Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [117]
Despite the public rivalry Rickard encouraged between his two fighters, when they met Carpentier and Dempsey took to one another immediately. Carpentier thought Dempsey was “a man made expressly to be a fighter” with his high Native American cheekbones and dark narrow eyes. His smile, said Carpentier, was almost childlike and lit up his face. Although Dempsey said little except to express the hope “that we would both make a packet” out of the fight, Carpentier found him immensely likeable. “Under the traditional rough exterior,” he wrote, Dempsey had “the equally traditional heart of gold.”
But Dempsey, dark and glowering, was cast as the villain. Even though Carpentier was a foreigner the crowd hoped he would win—he was smaller than Dempsey and it was so clearly an uneven match—and Dempsey sensed their antagonism. Carpentier looked like a statue, said Dempsey, while he was just a street fighter.
The street fighter knocked the statue out in the fourth round. Even the press reports afterwards favored the loser. “The more powerful but not the better man won,” said the Morning Telegraph. The New York Times stated that “Carpentier was quite rightly the more popular of the two men. He was beaten as a fighter but he remains superior as a boxer . . . Carpentier was the spirit of the fight; Dempsey was its body. Carpentier lost like a gentleman.”
Ring Lardner’s short story of 1921, “The Battle of the Century,” was a fictionalized account of the meeting between the hungry young American and the urbane foreigner. It focused less on the good-natured Jim Dugan (Dempsey) than on his wheeler-dealer manager, Larry Moon, a portrait of Kearns, whose pursuit of a triumph for his champion had brought about such a dangerously mismatched competition.
The next fight Rickard organized for Dempsey was against the Argentinean champion, Luis Angel Firpo, in September 1923. Paul Gallico remembered Dempsey’s training camp at Saratoga Springs before this meeting as “the most colorful, exciting, [and] picturesque” of gatherings. Sitting at a rickety wooden table with an illicit beer and a steak sandwich in front of him, Gallico joined the ribald, thrill-seeking gang of Dempsey’s supporters: “lop-ears, stumble-bums, cheap, smalltime politicians, fight managers, ring champions, floozies, gangsters, Negroes, policemen and a few actors thrown in for good measure.”
Jack Kearns, “smart, breezy, wise-cracking, scented,” guarded access to his champion. “Doubtful blondes who wandered in and out of the layout of wooden hotel and lake-front bungalows, and blondes about whom there was no doubt at all” mingled with sports-writers and aging boxers “with bent noses and twisted ears.” Dempsey himself, blue-black hair gleaming, “dressed in trousers and an old gray sweater, [played] checkers on the porch of his bungalow with a sparring partner.” Gallico was moved by the moments of beauty he glimpsed amid the organized chaos of the camp, “the smooth swiveling of Dempsey’s shoulder as he punched a rataplan on the light bag.”
For the editor of The Ring magazine the Dempsey-Firpo bout was the most exciting fight he witnessed in fifty years. The two men fought like animals, wrote another commentator, with “abysmal, unreasoning fury.” “Firpo came at me as no other living man ever did before, or since,” remembered Dempsey. The Argentinean matched Dempsey’s aggression, responding to his initial onslaught by knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the first minutes of the fight, only for Dempsey to be pushed back through the ropes by the ringside reporters on to whom he’d fallen. There were eleven knockdowns in the first round. Dempsey knocked Firpo out for a count of ten in the second, and then helped him up as he was declared the winner.
Dempsey’s no-holds-barred approach was becoming legendary. His rage in the ring seemed to express all the frustration of America’s marginalized underclasses, humiliated by the injustices