Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [115]
The next few years were hard. Managers came and went; a good-for-nothing wife demanded generous support; boxing promoters in New York, where he first arrived in 1916 with less than $30 in his pocket, had no interest in a skinny kid from out west. Only the hard-boiled young sports-writer Damon Runyon, whom he met as a youngster scuffling in Denver, saw Dempsey’s potential and encouraged him to continue. Runyon watched one of Dempsey’s early fights and gave him his ring soubriquet, the “Manassa Mauler.”
Finally, after dropping out of boxing for a time and working in the shipyards of Philadelphia, Dempsey was taken on by the manager Jack “Doc” Kearns and the promoter Tex Rickard, and his career began in earnest. Dapper Kearns was a con man, a master of the 1920s art of marketing “ballyhoo.” When someone accused him of being a crook, he responded, “I prefer to be called a manipulator.” Rickard, tall, taciturn and elegant, was cleared in the early 1920s of accusations of abducting and sexually assaulting young girls. Despite this shadow over his reputation, from which he never quite recovered, Dempsey adored him. Rickard was, he said, “a bourbon-and-branchwater man who could drink all night and not get drunk…a gambler of the old school.” The sports journalist Paul Gallico said Rickard instinctively understood the power of money: “He knew how to exhibit it, use it, ballyhoo it, spend it, and make it work for him.” Their informal partnership of Dempsey, Kearns and Rickard would make all three rich.
In 1919, under Kearns’s management, Dempsey knocked out his opponents in the first round in five consecutive fights. That July he challenged the World Heavyweight Champion, Jess Willard, for his title in Toledo, Ohio. No one in the audience thought Dempsey could win, although sports-writers were starting to take notice of the young boxer. Ring Lardner and Scoop Gleeson came to shake Dempsey’s hand before the bout, as well as his old friend Runyon.
At six-foot-five Willard was four inches taller than Dempsey and sixty-five pounds heavier, and far more experienced. But Dempsey was an instinctive fighter, lightning fast and graceful on his feet, possessing a devastating punch with both right and left fists. What set him apart, though, was his savage street fighter attitude. One journalist called him “part tiger, part wildcat and all killer”; others described him pursuing his opponents in the ring like a panther, smoldering with the intensity of his desire to win.
“Dempsey was a picture-book fighter,” wrote Paul Gallico in the 1930s. “He had dark eyes, blue-black hair, and the most beautifully proportioned body ever seen in any ring. He had the wide but sharply sloping shoulders of the puncher, a slim waist, and fine, symmetrical legs. His weaving, shuffling style of approach was drama in itself and suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes. His gorge lay close to the surface. He was utterly without mercy or pity, asked no quarter, gave none. He would do anything he could get away with, fair or foul, to win.
“This was definitely a part of the man, but was also a result of his early life and schooling in the hobo jungles, bar-rooms, and mining camps of the West. Where Dempsey learned to fight there were no rounds, rest intervals, gloves, referees, or attending seconds. There are no draws and no decisions in rough and tumble fighting. You had to win. If you lost you went to the hospital or to the undertaking parlor. Dempsey, more often than not, in his early days as hobo, saloon bouncer, or roustabout, fought to survive. I always had the feeling that he carried that into the ring with him, that he was impatient of rules and restrictions and niceties of conduct, impatient even of the leather that bound his knuckles.”
Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times in the first round alone. By the time the dazed, defenseless Willard was forced to retire, at the