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The Manassa Mauler
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00:00But Havlicek steals it! Havlicek stole the ball!
00:03Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!
00:10United Strovicci, a leeching all the best!
00:14The Giants are the ball! The Giants are the ball!
00:21That's a tough move! They've won their sixth NBA championship!
00:26Gets a swing! This is going to be an all-round unbelievable!
00:30You don't believe what I just saw!
00:41So, we did the episode about the White Sox for SportsCenter.
00:50So, these are people who were on the bottom in 1919, and now we're looking at a guy who was on the top in 1919.
01:00Hello, I'm Chris Fowler for SportsCentury.
01:07It was called the Golden Age of sport.
01:09It was the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties, a rollicking, rambunctious era when Babe Ruth bashed baseballs and Big Bill Tilden bashed tennis balls.
01:19And in boxing, a long-armed, sloped-shouldered Predator bashed heads and became the heavyweight champion of the world.
01:25It was Jack Dempsey, and he came to us directly from the Old West.
01:30Colorado, even at the turn of the century, was still...
01:35This train is bound for glory, this train...
01:39This train is bound for glory, this train...
01:45This train is bound for glory, don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy...
01:53This train, bound for glory, this train...
01:56Colorado, even at the turn of the century, was still a great part of the West Frontier.
02:01It was the American Frontier.
02:03This is where Jack Dempsey discovered who he was and became a man.
02:07This train, no count on liars, no pocket figures and no bar flyers.
02:14He realized that if he stayed in one place, he would never succeed at anything.
02:21Sometimes children grow up before they have to.
02:25At 16, like many young men, he decided to strike out on his own.
02:29This train is built for speed, pass this train...
02:36He would get on the rods under a freight train...
02:40And tie his hands and his legs to the rods with bandanas, so he wouldn't fall off.
02:47This train is bound for glory, this train...
02:52The railroad policemen were always on the lookout for hobos on the train.
02:55And one time, one of these policemen beat Jack Dempsey over the head several times and nearly killed him.
03:03Dempsey's mobile school of hard knocks carried him around the country
03:07as he learned to use his fists, courage and anger to turn a buck.
03:12He kicked around a lot of mining towns in the West and would make money
03:16even as a young kid fighting in these mining towns.
03:19And these grizzled old miners and cowpokes would look at him
03:23and figured they could just take this guy out and Dempsey generally laid them out.
03:28The rugged individualist who was not going to let anybody tell him...
03:32He would say to the bartender,
03:36Do you have any really bad customers that you want to get rid of?
03:40And if you do, I'll fight them and we'll split the pot.
03:44And he went from place to place just boxing. That's all he could do.
03:47That necessity bred a survival instinct that manifested itself in the ring.
03:53After turning pro in 1914, Dempsey amassed 25 first-round knockouts.
03:59On July 4th, 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, he challenged 6'6", 245-pound Jess Willard for the heavyweight championship.
04:10On paper, the match was a modern replay of David and Goliath.
04:14He beat... Look at the size difference. He beat Jack Dempsey by 60 pounds.
04:20But the difference was not so much in size as in talent.
04:25Here comes the champion, big in good nature, smiling and waving to the applause.
04:30He's certain he'll win. All the advantages on his side.
04:33Willard was a huge guy, 6'6", and he towered over Dempsey, who weighed 187 pounds at the time.
04:44He wanted some indemnification and guarantees that if he killed the boy, he would not be held liable.
04:50And Dempsey says to himself, I'm not fighting for the championship, I'm fighting for my life.
04:54If Dempsey was the underdog, his manager, the legendary Doc Kearns, regarded Willard not only as a tree to be chopped down, but a source of easy money.
05:05Kearns placed a bet of $10,000 at 10 to 1 odds that Jack Dempsey would win by a knockout in the first round.
05:13In the dressing room before the fight, Kearns says, Jack, you have to knock him out in the first round.
05:16For the first minute and a half, Dempsey doesn't even swing. It's obvious that he's a bit nervous, a bit apprehensive, a bit tentative.
05:24Then at 90 seconds, Dempsey throws a left hook from Olympus, and it shatters Jess Willard's cheekbone.
05:32It was so hard that Dempsey said he could hear it breaking.
05:37He's standing over Willard with his mouth snarling in deep bed.
05:42No neutral corner back then.
05:44Waiting for him to get up so that he can hit him again.
05:48At this time, remember, there's no neutral corner roll.
05:50So Dempsey's standing behind him, and Willard gets up, and he's bewildered.
05:54And, boom, Dempsey hits him with a roundhouse to the face.
05:58No sportswriters had ever seen such a fury any time in their living experience.
06:04It looked like he'd been taken into the shop of some sadistic butcher, and the butcher turned loose on him for about 30 minutes.
06:11And at the end of the first round, Dempsey had knocked down Jess Willard seven times.
06:17The bell rings for the end of round one, and nobody hears it.
06:21The referee continues to count.
06:23And Kearns hopped in the ring and brought Dempsey out of the ring and started him toward the dressing room.
06:28And they realized that Willard had been blown.
06:31The referee says, no, no, no. Willard was at seven.
06:33So they had to get Dempsey back in the ring before the next round started.
06:37Otherwise, he would have lost.
06:38With no chance to cash in on his bet, Kearns set his sights on winning the title and returned his fighter to the ring.
06:46They called Dempsey from halfway up the aisle to bring him in for the second round.
06:50By now, Willard is just a punching bag.
06:52His eye is closed.
06:53His jaw is broken.
06:54Gets a couple more ribs broken in the second round from Dempsey's left hook.
06:58By the end of the third round, he just slumped in his stool in the corner saying, I got my farm in Kansas.
07:04I got my farm in Kansas.
07:06Willard did not get out for the fourth round.
07:09He had become a giant fountain of blood.
07:12In this most unusual fight, an idol has been born.
07:16Jack Dempsey represented a whole new era, and he comes in like a pit bull.
07:20He crouches low, his hair is shaved up the back of his head.
07:24He's got this scowl, and he's out to kill his opponent.
07:28And this excited the country, and the country is coming out of the war.
07:31They wanted heroes, and boy, they love Jack Dempsey.
07:34Instant hero.
07:36Jack Dempsey was the one who brought boxing to fame in this country.
07:41He was the most important sports figure in the world.
07:44I knew a terrific fighter named Michael Donahue, and he told me one day, he said,
07:48I grew up in a neighborhood where there were two pictures in every house, the Pope and Jack Dempsey.
07:53I remember as a child, we used to debate who was the most famous person in the world.
07:58Some said Jack Dempsey, and others said Babe Ruth.
08:02It was probably Charlie Chaplin, but one of those guys was second.
08:08Continuing battle.
08:10The 1920s are the highlight of American popular sports.
08:15It's a prosperous time when the middle class has the money to spend on watching professional sports.
08:22For the millions who couldn't actually be there, newspapers, motion pictures, and radio vividly documented the events.
08:29Stars of unprecedented magnitude rose on the horizon in American culture.
08:34The golden age of sports.
08:37Dempsey, Red Grange, Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, and Bobby Jones.
08:44The pantheon of greats.
08:46The first one of which coming out of the 1919 fight is Jack Dempsey.
08:51There was no greater draw in America in sports than Jack Dempsey.
08:56We tend to think of Babe Ruth as the compelling sports icon.
09:01However, the national heroic figure was then the heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Dempsey.
09:12Dempsey represented the vanishing Old West.
09:16He was the guy who emerged out of poverty and made something out of himself.
09:21Jack Dempsey was born in 1895 in this little, tiny place called Manasseh, Colorado,
09:27which is actually a very pretty place, and his parents were Hiram and Celia Dempsey.
09:33One of 13 children, Jack was raised in poverty.
09:37Like many American dreamers of the late 1800s, his father had brought his family west
09:42in search of a fortune he never found.
09:45Hiram Dempsey was actually quite a lazy guy and didn't get much work in Manasseh
09:50or other places where he took the family in Colorado.
09:54They're following a father who's following dreams of success.
09:59When the dream doesn't pan out in one place, he goes to another place.
10:04He and his mother and a couple of his siblings were riding on a train and the conductor came around
10:10and Mrs. Dempsey said she didn't have the money for the tickets.
10:14Well, the conductor was a kindly man and he let them go, but Jack Dempsey said later
10:20that he would never be in a position to be humiliated like his mother was that day.
10:25His fists were the only tools that he could really make a living with.
10:30His fists were the key to freedom.
10:34In the summer of 1916, after dozens of fights and thousands of miles riding the rails,
10:40Dempsey arrived full of hope in Manhattan.
10:44When you thought about places such as New York, they became a magical element in your mind.
10:51You imagine the streets truly paved with gold.
10:54He showed his press clippings to boxing writers in New York and no one had ever heard of anyone that he had fought.
11:02He didn't get many fights.
11:04He went to bars where there was a free lunch and he would offer himself as a sparring partner
11:10and you could get a dollar a round, which was pretty good money in those days.
11:14Dempsey's raw talent found meager expression in the big city.
11:18Without proper management, he was often overmatched and cheated out of his purses.
11:23He went hungry, slept in Central Park, and like his father, watched his dreams dissolve.
11:30Dempsey thoroughly disgusted, left New York City, broke with broken ribs, got a freight car back west.
11:37If ever there was a point in his life when he was ready for somebody to be nice to him, this was it.
11:43He found that the only thing good for him was some sort of woman's companionship
11:47and he found it in Maxine Cates, who is a working prostitute, 15 years his senior.
11:53He worked as a bouncer in the brothels and the whorehouses where she worked.
11:58He said, I really met her on business, but I fell in love with her as a piano player.
12:03The first marriage to Maxine, I suppose you could call her a woman of the evening, wasn't a marriage made in heaven.
12:09He went out to San Francisco, where he could maybe get some more fights, and that was functionally the end of the marriage.
12:15If Dempsey didn't have enough going wrong, he receives word that his brother Bruce is stabbed to death.
12:23And he doesn't even make it to the funeral in time.
12:26Not long after Bruce's death, Dempsey received an offer from Doc Kearns, an up and coming boxing manager who had seen him fight out west.
12:35Kearns told me, when I came upon Dempsey, he was a total wreck, financially, emotionally, morally.
12:45Kearns, who had this incredibly brilliant, immoral outlook on life, saw in Dempsey a greatness that was there.
12:53Kearns builds up Dempsey's confidence, and he gives Jack a look, a walk, a scowl, the unshaven face to build up his reputation in the press.
13:05Under Kearns' tutelage and promotion, Dempsey gained the attention of Tex Rickard, the P.T. Barnum of the boxing.
13:12He knew how to promote a fight.
13:14Although Rickard was a visionary, he was still trying to recover from the backlash of an earlier promotion.
13:20Rickard had promoted his first heavyweight championship fight in 1910, when Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffreys fought each other.
13:29Johnson destroys Jeffreys, humiliates him in the process, and causes an enormous stir.
13:35It led, in fact, to lynchings of black people in the South.
13:39No one wanted a black to be in this position of sort of representing American might, American character, American strength.
13:47America found its white hope in Jess Willard, a Kansas farmer who didn't begin boxing until he was 29.
13:54In 1915, Willard somehow, someway, knocked out Johnson in Havana, Cuba to become the heavyweight champion.
14:03After 1915, Willard had only had one title defense, and the fans were getting restless.
14:09Boxing needed someone who would truly catch on with the public, and Dempsey fit the bill.
14:15In his savage treatment of Willard, Dempsey scaled the heights of the boxing world.
14:20But just six months later, he was blindsided by his ex-wife, Maxine, who was still a working girl in Nevada.
14:28The other professional ladies in the brothel said,
14:31Hey, you're still doing two-dollar tricks?
14:34And your old buddy boy is getting a million dollars to fight?
14:38You shouldn't let him get away with that.
14:40Dempsey's ex-wife went to the press with an accusation that Dempsey had avoided the draft.
14:46These were devastating headlines.
14:48Because the war was portrayed as a moral crusade, Americans were encouraged to enlist.
14:53If they didn't, they were considered to be slackers.
14:55Here is the heavyweight champion of the war.
14:57You are supposed to be the baddest man in the world.
15:00Well, we just had the baddest war in the world, and you weren't in it.
15:02Doc Kearns had pictures of Dempsey supposedly working in a shipyard during World War I.
15:07And then someone noticed he was wearing black patent leather shoes,
15:11which is not what your average shipyard worker wore.
15:15And the press just tore him apart.
15:17Backpedaling, Dempsey claimed exemption from the draft on the basis that he was his family's sole supporter.
15:23But Maxine had stirred such widespread negative comment that the U.S. government brought charges against the heavyweight champion.
15:30If convicted, he could have gone to prison and would have effectively ended his career.
15:35The trial starts, and the government has some problems.
15:39Maxine makes the charges, but then, a few weeks later, she recants.
15:44Gavin McGann, lawyer in San Francisco, ran a great case.
15:48He got Dempsey's mother saying what a good boy he was.
15:51Just a pillar of respectability and support during the war.
15:56The government is going to have to attack this old woman to break her story, and that's not going to happen.
16:02The trial went on for about ten days.
16:05The jury was out for about ten minutes.
16:07Dempsey acquitted.
16:09Despite his acquittal and an attempt to enlist in the army toward the end of the war, Dempsey's public hat changed from white to black.
16:18Boxing is always looking for figures who generate emotions and passions.
16:23Dempsey became the man that people loved to hate.
16:26He was cast in the role of a villain, and what hurt Dempsey more than any punch was to be called slacker.
16:32Nobody would dare say it to his face, but it hurt Dempsey grievously.
16:37For the 20s, we were an explosive, noisy society as subtle as in right cross to the jaw, and that right cross to the jaw was Jack Dempsey.
16:48Well, the 20s were really an era that was bigger than life.
16:52World War I had been pretty gruesome, and people were trying to forget the war.
16:57You have prohibition, of course, gives rise to speakeasies, to bathtub gin, to millions of Americans breaking the law simply because they wanted to take a drink.
17:07When Dempsey agreed to fight George Carpentier in July of 1921, Tex Ricker demonstrated the full measure of his promotional genius by exploiting the champ's tarnished image.
17:19And Carpentier had been in World War I, I think so.
17:25So he was the good guy, Dempsey was the bad guy.
17:30Carpentier was a World War I hero, so the fight was portrayed in the media as the war hero versus a draft dodger.
17:38The fight that made sports a big-time business was Dempsey Carpentier, a battle wage at Boyle's 30 Acres in Jersey City.
17:47This was the lead story for the entire civilized world.
17:51It's a million-dollar fight. It's the first one.
17:54I mean, America just buys into it.
17:57Almost 90,000 people attended that fight. Nothing had ever been seen like it before.
18:03It is also being broadcast on radio, which is the first time a boxing match is broadcast.
18:09So it does symbolize a commercialization of the sport.
18:13Carpentier trained mostly in secret.
18:16The story was given out to the press that he was developing a punch that was going to surprise Dempsey.
18:22If you could sell tickets to a wrecking ball in a house, people would stand there and pay to see it.
18:28That's what Dempsey was. He was a wrecking ball.
18:31I mean, America is ready for this extravaganza.
18:35They've read about it. They've heard about it. Now it's time to see who wins.
18:40Carpentier was a great, slick boxer, clever, tough to hit.
18:44Dempsey was 190 to 200, somewhere on there.
18:47And at the peak of his career, the fight went four rounds.
18:50Carpentier had a good punch, but Dempsey simply wore him down.
18:54Dempsey just, just buried him.
18:57The Frenchman was unconscious.
19:01Suddenly boxing was an American obsession.
19:06One man did that. Jack Dempsey.
19:09Earning $300,000 of the $1.8 million gate, Dempsey was such a hot property that manager Doc Kearns decided to promote a match between his champion and Tommy Gibbons on July 4th, 1923, not in New York or Chicago, but in Shelby, Montana.
19:27Population just under 1,000.
19:30Jack Kearns made a deal.
19:31A $300,000 deal.
19:34That Dempsey would get $100,000 in three installments.
19:39He gets his first $100,000, no problem.
19:42Problems with the second $100,000, the people who owed him money are now saying, you know, well, how about livestock? How about sheep?
19:51And Kearns said, what would I do with 10,000 sheep in a Manhattan apartment?
19:57Lusting after national recognition, the citizens of Shelby came up with a second installment.
20:02But when they balked at making the third payment, Kearns' threat to call off the fight dramatically reduced the public's enthusiasm.
20:09It's a day of the fight.
20:11Tickets aren't selling.
20:13Special trains from Seattle and San Francisco are canceled.
20:17Even if you had bought a ticket to go out there, you would have seen a bad fight.
20:21A 15-round, non-knockdown fight, which up to then, in Dempsey's career, was very unusual.
20:28Unhappy enough over the uneventful fight and sparse turnout, Shelby's town fathers were absolutely distraught,
20:35and they had to fork over gate receipts of more than $70,000 to make good on their financial commitment to Kearns.
20:43Built, embarrassed, and broke, Shelby was on the warpath.
20:47Four banks were bankrupted because they had tried to raise money for this fight,
20:52and a lot of people lost their fortunes and their investments.
20:56The sack of Shelby.
20:58After the Shelby fiasco, Rickard regained promotional control of Dempsey
21:03and created another million-dollar spectacle.
21:06The Manasseh Mahler champion Jack Dempsey goes through strenuous training.
21:10He's taking Purple more seriously than any opponent since he won the championship.
21:15In September of 1923, the Manasseh Mahler climbed into the ring before 88,000 at New York's polo grounds.
21:23His opponent was Argentina's Luis Firpo, ballyhooed as the wild bull of the Pampas.
21:29There were huge crowds swarming around.
21:31About...
21:33Just a tremendous event.
21:35These two fighters came out and just went after each other.
21:39Firpo knocked Dempsey down.
21:41Dempsey knocked Firpo down.
21:43Dempsey was beating him up, but then Firpo landed a punch and knocked Dempsey right through the ropes.
21:48To the head and on the right to the shoulder.
21:50And Dempsey has knocked over the ring.
21:51It appears as though the tables are staring as now the champion is in desperate trouble.
21:56Dempsey outside the ring, knocked down.
21:58Sports writers lifted him up.
22:00He wasn't really out and he wasn't really that hurt.
22:04It was a flash knockdown, but since he was through the ropes,
22:08had the sports writers not boosted him up to get back in the ring,
22:12he would have lost his title like that.
22:18Being helped back in the ring, pushed back in by the sports writers.
22:21One of the great American painters, George Bellows,
22:24did that famous boxing scene of Dempsey through the ropes,
22:27where Damon Runyon and the other writers pushed Dempsey back into the ring.
22:31We knew how Dempsey punched, but this was how Dempsey could take it.
22:35And he took out Furpo in the first minute of the second round.
22:38When was the last time anybody hears about a fighter getting knocked out of the ring,
22:42coming back in and winning?
22:44That could only have happened in this golden age of sports.
22:47Tremendous fight.
22:48And that made Dempsey a boxing immortal.
22:50That was the one that cemented it.
22:54Reinstated as the good guy, Dempsey put on his white hat and headed west
22:58to charm a young and glittering world known as Hollywood.
23:02In the early twenties, the world wafted on twin airships,
23:08the newspapers and silent movies.
23:10Dempsey was in both of them.
23:12He is in demand at every party because he's Jack Dempsey.
23:17And he shared an apartment with Douglas Fairbanks, senior, and Charlie Chaplin.
23:22And he said it was the best time of his life.
23:25He fell in love with little Taylor.
23:28And he bought a big house and a golf course on the property.
23:32He lived very, very well.
23:33She introduced him to a number of things, including a nose job and the social graces.
23:39He's becoming a new man.
23:41And what it takes to be a boxer is fading out of his life.
23:44Dempsey and Taylor were no sooner married in February of 1925 than a war ensued between Estelle and Kearns.
23:53Each had different plans for the champ.
23:56Kearns made it a point to try and destroy that marriage.
24:00Estelle Taylor didn't want to compete any longer with Jack Kearns for Dempsey's attention and affections.
24:07Dempsey finally breaks away from his manager, Doc Kearns.
24:11Nobody breaks up with Kearns unless it's on his terms.
24:15And this wasn't on his terms.
24:16Kearns, like a scorned person, decided that he would do anything he could.
24:22And that involved a great deal of lawsuits and allegations of owing money.
24:28He made up a rumor years later that Dempsey had cheated to win the title.
24:34And he just tried to demoralize him.
24:39In 1926, Dempsey was lured back into the ring by the prospect of another mammoth payday.
24:46Rickard brokered a match with rising heavyweight Gene Tunney.
24:50One segment of the boxing world, however, felt that another fighter deserved first shot at a champ who hadn't defended his title in three years.
24:59The African American population opposes a Dempsey Tunney fight.
25:05They want to see Dempsey take on Harry Wills, who's the black champion.
25:08That would've been a great fight. Harry Wills was a big heavyweight.
25:11He was, at that time, he was 210, 215.
25:14Rickard didn't want that fight. He swore to himself he would never promote a fight again between mixed races.
25:19I don't think that Jack Dempsey was avoiding Harry Wills.
25:24He would probably have fought him had not his handlers ordered him not to.
25:30Despite Rickard's influence, the New York Boxing Commission refused to allow Dempsey to fight in the state unless it was against Wills.
25:38The Dempsey-Tunney bout was moved to Philadelphia, where the long-rested champion would change into another kind of people's hero.
25:49Offering nearly half-million-dollar guarantee to Dempsey, Rickard signs Gene Tunney, newcomer against Jack in defense of his title.
25:57When Dempsey fought Tunney in 1926, his best years were behind him.
26:01Three years since he fought Furco, and he was an all-fighter, Tunney was at his peak.
26:05He studied Dempsey's style very, very closely, and developed his own style in a way that would combat that successfully.
26:13Dad was depicted as being a sissy poop, because he liked to read.
26:17They thought, if anything, he was kind of a skinny, ungainly person that wouldn't have stood a chance against the great dynamite of Jack Dempsey.
26:25The public was hungry for a heavyweight championship fight, hungry to see Dempsey in the ring again.
26:31It was so one-sided. It was all Tunney in the rain, ten rounds of just picking Dempsey apart.
26:36Dempsey looks fired. Tunney is unmarked. Tunney gives Dempsey a shaking up with a left jab.
26:42And Tunney toyed with him when the fight was over. Dempsey's eyes were slit shut like Mr. Magoo.
26:48He tells one of his aides, take me over there, I gotta congratulate him, but I can't see him. Dempsey was finished.
26:54Tunney was the new heavyweight champion. It was like Paul Bunyan had been defeated.
26:58The fight, which drew 120,000, elicited a national characteristic that had been evolving since the birth of movies.
27:05The anti-hero. In defeat, Dempsey's popularity soared as America embraced him.
27:11In victory, Tunney was barely tolerated.
27:14My father did not mix as easily with the sports press as Dempsey had done.
27:21America doesn't want its heroes perfect. Tunney was an ex-marine, he was an intellectual, he was clean all the way through. Jack Dempsey was a flawed hero.
27:31After the fight, Dempsey came home, his face misshapen, his wife Estelle Taylor says, what happened Ginsburg, which was her pet name for him.
27:40And Dempsey said, honey, I forgot to duck. That comment, honey, I forgot to duck, endeared him to the American public in a way that nothing else could do. After that, the man could do no wrong.
27:54With the nation behind him, Dempsey was scheduled to meet the number one contender, Jack Sharkey, in July of 1927, when he was shocked by the sudden death of a second brother.
28:05Johnny had a star-crossed life. He followed Dempsey to Hollywood, got hooked on heroin. He ends up shooting his wife and then shooting himself. I mean, this happens just weeks before the fight.
28:17Badly shaken, Dempsey gathered himself to fight Sharkey. If he won, the next bout would be for the title against Tunney.
28:26Dempsey on the left gets belted by a beautiful left hook and a follow-up volley of punches.
28:34Sharkey has beaten him very badly for six rounds. But in those six rounds, Dempsey has constantly hit him low.
28:41And in the seventh round, Sharkey finally couldn't take it.
28:45He finally looks at the ref and what happens?
28:49Turned his head away to tell the referee that Dempsey is hitting him low.
28:53And Dempsey brings up a left hook from hell, knocking out Sharkey. This was one step above a barbarian.
29:02He would take advantage of every role and he broke a lot of the roles.
29:06When he turned to the referee, he said, what was I supposed to do, write him a letter?
29:12Next stop, Soldier Field, September 22, 1927.
29:17With Rickard stirring the interest of a nation, Dempsey's rematch against Tunney inspired one influential Chicago citizen to hedge his bet.
29:25The biggest organized crime syndicate, of course, was the Capone Syndicate, based in Chicago.
29:30Al Capone had a huge $5,000.
29:32Capone sent a note to Dempsey, I'm going to make sure that you get a fair shake.
29:38Dempsey sent back a note saying, please let sportsmanship run this and may the better man win.
29:45Unbeknownst to Dempsey, Capone had put in one of his henchmen as referee.
29:49The morning of the fight, that referee is pulled.
29:54The boxing commission has gotten wind of a fix for Dempsey and they put in the new referee, Dave Barry.
30:01What happens then is boxing history.
30:04For second Dempsey.
30:05In 1927, Lindbergh flies the Atlantic, Babe Ruth had 60 home runs, talking pictures come out.
30:14It was a marvelous year and here was Dempsey in his comeback against Tunney.
30:19Dempsey became the guy who was going to win the title back and beat this pretentious snob.
30:25Dempsey was the hero, Tunney was the villain.
30:30Over 100,000 people will attend the fight.
30:34The air was absolutely electric.
30:37There was a tremendous crowd at Soldier Field.
30:40It was the biggest crowd ever at the time to attend the prize fight.
30:43On the eve of the fight, two San Quentin inmates get permission from the warden to hear the contest in the minutes leading up to their execution.
30:53Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Al Capone and everybody else that had a name in America was sitting 10 or 15 rows back at that fight.
31:02Tunney fought the same fight he fought the first time.
31:05Dempsey was in better shape and was crowding him but he couldn't get to him.
31:09In the seventh round, he catches Tunney with a bodacious left hook and follows it up with a six-punch combination.
31:18Tunney is down! Tunney is down!
31:22Tunney is dazed, Tunney is down, Tunney is out.
31:25Nobody really knew he was badly hurt but he was badly hurt and he sat there.
31:29Dempsey, his instinct takes over. He refuses to go to a neutral corner.
31:34The referee orders him to a neutral corner.
31:35Dempsey, as in the old days, standing over Tunney, ready to pounce and destroy him.
31:40For the first time in boxing history, there is a clause that says the fighters scoring a knockdown must go to a neutral corner.
31:48Ironically, it was insisted upon by Dempsey.
31:51The referee kept waving at him to move over and when he finally did, the time on the timekeeper's clock was five seconds.
32:01And they came back, instead of starting on six, he started on one, two, three.
32:08As a consequence, Tunney is on the canvas for fully 14 seconds according to the watches of all the reporters who were at the site.
32:17Eight, nine, and Tunney is up! And now they're at it again, Tunney is up!
32:22And as soon as he was up, Dempsey hit him with a left hook.
32:27That makes me wonder if Tunney had nine seconds to get up instead of 14, does he not get knocked out?
32:40Maybe he gets knocked out.
32:43Back in the way, and Dempsey is following Tunney!
32:46If he hadn't have had those extra five or six seconds, would his mind have been clear enough to stay away from Dempsey the remainder of the round?
32:56He said, I could have gotten up, but what I don't know is whether I could have gotten away.
33:02That extra four seconds gave him enough time.
33:05After successfully avoiding Dempsey for the rest of the seventh round, a refreshed Tunney connected in the eighth.
33:13Dempsey!
33:14And as soon as Dempsey went down, the referee started counting immediately, without telling Tunney to go to a neutral corner.
33:23But he had to wait multiple seconds to send Dempsey to a neutral corner.
33:29Very suspicious.
33:30Dempsey, from a right left, he went down to his knees.
33:34Tunney throws a right hand that lands behind Dempsey's ear, and Dempsey drops.
33:39The referee immediately starts the count.
33:42Doesn't send Tunney to a neutral corner.
33:45Some controversy.
33:47As soon as Dempsey goes down, the referee Dave Barry is over him going,
33:50One, that suggests to me the crooked referee.
33:54Whether there was some sort of fix or whatever that hasn't been proven,
33:58what remains today is the controversy of the long count.
34:01Whatever he might have felt or knew about the legitimacy of the long count, Dempsey took the loss with grace.
34:10Jack Dempsey never complained about the losses to Tunney.
34:14Which might have been the smartest thing he ever did.
34:18He was a dramatic hero before that, but when he lost the long count,
34:22now cheated, in a sense, out of his championship, he became more endearing.
34:26Boy, this is great.
34:28Just saying. Overnight, I've jumped right into line with the biggest producers on Broadway.
34:33I hope not. A lot of those boys are on the bread line.
34:37Ha!
34:39Fight purses, movie rolls, and real estate investments had made Dempsey a multimillionaire.
34:43But on October 24th, 1929, the stock market landed a haymaker to his financial chin.
34:50He obviously got very bad financial advice. He was told to buy everything on margin.
34:57And one day, he lost $3 million.
34:59He also had to pay Estelle, who by that time had instituted a divorce proceeding against him.
35:06Then he had nothing. Zero.
35:08Horace Gregory was writing a poem about America in the 1930s.
35:13He used Dempsey as the central figure in the poem.
35:17Dempsey's down, but Dempsey's going to get up again. We're going to get up again.
35:22So Jack had a comeback. He fought exhibition fights from 1931 to 1932.
35:29Jack was 36 years old. He fought 165 fights, two or three guys a night.
35:35He just went back to what he knew. He went back to working in the mines.
35:40He did refereeing. And slowly but surely, he made his way up again.
35:44With his fighting days over by 1933, Dempsey married another Hollywood starlet,
35:50Hannah Williams, with whom he would have two daughters.
35:54Then in 1935, Dempsey became America's favorite restaurateur.
35:59Jack Dempsey created what I would say was the first celebrity restaurant.
36:02There might have been others, but not with a name as powerful as Jack Dempsey.
36:07And that restaurant was just smashed.
36:09And it's a big opening. It's an every newspaper in America.
36:12He's pictured with a chef's hat on, doling out the meals.
36:17And it becomes, within a day, the hangout of the sports crowd.
36:21When you walked in, you were struck with this enormous painting on a plaster wall of the Dempsey-Willard fight in Toledo.
36:30It was a classic.
36:31Dempsey would greet you at the door. Dempsey would say hi to everybody. He was great.
36:37They didn't want to eat at Dempsey's. The out-of-towners and the tourists, whatever.
36:42They wanted to see him in the window. He was the attraction, not the restaurant.
36:46My father always said, Dempsey had always told him, that the minute they quit asking for my autograph, I'm dead.
36:53These are my fans, and I would never ignore a fan. I'm grateful that they come up to me.
36:58Jack Dempsey was an icon in New York.
37:00He saw the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Jack Dempsey.
37:05When America entered World War II in 1941, Dempsey jumped at the chance to serve.
37:12He eagerly sought to enlist in either the Army, the Marines, the Navy.
37:17They rejected him because the Coast Guard accepted him.
37:21He became a lieutenant commander. He was put in charge of the physical fitness services.
37:24The Manasseh Mauler becomes the first lieutenant in New York State Guard.
37:28And the ex-Champ likes the assignment.
37:30I think this is really a rare thing, one of the finest things that's ever happened to Jack Dempsey.
37:36He insisted on going in because he wanted to help the war effort, and he wanted to erase that stigma.
37:42The slacker stigma.
37:44He was the great champ serving his country. The slate was wiped clean.
37:47In 1943, Dempsey's marriage to Hannah ended in divorce.
37:53Fifteen years later, Deanna Piatelli became his fourth and final wife.
37:58They lived in New York. He ran his restaurant.
38:01Life was good as the Dempsey name aged well.
38:05I love cats better than dogs. Take it or leave it.
38:08One thing I know, cats mean a very diet. Five solid foods in every can.
38:13Feed them tabby treat, and you've done your job.
38:14In July of 1963, Dempsey's former manager, Doc Kearns, died.
38:20Six months later, Dempsey found himself knee-deep in a controversy surrounding his fight with Willard 45 years earlier.
38:28Kearns said that he had put plaster of Paris that centered around Dempsey's fist.
38:33And just before he was about to go into the ring, he dipped his hands into water, then put the gloves on, and of course, before the fight even started, they would harden.
38:41So that when Dempsey hit a guy, he was hitting him with cement.
38:46But it's a story that a lot of many that Kearns told over the years.
38:50The thing about that is that you can see Willard on film checking Dempsey's gloves before the fight.
38:57If something, if he was cheating, Willard would have spotted it.
39:07Dempsey sued Sports Illustrated for libel and received an out of court settlement.
39:11With the lawsuit, he resumed his career as a favorite American icon, but the shadow of time was lengthening.
39:20They told me that he was the toughest man he ever saw in the ring.
39:26But outside of it, he was a sweetheart, and it was true.
39:29One of the paradoxes about Dempsey was although he had all these brutal fights and a brutal childhood and youth, he hardly had a mark on him.
39:37I'd walk with him down the street or in the restaurant.
39:40People would say, Jack, can you do me a favor?
39:42Can you come to my church Sunday night?
39:43Can you do a personal appearance at my birthday party?
39:46Well, Jack Dempsey could not say no.
39:48When Sports Century returns, the man who couldn't say no stumps for the son of an old friend.
39:54Well, Dad always said that the long count made both Jack and him sporting immortals.
40:05I had asked my father if he would come out and campaign and bring your friend Jack Dempsey along with you.
40:14And Jack was gracious enough to agree to come out.
40:17He did a lot of campaigning.
40:19In fact, a lot of people think that it was because of Jack Dempsey that he won the election.
40:24If Dempsey's celebrity helped Tony win, it didn't keep his landlord from closing down his restaurant in 1974, when the last rays of the Golden Age had faded.
40:35Many customers who have been eating and drinking at Jack Dempsey's for years say, for them, this is in every way the end of an era.
40:42A last landmark disappearing from Broadway.
40:45The link was gone to what they called the Golden Age of Sports, the 1920s.
40:50It was very sad.
40:51When the restaurant closed, he was very unhappy about that.
40:54He was very hurt.
40:55He had no place to go anymore.
40:58Dad's health was fine, I would say, until he lost the restaurant.
41:03His beloved restaurant.
41:05He suffered a mild stroke.
41:07The doctor said to him, you might never walk again.
41:10And my mother said, really?
41:12She got a stationary bicycle.
41:14She moved his legs.
41:16He trained one more time.
41:18And this man walked till the day that he died.
41:23Four years after losing his restaurant, Dempsey lost a close friend.
41:28Gene Tunney died on November 7th, 1978.
41:32When dad died, Dempsey said a chunk of him went with Gene.
41:38And he felt that very greatly.
41:40He had sadly lost so many of his friends over the years.
41:44That's when he started to get together with me and put down his thoughts.
41:48I suppose it's known as putting your affairs in order.
41:51With his affairs in order, Jack Dempsey closed the book on one of the most colorful eras in American sports.
41:57He died of heart failure in his New York apartment on May 31st, 1983.
42:03They said when Jack Dempsey hit them in the prize fighting ring, it felt as if his boxing gloves were full of rocks.
42:09They weren't.
42:10They were filled with perhaps the hardest pair of fists in the history of boxing.
42:15He took off his gloves in 1928, had a long career outside the ring, and now he is dead at 87.
42:22He had virtually outlived all his contemporaries.
42:26I can remember going to his wake and expecting to see mobs of people.
42:30And there weren't.
42:31It was virtually empty.
42:33It just seemed very subdued.
42:35For a guy who really was, in American sports history, one of the great icons.
42:40His funeral was in Southampton.
42:42This was a very dignified, small burial, and it was the way Jack wanted it.
42:49Of all the sports heroes of the 1920s, Jack Dempsey was the first to arrive and one of the last to leave.
42:56Jack Dempsey was probably the most popular champion ever, including Muhammad Ali.
43:01He put the roar in the roaring 20s.
43:04You can't envision that time frame without Dempsey as you can't envision it without Babe Ruth.
43:10He had that steely look, and nothing personified being hard and being able to overcome and be successful more than Jack Dempsey.
43:21When we lost Jack Dempsey, we lost a direct link to the Wild West.
43:26The late Jim Murray wrote an obituary column for him, and it put it better than anybody ever did.
43:32Whenever I hear the name Dempsey, I think of train whistles on a hot summer night on the prairie.
43:38I think of a tinkling piano coming out of a kerosene limp saloon in a mining camp.
43:43I think of an America that was one big roaring camp of miners, drifters, bunkhouse hands, con men, hard cases,
43:51men who lived by their fists and their shooting irons and the cards they drew.
43:56America at high noon.
44:01That's great.
44:03In his later years, Jack Dempsey was getting out of a taxi in New York City one night when he was jumped by two men.
44:10The white-haired former champion in suit and topcoat whirled on his muggers and body-punched both of them to the ground.
44:17And there they remained, refusing to rise until the police came and rescued them from the elderly gentleman with the thunderous fists.
44:25For SportsCentury, I'm Chris Fowler.
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