translator Captain J. H. Mallet, chef Henri Marcot (who doubled as occasional sparring partner), baby-faced French heavyweight Paul Journee, and a herd of baggage accompanied Carpentier.2 Journee was to serve as a sparring partner at training headquarters secured by Jack Curley and set up expressly for the occasion on farmland in the residential Long Island enclave of Manhasset, land of the millionaires. Carpentier had trained in the higher elevations of Summit, New Jersey, for his fight against Levinsky and could have returned, but he preferred the seashore.3 Descamps had declined an offer by the American Legion’s Atlantic City Post to bring the war hero to the shore resort—there were too many distractions in the resort town. “We will train in private,” said the decisive little manager. “That’s final.”4 That was Carpentier’s way. He wanted to train free from commotion, far from the madding crowd of reporters and spectators. Seclusion provided

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the right atmosphere for concentration and for working on new ring tactics and techniques without divulging them. He had said as much; he had even written about it in his published guidelines for fighters. Manhasset offered seclusion and was within hailing distance of the sea. As with preparations for Levinsky, Hoboken-based Joe Jeannette, the great black heavyweight who had fought Carpentier in Paris and now ran a garage with an upstairs gym on Summit Avenue not far from Rickard’s Jersey City stadium site, joined fellow New Jerseyan Marcel Thomas and Journee in training camp to get the challenger ready. They bunked at a timberframed Colonial on the old Matthews farm and set up a ring and small gym in the garden. Carpentier hiked and ran in the woods and parklands on the estate of restaurateur-confectioner Louis Sherry across the road from the Matthews place.5 Sometime Carpentier chum George Bourne, a resident of adjacent Port Washington and son of the former president of Singer Sewing Machine Company, smuggled in beer for lunch. If beer buoyed the mood at leisure, Carpentier and his camp counselors opted for grim privacy during working hours. Only those on official business were admitted; that included the press, but not during training sessions. To keep out intruders and preclude all but an aerial view, Descamps installed barbed wire topped by wooden fencing around the barn and farmhouse, where Carpentier did morning calisthenics. A Belgian Shepherd Dog and his human counterpart from the Nassau County Police Force stood guard at the gate. In a futile attempt to observe the challenger in action, the banned gentlemen of the press perched in trees and erected scaffolding on adjacent friendly property in an effort to snoop on workouts. Unsympathetic to their plight, Carpentier had vowed to follow his regimen in isolation. Though he was now in New York and preparing to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world, he would not yield to public pressure and make a spectacle of himself. “Of all training conditions, I desire quiet most,” he said.6 The fight’s promoter, however, wanted his foreign attraction on display. Rickard had mastered the press—had, to some extent, bought them—and knew of their sweet uses in goosing the gate. He summoned Carpentier and Descamps to New York after considering the French champion’s reclusiveness through the first few days of training. They forged a compromise: Newspapermen would be admitted to view Monday, Wednesday, and Friday workouts. And, of course, write about them.7 And in the most colorful of terms, Tex trusted. Dempsey kicked off his training in late April at former lightweight champion Freddie Welsh’s health farm in Long Hill, New Jersey, near the town of Summit, an area noted for its high altitude (implying health

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benefits) and excellent rail connections. Born Frederick Hall Thomas in Wales, Welsh had enlisted in the U.S. Army in late 1918, while World War I was still being fought, a year after defending his title against Battling Nelson and losing it to Benny Leonard. Apparently, military veteran Welsh had no objections to hosting the heavyweight champion who had avoided service. In the early stages of camp, the champion sought to sharpen his reflexes to face the smaller, arguably quicker Carpentier. Dempsey sparred with middleweights Alex Trambidas and Jimmy Darcy, and lightweight Joe Benjamin, all of them stablemates brought east from the West Coast by Kearns for their own bouts.8 Spurned by the Carpentier camp, Atlantic City now pursued the champion. When developer B. George Ulizio, who owned the rights to the local airport, made his site available to Dempsey and promised to erect a grandstand so fans could watch the champ’s public workouts in relative comfort, Kearns decided to move the operation to the seashore in early May. The South Jersey resort town craved any means—legal or otherwise—of attracting people to its boardwalk and beach, where they would inevitably, and gleefully, part with their hard-earned cash. Dempsey professed that swimming in the surf hardened the muscles. Atlantic City was an active, wide-open town, and he was ready for a change of pace after a couple of weeks in the thin air of Long Hill. Dempsey detrained from his Pennsylvania Railroad car at Atlantic City Station on May 6, a day late because he had missed the previous day’s train when attending soldiers were loathe to let go of him at an American Legion affair orchestrated by Kearns. (In a sense, Kearns’s bid to show the military’s admiration for his man contradicted Rickard’s overriding strategy of pitting draft dodger against war hero, but the game was already afoot, and it had something for everybody.) At the seashore, hundreds turned out to greet Dempsey. He checked into the Hotel Alamac, which had been built 20 years earlier by Million Dollar Pier maestro John L. Young, and which was now somewhat seedy but still a popular rendezvous for sportsmen, politicos, and theater types. The next stop was City Hall, where a reception committee awaited and where Mayor Edward L. Bader presented the champ with the ceremonial key to the city. “We picked the right town,” said Dempsey,9 who, as a younger man, had taken a lot of trains to a lot of towns, whether selected or random. In those days, he had been lucky to score a piece of bread charred over a trashcan fire. Now he received a home-cooked lunch at Doc Thompson’s Boarding House in the city’s genteel Chelsea district before surveying his accommodations at the nearby airport: two cottages, a hangar dedicated to his training needs, and wide-open spaces for obligatory roadwork. Not missing a

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beat, Rickard had arranged for fight tickets to be on sale at both the Alamac and the airport. Kearns arranged, or at least permitted, lots of extracurriculars at his hotel headquarters. “Doc’s suite became the drinking capital of the Eastern seaboard, and a gathering place for footloose rowdies in all income brackets, sportswriters, and show people with easygoing ways,” wrote Rickard biographer Samuels.10 When the revelers charged out of Kearns’s quarters for a night on the town, their drunken hijinks quickly graduated to ugly assaults at late-hour eateries and nightclubs. Two of the more energetic miscreants made headlines and were relegated to the local hoosegow, pleading that, as members of the heavyweight champion’s entourage, perhaps they were entitled to leeway. The champion appreciated high spirits and certainly liked unabashed women—hell, he’d married a prostitute—but drew the line at public sloppiness and endangerment. He berated his manager for creating and tolerating such a scene,11 a reversal of roles because it was Kearns who ordinarily kept his fighter on a short leash during training. Dempsey had his mind on a very different girl—on Mother’s Day, he and his beloved Celia exchanged telegrams, the missives facilitated by training aide Teddy Hayes. With Mom suitably acknowledged, Dempsey ran his miles on airport grounds earmarked for the construction of a baseball stadium, then stoked himself with a breakfast that consisted of grapefruit, mush, two soft-boiled eggs, strips of bacon, toast with honey, and mineral water. At night, the Manassa Mauler relaxed by listening to canned music from a rosewood playing machine. In the coming days, he attended a Rotary Club luncheon, visited kids at Atlantic City Hospital, and umpired a Kiwanis Club baseball game; he was becoming a roving ambassador of good will. He announced his intention to study the French language so he might understand any urgent dialogue in Carpentier’s corner on July 2 in Jersey City. He jogged alongside Mayor Bader, while Hizzoner cantered on horseback—an irresistible photo-op long before the genesis of the term. Dempsey was said to receive a hundred mash notes a day, many with photographs, none answered. Kearns went to New York City to recruit boxers of all stripes to come to the Atlantic City camp and spar with the champion. On May 12, the Doctor returned to the seashore. So Dempsey had set up camp at on the windswept airport grounds just off the road leading inland from Atlantic City, and the public flocked to his daily sessions, eager to see the Dempsey scowl, the Dempsey warrior haircut (the sides shorn, a dark thicket on top), and, above all, the Dempsey punch. The salt air failed to divert Kearns from the scent of money. He moved quickly to charge for admission, then hiked fees as attendance at his

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fighter’s workouts increased; eventually, daily crowds reached 1,000, and Kearns collected a dollar a head. His fighter more than gave them their money’s worth, battering and bloodying sparring partners of varying size, speed, and disposition. It made little difference who was put in front of Dempsey; they were all targets to him. Among other strategies, he practiced backing quicker, smaller men like Carpentier into the ropes, where he could whale at them with impunity. He went about his business with the controlled fury and nasty edge of a man who had been given life’s short end so often that no amount of money or fame could salve his anger. Fighters were schooled to be unemotional, for emotion was the enemy of discipline, but some could draw from a wellspring of hurt and channel their feelings into something fearsomely efficient in application, a professional’s flamewrought tool. Dempsey was the exemplar of managed rage. And his punch was as hard as a mule’s kick. When asked about the secret punch that Carpentier supposedly was developing, Kearns grabbed Dempsey’s right fist and said, “This ain’t no secret at all.” While the Belgian police dog at Carpentier’s camp in Manhasset stood guard and discouraged intruders, Dempsey’s seashore digs employed three frisky members of the breed to run and wrestle with the champ, who also added boardwalk strolls to the training regimen. He trained in the seashore sun, working up an appetite and a tan. He insisted to newsmen that he would not bet on the fight. (Of course, all understood that he was referring to any bets on himself, but nonetheless this illustration of the sport’s laxity of governance is rather astonishing when viewed through a modern sensibility. Two years earlier, the Black Sox scandal in the World Series had ruined baseball, as players on Chicago’s American League team had taken bettors’ payoffs to throw games.) Privately, Dempsey sniffed at word that Carpentier was planning to switch tactics and mount a body attack in their fight. Pounding the body was Dempsey’s stock-in-trade. He dined on ribs, jolted the heart, in order to take the heart of his opponent. A report that he would target the Frenchman’s jaw12 contradicted his M.O.—Dempsey found the jaw, all right (just ask Willard, Fulton, Brennan, etc., etc.), but only after sufficiently pulverizing the body; sometimes a single punch was sufficient. A fight between a headhunting Jack Dempsey and a bodypunching Georges Carpentier would have been a curious affair indeed. Of course, stratagems intended to mislead the opposition were part of boxing’s paraphernalia, but in the heat of ring action, instinct took over. To help handle publicity chores and give his fighter a more sympathetic reading, Kearns reached out to the West Coast for the San Francisco Call-Post’s Warren Brown, one of the first sportswriters to put the young Dempsey’s exploits in the newspapers.13 Two gents with homophonous surnames showed up in camp: Jimmy Dougherty, who had refereed Dempsey’s

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fight with Billy Miske in Benton Harbor; and Harding’s attorney general (and presidential campaign manager), Harry Micajah Daugherty, who saw nothing wrong with Dempsey’s profusions and, while in Atlantic City, also took time to view the questionable validity of professional wrestling at the Garden Pier, uptown over the ocean. There was talk in Dempsey’s camp of black light-heavyweight Kid Norfolk, who had recently lost a “colored” heavyweight title fight, as a future Dempsey opponent, and Kearns insisted that only the purse would determine the right match for his fighter—“The color line is to be eliminated under special financial circumstances,” said Doc.14 (Why he wasn’t considering the winner of that “colored” title fight, Lee Anderson, is not known.) While Kearns pontificated about race and boxing, two Chicago University students (athletes, fortunately) arrived in camp after walking all the way from their alma mater, so they claimed. No word on whether they had any tips on stamina for the champion. Dempsey was grim and unrelenting in his sparring and gym sessions, but other settings revealed a man less at odds with the world. He ran on the beach in Atlantic City, flanked by training pals, the majestic hotels along the boardwalk providing the backdrop. In Dutch boy cap, dark cardigan, white sweatpants and boots, he ran in the summer heat on the soft sand and treated photographers to hearty smiles. He was more than man enough to add gardening to his training regimen. After weeding the vegetable patch alongside his airfield cottage, he wielded a hoe to coax corn and beans from the seashore loam. Of course, he may have been adept at tilling this small plot of earth, but his marketable skill—unequaled on the planet—was to separate men from their senses. Late May brought rain, keeping Dempsey indoors for rounds of cribbage with trainer-secretary Hayes. Nights, they hopped into the “machine” (aka a red Buick) and drove onto the mainland. The rain subsided and the champion resumed outdoor workouts. Kearns raised the admission fee in anticipation of bigger crowds over Memorial Day weekend, and 2,500 fans showed up one day. Bankers in town for a convention ventured to the airport for a look at the heavyweight king, as did society ladies on holiday. The pretty-boy Frenchman wasn’t the only fighter in the matchup, evidently, who exerted sex appeal. Dempsey shaved for the ladies, and his full-length tights in assorted colors, Robin Hoodlike, caught their eye. Requests for his presence at social and charitable functions arrived in abundance.15 So, fierce Dempsey wasn’t seen as such a savage, after all. (Or, a decade early, was he a human-sized King Kong in their midst?) In New York, Rickard regarded the seashore females as a harbinger of the fight crowd in Jersey City on July 2. That was still a month away. The afternoon of June 2 turned sunny, and Dempsey, who held no credentials as a hurler, took the mound against

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a team of stage actors in a softball game on a sandlot on the airport grounds. Halfway through the contest, Kearns arrived to see his prized investment steaming around the bases. Jack Dempsey knew one gear only. Visualizing Rickard’s million-dollar gate turning to sand, Kearns yelled, “Don’t slide, for godsake!” Dempsey didn’t, but pitched as if his arm were in a sling. The thespians, no less, drove him from the box with a nine-run first inning en route to an embarrassing 38–11 win. The next day, the New York Tribune offered the headline, “Jack Dempsey Knocked Out in One Round.”16 Against Carpentier, though, Dempsey would not be tossing lollipops. Other Atlantic City diversions worried Kearns, who instructed his fighter to avoid all dames, society or otherwise. What better companion, then, than Mayor Bader—whose name the airport would soon bear—for an evening at the Garden Pier, where Dempsey pal and celluloid heavy Luigi Montagna wrestled as “Bull Montana” against Henry Irslinger, an Austrian who had won his sport’s middleweight title four years earlier right here in Atlantic City. Montana, who had helped fill out the cast of Daredevil Jack, wrestled between film gigs, or vice versa. This was the same Bull Montana brought to tears at ringside by Jim Jeffries’s crushing loss to Jack Johnson. When he arrived at Dempsey’s camp with a taste for action and publicity stunts, Montana attempted and failed to lift former bantamweight Johnny Coulon off the canvas, adding another notch to the retired Chicago fighter’s skein of foiled strongmen. Coulon, dubbed an “occult boxer,” reportedly stayed anchored either by positioning his feet just so, or by pinching a nerve on his aggressor’s wrist as they interlocked; he performed this stunt around the world. With Coulon intractable, Montana turned his attention to the heavyweight. The two grappled and horsed around in the ring, before a bull-like rush by the shorter thicker wrestler prompted Dempsey to pop him one, drawing the line between stagecraft and serious business. Dempsey found the task of obtaining veterinary services to be a stiffer challenge—when one of his playful dogs at camp was hit by a car, the champ hustled him all the way to Camden for the right vet. As the pooch mended, Dempsey sustained a cut over his left eye in a June 5 sparring session with Larry Williams, a Connecticut light-heavyweight who had lost to Levinsky, Brennan, Miske, and other Dempsey opponents. When the cut reopened the next day, Dempsey’s sparring was discontinued for a 10-day period, during which he continued to harden his muscles and imported a comedian from Long Branch, New Jersey, to stave off tedium and keep spirits high. Contributing further to the latter, the champ’s chef challenged the challenger’s to a face-off in either the ring or the kitchen.

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Though schooled in both the French culinary and pugilistic arts, Carpentier’s man never accepted. Before Dempsey had switched his training base from Long Hill to Atlantic City, he dueled Carpentier on the links. Bob Edgren had arranged the match between Dempsey and Carpentier on a North Jersey golf course for publicity purposes. The two fighters got along famously, Dempsey impressed by the Frenchman’s manners and likeability and conscious of his small (for a heavyweight) stature. But when they hit the showers afterward, Dempsey noted the Frenchman’s muscular arms and legs and understood the source of his knockout power.17 Still, he told one writer, Carpentier “wasn’t a heavyweight any more than I was King Tut.”18 Honing his body and boxing technique in training, Carpentier was as dutiful as a businessman with a briefcase. That body, its bearing, and facial features by turns classical and boyish captivated the working press, and literary and cultural lights far removed from the ring. Oblivious of the probability that Dempsey would rearrange those appealing features, they likened Carpentier to grand figures of history and myth, flesh and marble. British bantamweight George Bernard Shaw, a heavyweight playwright, compared the Frenchman to the centuries-dead Swedish king Charles II, who shared Carpentier’s “long” face and refined features, if not his defensive prowess— Charles died at 21, a bullet hole in the right temple. Newsman Heywood Broun wrote that Carpentier possessed “one of the most beautiful bodies the prize ring has ever known.”19 Neysa McMein, a fashion magazine illustrator on assignment from the New York World, lovingly sketched the challenger and conjectured that “Michael Angelo would have fainted for joy with the beauty of his profile, which is almost pure Greek.”20 Thus furnished with awestruck admirers and conflicting nationalities, Carpentier went about the sweaty exertions of training. If he lacked the tools to unseat Dempsey, the French challenger was nonetheless a large and perfect piece of Rickard’s promotional puzzle. Years later, in his entertaining White Hopes and Other Tigers, author John Lardner—yes, son of Ring—suggested that the promoter and the breathless Carpentier chroniclers were, in an instinctive way, on the same page: The amateur critics, beginning with Shaw, were right in seeing something special in Carpentier. It may be that they vaguely sensed a development which George L. (Tex) Rickard, the boxing promoter, casting a professional eye on Carpentier, explicitly foresaw—a business revolution.21 Until Rickard’s imagination sprouted at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, his WillardDempsey match had been the only fight to tally more than $200,000 at the

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gate. Before the war, boxing—at least in America (some of the fancier European venues suitable for a garden party did have a flowering of women)— had been strictly boys’ night out. At Dempsey-Willard, Rickard had tucked into the grandstand’s far reaches a distaff contingent that was largely demure (throughout this most brutal of fights), although an adventurous member of the ranks bolted for ringside as Willard was decomposing and screamed that she wanted one of the big guy’s departed teeth. With his Jersey City promotion, Rickard sought women—well-heeled women—in abundance, and he expected gate receipts more than double that of Toledo, all the way up to and past the stratospheric million-dollar mark. While framing his event with broad themes, Rickard added smaller touches like flecks of bright paint. One such element was the supposed hypnotic eye that wily conjurer Descamps was said to cast on opponents, bending them to his will and his fighter’s fists—in the European theater, both Beckett and Bombardier Wells had attributed their early exits to the manager’s mesmerizing glimmer as much as Carpentier’s right hand. Dempsey, of course, was made of sterner stuff. When asked about the little Frenchman’s evil eye, both Kearns and Dempsey would brandish the champion’s fist, the perfect antidote for mystical maneuvering.22 Sportswriters, however, loved the diversion, and, right up to the fight, reports of Descamps’s powers persisted. The two camps were polar opposites—Dempsey’s red-blooded and wide-open, Carpentier’s fastidious and secretive. The French champion was cultivating a mysterious new punch, reported the press, now privy to at least some of his workouts. How they divined that information is unclear because Carpentier was adamant about not tipping his hand. He kept his distance and stuck to his regimen—except for one night in the company of the Prince of Wales, who had journeyed to Long Island to see his fellow European hero and hoist a few rounds. Wary that the U.S. public might associate Carpentier too much with high society, Rickard and Curley plucked him out of the land of the upper crust to visit Theodore Roosevelt’s grave (though the late Rough Rider hardly had dwelled among the proletariat), and to attend lower-case fights in Jersey City and Brooklyn.23 In Manhasset, it was hot every day during training camp. Special visitors, such as Charlie Chaplin protégé Jackie Coogan—the child star of the recently released movie The Kid—received dispensation to watch Carpentier in action, meet with him, even pose for photographs. One day Carpentier ventured away from his sanctuary to spar—for show only—with longretired Jack McAuliffe in a public session at the Jersey City ballpark where the Frenchman had disposed of Levinsky. Former lightweight champion McAuliffe had not fought since 1897, and his paunchy 55-year-old physique showed it. But if McAuliffe did not provide genuine competition for Carpentier, the challenger was sure to be an authentic test for Dempsey,

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according to some observers. Corbett, among a select group of ex-fighters, liked Carpentier’s chances. Dan McKetrick, who had promoted the 1914 match in Paris between Jack Johnson and Frank Moran, and had attached himself to Dempsey’s camp, cautioned the champion. “That Frenchman’s dangerous,” McKetrick said to both Kearns and Dempsey on one occasion. “That right of his is enough to floor anyone.”24 Carpentier had been the referee for Johnson-Moran, but McKetrick had also seen him as a combatant in European outings, not all of them impressive. Carpentier indeed had learned the art of throwing a hard sneaky right hand, a weapon to neutralize, even vanquish, much bigger men—like Dempsey, he had toppled giants. His legs, whose muscular shapeliness had caught the eye of Neysa McMein and other illustrators, provided a sturdy launching pad for punching, and he was quick out of the crouch. He toiled behind the high shrubs and barbed wire of his Manhasset training camp to perfect the punch that would undo Dempsey or at least blunt the American’s ferocious charge and turn the bout into an even exchange, a boxing match, a cerebral mix of slash, feint, and footwork. Still, the elegant European had to be tough enough, man enough, to stand up against the Manassa Mauler, for no matter how clever he proved in that ring, at some point his chin and ribs and heart surely would be tested as they never had been tested before. That’s why, when Carpentier slipped, fell awkwardly, and hit his head on the canvas during a sparring session with Paul Journee, Descamps was quick to confiscate the evidence snapped by photographers present.25 Weakness in an opponent only made Dempsey more voracious, and over-confidence was not part of his makeup. Descamps knew where his croissant was buttered. Carpentier on the deck was bad publicity. So, beside the gentle coves flaring into shimmering Long Island Sound, Carpentier remained upright for the balance of training and sharpened his weaponry in his bower among the millionaires, oblivious to the comehither gazes of visiting ringside ladies grown tipsy on the notion of savagery in Adonis form; oblivious, too, to the burden placed on him by a similarly smitten international press and beguiled literati such as playwright Shaw, who joined others with assessments in print and near-orgasmic exclamations that trumpeted the svelte Frenchman as the inevitable and most glorious slayer of brute Dempsey. Another privileged visitor at Manhasset, of course, was stylish, sexy, normally insouciant illustrator McMein, who did nothing to lower temperatures in camp and whose own passions seemed a touch inflamed. Up close with her sketchbook, she had exulted over Carpentier’s lower limbs. “His legs!” read her dispatch accompanying her illustration in the newspaper. “I figured I knew a little something about the anatomy of legs, but

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this young Frenchman has developed a hundred little muscles that there is absolutely no accounting for.”26 The limpid-eyed illustrator, whose own anatomy had much to recommend, had been born Margary Edna McMein in the heartland Republican town of Quincy, Illinois. She had transformed herself into an indispensable member of the New York in-crowd of post–World War I—indispensable, because rather than dominate by sheer force of talent and personality, she reflected the brilliance of those true stars of the set, a quality craved by the illuminati. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, she dabbled in music, drama, and writing, and parlayed her artistic inclinations and a beauty incongruous with small-town America (the word that virtually all chroniclers of the time applied to her coloration was “tawny”) into a berth in New York City as Marjorie, which had already supplanted Margary and soon became “Neysa,” after an Arabian filly she had taken a liking to during a visit to a New Jersey farm.27 A new identity was in the making. The dazzle of Broadway, the teeming possibilities of New York, captivated Neysa. She found work as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera, sold a few sketches, tasted sexual freedom, and did it all with an ease of personality that distinguished her from the customarily high-strung women of her ilk. She discovered pastels, which gave her soon-to-be trademark sketches of independent young women a distinctive coloring. Major lifestyle magazines began to routinely feature her artwork. She eyed the sophisticated circles about town and, with her soft sell, insinuated herself into the forming Round Table, a now fabled gathering of literary types and show people who met regularly at the Algonquin Hotel to imbibe and dissect society in often acerbic terms. But Neysa left the zingers to the likes of short-story writer Dorothy Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, playwright George S. Kaufman, and influential columnist Franklin Pierce Adams. The girl from Quincy was no match for their verbal dexterity—nor did she aspire to be—but she was no hayseed, and her disarming beauty and, by turns, spirited and motherly ways, made her an irresistible complement to the true shapers of the debate. She volunteered during World War I, contributing posters, sailing to the front to entertain, and creating studio space in Paris. When the Algonquin set solidified and expanded after the War, Neysa’s airy Manhattan studio served as both respite and party central, her poise and low-key presence as hostess embroidering any session. The likes of Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, and Charlie Chaplin dropped in at the 57th Street digs to share their genius. The Age of Celebrity was at hand. With Prohibition underway, Neysa kept her salon stocked with bathtub gin. She was, in 1960s parlance, a “free spirit,” a kind of Annie Hall (indeed, her attire was arty and studiously casual) who consorted with both society and the working class, and her wide circle of friends, acquaintances,

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and suitors far outstripped the denizens of the Round Table. Despite her busy social schedule, she churned out a constant supply of illustrations for newspapers and magazines, including marquee names such as the Saturday Evening Post. Her iconic “McMein Girls,” crafted in part after her own image, made her one of the highest paid illustrators in the country.28 The world grew interested in the thoughts, as well as the renderings, of this beautiful woman with a flair for figures, color, and living, so it was no surprise that, when the Pulitzers’ New York World commissioned Neysa to do sketches of the visiting champion pugilist Carpentier, the newspaper also asked for her impressions of the French hero. F. P. Adams’s careermaker column “The Conning Tower” appeared in the World, as did erudite editorials by fellow Round Table member Heywood Broun, so Neysa was in good company. That fighters Carpentier and Dempsey had captured the attention of celebrity and its emissaries underscored the powerful potential of Rickard’s promotion. Smitten with Georges’s gams—which, as already established, were wellmuscled, as was the Carpentier torso—Neysa did not consider the possibility that Dempsey’s numbered just as many muscles and larger ones at that. Her mission was no more the tale of the tape than it was Rickard’s charge to make a match whose boxing dynamics justified the hype. The Great War was history, and the United States was on the verge of forging a new personality that incorporated mythmaking and hero worship in equal measure. In the process, truth could be subverted in the interest of symbolism and storytelling dramatics. Rickard, homespun, tough, and deceptively slick from his Wild West and Klondike days, knew where the balance lay. In addition to his talents as a promoter, Rickard had the administrative skills of a top executive. He obtained an insurance policy that would pay him $100,000 if either fighter came up lame. He set ticket prices at fivedollar intervals from $5 for nosebleed territory (although the stadium was designed to be wide rather than high) to $50 for ringside. Tickets went on sale, and advance reservations were converted to purchases, on May 1. Madison Square Garden served as command central, and Rickard established ticket agencies in Philadelphia, Boston, Newark, Pittsburgh, Washington, Atlantic City, Brooklyn, Hartford, and Chicago. He counted on drawing heavily from the densely populated burgs on the Hudson, but he wanted to cover the spread by expanding the radius north, south, and west. (If fish were fight fans, he might have gone eastward, too, with underwater alerts in the Atlantic, but sonar was still a couple of decades away.) When he examined a customer’s $40 ticket and spotted a single flaw in the lettering, he promptly placed newspaper advertisements warning prospective ticket-buyers that counterfeit pasteboards were in circulation, courtesy unscrupulous operators. “Counterfeit tickets will not be honored and holders are liable to imprisonment,” the ads read.29

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Rickard notified the office of the U.S. Attorney General, and the Secret Service, but the feds showed little interest. Local law enforcement officials, however, did, arresting counterfeiters in New York, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The level of counterfeiting activity confirmed the wildfire that was Rickard’s promotion—when big money confettied the air, disreputable characters sprang from the weeds to snatch it. Rickard assured the public that it was in no danger of being defrauded as long as tickets were purchased from “responsible persons.” That was his style: responsible, reputable. A bunch of bandits had tried to pull a fast one on the old marshal and been nabbed. He had set up special ticket agencies for this fight—be smart and buy your damn tickets from them! Mayor Hague promised extra police on the lookout for bogus tickets at the gate. The fakes lacked the upraised backs of the genuine articles, produced by steel-plate engraving. Rickard requested that his printer send 20 engravers and lithographers to the arena on fight day to scrutinize disputed tickets.30 He enlisted additional help from Hague, also adept at running an organization and maintaining order, to bag counterfeiters, pickpockets, and assorted undesirables certain to infiltrate a crowd that, at the current rate of ticket sales, would top 80,000. For this purpose, Hague designated 1,100 cops and 125 detectives to be buttressed by an additional 250 plainclothesmen from other cities, so that familiar scoundrels from near and far could be quickly rounded up.31 Under the direction of contractors Cornelius S. Edwards and Joseph W. Edwards (brothers of the governor—conflict of interest, anyone?), the work at Boyle’s Thirty Acres progressed, all manpower and muscle and a cacophonous symphony of hammer and nails. Clear-eyed and neatly pressed in poplin suit and fedora, Rickard coolly told a clutch of newspapermen that the construction deadline would be met. He had built two of these things already, and, if this one was the true behemoth, he had the men and materials to match and, by the way, weren’t the contractors related to the governor? The arena would hold 90,000 human beings without danger of collapsing. And now, he said with a wink and a bound to his Midwestern tenor, he had to get back to Madison Square Garden, where, at his behest, a swimming pool was under construction for summer recreation. Behind him, stacks of yellow-pine lumber loomed like battlements and relentless hammering pierced the air. Through his press agent, Ike Dorgan, Rickard arranged for some 700 newspapermen to attend the fight—a number fit for a coronation or the signing of a peace treaty. Many times that number requested credentials. The promoter had set his quota; seating was not infinite, and he had ticketbuyers to accommodate. “If we handed out tickets to half of those who applied for them in the name of newspapers, the press gate would be the most popular entrance at

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the arena,” said Dorgan from his office next to Rickard’s in Madison Square Garden Tower.32 Dorgan set aside ringside berths for about 200 of the scribes, those who needed to telegraph their dispatches instantaneously. Seven writers were due from France, 15 from England, eight from Canada, and others from Havana, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Manila, the far reaches of the globe. The various news associations would be there to get the word out beyond the big cities; some 135 Western Union and Postal Telegraph wires would be buzzing. News photographers on hand would snap their pictures and rush their plates to photo-development plants. Radio was in its infancy, and Rickard had determined that his fight would be the first to be broadcast. To accomplish that, a wireless telephone hookup in the arena was needed to transmit the moment-to-moment drama. Initial expectations of broadcasting coast to coast were scaled back to some 70 halls in the East, though the prevailing technology could also reach amateur receivers and sailors at sea.33 Dempsey-Carpentier could not claim boxing’s maiden broadcast—that distinction belonged to the Johnny Dundee-Johnny Ray lightweight bout the previous April, broadcast from Pittsburgh’s Motor Square Garden by the steel city’s Westinghouse-owned KDKA, the first commercial station in the country. Expanding radio’s profile via Dempsey-Carpentier was the brainchild of Julius Hopp, who was in charge of concerts at Madison Square Garden when Rickard took over the building’s lease. Rickard gave the idea a thumbs-up, and Hopp searched for technical expertise. He contacted J. Andrew White, editor of Wireless Age magazine, owned by the Radio Corporation of America, a two-year-old subsidiary of General Electric. White touted the project to RCA General Manager (and future NBC founder) David Sarnoff, who offered some cash assistance and the services of several company engineers. One of these, J. Owen Smith, helped equip designated theaters and halls with receivers, and enlisted the influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, former assistant secretary of the Navy, in borrowing a naval ship transmitter for the broadcast. Broadcast revenues were earmarked for the American Committee for Devastated France (Anne Morgan’s group) and the Navy Club of New York, whose president happened to be FDR.34 Rickard’s Jersey City show was ticketed to be on-the-air, live. The promoter received additional local, logistical support from the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, which established a clearinghouse for the rental of rooms. He was delighted with the civic response to his boxing show. As he had with the Johnson-Jeffries title fight in Reno, Nevada, Rickard pitched Dempsey-Carpentier not just as a moneymaker for investors and entertainment on the grandest scale, but as a local and regional

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economic boon. Forever more, this strategy became part of the calculus in promoting big-time sporting events, movie productions, political conventions, and assorted competitions and large-scale gatherings of all manner and repute. Build it (and/or advertise the hell out of it) and they will come, and when they come, everyone will reap the benefits. Not everyone, however, was enamored with the coming spectacle. While the fighters trained and Tex promoted and Neysa McMein sketched and wireless enthusiasts connected and the octagonal pine bowl added girth, the self-appointed caretakers of respectability railed against the fight. These included vociferous members of the clergy and Congress, and lay reformers forever in search of a cause. Massachusetts Congressman James Ambrose Gallivan not only derided Dempsey, but belittled Carpentier’s war record as well—the Frenchman’s medals, evidently, did not make an impression on him. Dr. Wilbur Fisk Crafts, a minister of Puritan heritage, spent a lifetime denouncing “popular amusements” and bending Congress’s ear; his Washington, D.C.–based International Reform Bureau lobbied for an injunction against the bout. Congress ignored the plea, so the reformers took their case to the state of New Jersey. Before arguing its merits in Trenton, one of Crafts’s lieutenants addressed a Baptist congregation in Atlantic City, calling the match “a bloody, brutal prizefight” not permitted under New Jersey Law. Down beach, the heavyweight champion was bloodying his sparring partners. Despite the protestations of the IRB orator, New Jersey Law, amended as recently as the previous year, did permit “no-decision” prizefights up to 12 rounds as sanctioned by the state boxing commission. The lawmakers had an appetite for violence—only a knockout could determine a winner. Otherwise, the combatants could pound each other for the full 12 rounds and walk away with lumps and bruises but no verdict. “As soon as a championship match is scheduled, these reformers immediately try to get into the limelight,” said Rickard, confident that no injunction would be granted. “[They] want to get their names in the papers.”35 The reformers, however, had compared the language in current New Jersey law to that of California law a decade earlier, when that state’s governor saw fit to send Rickard packing within weeks of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, his stadium half-built in San Francisco. It was difficult to imagine a similar result in 1921 New Jersey, ruled as it was by Frank Hague of Jersey City. The Jersey City landscape, if not its waterways, had changed significantly in the three centuries since Henry Hudson had sailed the river that would bear his name to chart the broader region for the trade-minded Dutch East India Company. Incorporated in 1820 and expanded 50 years later, the town soon hosted a nexus of railroads, a busy flow of immigrants, and latterday merchants and manufacturers. Things ended badly for Hudson—on a

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subsequent voyage, mutineers sent him on his way with limited provisions. Frank Hague determined that no such fate awaited him; he kept his political larder well stocked. Jersey City boasted a rather rich boxing tradition dating back to an 1885 bout in which future lightweight champion Jack McAuliffe (26 years younger and in far better shape than the day he sparred Carpentier), en route to an undefeated record in more than 40 bouts, stopped his man in the second round. The following year, the original Jack Dempsey, future middleweight champ, won a fight on points at a Jersey City skating rink and, two years later, repeated that performance at another local rink. Both McAuliffe and Dempsey had been born in Ireland, hailed from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, and become good friends. Dubbed the Napoleon of the Prize Ring, McAuliffe learned much of his strategy from the Nonpareil, who joined the younger fighter’s corner in many bouts. Following the trio of appearances by these two celebrated names, Jersey City’s boxing profile quickly declined, as Newark became the state’s prizefighting center. But in 1918, a full 30 years after the Nonpareil’s second and last fight here, a resurgent Jersey City hosted 37 boxing cards at venues such as Grand View Auditorium, the minor league Jersey City Skeeters baseball park, and the armory on Montgomery Street, as promoters found more hospitable tax treatment in the Garden State vis-à-vis New York. Host of International League baseball, the Skeeters’ West Side Park (also called Jersey City Park) near the Jersey Central rail station, held 8,500—not including the ever-present mosquitoes that provided the club’s moniker. Hometown favorite Frankie Burns, a veteran bantamweight, fought twice at the ballpark in 1918. That same year, Gene Tunney, who would later figure prominently in the career of the new-generation Jack Dempsey, fought at the armory. Tunney, then a light-heavyweight, knocked out a welterweight from neighboring Bayonne. Joe Jeannette fought twice in Jersey City in 1918 and, the following year, lost an eight-round newspaper decision to Harry Wills at the armory for the “colored” heavyweight title. Also in 1919, Jack Britton, of Clinton, New York, and England’s Ted Lewis continued their epic series of duels for the welterweight crown, this one in favor of the American by newspaper decision at the armory.36 And in 1920, of course, Carpentier met Levinsky at the ballpark. Although its effect on Rickard’s Madison Square Garden operation was uncertain, the Dempsey-Carpentier fight had boosted overall boxing interest in the receptive—reformers aside—state of New Jersey. The Garden State was attracting title fights once again—charismatic lightweight champion Benny Leonard whipped tough contender Rocky Kansas over the full

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12 rounds to gain a newspaper decision on June 6 at the Federal League ballpark in Harrison, scene of Dempsey’s first-round demolition of Fred Fulton in 1918. Mayor Hague and his man in Trenton, Governor Edwards, had fostered a climate favorable to promoters and provided an alternative to New York City—come on across the river and enjoy all the advantages of the Big Town without the interference of a conservative Republican governor. If fallout from Dempsey-Carpentier meant that Madison Square Garden would be hamstrung, all the more reason for Rickard to make his mint at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. Money bought time and mobility. Ticket sales hit $600,000 in mid-June and $800,000 a week later.37 Rickard then made a move—a fast one in the eyes of Kearns, who was known for such maneuvers—that would pay him a greater share of the fight’s proceeds. When he had taken over the promotion following the departure of Englishman Cochran and American partner Brady, Rickard had substituted a percentage agreement for the original guaranteed $500,000 purse. The arrangement, agreed to by the fighters and their managers anxious to make the fight and a tidy sum of money in any event, split gross receipts evenly between the promoter and the fighters, with Dempsey getting 36 percent and Carpentier 24 percent. Rickard claimed that the change in terms was intended to blunt charges of commercialism ($500,000! screamed adversaries) that, at the time (prior to site selection), threatened to torpedo the fight. But his greater concern was staying solvent. Now, with the fight a bona fide gold rush, solvency was solved. Rickard’s sudden reversion to the $500,000 purse amounted to the exercise of an option reserved for him in the contract. When he announced the restoration of the purse in place of the percentage, the promoter acknowledged his self-interest but regarded everyone as winners. “I always wanted to guarantee a definite sum to the boxers—it has been my policy since I first began conducting boxing bouts,” Rickard told newsmen after he had broken the news to Kearns/Dempsey and Descamps/Carpentier. “With the guaranteed purse, I must pay the boxers only $500,000, an arrangement which is advantageous to me as promoter.”38 Advantageous, because the escalating gate now promised to return him a lot more money beyond his obligation of a half-million than he would realize by splitting the pot fifty-fifty. And no one had been rooked—the fighters would get the substantial amount of money (a combined $500,000) that they originally had anticipated. The amount that the “Cuban capitalists” had helped set. As always, Tex Rickard had protected his flanks while bringing everyone home safely. Of course, Kearns didn’t quite see it that way. When the fight ultimately grossed well in excess of a million dollars, and Kearns realized

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the extent of the differential between guarantee and percentage, his already considerable resentment of Rickard mushroomed.39 Feelings went both ways. While the public Rickard was sober and straightforward, in private he could let loose some vinegar. “Tell your loudmouth manager,” he said to Dempsey as the fight neared and ticket sales continued to climb, “not to underestimate me again.”40 Kearns and Rickard had taken the measure of each other, and, if they spilled some blood, they would never be called brothers. Still, this combative alliance was on the verge of producing the most significant and lucrative sporting event ever. And that’s because, all else stripped away, they each rode a fearsome steer about to become the top sports attraction in the star-spangled rodeo of the Roaring Twenties.

Chapter 18

GIRDING FOR BATTLE

The choice of the fight’s referee, or lack thereof, was proving a bit contentious. At a meeting with Rickard and the New Jersey State Boxing Commission, Kearns sought to settle the matter; he wanted Dougherty, who, in the manager’s estimation, had done all the right things as the third man in the ring in the Miske fight. When negotiations stalled, Kearns snapped that he would get his way or withdraw his fighter from the contest. Rickard warned that nothing would imperil the fight, and he had signed contracts and the fighters’ posted bonds on his side.1 At this point, he had not yet informed Kearns of the planned switch from percentage back to guarantee. Maybe they would need a ref to preside over that piece of business as well. Dempsey was concerned only with fighting—not officiating—and, in his training sessions, he provided a convincing demonstration. Bill Brennan, Dempsey’s most recent conquest and perhaps his toughest, arrived at the champion’s camp and proclaimed that “Dempsey will knock Carpentier out before the fourth round.”2 Dempsey sparred with black fighters “Battling” Gahee, a light-heavyweight from Memphis, and Babe Herman, a featherweight from Salt Lake City, geography with which the champion was quite familiar. (Black fighters were A-OK in Dempsey-land for sparring sessions, whose only purse was the one filled with Kearns’s admission fees.) Gahee, who had waited for eight days to get into the ring with Dempsey, was rewarded with two loose teeth and three trips to the canvas in two rounds.3 Earlier during camp, Dempsey had acknowledged the punishment he dealt sparring partners, and requested that his manager increase their pay. Now,

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with the fight only 11 days away, he upped the ante in the ring, thrashing the unfortunates “as if he were paying off old grudges,” wrote visiting journalist Heywood Broun. With the diminutive Herman, the test was speed, but the larger fellows were mere stand-ins for the heavy bag. Avenging the sliced brow that had sidelined him, Dempsey knocked down Larry Williams with a left to the stomach and a right to the jaw in the first round of their session, then knocked him out with another right in the second. Fortunately for the employee, they were wearing 14-ounce gloves. The next day, a different species of opponent visited, willing to back her gloves-off style with hard cash. Claiming to be a medium, a fashionably dressed Frenchwoman sashayed into camp and audaciously informed observers that her countryman would knock out the champion in the first round, and she would be betting a cool $300 on that outcome. Whether or not he learned of her prognostication, Dempsey looked mean and lean and unruffled. On June 24, he turned 26 and exchanged wires with Mama Dempsey, who liked her son’s chances regardless of the mademoiselle’s crystal gazing. A large Sunday crowd turned out to see the champ two days later. The fight had become the top story in the world. The London newspapers had pressed war correspondents into duty to help their brethren on the sports desk detail the training days of the two fighters.4 Newspapers in Paris, by some estimates, were expending more ink on the fight’s prologue than they had in reporting the crucial entrance of the United States into World War I, as they cut the usual tight purse strings on cable dispatches from America.5 Whereas the City of Light favored Carpentier unanimously, and Londoners loved Carpentier but understood the capability of Dempsey, the vanquished European power of Germany was rabidly pro-Dempsey. Carpentier, after all, was a Frenchman, a natural antagonist for Teutonic fight fans, who had proliferated following the demise of the anti-boxing Kaiser. During the War, German prisoners in U.S. and British camps had learned about the fine art of pugilism and taken a liking to the sport. Now, the Republic’s newspapers brimmed with boxing reportage; there was even a boxing trade journal called Boxsport. Dempsey-Carpentier was news to shake a continent, and Berlin awaited fresh reports.6 A special band of French and British journalists and men of letters visited Dempsey’s Atlantic City training camp on June 237 to record their observations and launch them across oceans. Dempsey, in his rough but polite way, had learned to inject a hint of charm into his civility. He was no charmer in the ring, however, and less exalted writers got the message. “Dempsey is a far better fighter than he was at Toledo,” wrote presscredentialed Battling Nelson, using the delusional byline “Greatest of all Champions” for his Atlantic City Press column.8

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Meanwhile, Kearns had headed north early to meet with Rickard regarding the International Reform Bureau’s bid to stop the fight. However, the bureau had not filed for a state injunction as it had promised to do, and though it still vowed to go all the way to the state Supreme Court if necessary, by now it had gauged the prevailing winds. The governor and various state officials continued to emphasize that that the Dempsey-Carpentier fight was on the right side of the law—this was not Johnson-Jeffries and the muddled legal climate of California 11 years earlier, even though some contradictory language could be found in existing statutes. The current state boxing legislation (known as the Hurley Law after the sponsoring assemblyman) had been passed in 1918, but an older law per the New Jersey Crimes Act was still in-force and included a prohibition of prizefighting. A Jersey City Presbyterian minister had seized on that distinction and called on the Hudson County prosecutor to stop the fight. Legal opinions offered throughout the state agreed that Hurley superseded Crimes. The county prosecutor declined to take action. The reformers had hung their campaign on a thin reed. And they were running out of time. “I am too old a bird at this game to be caught in such a jam, with all the money I have at stake,” said Rickard, back in his Madison Square office after conferring with a corporate lawyer he had retained in Jersey City. “I saw to it that no technicality will be allowed to interfere with this contest.”9 He told Kearns as much. They had finally agreed on a city marshal named Harry Ertle as referee, as if to ensure that the letter of the law would follow the fighters into the ring. Reformers and religious leaders huddled and formalized their complaint of conspiracy to violate the Crimes Act, obligating the county prosecutor to convene a grand jury; he was in no hurry but complied. Word was that some members of the grand jury had purchased tickets to the fight. Dr. Crafts, pooh-bah of the Reform Bureau, had conceded any hopes of blocking the fight, but planned to resume the campaign afterward. “If we can punish these fellows after the fight for any violation of the law, this will be the last fight in this country,” said Crafts, who also intended to press charges if any films of the fight were shipped to other states, which would be a violation of federal law.10 Let not New Jersey’s folly be visited upon other commonwealths. Kearns had other thrusts to parry. His premature departure from Dempsey’s training camp had been interpreted by some as a sign of a rift between manager and fighter. Another theory suggested that Kearns sought legal help to protect their end of the fight purse from a lawsuit per an old motion-picture contract. Things were never dull on the Kearns-Dempsey circuit. The manager dismissed any notion of friction between himself and Dempsey. “I don’t believe there ever were a boxer and manager who got

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along together as do Jack and I,” Kearns told reporters,11 an undeniably true statement—their relationship was unique, if rarely peachy. After meeting with Rickard at the Garden, the mobile manager was on his way back to Atlantic City, so reports of the Kearns-Dempsey demise had been greatly exaggerated. He speculated that reporters who had seen him toting a good deal of luggage on the way up must have concluded he had pulled out for good. “It was the champion’s stuff . . . filled with apparel he will not need until after the bout,” Kearns said. He also scoffed at a report that, in his absence, Dempsey had disobeyed training instructions. “Trainer Teddy Hayes arranged a private workout for the champ behind barred gates,” Kearns snapped.12 One from the Carpentier playbook. Kearns reminded newsmen that he and Dempsey had a 10-year contract, 3 years in, but that no contract was necessary between the two; their word was their bond. On June 29, Dempsey did his last bit of boxing before the fight. His weight had settled at 192 pounds. He was brown from the sun and as hard as a post on the Garden Pier. And a touch irritable. He was tired of training and itchy to finish the job. The next day was Dempsey’s last in Atlantic City, and his spirits had improved. Accompanied by bodyguard Mike Trant, a detective from Chicago, he walked about the airport grounds early in the morning, exercise intended to be his most strenuous prior to entering the ring against Carpentier two days later. Shortly after noon, a rainstorm blew in from the ocean and hung around in varying intensity for the rest of the day. Dempsey waited out the intermittent rain with trainer Hayes and sparring pal Benjamin on the cottage veranda. Someone produced ragtime sheet music. Dempsey sang, much like he spoke, in a squeaky tenor. A hundred fight-goers just in from Chicago dropped by unannounced and gained admittance on the say-so of bodyguard Trant, sympathetic to his hometown visitors, whose ranks included a judge, an aldermen, and several boxing promoters. Dempsey shook hands with all of the Windy City fans, who assured him that he would take care of business speedily in Jersey City. Older brother Bernard Dempsey, whose fighting name “Jack” the future heavyweight champ borrowed the night he substituted for him, squired the three Belgian Shepherd Dogs out of camp and up north. Jack Dempsey’s preparation was over. As always during training, he went to bed early.13 Next stop: Jersey City. Sparring with Joe Jeannette at his Manhasset training camp, Carpentier knocked out the veteran black fighter who had fought him on even terms in Paris, and who had toiled long and hard (and successfully) in

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the shadows of segregated heavyweight boxing. Some writers claimed the knockout was a fake to boost Carpentier’s standing as a puncher; others extolled the power in the French champion’s right hand. Meanwhile, sparring partner Journee met a comer named Charley Weinert at Ebbets Field and kissed the canvas 10 times before succumbing in the fifth round. That was no fake but an embarrassment for the French contingent. Weinert, dubbed the Newark Adonis, had decisioned Battling Levinsky in 15 rounds in March; Journee’s plight had more to do with his lack of skill than the winner’s punching power. For speed work, Carpentier chased down rabbits set loose in the Manhasset grasslands.14 (Five-and-a-half decades later, Rocky Balboa of movie fame would employ yard chickens for this purpose. Which of the creatures provided the better test has not been established.) One day Carpentier took a break from training and journeyed to Jersey City, where he and Rickard, each in a pinstriped suit, stood in the bleachers and surveyed the new arena. His tie studded to his shirt collar, the Frenchman held a silk hat by his side. Tex pointed his trademark cane toward the vast reaches of the pine stadium and signaled just where the ring would be situated. They looked like a couple of swells out for a Sunday constitutional. A female reporter from the New York Tribune joined Neysa McMein and two other women, including one with the novelistic handle “Hope Hampton” (and very possibly from the Hamptons), at Carpentier’s bucolic camp. HH remarked on the French boxer’s “gentle disposition” and “wonderful eyes,” and promised to bet three bottles of perfume and twice as many pairs of stockings on his success in the title fight. Carpentier didn’t say much more than “Oui.”15 Hope’s hopeful wager notwithstanding, the betting action on DempseyCarpentier had been less than slack—“as much as might be expected at the women’s auxiliary of master knitters,” wrote a New York Times reporter.16 Up and down Broadway, and along the other byways of New York, the big fight seemed to be foremost on everyone’s mind, but few were willing to back their beliefs with cash (at least not at three-to-one, the betting line favoring the champion). What money that did emerge was Dempsey money. Members of the gambling community scratched their heads at the lethargy. How could the biggest event in the history of sports produce such an anemic handle? Then, two days before the fight, a sizable amount of Carpentier money surfaced, lowering the odds on the champion to two-and-a-half to one. Rather than simply pick the challenger, many would-be bettors wanted their money riding on his remaining upright by a given round. To their surprise, most of these folks could not get their bets down, as Dempsey money dried up, perhaps as a tactic to prevent the odds from dropping

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further. This analysis came courtesy of the stakeholders—on Wall Street and Broadway, but also in Brooklyn and Harlem—who served as repositories for the funds at risk. Most of the new Carpentier money had originated outside of New York City, but little if any had crossed the ocean; Europeans, apparently, believed in their standard-bearer but held fast to their wallets. From the financial district, brokerage houses freely disclosed the nature and amount of monies deposited for betting purposes. In the first decade of the next century and millennium, as baffling loans and investments undid international financial systems, the sports book would be long gone from Wall Street, but the dynamic remained the same.17 The occasion’s two chief mercenaries, Dempsey and Carpentier, sought diversion as they approached their moment of reckoning. In Manhasset, on the day before the fight, a morning rain soaked Carpentier and Journee as they ran across roads and hiked through woods near the Matthews spread. Back in the shelter of the property’s weather-tested Colonial, Carpentier received a rubdown and settled into a cozy armature of blankets. After lunch, he did some light calisthenics in the barn gymnasium, and that concluded his training. Preparation had reached its finis; battle awaited. The challenger lounged, chatted, and played poker on the front porch with Journee, trainer Gus Wilson, and trusted adviser and World War I veteran Captain Thierry Mallet. Word came that a few persistent youths at the front gate were hopeful of seeing the man who dared challenge Dempsey, and Carpentier interrupted his card playing to engage the boys in a round of ball playing. One of them, a frequent visitor given leeway by camp security, said to his host, “You’re about the nicest fellow I ever met, but Dempsey’s going to beat you tomorrow.” Carpentier laughed, patted the boy’s back, and said, “You’re what I call a real good American.”18 At 9 p.m., Georges Carpentier bid everyone good night, then whistled tunefully as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He did not seem at all like one about to lock in gladiatorial combat with the most fearsome man on the planet. Or maybe the tune he was whistling—that of an obscure World War I song—more closely reflected his state of mind. He was going to war. The customarily frenetic Descamps, his thick hair freshly trimmed after a visit to Manhasset’s sole tonsorial parlor, seemed unperturbed by the looming conflict. Wilson offered a clear-eyed and, as it turned out, largely accurate, assessment of the imminent fight. “Many people think that this will be a dancing exhibition and that Georges will wait out Dempsey and keep away from him for the entire 12 rounds,” said the masseur-cum-trainer. “I am not saying that Carpentier

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will dive in foolishly and slug from the moment the first bell rings, but I do mean that he will fight Dempsey and fight him viciously.”19 Accompanied by Kearns, trainer Hayes, bodyguard Trant, and Atlantic City Mayor Bader, who had become a friend of the champion and was already pitching his seashore town for the next title defense, Dempsey arrived in Jersey City late in the afternoon of the day before the fight, aboard a chartered Pullman coach attached to a Reading Railroad train. Hague and a few of his men met them at the station, and both parties disappeared into limousines.20 Banker William Christian Heppenheimer, a Hague advisor and former speaker of the state assembly, had volunteered his Jersey City home—within walking distance of Rickard’s stadium—as accommodations for the champion, including a meal of broiled steak and green beans. That evening, from the balcony of the three-story stone mansion, Dempsey took a few moments to wave at fans shouting for him from below. They somehow had found the champion, even though Kearns had withheld the location from the press, feeling that publicity had accomplished its mission by now. As police scattered the street-level enthusiasts, Dempsey briefly visited the billiard room, where the balls were almost as hard as his head in the old days after a soaking in brine. On many other streets and alleyways in Jersey City, youths faced off and played out their versions of Dempsey versus Carpentier up to midnight, ignoring the summonses of their mothers, and taking pains most of the time to fall short or wide with their punches.21 A short jog from the huge wooden stadium slumbering in darkness, Dempsey retired at the same time as his opponent, across water and miles to the east.

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Chapter 19

BATTLE DU JOUR

The day came up muggy and overcast in Jersey City, July 2, 1921, a Saturday, “the greatest single day in the ancient history of an ancient sport,” wrote Grantland Rice.1 At the bottom of the gargantuan, eight-sided bowl at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, the ring had been assembled and covered with tarp, and moving picture booths had been mounted to tower over the action. From May 11—the day the first nail was hammered—until the eve of the fight, there had been a daily average of 350 workmen on the job. The only glitch had been a very brief carpenters’ strike triggered nine days earlier by Rickard’s importing six non-union men from Madison Square Garden to mark seat numbers. Rickard, the master conciliator, quickly assuaged the union and work proceeded. Finally, there it was: Rickard’s big top, with a canopy not of canvas but of sky, situated just below the Lehigh Valley Railroad tracks, the Hudson River streaming beyond the Jersey City Stock Yards and, across the water, the steel-and-concrete forest of lower Manhattan. Rickard had built the last and largest of his great pine stadiums, a $250,000, 91,613-seat octagonal colossus on nearly 7 of the boxboard manufacturer’s 34 acres at Cornelison Avenue, a block south of Montgomery Street, which sprinted eastward past the public library, Frank Hague’s City Hall, and the Chamber of Commerce to the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal at Exchange Place near the banks of the Hudson. The structure had displaced 60,000 cubic yards of earth, and consumed two-and-a-quarter million board feet of lumber (125 carloads), 60 tons of nails, and, indirectly, uncounted reams of newspaper print. The arena’s backless bleachers within its 2,016-foot circumference overwhelmed

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the eye, and its 600-foot diameter was more than sufficient for two home runs, end to end, down either foul line at the Polo Grounds. Press coverage, to the tune of hundreds of newspapers (from around the country, Canada, Europe, South America, Australia, and Japan) exceeded that accorded coronations, natural disasters, and world wars. The Western Union Telegraph Company, which maintained offices on Montgomery Street, had installed 25 wires at ringside and, joined by Postal Telegraph Company, added another four dozen under the grandstand. Western Union also provided direct cable transmission to Paris and London. The Hudson & Manhattan and Jersey Central railroads both had scheduled special train service to the fight. The Pennsy, Lackawanna, Baltimore & Ohio, Lehigh Valley, and Erie railroads also brought people into town from points north, south, and west. They streamed into Jersey City by train, tube, trolley, jitney, ferryboat, and automobile. Locals arrived on foot. As early as 9 a.m. (with the big fight scheduled for three o’clock, preceded by preliminary bouts starting around noon), 5,000 people stood in line and waited for the gates to open.2 In addition to the masses, Rickard expected celebrities in profusion. Among those reported en route to the great wooden bowl this day, Hollywood’s Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, was due with her retinue by private yacht via the Panama Canal and anchorage in New York Bay; a nest of seats worth $3,500 awaited the Pickford party. As ticket sales had mounted and pledges poured in from the upper echelons of society, business, government, and sports, Rickard, leaving grammar to the less imaginative, kept repeating to anyone within earshot, “I never seed [sic] anything like it.” For months he had willed this event into being. He had dreamed about it as he smoked his cigars while sitting in his office high atop Madison Square Garden, where he’d spent $300,000 in a foolhardy bid to make the indoor arena a summertime swimming mecca. Now the papers were calling him the Modern Barnum and, indeed, Rickard had enlisted the financial support of none other than John Ringling at two crucial points in his odyssey, and he had invested Dempsey-Carpentier with a circus-like atmosphere that outdid the biggest Barnum & Bailey-Ringling Brothers show. Hague supplemented his army of police at the site with several hundred firemen, medical personnel at dressing stations, and a handful of ambulances. Hundreds more policemen and detectives arrived from New York City, as did squads or lone operators from other towns, on the lookout for homegrown troublemakers. Law enforcement set up rope barriers a full three blocks from the arena to nab anyone without a ticket from getting closer. The stadium at Boyle’s Thirty Acres (called “Montgomery Park Arena” on a Chamber of Commerce map) was all but sold out except for

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general admission tickets available at special booths outside the cordon, and anyone without a ticket could not go forward and further clog the area. Those who did had their tickets scrutinized at the gate and, reportedly, only a half-dozen bogus ticket-holders made it to the Promised Land. The promoter had offered to contribute $25,000 toward the prosecution of phony distributors, redoubling the alertness of law enforcement. On the softer side, Rickard was intent on providing all of his legitimate customers—not just the VIPs—a civilized experience. He wanted none of the uproar and rudeness associated with the Willard fight and other boxing promotions (not his) lambasted by the newspapers. He put hundreds of ushers to work, and made sure they were freshly attired in red caps and knew the meaning of the word polite. In all, he hired more than 1,100 service workers for the event.3 With heat the order of the day, Rickard installed concessionaire Harry Stevens, accustomed to large sports venues such as Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, to slake thirsts with “soft” beer (not in violation of the Volstead Act), sarsaparilla, ginger ale, and mineral water. Stevens and his orderly army of 500 food preparers and servers would also fill stomachs with 100,000 ham, chicken, tongue, and cheese sandwiches, but no hotdogs—the Jersey City Board of Fire Commissioners had banned the sizzling wieners as a fire hazard, though paradoxically permitting smokes. Accordingly, Stevens planned to have plenty of cigars and cigarettes on hand, as well as 30,000 bricks of ice cream, 50,000 bags of peanuts, and 40 tons of ice. Posters throughout the stadium displayed the food and drink prices, as did cards carried by the white-coated waiters. “I will serve more people than any one man ever attempted to serve in a single day,” Stevens boasted.4 When it came to record setting, everybody wanted to be part of the act. Stevens faced mild competition en route to the stadium. Enterprising sidewalk chefs set up tables stocked with sausage sandwiches, veal parmigianna, a rudimentary form of pizza, and other dishes unsuited to a hot day but irresistible to excitable appetites. Elsewhere along the access streets, cars pulled into parking spaces where permitted. Eager kids promised to watch the vehicles for a fee of 25 cents.5 Rickard arranged for 18 entrances to the stadium to promote a smooth flow of human traffic.6 He had paid attention to detail. He had beaten back the reformers but still chose his official words carefully to conform to the law—the Chamber of Commerce’s printed material referred to a “heavyweight pugilistic contest,” and a seating layout of the stadium from ringside ($50) through general admission ($5.50, up from the original $5) specified a “12 Round Boxing Exhibition.” The promoter avoided the use of the word “prizefight.”

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Though not silver-tongued, Rickard could count as well as anyone extant, and he had known for two days that, short of an earthquake, his gate would be well in excess of the million-dollar mark. Now if only the rain held off, and both the stadium and Carpentier (the latter at least for a little while) remained upright. More than 100 U.S. congressmen, including a dozen senators, had tickets to the fight and left work early.7 At Boyle’s Thirty Acres, both hospitality and a sturdy oversight held sway. The Jersey City police and fire presence inside and outside the arena had swelled to a combined 1,400 men—Hague’s prestige was at stake, as well as Rickard’s. A fleet of cops diverted customary vehicular traffic from the arena zone.8 By late morning, the famous, the infamous, and the illustrious began to arrive via limousine, yacht, private railway car, even chartered tugboat. A day earlier, three ships from the White Star and Cunarder lines had docked in New York and disgorged more than 5,000 passengers, many of them European sportsmen with paid reservations for the fight.9 Hague arrived wearing a spruce straw hat and a blue poplin suit with a red carnation tucked into the lapel. He surveyed the huge crowd and somehow spotted a less fashionable policeman, who had apparently been patronizing a bad barber and an equally bad dentist. “Put that hayseed under the stands somewhere,” the mayor ordered.10 Above the stands, it was drizzling. Tex Rickard, clear-eyed and tightlipped in suit and fedora, surveyed the spitting skies. He had insured himself in the amount of $100,000 against a disruption of the big battle by weather and various catastrophes. Already worried that the vast wooden stadium would sway drunkenly when filled (sway being a possible precursor to collapse), he had scheduled—for the first time, it is believed, in the annals of the prize ring—one bout after the main event, anticipating that at least some fans would opt to remain in their seats and receive their total money’s worth, reducing the exit stampede. Now he worried that rain would ruin the title fight. The bigger the promotion, the greater the potential disaster; uneasy lay the head that bore the crowns . . . and guineas. Impervious to weather but not aching feet, the working press arrived and staked out folding chairs at or near ringside. Rice, Runyon, Lardner, Broun, and Bob Edgren were all there, as well as the other leading lights in sportswriting among the 700-plus newspaper journalists from around the world. On loan from the Saturday Evening Post, rotund bushy-browed author Irvin S. Cobb settled in on behalf of the New York Times. At quarter past noon, western film star Tom Mix arrived and caused a stir among onlookers, his multi-gallon cowboy hat bobbing above the tide of seat-seeking fight fans. Those of renown and celebrity pressed close

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to the ring, while behind and above them in the great wooden structure massed the commoners and business classes, many of whose members, Kentucky-bred Cobb inferred, brought with them a “vicarious lusting for blood and brute violence.”11 Men’s straw hats were in profusion, and peonies sprang from more than a few female headdresses. At ringside, urban realist painter George Bellows, commissioned by the New York World to capture the event on canvas, sketched away, anticipating by five decades the flamboyant LeRoy Neiman at Ali-Frazier I in Madison Square Garden. Neysa McMein also sat ready with her sketchpad, her heart in her throat and her Algonquin cronies at her side. Cameramen crammed the 30-foot tower that overlooked the ring, ready to crank out film footage to further enrich the fighters and the promoter. The crowd built to a threshold, massing round the lit square at bottom-center, and from the farthest reaches of the stadium, it all looked like an ant colony inspecting a particle of food, that patch of white in a sea of top hats and drab clothing. At the very top, flags hung limply in the humid air, and beyond, the smokestacks and church spires of Jersey City peeked through the haze. In a ringside enclosure, wireless equipment—a mélange of dials and speakers—had been set up to relay reports of the fight via radiophone to an offsite transmitter, and then through loudspeakers at the various theaters and other sites designated by the American Committee for Devastated France. The Navy transmitter had been procured by Franklin D. Roosevelt and shipped from General Electric’s Schenectady plant to the Lackawanna Railroad terminal in Hoboken, two-and-a-half miles from Boyle’s Thirty Acres. American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) then ran a telephone line from ringside to the transmitter. The concept of mass communications had dipped its toe into the post-World War I culture. With J. Andrew White, the RCA official and radio buff who got the broadcast ball rolling, at the mike (which looked like a vintage telephone) as early as 11:30 a.m., the card’s opening bout—an intrastate bantamweight matchup between Jersey City’s Johnny Curtin and Newark’s Mickey Delmont—took wing at 12:15 p.m. per authorized call sign WJY, the signal heard within a radius of approximately 250 miles. The number of listeners who ultimately received the signal was tiny compared to the vast radio audience on the horizon, but the fight broadcast was a baby step forward for a fledgling industry.12 Among the legions of hoarse-voiced sportswriters engulfing the broadcast enclosure was the New York Evening Journal’s James J. Corbett, the exchamp who had dethroned the mythical John L. Sullivan a quarter-century earlier. Telegraph instruments clacked at ringside, some of them linked to the wires of the Committee for Devastated France to transmit news of the fight to Europe. Ring announcer Joe Humphreys, the dean of the breed, had developed his pipes as an 11-year-old newsboy on the streets of New

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York and as a teenage singer in nightclubs. He was almost 50 now, but his stentorian voice was in its prime. He introduced Curtin and Delmont, and history unfolded. The stadium was filling and the elite continued to arrive, the names plucked from the society pages and the wealthiest families in the United States: Astor, Baruch, Gould, Harriman, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Whitney. A dozen Biddles came up from Philadelphia. Kermit Roosevelt, his brother Theodore Jr., and sister Alice Roosevelt Longworth were in attendance; the old man, dead more than two-and-a-half years, surely would have been. Henry Ford was there. A flock of ambassadors, foreign ministers, visiting royalty, and assorted dignitaries of no special talent or achievement were up from Washington. Dempsey buddy Al Jolson curtailed his show to root in person for the champ. Broadway giants George M. Cohan and David Belasco grabbed choice seats. The fight audience included silent screen stars, although Mary Pickford, apparently, was a no-show. New York Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, who brewed the beer served this day by concessionaire Stevens (and appreciated any day by the colonel’s new baseball acquisition, Babe Ruth), was at the stadium, dreaming of a comparably sized, but sturdier, proprietary home for his ballclub. (Yankee Stadium in the Bronx would follow within two years.) Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, coming into his own as Hague’s counterpart in Atlantic City thanks to Prohibition, was the Jersey City boss’s guest at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. Though the two belonged to opposing political parties, money and control were common denominators. Wrote Irvin Cobb: “A calling over of the names of the occupants of the more highly priced reservations would sound like reading the first hundred pages of Who’s Ballyhoo in America.”13 Ballyhoo. The word had been coined exactly two decades earlier, just in time for the 20th century. “Flamboyant, exaggerated, or sensational promotion or publicity,” says Webster’s. That was Dempsey-Carpentier, all right. Produced by taciturn Tex Rickard. Late in the morning of July 2, good-time guy George Bourne and his automobile arrived in Manhasset to take Carpentier and company to Port Washington, where Bourne’s 65-foot steam yacht Lone Star waited to ferry the party to the Jersey City shore. (Bourne’s late father, the ex-Singer prexy, had been a yachtsman and owner of a 3,000-acre Long Island estate in Vanderbilt country.) Carpentier, whose system had adapted to trans-Atlantic voyages after initial bouts with seasickness, had no qualms about the short trip to Jersey City from Long Island. During the 45-minute crossing, he clung to his nonchalance, stretching on deck and trailing his hand in the

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water.14 Ashore, the far-from-condemned man’s last meal before the fight consisted of a small steak, string beans, toast, and weak tea. As fight time approached, he motored to the stadium at Boyle’s Thirty Acres, the short drive escorted by six white-gloved policemen on motorcycles. Dempsey received a more uproarious escort. At the Heppenheimer mansion, all was quiet until one o’clock, when a detail of state fire and police chiefs arrived, sirens blaring. They were to take the champion just down the road to the jam-packed arena, which, filling with fans, had a little sway to it at this still early hour. An anxious Rickard was poised to start the main event at any instant.15 It began to drizzle in the sixth round of the second preliminary bout, which pitted local favorite Frankie Burns against New York featherweight Packey O’Gatty, sending Rickard—already paranoid about fire (the wooden structure had been hosed down daily and outfitted with 17 fire plugs connected with a high-pressure water main), structural collapse, and spectators muscling in on better seats—into a fit of concern that his main event would be compromised by a slippery ring canvas. (He had set a rain date of July 4, but it was too late for that now.) Making use of the latest technology, he asked radio broadcaster White to announce on the air that Dempsey and Carpentier would fight even if it rained. No downpour materialized, however. The drizzle died and the massive crowd was left to stew in the humidity without an additional assist from above. Relieved, the promoter took a moment to gaze panoramically about the jam-packed stadium, taking in what he had wrought, the scene he had conceived, courted, and dreamed of. Imperceptibly, he shuddered. He went below to the champion’s dressing area and urged him not to hammer Carpentier into the Hudson, at least not too soon. “The best people in the world are here today, and this is just the beginning,” Rickard said to Dempsey. “Don’t knock down the show. . . .16 Don’t kill him, Jack.”17 While Rickard obsessed, Hague acted as both enforcer and majordomo. He chased encroaching fans and photographers to keep the aisles clear. He ordered the removal of a high canvas screen intended to prevent unlawful filming of the fight from the roof of the nearby city hospital, and stationed a policeman there—now patients could see over the top row of seats and into the stadium. When a certain spectator found his view blocked and asked for a better seat, Hague brought him directly to Rickard, who, as soon as he learned the man’s identity, complied with alacrity. The transplanted fan was John D. Rockefeller Jr.18 Now there was a man with a bankroll, Rickard must have been thinking.

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At least one individual in attendance didn’t appreciate the largesse that Rickard had showered on Jersey City. A local promoter named Jack Jennings, who staged boxing shows at the armory on Oakland Avenue, grumbled about the carpetbagger who had stolen his thunder.19 But Rickard had not only laid carpet; he had built the whole house, furnished it, and supplied the parlor show. At least 2,000—perhaps as many as 5,000—women would settle into their seats at Rickard Stadium, Tex’s cultivated subset of the community of boxing fans expanded by Dempsey-Carpentier. As if in tribute, the referees of the preliminary bouts wore silk shirts and white trousers. When fighters trudged to their corners at the bell ending a round, a little fat boy held up a placard whose printed numeral indicated the next stanza—no Vegasstyle showgirls promenading about the ring at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. (What a field day the reformers would have had with that spectacle.) The fighters waited in roofless, partitioned spaces that served as their dressing rooms just below the stands. Dempsey sparring partner Babe Herman was fighting in the third prelim, when Governor Edward’s arrival triggered a roaring salute. During the next fight, the sun served notice, as if warming up for the main event. Outside the arena, Carpentier’s car had pulled to a stop. When the Frenchman exited, the fans in the top tier of seats turned away from the ring action to give him a rousing greeting. Carpentier, in gray suit and cap, clasped his hands overhead. Despite the gesture, observers later said, he appeared nervous.20 The fifth of six preliminary fights featured an ex-Marine named Gene Tunney, who had won 30 fights without a loss, against a crude fighter whose ring moniker was Soldier Jones. Fighting as a light-heavyweight, Tunney stopped his man in the seventh, but showed little of the boxing brilliance that he would demonstrate twice against Jack Dempsey in the years to come. The final bout scheduled on the undercard pitted Billy Miske, on the rebound since his loss to Dempsey, against Jack Renault, one of the champ’s sparring partners in Atlantic City. The two fighters were at ringside, warmed up and ready to go, but Rickard had other ideas. Minutes before three o’clock, a brass band played “La Marseillaise” as Carpentier and his people found the narrow walkway to ringside. The French champion approached and entered the 18-foot-square ring to an ovation that overwhelmed the music. Some spectators in the uppermost seats felt a sway to the great structure. When the roar finally diminished, Carpentier called out to friends at ringside, smiling, light on his feet. Four minutes later, an unshaven Dempsey, accompanied by a phalanx of police, strode toward the ring and climbed into it, the crowd responding

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with applause and shouts, but its enthusiasm no match for that accorded the challenger. The combatants shook hands, Carpentier draped in a gray kimono, Dempsey in an unbuttoned red cardigan that revealed a slice of granite torso. Dempsey’s crop of hair sat atop his head as if it had been planted there; Carpentier’s was neatly combed and fit for a barbershop advertisement. A huge floral horseshoe had been brought into the ring, and Dempsey sat within its arc, scowling at photographers before staring at his fists. His brother Bernie joined Kearns and Hayes in his corner. Carpentier seemed composed, grinning broadly as he sat in his corner while Wilson strapped on his gloves, as Descamps, Journee, and French bantamweight champ Charles Ledoux looked on. An instant later, however, the smile vanished, replaced by a mouth tight with anxiety—in truth, Carpentier was understandably nervous. To chase the jitters, he tried to focus on an airplane puttering in the milky sky above the yawning expanse of stadium. When Hayes began to tape Dempsey’s hands, Descamps came across the ring to inspect and made a great show of insisting that soft gauze bandages required by the state boxing commission be substituted for the brand circling the champion’s fists. Willard’s people had started a rumor that Dempsey’s tape in that fight had given him an edge. Descamps had his way; the Dempsey corner went for the soft stuff.21 Speaking through a voice amplifier synched to large speakers throughout the massive arena, ring announcer Humphreys introduced the makers of the feast: Hague, Edwards, and, of course, Rickard, outfitted in blue serge, his cigar protruding from an amber holder. “The world’s premier promoter,” Humphreys called him. When the announcer proceeded to the fighters, the throng again voiced its allegiance to Carpentier. Of Dempsey, Humphreys told the crowd, “Every red-blooded American pins his hopes [on him] this day.” Well, not quite. Carpentier, the announcer informed everyone, was “the heavyweight champion of the Old World, the idol of his people, and a soldier of France.”22 The war hero and cosmopolitan darling was the sentimental favorite. Bow-tied referee Ertle hovered out of punching range. The house appeared full and then some, including the $50 ringside section filled with folding chairs. Rickard sat next to partner John Ringling in a ringside box. The promotion, by all measures so far, had worked—in spades, faro and poker dealer Rickard might have added. Now, the fight itself would justify or mock this unprecedented enterprise. Cameramen perched on the tower looming above the ring, ready to capture the action with their cumbersome equipment. When Ertle summoned the fighters, they rose from their swivel seats attached to the post by steel rods, a recent innovation in the prize ring. At ring center, the size

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differential between the two fighters became more apparent as they stood close to each other. Dempsey’s weight had been announced as 188 and Carpentier’s as 175, but the champion was at 190 according to his trainer, and the Frenchman was probably closer to 170. Dempsey was a couple of layers thicker. At six-foot-one, he was an inch-and-a-half taller, and several feet scarier. Still, the odds on the champion had shrunk to two-to-one, as a nice chunk of the belated Carpentier money had finally found takers. As with Carpentier-Levinsky, Dempsey-Carpentier was officially a “no-decision” fight (per New Jersey law), meaning that the title would not change hands unless the champion were knocked out or disqualified by a foul. The papers had been running articles that said Carpentier had patterned his punches after fencing thrusts. Against Dempsey, the Frenchman would have no épée—only fists encased in eight-ounce gloves. Still, of a particular “stroke,” a fencing master remarked, “There is no possible guard for the manner Carpentier employs it in boxing.”23 Thousands packed Times Square to get bulletins transmitted from ringside to a man with a telephone receiver, and then posted on the north end of the Times Building by other men moving along a wooden platform. The crowd—much larger than those that typically crammed this site for updates on World Series games—pressed forward in the heat, shoulder to shoulder. The police had rerouted vehicular traffic. Judging by the level of cheers triggered by any reported headway made by Carpentier (“Carpentier landed a right”), the crowd favored the Frenchman.24 In the early going and through the first three rounds, they had reason for optimism. Across the river in Jersey City, in a sprawling stadium of his invention, Rickard had made sure that the bell sounded cleanly—no audio fiasco, as in the Willard fight—and it did just that when timekeeper Joe Bannon rapped it at 3:16 p.m. to start the fight. Though the humidity clung, the sun was again imprisoned behind cloud cover, and a light breeze stirred the haze of tobacco smoke that hung over the ring and the sea of chairs and benches, soaked earlier once more this day to ward off sparks. In the shadows below, on the soil of Boyle’s Thirty Acres, puddles of water testified to that vigilance. When Ertle finished his instructions, the fighters did not quite touch gloves. Trainer Gus Wilson had said that Carpentier would mix it up with Dempsey, and sure enough, in the opening seconds the Frenchman fired a left that swiped Dempsey’s face and uncorked a right that missed. One observer wrote that Carpentier charged into the fray as if following Macbeth’s private exhortation, “ ’twere well it were done quickly.”25 Of course, that can work both ways. Dempsey dug a right to the Frenchman’s stomach, a short blow to the back of his head, and a two-fisted flurry to the body. Fighting at

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close quarters with Dempsey was a recipe for pain and a prelude to disaster, but keeping the champion at a comfortable distance was a near impossible task, given his quickness and agility. Still, Carpentier surprised by throwing body punches, a planned tactic that had been reported from his Manhasset training camp. But in-fighting was Dempsey territory. Following a Carpentier right-left combination that reached his face but did no damage, the champion began to work the smaller man’s ribs. After dominating a few succeeding clinches with more short punishing blows to the head (Carpentier later bemoaned what he called the champion’s “rabbit punches”), Dempsey drew first blood with a slashing left to Carpentier’s nose—not a devastating punch, but enough to fracture a bone. Rickard had asked Dempsey not to kill Carpentier, to give the fans a satisfying taste of action. Carpentier was not so easy to kill, for Dempsey clearly was not carrying him. Dempsey’s fast hands punctuated his instinct for brawling, and it was clear right away that Carpentier, who was perhaps slightly faster, would need surgical punching and much luck to survive. The pattern of combat also became clear: Dempsey weaving forward, head leading, left arm dangling the glove just below the belt (this day, his belt was a ribbon, whose ends hung loosely several inches down the left side of his trunks), right arm close to the chest and crooked upward at a 45-degree angle; Carpentier giving ground grudgingly and retaliating with right-hand leads and classic left-right combinations. He threw the right off the left with beautiful timing, and it was not difficult to see how he had dispatched of Bombardier Wells and Beckett, his two principal European rivals. But Dempsey had a far better chin and a greater ring awareness than the two Englishmen. He anticipated and slipped some of Carpentier’s beauties; those that connected did not land flush because Dempsey turned his head a split-second in time. At close quarters, he jolted the challenger with short lefts and rights to body and head. As Dempsey pressed, Carpentier retreated, but not headlong. He maintained a distance that allowed him to launch sharp, fast counterpunches, especially the right. In the second round, he leaped out of a crouch and landed a left-right combination to Dempsey’s noggin, but the punches had little effect. Dempsey muscled his man around the ring and continued to deliver body blows in the clinches. When they broke, Carpentier stepped back, then suddenly reversed gear and fired a left hook that flew over Dempsey’s lowered guard and connected with his jaw, surprising him and stopping him short. Carpentier, the champion was learning, could punch with both hands. Midway through the round, the challenger found the precision and timing he needed in the delivery of that vaunted right hand cloaked these

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many months in Descamps’s hocus-pocus and European lore. Carpentier purposely lowered his guard. Dempsey took the lure and rushed forward. The Frenchman flicked a distracting left and followed with his big punch. It caught Dempsey under his left cheekbone, stopping him in his tracks. Outside the stadium, across the street, 25-year-old John F. Boyle Jr. froze at the snap of the crowd’s instantaneous roar. He looked skyward and saw the backs of those standing at the very top of the stadium, dwarfed by wooden utility poles well-spaced along the circumference of the structure. Electrical wire strung between the poles dangled lighting fixtures that danced violently in the uproar. And then the poles themselves swayed and spectators struggled to steady themselves, and the upper reaches of the wooden stadium undulated beneath their feet, as in the beginning stages of an earthquake.26 Such was the measure of the laws of physics— forgiving on this day—and the crowd’s fervent wish that Carpentier upend the champion. That would have been a true earthquake. But Dempsey, though momentarily stunned, wasn’t going anywhere, and Carpentier retreated rather than press his advantage. In landing that right hand, he had been the one to suffer the real damage: a double-fracture of the right thumb and a sprained wrist. One writer concluded that, in his haste to land what was a follow-up right to a light left jab, Carpentier had neglected to twist his hand at point of impact so that the knuckles could land flush, enhancing the blow and offering a measure of protection for the hand. As soon as the punch landed, Carpentier felt sharp pain. In effect, the fight ended right there, because Carpentier’s biggest weapon had been compromised. He had aimed for the jaw and caught the cheek, still a vulnerable spot on a lesser fighter. But Jack Dempsey was no leaf dangling from a tree limb at the Bois de Boulogne. Slightly out of range, he immediately threw two reflexive punches that caught nothing but air, but served as a warning that intruders could get clocked. Carpentier paused and lost the moment. His right had made a strong impression on Dempsey, but now the champion cleared his head, recalled his scowl, and resumed his pressure. (In lauding his fighter’s performance, Kearns said afterward that he “never saw a cooler man in the ring than Jack was today.”27 Carpentier landed five more overhand rights to Dempsey’s head in the round, but the punches lacked steam, and Dempsey shook them off like skin irritants. He picked up the tempo, hunching and shuffling and swinging his way through round three, taking charge of the proceedings. His right thumb broken, Carpentier was increasingly unable to keep the bigger man off of him. He continued to throw his right—sometimes wildly—but up close, Dempsey’s short powerful punches were wearing down Carpentier. Dempsey attacked the ribs with short powerful punches, then sighted

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higher and cracked Carpentier just under the heart, a blow that, when delivered by a Dempsey, could easily take that organ from its owner. Carpentier’s knees buckled, but he stayed upright. Between rounds, Descamps put a bottle of smelling salts under his fighter’s broken nose. Dempsey came out for round four and moved deliberately into Carpentier’s range, but then he always seemed disdainful of his opponent’s punching power, whether he were facing a feather duster or a wrecking ball. Or a man who, just two rounds earlier, had smacked him a good one. Dempsey dug a right to the body, clinched, and came up top with a jarring left. When they broke, Carpentier’s retreat had none of its earlier wiliness—this was pure, get-out-of-the-way backpedaling. Even so, Dempsey reached him with a long body shot, then closed for more work on the ribs and a shot to the nose. Carpentier flailed with a left that connected with no more impact than the rain that never arrived. Dempsey hooked a left to the face and cracked a right high up on the cheek, and Carpentier slid down the ropes and to the canvas, where he lay on his side, seemingly out of commission. Years earlier, when his fighter was as plainly beaten as evident at this moment, Descamps had thrown in the towel. But when Ertle’s count reached eight, the Frenchman lurched to his feet, tottering like a newborn colt. There was no towel in sight. Dempsey, who had been standing and waiting nearby, legs spread and gloves on hips, moved in with a left to the face, a right-hand hammer again to the heart, and an uppercut to the jaw that sent Carpentier, only semiconscious now, to the canvas for keeps, though after lying motionless in a semi-fetal position on his right side for eight seconds, he did make a fruitless effort to rise. Resting his arms on the ropes in Carpentier’s corner, Dempsey showed his teeth in an enigmatic snarl. Below him and eight feet away, the fallen fighter’s legs kicked out involuntarily. Many of the women, including Neysa McMein, were crying. At 1:16 of the round, Ertle swung his arm across his body as his count reached 10, and Dempsey promptly stooped over Carpentier to help him to his feet, a reprise of the Frenchman’s gesture toward the fallen Beckett two years before. Carpentier’s corner men quickly interceded to fully lift their fighter and drag him to safety, as a dozen policemen encircled Dempsey, a man seemingly in no need of protection. He raised his arms to acknowledge the robust cheers now coming his way—winning was the antidote to suspicions and untruths. The newly converted all but clinging to him, Dempsey strode from the ring. Carpentier followed, “deadly pale, and most bewildered-looking with a forlorn, mechanical smile plastered on his face.”28 The volume of the exodus from Boyle’s Thirty Acres was unprecedented, but the city and the transportation operators were up to the task. The Erie,

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Pennsylvania, Lackawanna, Central, and West Shore ferries all floated extra boats to accommodate the 15,000 automobiles on their return trip across the river. The Hudson & Manhattan tube system reduced train cycles to 90 seconds in order to shuttle 30,000 passengers an hour. By those measures, the entire crowd probably was dispersed within two hours. Not everyone went directly home, wherever that happened to be. Many of the late-night revelers and out-of-towners who were unable to secure lodging slept on trains in the railroad yards overnight. After the fight, Carpentier retraced his route, returning to Port Washington by yacht and motoring in silence, except for the muted moans of a suddenly sick Journee, to the Matthews farm. In the 10 days of relative seclusion that followed in Manhasset, Carpentier received scores of telegrams from Europe, from kings and commoners. He was still their hero and, in the minds and words of many of them, the better of the two men. The speedy, sharp-punching Carpentier had displayed his skills and tested the champion, but he had been worn down by Dempsey’s unceasing pressure, weight advantage and roughness in the clinches, and body attack combined with telling head shots. Carpentier threw pretty combinations and had a flashing right hand, to be sure, but their power and his speed were not enough to keep Dempsey off of him. Not nearly enough. For Dempsey had some speed and smarts of his own, and a relentless attack punctuated time and again by explosive punches—in bunches. “Every blow he [Dempsey] landed on my body hurt me terribly,” the Frenchman said via an interpreter.29 What would have happened, had Carpentier landed that big right flush on Dempsey’s jaw in the second round? The view here is that Dempsey would have taken a few more seconds to recover—even to the point of going to one knee—without sustaining further damage. Had Carpentier not broken his thumb with the punch, it is likely that he still would have been wary of letting loose at that moment. Perhaps the challenger would then have lasted a few rounds more than he did. Such considerations have fueled boxing fans’ barroom debates and verbal sparring sessions among succeeding generations of boxing writers. Rickard tabulated 80,183 paying customers for his great event, generating a gate of $1,789,238.30 The arena held around 91,000 human beings, and many eyewitnesses could not remember seeing an empty seat. Much of the differential may have been due to free admissions. But it is doubtful that ticket buyers dried up after reaching 80,000, so Rickard may have generated more revenue and profit than stated. His expenses (including the fighters’ guarantee), for the sake of a nice round figure, were a million dollars. The federal tax bite (the day of the event, 75 Internal Revenue

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operatives tabulated receipts from all sources at Rickard Stadium), which ultimately may not have chewed all it had coming, was at least $150,000.31 By any measure, the promoter made out okay. Erstwhile co-promoters Cochran and Brady sent congratulatory telegrams, Brady saying, “You profited by my stupidity, but I must pay this tribute to you: You are a dead game sport.”32 Rickard spoke of further plans for Boyle’s Thirty Acres. He hoped to stage Dempsey-Brennan III on Labor Day, and, at a later date, a match between Carpentier and St. Paul light-heavyweight Tommy Gibbons, a rising contender for Dempsey’s title. And towering Jess Willard would still be an attraction if the ex-champ wanted to give it another try. Carpentier had scored points with the promoter and the U.S. public, which had boosted him before the fight and recognized his gameness afterward. Rickard said of Carpentier’s performance against Dempsey, “The French titleholder showed us some fine boxing, real speed, and the courage of a lion. He was trying to make up for physical handicaps, and it could not be done.”33 In a press conference, Dempsey said that Carpentier “took his medicine without a whimper.”34 The champion was eager to take on all comers— Brennan, Willard, Wills, whomever the public and the promoters wanted. “Fighting is my trade and I like to keep busy,” he said.35 In the ring, Jack Dempsey stayed busy and was all business, all the time.

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EPILOGUE

Sportswriter Ring Lardner, working in the genre and idiom that would define his literary standing, exercised his jaundiced eye in the service of a short story published by the Saturday Evening Post four months after Tex Rickard’s inspired creation at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. On the page, “The Battle of the Century,” accompanied by de rigueur illustrations, hit every marker characteristic of the eponymous fistic battle late of Jersey City. Only the names were changed to protect the guilty. In often fractured English, Lardner’s street-smart characters tell their tale. Larry Moon, who manages heavyweight champion Jim Dugan, knows he’s handling a hot property that will turn cold if someone or something doesn’t relight the fuse. “He won’t be worth a dime unless I can build something up,” says Moon of his marquee fighter. Someone floats a trial balloon. There’s a French war hero named Goulet who just knocked out the English champion, Bradford. “That little French boy popped him on the chin, and he laid down and rolled over like a circus dog.” At first, Moon/Kearns scoffs. Goulet is a “brittle-looking bird” to take on the guy who “sprinkled Big Wheeler all over Ohio.” Then the canny manager grabs the notion by the throat. “What I’ve got to do is convince some guy with money and a lot of nerve that it would be a fight, not a murder.” He reaches out to La Chance, manager of Goulet/Carpentier, and offers him $200,000, though he would be hard-pressed to come up with

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one-tenth that amount. The fighters fatten their records—Dugan/Dempsey takes a setup in Michigan and knocks him out in three, while Goulet goes to Jersey to fight an “old guy who manages to stand up three rounds without his crutches.” Dugan then trains on a ship for a fight with a “big horse named Joe Barnes (Brennan) . . . in the Big Town. “When he clumb [sic] into the ring, he was still at sea,” says Moon. “It made him look like he could be licked, and that was a boost for the Goulet match.” To gin up the purse for Dugan-Goulet, Moon outfits a couple of waiters to portray Cuban bankers angling to bring the fight to Havana, and then turns them loose during a restaurant meeting with a pair of promoters. He uses the episode as leverage to hook the biggest fish in the promotional pond, Charley Riggs. Riggs/Rickard makes plans to stage the fight in Jersey, staying close to the Big Town. Goulet, who has, among other attributes, long eyelashes, goes into “secret training.” Dugan notices “what girl reporters have been writing about Goulet, and says, with no trace of hurt feelings, “I doubt if they’s [sic] a dozen Americans that ain’t pulling for me to get knocked for a corpse.” Riggs and his backers come out of the enterprise with a profit of a halfmillion.1 Lardner’s art imitated life. If Rickard’s promotional flair was a form of art, his own life was high drama. He may not have been the first to divine the gold lode embedded in Dempsey-Carpentier—Kearns always said it was his idea (as Lardner represents through Larry Moon), but then he embraced almost every successful outcome as his own original thinking—but the promoter was clearly the prime mover in this boxing show that revolutionized its sport, big-league sports, and promotion in general. Rickard’s initial “Battle of the Century” was the Johnson-Jeffries fight, that sorry chapter meant to restore white supremacy to boxing’s grandest prize, the heavyweight title. But the overheated mismatch in Reno was just a trial balloon. A decade later, with the more seasoned century having survived World War I, it was as if Rickard had synthesized all of his insights about people, about what got their juices flowing, all of his contacts through the years in the press and in high-level business across continents, to produce an event that would set a new standard, a template, for big-time promotion. Other “fights of the century” followed—the Louis-Schmeling rematch and the first Ali-Frazier fight come to mind. And the “century” designation would be applied to singular contests in other sports, political campaigns, murder trials, high-society divorces, and face-offs in other fields of human

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error and endeavor. The architects of such clashes—including agents, spin doctors, and celebrity attorneys—all should doff a Panama hat to Tex Rickard, who, with self-belief and a gambler’s instinct, changed the scale and style of promotion. With his greatest triumph in the books, Rickard’s fortunes took a shocking, if momentary, nosedive. Three weeks into the New Year, newspaper headlines screamed that he had been arrested on a morals charge involving underage girls. A grand jury indictment followed, and the trial that took place in March 1922 offered a host of sordid allegations for public consumption. This was one time that publicity did not work in Rickard’s favor. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had brought the charges on behalf of seven girls, some of them preteens, some of them visitors to the Madison Square Garden swimming pool beginning the previous August. Rickard had given them money to entice them to his Garden office and a nearby apartment on West 47th Street, they charged. At both locations, according to the girls’ stories, the 50-year-old promoter had committed sexual acts ranging from fondling to intercourse. The formal charge was abduction and assault. The society’s investigation had led to a medical examination that revealed semen in the vagina of one of the girls, a 15-year-old. Rickard flatly denied all charges and hired Max Steuer, a top New York trial attorney. Still, prosecutor Ferdinand A. Pecora succeeded in having the defendant confined to “The Tombs” in lower Manhattan for the duration of the trial, which began on March 15 and focused on two of his accusers. One of them described in detail his Garden office and 47th Street apartment. The prosecution zeroed in on a particular afternoon, November 21, 1921, as the date on which the girls said that Rickard had consummated his sexual overtures. Steuer grilled the girls in cross-examination, inducing one to admit that she had regular sex with her teenage boyfriend, the other to acknowledge having committed various acts of theft. It was a put-up job, the defense attorney insisted. The girls had been paid off—with a lot more money than they said they received from Rickard—to sully Rickard’s reputation. The promoter had made plenty of enemies during his climb to success; there were, in fact, lawsuits pending. Suppositions and stories swirled about the case. A claim that agents from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had offered to make the charges go away in exchange for Rickard’s payment of $50,000 went unexamined in court, as the judge ruled out related testimony. So it was left for Rickard himself, buttressed by character witnesses that included

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Anthony Drexel Biddle and Kermit Roosevelt, to take the stand. Steuer led him through the telling of his life story, and the saga, which he delivered in a composed believable fashion, captivated the jury. Prosecutor Pecora was less enamored of the storytelling. He asked Rickard about an earlier incidence of underage seduction. He questioned Rickard’s long association with gambling, and suggested that brothels were part of the business package. His voice calm, as if facing down a drunk waving a loaded pistol, Rickard denied the demeaning claims. Furthermore, he subsequently told Steuer, he had attended a college football game at the Polo Grounds on the afternoon of November 21, attendance corroborated by his chauffeur, press agent Ike Dorgan, sometime co-promoter and now employee Frank Flournoy, and newspaper pal Bill Farnsworth. Yet, under more interrogation by Pecora, Rickard could not remember a thing about the game except the crowd noise. During the course of the trial, Steuer introduced no specifics on a possible frame-up. As for the semen found in the medical exam, this was 1921, and DNA analysis was still far in the future. Loose ends and suspicions. The jury took an hour-and-a-half to declare Tex Rickard not guilty. If he had been a victim of enemies, none were ever fingered. Aside from the reformers, always ready to add fuel to their fire, the public’s reaction was one of uneasiness. There had been a vindication, or had there? Rickard’s public face remained solid as ever, as he tentatively returned to the helm of his boxing empire. Great days lay ahead, followed by his premature demise. Tex Rickard died on January 6, 1929, of a stomach infection resistant to the medicine of the day. Thousands came to Madison Square Garden, where his body lay in state. The tawdry case of People of the State of New York v. George L. Rickard gave unexpected ammunition to anti-boxing forces, which could now trumpet the sport’s promotional exemplar as a depraved old man who used a portion of his ill-begotten fortune to beat the rap. But though the spunky International Reform Bureau sought Dempsey’s arrest for assault in the wake of the Carpentier fight (a fat chance, legally speaking), the crusade to ban boxing had smashed against the twin beachheads of commercialism and changing public mores. People were flouting Prohibition. Hemlines were rising. Hollywood seduced moviegoers with carnal imagery. And boxing, in the right hands, was a big moneymaker. Dempsey had vowed to be a busy heavyweight champion, but he spent most of his time in the 1920s as a celebrity outside the ring. He did, however, provide boxing with two of its most storied fights, and Rickard with

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three more million-dollar (one, a two-million-dollar) gates, during this period. His match with Luis Angel Firpo, the aptly named “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” on September 14, 1923 in the Polo Grounds may still be the quintessential Pier Six Brawl in the prize ring. Dempsey took a knee after absorbing a Firpo left in the opening seconds, then proceeded to deposit the Argentinean on the deck six times in the next minute-and-a-half before going down again—this time on all fours—from the effects of a Firpo right. Dempsey rose and knocked his man down a seventh time, but the powerful Firpo, an inch-and-a-half taller and more than 20 pounds heavier than the champion, struggled to his feet yet again and launched an overhand right—the stuff of comic books—that knocked Dempsey over the middle rope, onto the laps of the ringside sportswriters, and into the frozen immortality of George Bellows’s modernistic painting. Dempsey somehow revived and, with the help of one or more spontaneous Samaritans, climbed back into the ring in time—the assistance, technically, grounds for disqualification, but in this case, ignored by the referee. In Round Two, a perfectly timed Dempsey left-right combination ended matters before the first minute had elapsed.2 The Rickard promotion drew more than 88,000 to the Polo Grounds, generating a gate of more than $1.1 million.3 Dempsey didn’t fight again for three years, and he was not the same fighter when he returned. Boxer-puncher Gene Tunney dominated him over 10 rounds to take the heavyweight title in the rain on September 23, 1926, in the new South Philadelphia stadium built for the country’s Sesquicentennial celebration. More than 120,000 packed the huge stadium, and gate receipts tallied nearly $1.9 million, displacing DempseyCarpentier as boxing’s revenue king. The two fighters met again a day short of one year later at Soldier Field in Chicago, producing a similar result but adding a new layer of boxing lore. With Tunney again making it largely a one-sided fight, Dempsey finally nailed him in the seventh round with a left to the jaw, and punched him to the canvas with an unerring series of blows. But when, in implementing a new guideline, the referee ordered Dempsey to the farthest corner (from the fallen Tunney), Dempsey stayed put, forcing the ref to walk him toward the designated corner. By the time the ref began the count, the timekeeper had ticked off five seconds. Tunney rose at nine, cleared his head, and resumed his pattern of dominance; he won going away. He had been down for 14 seconds (some say longer). The argument, of course, was, and is, whether he would have risen sooner, had the ref started counting immediately. He appeared to be waiting until the last moment possible to rise to give himself the best chance of recovery. He had beaten the Long Count. And beaten Dempsey again.

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The fight grossed $2,658,660. Dempsey and Rickard had invented a new arithmetic for their sport. By the Tunney fights, Dempsey and Kearns had parted company, embittered by money disputes and perhaps having been too close for too long. Based in Chicago, the mercurial Kearns continued to ply his trade, managing high-profile fighters such as welterweight/middleweight champ Mickey Walker in the 1920s and 1930s, and light-heavyweight champ Joey Maxim in the 1940s and 1950s. Brilliant and abrasive, Kearns retained mixed feelings of resentment and love toward Dempsey, his estranged “son,” to the end, which came for Doc in July 1963. He was working on his autobiography on his deathbed. Dempsey, once reviled for not enlisting in the Armed Forces, became a revered figure as he entered into U.S. iconography. A longtime, visible New York City restaurateur, he was forever hailed as the “champ.” To his death in May 1983, he was the prime standard-bearer of the Golden Age of Sports. Georges Carpentier fought without distinction in his post-Dempsey career, though he did extend Tunney into the 15th and final round of their July 1924 non-title fight at the Polo Grounds before losing on a technical knockout. The previous year he had fought Beckett back at the Olympia in London and KO’d the Brit once again in the very first round; some fighters are tailor-made for other fighters. Descamps and his evil eye returned to France. Lionized, as ever, in Europe, Carpentier died in Paris in October 1975. In Jersey City, Boyle’s Thirty Acres survived and even flourished for awhile under Rickard’s stewardship. A year after Dempsey-Carpentier, lightweight champion Benny Leonard successfully defended his title against Lew Tendler at the wooden octagon. Firpo blasted Willard into retirement there with an eighth-round knockout in July 1923, two months before the “Bull” locked horns with Dempsey. And Rickard staged other fights of marquee value at this stadium he had built out of dreams and will power. By 1927, however, the boxing gods had curried favor with New York, and the sport once more crossed the Hudson. Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds grabbed the big-ticket action. As he had with his previous arenas, Rickard dismantled his creation in the Jersey City lowlands and sold the wood. Two years later, he was gone, too.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1 1. Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 4. 2. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 20. 3. Ibid., 21. 4. Maxine Elliott Hodges Rickard, with Arch Oboler, Everything Happened to Him (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1936), 50. 5. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 28; Rickard, Everything Happened, 55. 6. Rickard, Everything Happened, 127. 7. “No Love for Her Husband,” New York Times, December 26, 1898, 1. 8. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 64. 9. Ibid., 68. 10. Ibid., 66. 11. Ibid., 73 12. Rickard, Everything Happened, 143. 13. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 78–79. 14. Ibid., 82. 15. Rickard, Everything Happened. CHAPTER 2 1. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 93. 2. Ibid., 89–91.

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3. Maxine Elliott Hodges Rickard, with Arch Oboler, Everything Happened to Him (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1936), 208. 4. Ibid., 201. 5. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 113–114. 6. J. Michael Kenyon, ed., The Boxing As We Liked It Papers 84 (1999). 7. F. Daniel Somrack, Boxing in San Francisco (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 9. 8. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 103–104. 9. Russell R. Elliott, Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1966), 82–83; Louis Guenther, “Pirates of Promotion,” The World’s Work, 1918, 84. 10. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 104. 11. Ibid., 107. 12. Elliott, Mining Boom, 82–83; Guenther, “Pirates of Promotion,” 84. 13. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 117–120. 14. Ibid., 121–122; Elliott, Mining Boom, 83. 15. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 123. 16. Ibid., 125–126. 17. Ibid., 126. CHAPTER 3 1. Jack “Doc” Kearns, with Oscar Fraley, The Million Dollar Gate (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 21. 2. Ibid., xi. 3. Telephone interview with Jack Kearns II, March 26, 2010. 4. In his autobiography The Million Dollar Gate, ghostwritten by Oscar Fraley, Kearns recalls teenage adventures in the Klondike. Others suggest that the experience took place later in life, and some doubt its veracity altogether. Kearns was a great spinner of tales, but his command of descriptive details suggests that he spent time in the Klondike at some point. 5. Kearns claimed that the saloon was The Northern, but given Mizner’s presence and dominance, it may have been the Monte Carlo. 6. Kearns, Million, 28. 7. Ibid., 35. 8. Telephone interview with Jack Kearns II, April 26, 2010. 9. Tacoma Daily News, March 12, 1909, per BoxRec Boxing Encyclopedia, http://boxrec.com/media/index.php?title=Human:193725 (accessed May 2010). 10. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness (New York: Knopf, 2004), 10.

NOTES

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Ibid., 15. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 115.

CHAPTER 4 1. “Boston Copper Gossip,” New York Times, March 19, 1906, 10. 2. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness (New York: Knopf, 2004), 133. 3. Ibid., 168. 4. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 138. 5. Ibid. 6. Maxine Elliott Hodges Rickard, with Arch Oboler, Everything Happened to Him (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1936), 231. 7. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 170; Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 140. 8. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 142. 9. Ibid., 144. 10. Ibid., 145. 11. Ibid., 157. 12. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 183. 13. “Jeffries Checked in His Training,” New York Times, April 26, 1910, 12. 14. “Attacks on Jeff and the Reasons,” New York Times, May 22, 1910, S3. 15. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 183–184. 16. Ibid., 186. 17. Ibid., 188–189. 18. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 163. 19. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 194. 20. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 167. 21. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 197. 22. Ibid., 208. 23. Ibid., 211. 24. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 173–174. 25. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 283.

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CHAPTER 5 1. Georges Carpentier, My Fighting Life (London: Cassell, 1920), 11. 2. Ibid., 20. 3. Ibid., 79. 4. Harry Carpenter, Masters of Boxing (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1964), 126. 5. Bohun Lynch, Knuckles and Gloves (London: W. Collins Sons, 1922), 182. 6. Carpentier, Fighting Life, 92. CHAPTER 6 1. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 191. 2. Ibid., 193. 3. “Les Darcy Arrives Here In Fine Form,” New York Times, December 24, 1916, E7. 4. Ibid. 5. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 195. 6. Ibid., 196. 7. Ibid., 197. CHAPTER 7 Unless otherwise noted, this chapter blends information from the following books: Jack Dempsey, as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Dempsey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960); Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999); Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 1. Frank Graham Jr., A Farewell to Heroes (New York: Viking, 1981) 26. 2. Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 6. 3. Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Garden City, NY: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987), 87. 4. Jack Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 30, 32. 5. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 13. CHAPTER 8 1. Georges Carpentier, My Fighting Life (London: Cassell, 1920), 100. 2. Ibid., 105.

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3. Georges Carpentier, Carpentier (London: Sportsmans Book Club, 1958), 106. 4. Ibid., 107. 5. Ibid., 108. 6. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 177–178. 7. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 26. 8. Ibid., 366. 9. Ibid., 365. 10. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 183. 11. “M’Cue’s Effort To Kill Bout Futile,” New York Times, March 15, 1916, 12. 12. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 185. 13. Ibid., 187. CHAPTER 9 1. Jack “Doc” Kearns, with Oscar Fraley, The Million Dollar Gate (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 82. 2. Nat Fleischer, Jack Dempsey (New York: Press of C. J. O’Brien, 1936), 67. 3. Jack Dempsey, as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Dempsey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 90. 4. “Ranch Owner Tries Hand at Promoting,” New York Times, March 31, 1918, 29. 5. “Fulton to Claim Title,” New York Times, December 11, 1917, 16. 6. “Places Available for Bout Decrease,” New York Times, April 14, 1918, E6. 7. Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 83. 8. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 205. 9. Fleischer, Jack Dempsey, 82; “One Punch Floors Fulton for Count,” New York Times, July 28, 1918, 25. 10. “Says Fight Was a Fake,” New York Times, February 2, 1919, 19. 11. Fleischer, Jack Dempsey, 83. 12. Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 7. 13. Dempsey, Dempsey, 92. 14. Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 45. 15. Ibid.

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CHAPTER 10 Unless otherwise noted, this chapter blends information from the following books: John Lardner, White Hopes and Other Tigers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951); Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999); Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 1. Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 96. 2. “Willard Accepts $100,000 Fight Offer,” New York Times, January 25, 1919, 8. 3. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 46; Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 207. 4. “Dempsey to Get $27,500 for Bout,” New York Times, February 5, 1919, 12. 5. Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 52. 6. Ibid., 53; Kahn, A Flame, 54. 7. Kahn, A Flame, 52–53; Dempsey, Dempsey, 99–100. 8. Kahn, A Flame, 59; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 60. 9. Willis Stork, “Toledo’s Day in the Sun,” http://www.captain-johns. com/Ohio/Fight.html. 10. Kahn, A Flame, 55. 11. “Churches Rebuked for Opposing Bout,” New York Times, May 28, 1919. 12. “Willard and Dempsey Get Down to the Hardest of Intensive Work in Training Camps,” New York Times, June 27, 1919, 23. 13. John Lardner, White Hopes and Other Tigers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951), 66. 14. Kahn, A Flame, 61–62; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 57–58. 15. Lardner, White Hopes, 69. 16. Kahn, A Flame, 62; Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 211. 17. Kahn, A Flame, 98. 18. “Barbour Disputes Pecord,” New York Times, July 13, 1919, 3. CHAPTER 11 1. Harry Carpenter, Masters of Boxing (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1964), 127. 2. Georges Carpentier, My Fighting Life (London: Cassell, 1920), 146.

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3. Ibid., 149. 4. “All London Eager for Title Contest,” New York Times, December 4, 1919, 21; “Carpentier Makes Short Work of Beckett in Bout for European Title,” New York Times, December 5, 1919, 18. 5. Carpentier, Fighting Life, 151. 6. Ibid. 7. “Carpentier Makes,” 18. 8. Carpenter, Masters, 126. 9. Ibid., 132. 10. Lyman Abbott, The Outlook, Volume 123, London, 1919, 579. 11. American Medicine, Volume 26, The Ethical Publishing Company, 1920, 190. 12. “Carpentier Signs to Meet Levinsky,” New York Times, May 24, 1920, 8. 13. “Promoters Meet,” New York Times, August 26, 1920, 18. 14. “Carpentier to Box Levinsky Oct. 12,” New York Times, August 20, 1920, 15. 15. “May Lift Contract with Carpentier,” New York Times, October 1, 1920, 20. 16. Beloit Daily News, September 13, 1920. 17. “Carpentier Here to Fight Levinsky,” New York Times, September 14, 1920, 22. 18. “Carpentier to Box,” 15. 19. Ibid., “Carpentier Meets Levinsky Tuesday,” New York Times, October 10, 1920, 105; “Carpentier Here,” 22. 19. “Carpentier Knocks Out Levinsky in Fourth Round,” New York Times, October 13, 1920, 1. 20. “Dempsey Next,” New York Times, October 14, 1920, 21. CHAPTER 12 1. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 213–214. 2. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 61–62; Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 123. 3. Kahn, A Flame, 127. 4. Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 81. 5. Kahn, A Flame, 135. 6. Ibid., 137. 7. Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 83.

212

NOTES

8. Kahn, A Flame, 159. 9. Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 85. 10. Ibid., 85; Kahn, A Flame, 167. CHAPTER 13 1. “National Control of Boxing Planned,” New York Times, December 28, 1920, 18. 2. Ibid. 3. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 205; Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 95; Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 224. 4. Maxine Elliott Hodges Rickard, with Arch Oboler, Everything Happened to Him (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1936), 275; “Tex Rickard Sued for an Accounting,” New York Times, April 28, 1921, 8. 5. Rickard, Everything Happened, 284; Kahn, A Flame, 36–37; Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 218, 225. 6. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 225–226. 7. “Dempsey to Fight Brennan at Garden,” New York Times, September 12, 1920, 22. 8. Kahn, A Flame, 202. 9. Ibid., 206. 10. “Fight Articles Signed,” New York Times, August 4, 1920, 19. 11. “Champion Leaves to Defend Title,” New York Times, August 14, 1920, 11. 12. “Dempsey Is Bound to Be at Top Form,” New York Times, August 29, 1920, 18. 13. “Dempsey Ready to Train,” New York Times, August 8, 1920, 18. 14. Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey(New York: Harper and Row, 1997), 135. 15. Kahn, A Flame, 209. 16. “Prepare for Big Crowds,” New York Times, August 30, 1920, 15. 17. “Benton Harbor Groans,” New York Times, September 5, 1920, S17. 18. “Dempsey to Fight Brennan This Year,” New York Times, August 12, 1920, 22. 19. Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 89–90. 20. “Great But Orderly Crowd Sees Fight,” New York Times, September 7, 1920, 25; Kahn, A Flame, 209. 21. “Dempsey’s Blows Knock Out Miske in Third Round,” New York Times, September 7, 1920, 1.

NOTES

213

22. “Dempsey to Arrive in New York Today,” New York Times, September 9, 1920, 20. 23. “Dempsey Here to Close Next Match,” New York Times, September 10, 1920, 23. 24. “Dempsey off for Long Branch Camp,” New York Times, September 14, 1920, 22. 25. “Boxing Officials Approve Big Bout,” New York Times, November 19, 1920, 21. 26. “Willard Signs to Fight Next March,” New York Times, December 1, 1920, 23. 27. “Dempsey Knocks Out Brennan in Bout at Garden,” New York Times, December 15, 1920, 1, 11; Kahn, A Flame, 217–219; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 97–98; film footage of fight available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mFxcNfXMA60. 28. Jack Dempsey, as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Dempsey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 131. 29. “Dempsey Knocks Out Brennan in Bout at Garden,” New York Times, December 15, 1920, 1, 11. 30. Kahn, A Flame, 219; Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 226. 31. “Dempsey Denies Reports,” New York Times, December 18, 1920, 18. CHAPTER 14 1. Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 102. 2. “England Expects Bout,” New York Times, December 6, 1919, 13. 3. “Tortorich in the Race,” New York Times, December 6, 1919, 13. 4. “Syndicate for Big Fight,” New York Times, December 30, 1919, 13. 5. “Rickard Appears Wary,” New York Times, December 5, 1919, 18. 6. “Dempsey and Carpentier in Big Demand for Title Bout,” New York Times, December 6, 1919, 13. 7. “Dempsey Asks $250,000,” New York Times, December 17, 1919, 21. 8. “Carpentier Seeks Match for Title,” New York Times, December 13, 1919, 14. 9. “Rickard Bidding for Title Match,” New York Times, December 18, 1919, 15. 10. “Cochran in Chicago,” New York Times, January 5, 1920, 13. 11. “$400,000 Offer for Bout Is Accepted,” New York Times, January 5, 1920, 13. 12. Ibid. 13. “New Doubt Raised Over Fight Plans,” New York Times, January 8, 1920, 18.

214

NOTES

14. “ ‘Carpentier Not Signed to Meet Dempsey’—Descamps,” New York Times, January 9, 1920, 18. 15. “French Promoter Now Claims Option,” New York Times, February 6, 1920, 15. 16. “W. A. Brady Says Fox Cannot Sign Carpentier and Offers Contract As Proof,” New York Times, February 17, 1920, 10. 17. “Carpentier’s Manager Says Whoever Signs Dempsey Will Stage Big Bout,” New York Times, February 25, 1920, 12. 18. “Carpentier Feted at I.S.C. Luncheon,” New York Times, September 15, 1920, 17. 19. Jack “Doc” Kearns and Oscar Fraley, The Million Dollar Gate (New York: Macmillan, 1966). 20. “Jack Dempsey and Carpentier to Fight Here,” New York Times, October 25, 1920, 1, 7. 21. “O’Rourke Bids for Bout,” New York Times, December 9, 1919, 120. 22. “Descamps Says He Is Ready to Sign,” New York Times, October 26, 1920, 13. 23. “$500,000 Bout Is Not a Certainty,” New York Times, October 27, 1920, 19. 24. “Cuban Syndicate Gets Title Bout,” New York Times, October 28, 1920, 21. 25. “To Close Details of Big Bout Today,” New York Times, November 5, 1920, 22. 26. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 233; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 104; Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 230. 27. Kahn, A Flame, 233. 28. “Carpentier Signs to Meet Dempsey,” New York Times, November 6, 1920, 1. CHAPTER 15 1. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 232; Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 107. 2. “Dempsey-Carpentier Fight Near This City,” New York Times, November 8, 1920, 1. 3. Ibid. 4. “July 2 Favored As Date for Big Bout,” New York Times, November 9, 1920, 21. 5. “Boxing Combine Is Granted a Charter,” New York Times, November 16, 1920, 20.

NOTES

215

6. “Carpentier Fight Is Off, Says Brady” New York Times, January 20, 1921, 1. 7. “Promoters Call World Title Bout for $500,000 Off,” New York Times, January 19, 1921, 1; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 106–107; Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 120. 8. “Canada Makes Bid for Dempsey Bout,” New York Times, December 3, 1920, 21. 9. “Will Bid for Big Bout,” New York Times, December 8, 1920, 25. 10. “Benton Harbor Wants Go,” New York Times, February 2, 1921, 18. 11. “Graham with Trio of Offers Is Here,” New York Times, January 28, 1921, 18. 12. “Hoaxed,” Straits Times, March 31, 1921, 7. 13. “Canada Makes Bid for Dempsey Bout,” New York Times, December 3, 1920, 21. 14. “Heavyweight Bout May End in Courts,” New York Times, January 21, 1921, 22. 15. Ibid. 16. “Promoters Call,” 1. 17. “Heavyweight Bout,” 22. 18. Ibid. 19. “Cochran Now Says He Will Not Quit,” New York Times, January 22, 1921, 13. 20. “Hope of Big Fight in 1920 Is Dead,” New York Times, July 9, 1920, 22. 21. “Kearns Now Ready to Waive Big Purse,” New York Times, February 1, 1921, 13; “Rickard Now Sole Promoter of Bout,” New York Times, March 1, 1921, 21. 22. “Championship Bout Here, Rickard Hints,” New York Times, February 3, 1921, 12. 23. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 232. 24. Ibid. 25. “Blame Miss Anne Morgan,” New York Times, February 16, 1921, 8. 26. Kahn, A Flame, 234; Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 108. 27. “Rickard Now Sole Promoter of Bout,” New York Times, March 1, 1921, 21. 28. “Rickard Remains Silent,” New York Times, March 16, 1921, 17. 29. “Newcomer in Lists for Titular Bout,” New York Times, March 29, 1921, 24. 30. “Cumberland Eager for Dempsey Bout,” New York Times, March 26, 1921, 18. 31. “Canadian Report Denied by Rickard,” New York Times, April 2, 1921, 17.

216

NOTES

32. “Montreal Still in Field,” New York Times, April 1, 1921, 570. 33. “Rickard Selects Jersey for Bout,” New York Times, April 10, 1921, 98. 34. “Tex Tours Jersey City,” New York Times, April 15, 1921, 23. 35. “Jersey City Chosen for the Big Prizefight for the World’s Championship on July 2,” New York Times, April 20, 1921, 1. CHAPTER 16 Unless otherwise noted, the section on Frank Hague is based on the following source: Alfred Steinberg, The Bosses (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 1. Thomas Fleming, Mysteries of My Father (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 71. 2. Alfred Steinberg, The Bosses (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 33. 3. Fleming, Mysteries, 137. 4. Ibid., 138–139. 5. Jack “Doc” Kearns, with Oscar Fraley, The Million Dollar Gate (New York: Macmillan, 1966). 6. “Irish Immigrants to Fill . . . ,” telephone interview with Robert Boyle, March 23, 2010. 7. “Montgomery Oval Leased by Rickard,” New York Times, April 26, 1921, 24. 8. Ibid. CHAPTER 17 1. “New York to Greet Carpentier Today,” New York Times, May 16, 1921, 18. 2. “Carpentier Arrives; Who’ll Win? He Will Answer on July 2,” New York Times, May 17, 1921, 1. 3. “To Bar All from Carpentier Camp,” New York Times, April 24, 1921, S4. 4. “Georges Carpentier Is Sure He Will Beat Jack,” Atlantic City Press, May 17, 1921, 7. 5. “Carpentier Eager for More Sparring,” New York Times, June 1, 1921, 23. 6. “Carpentier Rests at Training Camp,” New York Times, May 19, 1921, 22. 7. “Carpentier Confers with Rickard Here,” New York Times, May 21, 1921, 21.

NOTES

217

8. “Real Training Is Begun by Dempsey,” New York Times, April 28, 1921, 19. 9. “Big Throngs Jam Station,” Atlantic City Press, May 7, 1921, 2. 10. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 237. 11. Ibid. 12. “Dempsey to Direct His Attack at Jaw,” New York Times, May 29, 1921, 22. 13. Jack Dempsey, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 141. 14. “Dempsey to Direct,” 22. 15. Ibid. 16. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 239. 17. Ibid., 225; Jack Dempsey, as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Dempsey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 133–134. 18. Kahn, A Flame, 225. 19. John Lardner, White Hopes and Other Tigers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951), 75. 20. Ibid., 76. 21. Ibid. 22. Kahn, A Flame, 247; Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 241. 23. Ibid. 24. Georges Carpentier, Carpentier (London: Sportsmans Book Club, 1958), 150. 25. Kahn, A Flame, 241. 26. Lardner, White Hopes, 80. 27. Brian Gallagher, Anything Goes (New York: Times Books, 1987), 35. 28. Ibid., 89. 29. Kahn, A Flame, 241–242. 30. “Fake Fight Tickets Sold in Four Cities,” New York Times, June 24, 1921, 13. 31. “Latchstring Out Except to Crooks,” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 20. 32. “700 Newspaper Men Will Circle Ring,” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 20. 33. Ibid.; Kahn, A Flame, 240. 34. “Voice-Broadcasting the Stirring Progress of the ‘Battle of the Century,’ ” Wireless Age, August, 1921, 11–21; Thomas H. White, “ ‘Battle of the Century’: The WJY Story,” January 1, 2000, http://earlyradiohistory.us/ WJY.htm.

218

NOTES

35. “Reformers to Try to Stop Big Fight with Court Order,” New York Times, June 27, 1921, 1. 36. Jim Hague, “Ringside Jersey City’s Pugilistic Past,” Jersey City Magazine, October 20, 2006. 37. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 242. 38. “Rickard Reverts to $500,000 Purse,” New York Times, June 27, 1921, 2. 39. Samuels, Magnificent Rube, 242. 40. Kahn, A Flame, 234. CHAPTER 18 1. “Compromise ‘Ref ’ Question Is Expected,” Atlantic City Press, June 20, 1921, 11. 2. Ibid. 3. “Name Dempsey-Carpentier Box Fight Referee Monday,” Jersey Journal, June 19, 1921. 4. “Columns About Fight in London Papers,” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 2. 5. “Only One Interest Possesses Paris,” New York Times, June 30, 1921, 21. 6. Cyril Brown, “German Fight Fans All Pro-Dempsey,” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 14. 7. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 254–255. 8. “Greatest of All Champions,” Atlantic City Press, June 28, 1920, 12. 9. “Reformers Fail to Stop Big Fight,” New York Times, June 28, 1921, 1. 10. “Grand Jury to Get Plea to Stop Bout,” New York Times, June 30, 1921, 1. 11. “Wad’ye Mean, Rift? Says Jack Kearns,” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 20. 12. Ibid. 13. “Dempsey Playful on Eve of Battle,” New York Times, July 1, 1921, 17. 14. Kahn, A Flame, 250. 15. Ibid., 255–256. 16. “Fans Talk Wagers; Few Sign Checks,” New York Times, June 28, 1921, 11. 17. “Carpentier Money Appears in Flood,” New York Times, July 1, 1921, 1. 18. “Georges Carefree as Bout Approaches,” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 12.

NOTES

219

19. Ibid. 20. “Both Boxers Confident of Winning Today’s Bout for Heavyweight Championship,” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 12. 21. Marc Mappen, “Jerseyana,” New York Times, June 9, 1997. CHAPTER 19 1. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 258. 2. Lud Shahbazian, “Jersey City Gave Boxing Its First Million Dollar Gate,” Hudson Dispatch, July 2, 1971, 10. 3. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 242–243. 4. “Food Consumption to Set New Mark,” New York Times, June 30, 1921, 21. 5. John R. Longo, “On a July 4th Weekend, 58 Years Ago . . . ,” Jersey Journal, June 27, 1979, 4. 6. “Big Bout Is Sure to Break Records,” New York Times, June 26, 1921, 88. 7. Kahn, A Flame, 261. 8. “All Ready for Great Fistic Battle,” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 1. 9. “Three Liners Bring 5,200 Passengers,” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 8. 10. Thomas Fleming, Mysteries of My Father (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 139. 11. Irvin S. Cobb, “Cobb Fights It Over Again,” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 1. 12. “Voice-Broadcasting the Stirring Progress of the ‘Battle of the Century,’ ” Wireless Age, August, 1921, 11–21; Thomas H. White, “ ‘Battle of the Century’: The WJY Story,” January 1, 2000, http://earlyradiohistory.us/ WJY.htm. 13. Cobb, “Cobb Fights, 1. 14. Georges Carpentier, Carpentier (London: Sportsmans Book Club, 1958), 147. 15. Kahn, A Flame, 262. 16. John Lardner, White Hopes and Other Tigers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951), 78. 17. Jack Dempsey and Barbara Piatelli Dempsey, Dempsey (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 143. 18. Longo, “On a July,” 4; Kahn, A Flame, 263. 19. Shahbazian, “Jersey City,” 10. 20. “Scenes in the Arena and Outside,” Jersey Journal, July 3, 1921.

220

NOTES

21. “Dempsey Proves Prowess,” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 1. 22. Ibid. 23. “Carpentier’s Ring Skill Said to Be Due to Use of Classic Fencing Methods,” New York Times, June 30, 1921, 21. 24. “Times Sq. Crowd Roars for Both,” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 5. 25. John Gilbert Bohun Lynch, Knuckles and Gloves (London: W. Collins Sons, 1922). 26. Telephone interview with Robert Boyle, March 23, 2010. 27. “Rickard Is Happy at Fight Success,” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 6. 28. Cobb, “Cobb Fights, 1. 29. Kahn, A Flame, 268. 30. George Mercurio, “The Battle of the Century,” Jersey City Reporter, July 16, 2001. 31. “All Ready,” 1. 32. “Rickard Is,” 6. 33. Ibid. 34. Kahn, A Flame, 269. 35. Ibid. EPILOGUE The brief account of the Rickard trial blends information from Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 271–278; and Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 253–262. 1. Ring W. Lardner, “The Battle of the Century,” Saturday Evening Post, October 29, 1921, 84–86. 2. Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 343–347. 3. Charles Samuels, The Magnificent Rube (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 266.

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BOOKS Carpenter, Harry. Masters of Boxing. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1964. Carpentier, Georges. Carpentier. London: Sportsman’s Book Club, 1958. Carpentier, Georges. My Fighting Life. London: Cassell, 1920. Dempsey, Jack, as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum. Dempsey. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. Dempsey, Jack, with Barbara Piatelli Dempsey. Dempsey. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Elliott, Russell R. Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1966. Fleischer, Nat. Jack Dempsey. New York: Press of C. J. O’Brien, 1936. Fleming, Thomas. Mysteries of My Father. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005. Gallagher, Brian. Anything Goes. New York: Times Books, 1987. Gallico, Paul. Farewell to Sport. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. Graham, Frank, Jr. A Farewell to Heroes. New York: Viking Press, 1981. Kahn, Roger. A Flame of Pure Fire. New York: Harcourt, 1999. Kearns, Jack “Doc,” with Oscar Fraley. The Million Dollar Gate. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Lardner, John. White Hopes and Other Tigers. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951. Lynch, John Gilbert Bohun. Knuckles and Gloves. London: W. Collins Sons, 1922. Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. Garden City, NY: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987.

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“Montgomery Oval Leased By Rickard.” New York Times, April 26, 1921, 24. “Montreal Still in Field.” New York Times, April 1, 1921, 570. “Name Dempsey-Carpentier Box Fight Referee Monday.” Jersey Journal, June 19, 1921. “National Control of Boxing Planned.” New York Times, December 28, 1920, 18. “New Doubt Raised Over Fight Plans.” New York Times, January 8, 1920, 18. “New York to Greet Carpentier Today.” New York Times, May 16, 1921, 18. “Newcomer in Lists for Titular Bout.” New York Times, March 29, 1921, 24. “No Love for Her Husband.” New York Times, December 26, 1898, 1. “One Punch Floors Fulton for Count.” New York Times, July 28, 1918, 25. “Only One Interest Possesses Paris.” New York Times, June 30, 1921, 21. “O’Rourke Bids for Bout.” New York Times, December 9, 1919, 120. “Places Available for Bout Decrease.” New York Times, April 14, 1918, E6. “Prepare for Big Crowds.” New York Times, August 30, 1920, 15. “Promoters Call World Title Bout for $500,000 Off.” New York Times, January 19, 1921, 1 “Promoters Meet.” New York Times, August 26, 1920, 18. “Ranch Owner Tries Hand at Promoting.” New York Times, March 31, 1918, 29. “Real Training Is Begun by Dempsey.” New York Times, April 28, 1921, 19. “Reformers Fail to Stop Big Fight.” New York Times, June 28, 1921, 1. “Reformers to Try to Stop Big Fight with Court Order.” New York Times, June 27, 1921, 1. “Rickard Appears Wary.” New York Times, December 5, 1919, 18. “Rickard Bidding for Title Match.” New York Times, December 18, 1919, 15. “Rickard Is Happy at Fight Success.” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 6. “Rickard Now Sole Promoter of Bout.” New York Times, March 1, 1921, 21. “Rickard Remains Silent.” New York Times, March 16, 1921, 17. “Rickard Reverts to $500,000 Purse.” New York Times, June 27, 1921, 2. “Rickard Selects Jersey for Bout.” New York Times, April 10, 1921, 98. “Says Fight Was a Fake.” New York Times, February 2, 1919, 19. “Scenes in the Arena and Outside.” Jersey Journal, July 3, 1921. “700 Newspaper Men Will Circle Ring.” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 20. Shahbazian, Lud. “Jersey City Gave Boxing Its First Million Dollar Gate.” Hudson Dispatch, July 2, 1971, 10.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

227

“Syndicate for Big Fight.” New York Times, December 30, 1919, 13. Tacoma Daily News, March 12, 1909, per Boxrec Boxing Encyclopedia. “Tex Rickard Sued for an Accounting.” New York Times, April 28, 1921, 8. “Tex Tours Jersey City.” New York Times, April 15, 1921, 23. “Three Liners Bring 5,200 Passengers.” New York Times, July 2, 1921, 8. “Times Sq. Crowd Roars for Both.” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 5. “To Bar All from Carpentier Camp.” New York Times, April 24, 1921, S4. “To Close Details of Big Bout Today.” New York Times, November 5, 1920, 22. “Tortorich in the Race.” New York Times, December 6, 1919, 13. “W. A. Brady Says Fox Can Not Sign Carpentier and Offers Contract As Proof.” New York Times, February 17, 1920, 10. “Wad’ye Mean, Rift? Says Jack Kearns.” New York Times, June 29, 1921, 20. “Will Bid for Big Bout.” New York Times, December 8, 1920, 25. “Willard Accepts $100,000 Fight Offer.” New York Times, January 25, 1919, 8. “Willard Signs to Fight Next March.” New York Times, December 1, 1920, 23. ONLINE ARTICLES Kenyon, J. Michael, ed. The Boxing As We Liked It Papers, 1999. Stork, Willis. “Toledo’s Day in the Sun,” http://www.captain-johns.com/ Ohio/Fight.html. White, Thomas H. “ ‘Battle of the Century’: The WJY Story,” January 1, 2000, http://earlyradiohistory.us/WJY.htm. TELEPHONE INTERVIEWS Jack Kearns II, March 26, 2010. Jack Kearns II, April 26, 2010. Robert Boyle, March 23, 2010. FILMS “Battle of the Century,” by Fred C. Quimby. Footage of the first Carpentier-Beckett fight. Footage of the Dempsey-Willard fight. Footage of the second Dempsey-Brennan fight. Footage of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight.

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INDEX

Age of Celebrity, 167 Algonquin Hotel Round Table, 167 – 68, 187 Ali-Frazier fight, 200 American Athletic Club, Inc., 140 American Committee for Devastated France, 144, 170, 187 American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), 187 Anderson, Andre, 62 Anderson, Lee, 162 Anti-boxing factions: in California, 36; in Chicago, 23; in Colorado, 60; on DempseyCarpentier fight, 171, 177; government response to, 89 – 90; legal attacks on Rickard, 201 – 2; during Prohibition, 87 – 88; religious groups, 87, 89 – 90, 144; and state bans on prizefighting, 34; threats of violence from, 92; during WWI, 80 Armstrong, Bob, 25 Armstrong, Frank C., 118

Army, Navy and Civilian Board of Boxing Control, 89 – 90, 117 Auerbach, Al, 64 Australia, 51 – 52, 61. See also specific Australian boxers Bader, Edward L., 159, 160, 163, 181 Badoud, Albert, 69 Baker, Reginald Leslie “Snowy,” 51 Barbour, William Warren, 94, 95 Beach, Rex, 7, 37 Beckett, Joe, 97 – 99, 128 – 29, 165, 193, 204 Belasco, David, 188 Bellows, George, 187 Benjamin, Joe, 159 Bennett, Arnold, 48 Berger, Sam, 33, 35, 40 Berteau, Marie, 6, 8 Bettinson, Arthur Frederick, 27 Biddle, Anthony J. Drexel, 92 – 93, 94, 101, 118, 202 Bittick, Leona, 4

230

INDEX

Bodkin, Thomas, 91 – 92 Bonds, Joe, 51, 61, 77 Bonnifield, Sam, 5 Bourne, George, 188 Boxing, lack of regulation, 116 – 17, 161. See also specific states and laws Boyle’s Thirty Acres, 154 – 55, 169, 184, 197, 204 Brady, William A.: CarpentierLevinsky fight, 104; congratulating of Rickard, 197; DempseyCarpentier fight negotiations, 102, 131 – 32, 133 – 36, 141 – 44; and Dempsey’s alleged draft evasion, 111; emphasis on image, 83; reputation of, 22 Brennan, Bill “Knockout,” 79, 119, 120, 122 – 26, 163, 175 Bribery attempts, 15 Britt, Jimmy, 12, 15 Britton, Jack, 172 Broadribb, Edward Alfred “Young Snowball,” 45 Broun, Heywood, 164, 168, 176, 186 Brown, Aaron “Dixie Kid,” 46, 104 Brown, Ned, 54 – 55 Brown, Warren, 161 Bryan, William Jennings, 34 Buel, Arthur V., 32 Burge, Dick, 50 Burns, Frankie, 172, 189 Burns, Sid, 46 Burns, Tommy, 26, 27 – 28, 30, 38 California, state politics and boxing, 36 Campbell, Emmanuel, 60 Canfield, Richard, 12 Carillo, Frank, 24 Carnegie, Andrew, 139

Carpenter, Harry, 99 – 100 Carpentier, Albert, 43 Carpentier, Georges “Orchid Man”: and Battle of the Century, 188 – 97; Beckett fights, 97 – 99, 128 – 29, 204; early life and career, 43 – 50, 78; frozen assets, 141; Lardner on chances with Dempsey, 95; Levinsky fight, 102 – 5, 132, 172; marriage and family, 100, 132; military service, 55, 67 – 69; as movie actor, 43, 101, 132; post-Dempsey career, 204; and potential Willard fight, 85; social relationship with Dempsey, 164; training camp for Dempsey fight, 157 – 58, 165 – 66, 176, 178 – 81; travels to New York, 100 – 105; Wells fights, 47 – 49, 193 Carpentier, Georgette Elsasser, 100 Carroll, P. J. “Paddy,” 70 Cates, Maxine. See Dempsey, Maxine Cates Central Union Trust Company, 141, 142 – 43 Chevalier, Maurice, 48 Choynski, Joe “Chrysanthemum Joe,” 23, 35 Clabby, Jimmy, 51 Cobb, Irvin S., 186 – 87, 188 Cochran, Charles B.: CarpentierLevinsky fight, 104; congratulating of Rickard, 197; DempseyCarpentier fight negotiations, 99, 101, 127 – 34, 136, 140, 141 – 44 Coffroth, James W. “Sunny Jim,” 13 – 14, 15, 27, 31, 33, 130 Cohan, George M., 188 Cole, Thomas F., 30, 32 Collins, Mike, 80, 81, 82

INDEX “Colored” boxing titles, 24, 26, 124, 162, 172. See also specific black boxers Coogan, Jackie, 165 Copelin, George, 61 Corbett, James J. “Gentleman Jim,” 12, 22, 35, 39, 74, 94, 166, 187 Coulon, Johnny, 163 Counterfeiting of tickets, 168 – 69, 185 Cox, James M., 88 Cox, Joe, 71 Crafts, Wilbur Fisk, 171, 177 Cuba, Willard-Johnson fight in, 72 Cuny, Fernand, 45 – 46 Curley, Jack: as Carpentier’s representative, 101, 102 – 3, 132 – 33; Carpentier training camp, 157; Dempsey-Carpentier fight negotiations, 134, 135; DempseyCarpentier fight promotions, 165; Johnson-Willard fight, 70; and Kearns, 51, 53; legacy, 70; as manager of Flynn, 41; as manager of Hart, 26; WillardFulton fight, 81, 82; WillardJohnson fight, 71 – 72 Curtin, Johnny, 187 Curtis, Jim, 2 Cutler, “Kid,” 26 – 27 Darcy, Les, 51, 52 – 56, 119, 159 Daredevil Jack (film), 109 – 10, 114, 163 Daugherty, Harry Micajah, 162 Daugherty, James F., 121, 122, 161 – 63, 175 Davis, Robert “Little Bob,” 149, 151 – 52 DeForest, Jimmy, 81, 89, 107 Delaney, Billy, 35 Delmont, Mickey, 187

231

Dempsey, Bernie, 58, 59, 61, 64, 178, 191 Dempsey, Hyrum, 58 Dempsey, Jack “Manassa Mauler”: alleged draft evasion, 83 – 84, 101, 107 – 14, 132; and Battle of the Century, 189 – 97; Brennan fight, 79, 119, 120, 122 – 26; Carpentier fight negotiations, 102, 128, 131; early life and career, 57 – 65; Flynn fights, 64, 79; Fulton fight, 79 – 82; image of, 57; legacy, 55; marriage, 61 – 65, 84, 110 – 13; Meehan fights, 77 – 78, 82; Miske fights, 82, 120 – 22; Morris fights, 78 – 79; as movie actor, 109 – 10, 114, 131; named as “Jack,” 61; post-Carpentier career, 203 – 4; Smith fights, 78, 83; social relationship with Carpentier, 164; training camp for Carpentier fight, 158 – 74, 175 – 76, 178, 180 – 81; waning popularity of, 105; Willard fights, 85 – 95, 133, 164 – 65 Dempsey, Jack “Nonpareil,” 61, 172 Dempsey, Mary Celia Smoot, 58, 112, 160, 176 Dempsey, Maxine Cates, 61 – 65, 84, 110 – 13 Dempsey, William Harrison. See Dempsey, Jack “Manassa Mauler” Descamps, François: at Battle of the Century, 191; Beckett fights, 97 – 99, 128 – 29, 193, 204; Carpentier-Levinsky fight, 104 – 5; Dempsey-Carpentier fight negotiations, 129, 130 – 36, 141, 147; early years as Carpentier’s manager, 44 – 50; evil eye

232

INDEX

of, 44, 165; training camp for Dempsey fight, 157 – 58, 166; travels to New York, 100 – 105 Dickerson, Denver Sylvester, 36, 38 Dooling, Maurice T., 112 Dorgan, Ike, 86, 169 – 71, 202 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 34 Dundee, Johnny, 119, 170 Duryea, Etta. See Johnson, Etta Earp, Wyatt, 11, 20 Ebbets, Charles, 103, 133 Edge, Walter, 152 Edgren, Bob, 136, 142, 164, 186 Edward, Prince of Wales, 98 Edwards, Cornelius S., 169 Edwards, Edward I., 104, 146 – 47, 153 – 54, 173, 177, 190 Edwards, Joseph W., 169 Ertle, Harry, 177, 191 – 92, 195 Fagan, Mark, 149, 151 – 52 Fairbanks, Douglas, 110, 111 Fairmont Athletic Club (NY), 62 Farnsworth, Bill, 81, 87, 202 Felix, Peter, 26 Fidelity Surety and Deposit Company, 143 Fielder, James, 152 Fields, W. C., 8 Films: of boxing matches, 31, 33, 74 – 75, 91; Carpentier as movie actor, 43, 101, 132; Dempsey as movie actor, 109 – 10, 114, 131 Firpo, Luis Angel, 203, 204 Fitzpatrick, Sam, 26, 27 Fitzsimmons, Bob, 23, 26, 38 Fitzsimmons, Floyd, 120 – 22, 141 Floto, Otto, 104, 109 Flournoy, Frank, 86, 96, 202 Flynn, Jim “Fireman,” 26, 27, 40 – 41, 63, 64, 79

Flynn, Leo, 79, 119, 124 Ford, Henry, 188 Fox, William, 131, 133 Fox Films, 131 Fraley, Oscar, 77 – 78 Frawley Law (NY), 115, 117 Frazee, Harry, 70, 72, 135 Frazier, Joe, 127 Fulton, Fred, 173 Fulton, Fred “Rochester Plasterer,” 73, 79 – 82 Gahee, “Battling,” 175 Gallico, Paul, 57, 83 Gallivan, James Ambrose, 171 Gans, Joe “Old Master,” 12 – 18, 21, 25, 29, 30 Gans, Joe “Panama,” 121, 124 Gates, “Swiftwater Bill,” 6 Gavin, William A., 103, 116 – 17 Gibbons, Tommy, 197 Gibson, Billy, 62 Gillett, James Norris, 36 Gleason, Jack, 32 – 35, 40 Goldfield Athletic Association, 13 Graham, Frank, Jr., 57 Graney, Eddie, 15, 33 Greb, Harry, 121, 122 Greeley, Horace, 57 – 58 Greggains, Alexander, 25 Griffin, Hank, 24 Grundhoven, Georges, 100 Grupp’s Gym (NY), 62 Gunther, George, 47 Hague, Frank, 104, 147, 149 – 54, 169, 171 – 72, 173, 184, 186, 189 Haines, John Klondike, 23 Hampton, Hope, 179 Hancock, “One Punch,” 60 Hansen, Vic, 56 Harding, Warren G., 88, 139, 153

INDEX Hardwick, Harold, 52 Harrison, W. E., 145 – 46 Hart, Marvin “Fighting Kentuckian,” 24, 25 – 26 Harvey, Charlie, 53 Haukop, Johnny, 125 Hawkins, Dal, 21, 73 Hayes, Teddy, 107, 109, 111, 119 – 20, 160, 162, 178, 181 Hazard’s Pavilion (Los Angeles), 24 Hechheimer, Harry Saks, 142, 143 Heppenheimer, William Christian, 181 Herford, Abraham Lincoln “Al,” 15 Herman, Babe, 175 – 76, 190 Highley, “Kid,” 11, 29 – 30 Hopp, Julius, 170 Humphreys, Joe, 12, 104, 124 – 25, 187 – 88, 191 Hurley Law (NJ), 177 Hyland, Dick, 22 International Reform Bureau, 88, 171, 177, 202 International Sporting Club, 102 – 3, 105, 116 – 17, 135 Irslinger, Henry, 163 Jackson, Peter, 25 Jacobs, Michael Strauss, 144 Jeannette, Joe, 25, 49, 82, 104, 158, 172, 178 – 79 Jeffries, Jack, 24 Jeffries, James Jackson: and Brady, 22; Choynski fight, 23; and Coffroth, 13; and Curley, 70; discomfort in spotlight, 72; fighting black boxers, 25; J. Johnson fight, 24, 30 – 40; retirement, 26, 30, 40 Jennings, Jack, 190

233

Jersey City politics, 149 – 55, 171 – 72 Joel, Solomon “Solly,” 141 Johnson, Arthur John “L’il Artha.” See Johnson, Jack “Galveston Giant” Johnson, “Battling” Jim, 42 Johnson, Enoch “Nucky,” 188 Johnson, Etta, 35, 41 – 42 Johnson, Jack “Galveston Giant”: “Battling” Jim fight, 42; Carpentier fight, 46; Curley’s promotion of, 70; early career, 22 – 28; in Europe, 40, 42, 49; federal prosecution of, 40, 42; Flynn fight, 41, 64; Jeffries fight, 30 – 40; marriage, 72; racial prejudice against, 24 – 26, 28; Willard fight, 71 – 72 Johnson, John Lester, 63 Johnson, Joseph, 123 Johnson, Lucille, 72 Johnston, James J., 73, 118 Jolson, Al, 37, 188 Jones, Soldier, 190 Jones, Tom, 71, 72, 73 Jordan, Billy, 38, 39 Joseph, “Young,” 46 Journee, Paul, 157 – 58, 166, 179, 180, 191 Kahn, Roger, 113 Kansas, Rocky, 172 – 73 Kaplan, Max “The Goose,” 83 Kaufman, Al, 31 KDKA radio station, 170 Kearns, Jack “Doc”: accusing Dempsey of cheating, 107; in Australia, 51 – 52; at Battle of the Century, 191; Carpentier and, 102; charade of Cuban capitalists’ offers, 134 – 37; competition

234

INDEX

with Rickard, 54 – 55, 81 – 82, 91, 119, 173 – 74; DempseyBrennan fight, 119, 120, 122 – 26; Dempsey-Carpentier fight negotiations, 128 – 37, 142 – 43, 146 – 47, 154, 155, 173 – 75, 177 – 78; DempseyFulton fight, 81 – 82; DempseyMiske fight, 120 – 22; and Dempsey’s alleged draft evasion, 110 – 14; development of Dempsey’s career, 77 – 83; early life and career, 19 – 22; end of relationship with Dempsey, 204; financial mismanagement, 108; first meeting with Dempsey, 56; image of, 83; and J. London, 20, 21; meeting Rickard, 20; reputation of, 19, 21, 22; training camp for Carpentier fight, 159, 160 – 63, 181; Willard-Dempsey fight, 86 – 87, 88, 91 – 92, 95, 107 Kellar, Terry, 61 Kennedy, John F., 113 Kenny, William “Wild Bert,” 62 Ketchel, Stanley, 31, 38 Klaus, Frank, 47, 102 Lang, Bill, 26, 27 Langford, Sam “Boston Tar Baby,” 25, 49, 63, 89, 122 Lardner, John, 164 Lardner, Ringgold Wilmer “Ring,” 93, 95, 136, 137, 186, 199 – 200 Lauder, Billy, 21 Lawrence, “Snowy,” 45 Ledoux, Charles, 191 Leonard, Benny, 121, 144, 159, 172 – 73, 204 Levinsky, “Battling,” 79, 82, 83 – 84, 101, 102 – 5, 132, 163, 172, 179 Lewis, Harry, 46 – 47

Lewis, Ted, 172 Lewis, Willie, 47 Little, George, 33, 35 – 36 Lloyd’s of London, 145 London, Jack, 20, 30, 37 Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 188 Louis-Schmeling fights, 200 Madison Square Garden, and Rickard’s plans for, 116 – 19, 124 Mallet, J. H., 157 Mallet, Thierry, 180 Malloy, Andy, 60 – 61 Mann, James, 40 Mann Act, 40, 42 Marcot, Henri, 157 Marquess of Queensberry rules, 23 Masterson, Bartholomew “Bat,” 12, 37, 93 Maxim, Joey, 204 McArdle, Tom, 62 McAuliffe, Jack, 35, 165 – 66, 172 McCarey, Tom, 24, 26, 33, 71 McCarney, Billy, 71, 88, 91 – 92 McCarty, Luther, 71 McCloskey, “Blink,” 100, 131 McCue, Martin G., 73 – 74 McGeehan, William O’Connell, 110 McGoorty, Eddie, 51 McGovern, “Terrible” Terry, 12, 16 McGraw, John, 81 McIntosh, Hugh, 27 – 28, 31, 33, 51 McKernan, John Leo. See Kearns, Jack “Doc” McKernan, Philip Leo, 19 – 20 McKetrick, Dan, 42, 166 McLaglen, Victor, 31 McLaughlin, James P., 88 – 89 McMahon, Tom, 71 McMein, Neysa, 164, 166 – 68, 171, 179, 187, 195

INDEX McNab, Gavin, 111 – 13 McQuesten, Leroy Napoleon “Jack,” 5 McVea, Sam, 49 Meehan, Willie, 65, 77 – 78, 82 Miller, Joseph Carson, 80 Miller, Nathan Lewis, 139, 141, 146 Minnesota, and politics of boxing, 80 Miske, Billy “St. Paul Thunderbolt,” 79, 81, 82, 120 – 22, 163, 190 Mission Street Arena (San Francisco), 13, 31, 71 Mistinguett (J. Bourgeois), 48 Mix, Tom, 186 Mizner, Wilson, 6 – 7, 11 – 12, 20 Monahan, Walter, 74 Montagna, Luigi “Bull Montana,” 163 Monte Carlo, 6 – 7, 11 Moran, Frank, 42, 73 – 75, 79 – 80, 91, 123 Morgan, Anne, 144 Morgan, John Pierpont, 29 Morris, Carl “Sapulpa Giant,” 41, 63, 64, 71, 78 – 79, 82 – 83 Morris, William, 30 Movies. See Films Murphy, George, 7, 8 Murphy, Robert, 33 Murray, Billy “Fighting,” 22, 51 Murray, Charlie, 79 Myers, Edith Mae. See Rickard, Edith Mae National Sporting Club (London), 27, 48 Navy Club of New York, 170 Nelson, “Battling,” 12 – 18, 38, 92, 159, 176

235

Nevada, and politics of boxing, 36, 80 New Jersey, and politics of boxing, 81, 87, 104, 146 – 47, 171 New Jersey Crimes Act, 177 New Mexico, and politics of boxing, 80 New York (state): Boxing Commission, 104, 123, 134, 142 – 43; and politics of boxing, 33, 55, 73 – 75, 87 – 88, 115, 139 – 41, 172 – 73 New York City, 118, 192 New York Life Insurance Company, 115 – 16 New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 201 Nolan, Billy, 13 – 14, 16, 18 Norfolk, Kid, 162 Northern (saloon), 7 – 8, 11, 20, 30 Norton, Al, 65, 78 Oates, Joyce Carol, 57 O’Brien, Jack, 26, 31 O’Gatty, Packey, 189 Ohio, and politics of boxing, 88 O’Rourke, Tex, 135 – 36 O’Rourke, Tom, 53, 134, 135 O’Sullivan, E. T., 52 – 53, 54 Pantages, Alexander, 146 Papke, Billy “The Illinois Thunderbolt,” 47 Pathe Studios, 109 – 10, 114 Pecora, Ferdinand A., 201 – 2 Pecord, Oliver, 93, 95, 96 Pelky, Arthur, 71 Percival, Walter C., 145 Pershing, John J., 69 Pickford, Mary, 111, 184, 188 Ponzi, Charles, 144 – 45 Postal Telegraph Company, 184

236

INDEX

Price, Jack, 61 – 63 Prizefighting. See Boxing, lack of regulation; and specific boxers, managers, and promoters Prohibition, 87 – 88, 202 Protestant Bible Society, 118 Public Service Railway Company, 154 Quimby, Fred C., 109 Race riots, 40 Racial prejudice: against black boxers, 17, 23, 24, 50, 74; “colored” boxing titles, 24, 26, 124, 162, 172; promotional exploitation of, 35, 71 – 72; in South, 109. See also specific black boxers Radio broadcasts of fights, 170 – 71, 187, 189 Radio Corporation of America, 170, 187 Railroad special trains, 16, 95, 121, 184 Ray, Johnny, 170 Reformers. See Anti-boxing factions Reisler, John “The Barber,” 63, 78, 81 Renault, Jack, 190 Rice, George Graham, 14 – 15, 17, 29, 30 Rice, Grantland, 87, 93, 108, 183, 186 Rickard, Edith Mae, 8 – 9, 13, 29 Rickard, George Lewis “Tex”: attempts to persuade Dempsey to leave Kearns, 120, 121; at Battle of the Century, 183 – 86, 189 – 91, 196 – 97; cattle ranching in South America, 69 – 70; competition with Kearns,

54 – 55, 81 – 82, 91, 119, 173 – 74; Dempsey-Brennan fight, 122 – 26; Dempsey-Carpentier fight negotiations, 101, 102, 124, 128 – 29, 131 – 32, 133 – 37, 139 – 47, 149, 154 – 56, 173 – 78, 179; Dempsey-Carpentier promotions, 158, 160, 162, 164 – 65, 168 – 74; and Dempsey’s legal problems, 111, 112; early life and career, 1 – 8; gate proceeds, 18, 40, 74, 95 – 96, 164 – 65, 196 – 97, 203 – 4; JohnsonJeffries fight, 32 – 40; marriage and family, 4, 9, 13, 29, 116; Nelson-Gans fight, 12 – 18; plans for Madison Square Garden, 116 – 19, 124; promotional resourcefulness, 12 – 14, 18, 30, 35, 38, 70, 116 – 17, 185, 199 – 204; and proposed Darcy fights, 53 – 54; reputation of, 1, 96, 117, 201 – 2; stadium construction projects, 16, 38, 88 – 89, 140, 144 – 45, 147, 154 – 55, 169, 183 – 84; WillardDempsey fight, 85 – 96, 164 – 65; Willard-Fulton fight, 81 – 82; Willard-Moran fight, 73 – 75 Rickard, Lucretia, 2 Rickard, Robert Woods, 2 Ringling, John, 112, 118 – 19, 191 Robertson, “Sparrow,” 129 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 189 Rodel, George, 71, 73, 74 Romance of Carpentier, The (film), 46 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 88, 170, 187 Roosevelt, Kermit, 17, 188, 202 Roosevelt, Theodore, 27, 34, 36, 69, 94

INDEX Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 17, 188 Root, Jack, 26 Ross, Tony, 31 Rowardennan Redwood Park, 34 Ruhlin, Gus, 24 Runyon, Damon, 62, 73, 87, 93, 136, 137, 186 Ruppert, Jacob, 81, 188 Ruth, Babe, 70, 83 Ryan, John, 95 Salmon, Ed, 45 Samuels, Charles, 2, 107, 160 San Francisco Fight Trust, 13 Sarnoff, David, 170 Scaler, Louis “Kid,” 22 Schreiber, Belle, 32 Schreiber, Cornell, 88 Schwab, Charles M., 104 Selective Service Law, 83 Sells Floto Circus, 102, 109 Shanks, Wilhelm, 79 Shaw, George Bernard, 164 Sheehan, Winfield, 131 Shine, John “Buck,” 45 Siler, George, 16, 17 – 18, 70 Slack, Will, 4 Smith, Alfred E., 115, 117 – 18, 139 Smith, “Big Jim,” 151 – 52 Smith, Dick, 97 Smith, Ed “Gunboat,” 50, 64, 71, 78, 82 – 83, 103, 123 Smith, Homer, 79 Smith, Jeff, 48 Smith, J. Owen, 170 Snyder, John W., 145 – 46 Social change. See Women, social change and boxing attendance Southern Pacific Railroad, 16 Spellman, Frank, 110 Squires, Bill, 27

237

State of New York v. George L. Rickard, 201 – 2 Stecher, Joe, 51 Steuer, Max, 201 – 2 Stevens, Harry, 185 Sudenberg, Johnny, 60 Sullivan, Jimmy, 47 Sullivan, John L., 12, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 36, 37, 38, 58, 74, 94 Sullivan, Lawrence, 14 – 16, 17 Sullivan Trust Company, 14, 29 Tate, Bill, 89, 109, 121, 122 Taylor, Ben, 27 Tendler, Lew, 204 Thacher, Addison Q., 88 Thirty Acres Oval. See Boyle’s Thirty Acres Thomas, Charles, 110 – 12 Thomas, Marcel, 104, 158 Thompson, Maurice, 21 Ticket scalping, 144 Til, Paul, 46 Times Square crowd, 192 Tortorich, Dominick, 86, 128 Totem (saloon), 9 Trambidas, Alex, 159 Tumulty, Joseph Patrick, 111, 151 – 52 Tunney, Gene, 172, 190, 203, 204 Ulizio, B. George, 159 Uren, William, 22 Van Dyke, W. S. “Woody,” 109 – 10 Vaudeville circuit, 30, 34, 70, 72, 83, 101 – 2, 105 Vidaver, Nathan, 143 Vienne, Theodor, 131 Walker, James John “Jimmy,” 117 – 18, 133

238

INDEX

Walker, Mickey, 21, 204 Walker Law (NY), 104, 115 – 17, 123, 139, 141 Ward, Geoffrey C., 35 Washington, Booker T., 34 Watson, Red, 51, 77 – 78 Weinert, Charley “Newark Adonis,” 179 Wells, William Thomas “Bombardier,” 40, 46, 47 – 49, 97 – 98, 99, 165, 193 Welsh, Freddie, 158 – 59 Western Union Telegraph Company, 184 White, James, 46 White, J. Andrew, 170, 187 White, Jim, 7 White, Stanford, 116 White Hopes and Other Tigers (Lardner), 164 White-Slave Traffic Act (1940), 40 Whitman, Charles S., 55 Who’s Ballyhoo in America, 188 Wild West shows, 33, 72 – 73, 80 Willard, Jess: armed services exemption, 85; Darcy on, 54; Dempsey fights, 85 – 95, 107, 124, 125, 133, 164 – 65; early life and career, 70 – 75; Fulton fight,

80 – 81; “Gunboat” Smith fight, 78; Johnson fight, 71 – 72; Moran fight, 73 – 75; Morris fight, 63; retirement, 204; Rickard’s plans for, 197 Williams, Larry, 163, 176 Wills, Harry, 172 Wilson, Edith Galt, 111 Wilson, Gustav, 100, 103, 157, 180, 191, 192 Wilson, Woodrow, 111, 151 – 53 Wingfield, George, 32 Winsor, Fred, 64 – 65 Wittpenn, Otto, 149, 151 – 52 Women, social change and boxing attendance, 13, 16, 17, 34, 74, 89, 98, 165, 190 Wonder Man, The (film), 101 Woods, Freddy, 60 World War I: Carpentier’s military service, 67 – 69; Darcy’s avoidance of military service during, 52 – 53, 55; exemptions from armed services, 83 – 84; public opinion on boxing during, 80, 84, 85, 108 Young, John “Bull,” 71 Young, John L., 159

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JIM WALTZER is a longtime newspaper sports editor and freelance magazine writer. He is also the author of Tales of South Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2001) and the novel Sound of Mind (Five Star Mysteries, 2007).